No one designs cars to do that.

Yeah, because the only alternative to American style inequality is Soviet style inequality, right?

Slavs ran the show, if you didn't notice.

CA still out-manufactures every other state. second place is texas, Though CA has a bigger population.

It's had some decline in manufacturing, sure, but it's never going to be like detroit. Hell, even if they quit making things entirely - CA will never be detroit, between IT, hollywood, tourism, service BS, etc.

That's kind of a bullshit complaint. Do you currently plug your phone into a USB A to USB B adaptor, to a USB B to USB mini B adaptor, which is plugged into a USB mini B to micro B adaptor? (yeah, I skipped some USB variants).

No? then shortly you'll just have a USB micro C cable / charger, same as how you have a micro B cable / charger now.

I know, one more USB connector to have an adaptor for... But this is how the mini/micro and even old USB 'A' should have been from the beginning.

There's nothing worse than having to blind mate USB, and having to flip it four bloody times before it works. (except maybe blind mating 'F' connectors, or sometimes D sub..)

Well, the Molex bit is kind of a stretch, to me. They make connectors for _everything_, not just aerospace. I'd imagine aerospace is a pretty small amount of their business?

Looks like molex runs about 10% of the global connector market. 70% of which they generate outside of the US. Kinda surprised me their share is that small.

I think defense and areospace use more connectors by Amphenol, or Cannon (now ITT). At least they did 40 years ago.

140 characters comes from Europe, 30 years ago, FWIW.

But when concrete sets, it does so via reabsorbing the CO2, right? So it should be a net neutral (minus CO2 from the fuel to cook the limestone in the first place).

CaCO3 + heat -> CaO + CO2 (in air)

Add water, get Ca(OH)2, which reacts with CO2 from air to set... back as CaCO3 and water..

Or did I miss something?

Oh no! Kids in Seattle must not have rotten teeth. The horror!

If you put the person controlling the drone inside the drone, it would fix the latency issue... oh wait.

Serbia managed to wipe out an F-117 with late 50's soviet SAM S-125.

Maybe iraq army was inept.

I guess the compound mustn't be 1:1 Ni:Co as written, as some site shows Co and Li being 10% of mass, and Ni 50%, for reasons I don't entirely understand.

In that case Ni is by far the biggest cost, and Cobalt is still a bigger share of the cost than lithium.

It must actually be a mixture of LiNiAlO2 and LiCoAlO2 or something like this? my distant highschool chemistry is failing me.

There is zero nickle in a Li-ion cell. Nickel, on the other hand exists in some variants.

Anyway, it looks like the model S uses lithium nickel cobalt aluminium oxide "NCA" LiNiCoAlO2. Aluminium is almost free. lithium compounds are cheap (looks like 5-7k per ton, depending on grade or compound) in comparison to the other metals. Nickel is 18k a ton, and cobalt double that yet.

Both nickel and cobalt weigh around 60g per mole, with lithium a tenth of that, so they also need roughly ten times the mass of nickel and cobalt per mole of LiNiCoAlO2. I guess the lithium is sold as LiOH, which is only roughly a quarter lithium by mass. So to make 1 ton of lithium worth of the compound, you'd need:

4 tons LiOH - $24k
10 tons Ni $180k
10 tons Co $360k
4t aluminium $8k

so the lithium seems to be pretty inconsequential to the overall cost. Mind you those are just metal prices, which I guess is technical grade. If the batteries require better refined metal it probably costs more yet. Then you need graphite for the anode, steel? case, and whatever else bits.

So it looks like the GP is right (barring forgetting cobalt), unless i'm missing something with the chemistry..?

5th highest rate of poverty in the country. I guess even being poor is bigger in Texas.

Sure, it's fine if you're a developer in Austin. But a lot of texas is... texas.