This is from 2009, so they've probably done it by now.

After reading this article, there can be little doubt as to why doing things in NJ is so expensive.

You wouldn't ask why the mob is so influential, would you? This is the same kind of thing. A group of shady criminals demanding "protection money" from politicians.

The thing is this basically is a tariff war. There is no way this law would have been passed if Tesla built cars in New Jersey.

Interstate commerce means any work involving or related to the movement of persons or things across state lines. If you make a car in CA and take it to NJ, that's clearly interstate commerce, and the Federal Government is granted constitutional authority to regulate it. Maybe you are confused about what it means?

A company based in CA selling cars in NJ most certainly is interstate commerce.

Researchers have been making humanoid robots for much longer than they've been trying to make any of those other things you listed. And yet, such devices are still limited to doing simple tricks of little or no real value. In the mean time, robots designed for specific purposes (that look nothing like people) are used throughout society. Humanoid robots will always be much more complex, and much less stable, than their non-humanoid counterparts. So of course they will never be affordable because you will always be able to make a cheaper wheeled robot.

Also, it is baffling to me that anyone would throw away money on this line of research. The limits of this kind of robot should be obvious to all of us, since it would have all the same limits we do. But for some reason this idea is so compelling to the less logically minded masses that it attracts all kinds of money for research that is destined to lead nowhere.

I did watch the video. You certainly can use a regular loader or mini-excivator for disaster relief, so I don't know what they were on about. It was more like they wanted to make a cool robot exoskeleton, and they needed to come up with an excuse for why you would even want the stupid thing.

If they were really interested in disaster relief, they would be making attachments for compact loaders and mini-excivators, not ridiculous exo-skeletons that could never possibly be useful for that (or any other) application.

So it has 10 times the moving parts of a regular loader, but can lift less than 10% of the weight?

I know these things look cool in the cartoons, but there's a reason we don't build construction equipment this way. Things like these will never be as practical as wheeled and tracked vehicles.

Why investigate and attempt to solve a potential problem that your engineers have brought to you attention? There could be some risk involved (to your career). Better to do nothing and write a report later on saying there was nothing you could do.

It's about learning from mistakes, not making them worse.

If NASA was capable of learning from their mistakes, they wouldn't have been flying space shuttles in the first place.

Fortunately Cowards don't become astronauts.

Unfortunately, they do become administrators. . .

It means you're a bad developer because you're using .net to make webpages. You should always use the right tool for the job.

This is one thing that bothers me. If the natural order is for a period of glaciation to begin in the near future, surely global warming will benefit mankind. So why are we acting like we need to cool the place down? All the geologic evidence points to a risk for run-away cooling, if temperatures get a just few degrees lower than they are today. None of it points to a serious long-term threat of run-away global warming. And if the present ice-age were to end, it seems like the world would more hospitable to humans than ever. Sure over the next couple thousand years some cities would have to move to make way for rising water, but most buildings aren't occupied over that kind of time-frame anyway.

Most of their arguments for a potential global catastrophy hinge one a hypothetical "tipping point" beyond which the climate will no longer be in stable equilibrium and will spiral out of control. I haven't seen a plausible mechanism for this, but based on what we know about the climate, such tipping points probably do exist. On the other hand, we know this kind of thing has happened in the past without human intervention. The causes cited are always much larger than anything humanity has been capable of (huge meteor impacts, super volcanoes, things like that). Also, it seems that only run away global cooling has been the real problem in that past, and we understand how that can happen: ice sheets reflect a lot of light and result in the earth taking on less and less heat from the sun. If there's too much ice, the sheets will get bigger and bigger every year.