So I'm looking at the lithium price and I see that for $64M I can make a plant/mine which will give me $8M/year profit, and ROI of 12.5%. This looks pretty good. Then I consider than some bright spark might come up with an aluminium based battery technology which would make lithium ion batteries obsolete and could be in production 4 years from now. If this were to happen, in four years I've made back just $32M and now have a worthless mine. Therefore I decide not to invest in lithium production until I can get ROI of 20% because of the risk.

It seems to me that lithium is bound to be either overproduced (if new technology comes along) or underproduced (if new technology does not, but investors are wary of building facilities for fear it might.)

He quickly became very unpopular with settlers due to trying to be fair to the Maori. In one notable occasion some colonists invaded Maori land in an attempt to seize it and got massacred. (They were a poorly armed militia and on the other side was Te Rauparaha, who was so scary that to this day his haka is used by the All Blacks to intimidate their opposition.) After an investigation, Fitzroy sided with the Maori.

I have no doubt that the holographic principle is an interesting mathematical representation of certain physical laws. It is no doubt quite useful in solving certain problems and may even be suggestive of new phyisical theories.

However, it's just nonsense to get excited just because you know that the physical laws can be represented in fewer dimensions. OF COURSE THEY CAN. You can always code the information about any functions/distributions/whatever in n dimensional space in fewer dimensions. The holographic principle is just doing it in a way that isn't horribly ugly (probably preserves certain properties that aren't even mentioned in popularizations). In fact it's not at all uncommon for the information about the solution to some (class of) mathematical problems to be fully reflected in the behavior of that solution on some smaller dimensional part.

In short, while this may be quite interesting to the people actually doing the math if you aren't you certainly shouldn't pretend this gives you some deep insight into what the universe is "really" like.

Why should it matter if there are fewer female engineers than male engineers? Women outnumber men by a large percentage in most humanities graduate programs but it would be absurd to suggest we need to do something to fix that situation. People have gotten so caught up in the numbers that they have forgotten the *REASON* we care about underrepresentation.

THE REASON TO WORRY ABOUT THE UNDERREPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IS BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE WOMEN ARE BEING DENIED A FAIR OPPORTUNITY TO PURSUE CAREERS THEY WANT.

This supposed solution is at odds with that concern. After all, if women aren't entering engineering simply because they don't find engineering jobs as attractive (and not because they were discouraged) there is no problem at all. Both men and women are simply choosing the type of work they prefer to do. If it turns out that women find work that is more socially meaningful more fulfilling that's great for them and we shouldn't mourn because they choose the type of work they prefer.

Moreover, this kind of "solution" doesn't really address the underlying problem we care about. If women are being discriminated against or discouraged from studying STEM subjects then no incentives at the college level removes that discouragement or discrimination. Even if you gain gender equality in engineering you haven't made things any better if, but for discrimination/discouragement, women would have made up 75% of the profession. This is just a band-aid to make people look better not a solution.

There are many ways to 'store' electricity. Batteries are just one.

I rather like this one, a thermal storage solution. Putting air into and out of bladders under deep water is a very simple method, as is moving water up and down hills. Then there are flywheels and fixed volume compressed air storage. (The air bladders above are fixed pressure compressed air storage.) There other thermal storage possibilities, but getting good round trip efficiency is tricky.

There are non-traditional battery techniques too: flow batteries (liquid electrolytes in tanks, adding storage capacity is as easy as adding tanks full of electrolyte) and molten metal batteries (take the idea of aluminium smelting and make it reversible).

All the non-battery alternatives I can think of work at industrial scale, so if you're looking for a household/small business solution, I think that at least for now batteries are it.

Michelle Slaughter
Earl Gallows
Trigger Winchester
Otis Hangem
Billy Bob Guilty

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There are three lessons here. One is about arbitrary work requirements, which you've made well.

Second is the problems which arise when vertical integration in your company means that one level's customers are another level's competitors. This conflict of interest is liable to drive away customers. (A company my father worked for many years ago had a similar issue: one branch manufactured and sold refrigeration equipments and spare parts. Another branch maintained and repaired refrigeration equipment, so their competition was the manufacturing branch's customers. The maintenance branch was separated into a new company to avoid this problem.)

Third is when you have a large corporation with an innovative product, that innovative product's potential can easily be crippled by being held hostage to vested interests of other parts of the corporation.

They were going to include one, but they were unable to complete it by the launch date.

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Did Guistra get the contracts?

Duh.

Someone in the Youtube comments says "The flight profile veers the booster off to the side on purpose so the exhaust from the final burn isn't directed at the barge where it could do damage"

If this was a planned manoeuvre, I'm much happier. Can anyone confirm this statement?

I was shocked at how abrupt and extreme the pitch changes were. I think so long as it needs such gross adjustments so close to landing, landings will be unreliable with a significant chance of failure. It is not at all like the tidy landings made by the Grasshopper test vehicle.

Two engineering changes which could make a big difference are lower minimum thrust (so it can approach the landing with lower acceleration) or lateral control rockets (RCS) at the top of the stage.

That's odd, when I went through the screening and they mis-entered me into the scanner as female, it didn't report any anomaly.

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Google does have an effective monopoly in search, and it's not a bad idea to have some degree of regulation in place to make sure that it doesn't harm consumers. (Though nonsense like a 'right to be forgotten' is going too far, and should be dropped)

The problem is that that very well may not be the EU's only motive here. At about the same time that the charges were announced, Gunther Oettinger, the EU's Digital Commissioner gave a speech where he said:

A great challenge is also Europe's position in the development of the next digital platforms that will gradually replace the current Internet and mobile platforms. We have so far missed many opportunities in this field and our online businesses are today dependent on a few non-EU players world-wide: this must not be the case again in the future. ... We need European industry 4.0 champions to win the global game in industry 4.0. ... Industry in Europe should take the lead and become a major contributor to the next generation of digital platforms that will replace today's Web search engines, operating systems and social networks.

Maintaining a level playing field and ensuring fair competition is one thing. Using the law to rig the market in order to engage in protectionism, however, is not acceptable. If the EU wants to pursue Google, they're going to need to do so in a way that is justifiably beyond reproach. Otherwise it's relatively easy for Google to restructure the way it does business internationally to avoid the EU from having any power over them, while still offering its services to persons in the EU, and to have many people cheer them on in the process.