I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

If they're still using VMWare's licensed software, are they a former customer? I think the answer depends on the details of the license and purchase agreements.

I think they'd argue that the audit is a condition of the license to use the software, which the customer already agreed to and which was not tied to an ongoing support contract. Depending on the details of the license agreement, this could pass legal muster.

It still seems like a stupid move on the part of Broadcom, alienating their customer base in the hope of extracting a few more fees. I wonder if they've decided that their virtualization business is soon going to be eaten up by OSS anyway, so they have to get what they can while they can.

This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

You need to actually look at the data here. Much of US healthcare is non-profit, at least on the provider side, and the for-profit provider institutions don't make that much money. People naturally then assume it's the insurance companies that are making out like bandits, except they're all publicly-traded so we can see exactly what their profit margins are and they don't remotely explain the high cost of healthcare. At worst, the for-profit model adds 5%, and there's no real reason to expect it to add even that. In most industries, for-profit is more efficient than non-profit, because it turns out that the competitive drive for profits drives costs down.

Again, look at actual numbers. What you'll find is that this explains basically nothing. Yeah, they have high salaries; take those and spread them across the patient base and you're talking about maybe 0.001% of healthcare costs -- and then only if you assume that these high salaries represent a pure loss, that an administrator getting paid a tiny fraction of that would the job just as well. If you assume that at least part of those high salaries are payment for services rendered, then the CEO salary overhead is even smaller.

Again, the pharmaceuticals are publicly-traded and they break out what they spend on advertising. Is is a lot in absolute terms? Yes. Is it a lot relative to the total amount of money we're talking about? No.

I'll stop here, but the same applies to everything else you mention. Yes, there is some waste due to the for-profit model, but it actually isn't that big. Our drug costs are high because we fund most of the research, because we can afford to. If we found a way to stop doing that, a lot of drug research would stop. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is something you have to decide. Personally, I think we get a lot of value for that money.

It feels like you should be able to point to just one thing and say "That's why healthcare is expensive in the US!" but you can't, really. The root cause is actually a lot of different things, and most of them have their roots in regulation (and, specifically, the way in which we regulate), rather than in a for-profit model.

If you want to make US healthcare both very cheap and very good, but only for those who can afford it, you should do the hard-eyed libertarian thing and go full-on for-profit, including removing the legal requirements that doctors treat people who can't pay, and eliminating Medicaid and Medicare and all of the complexity and cost they add. Also, make competition nationwide -- make provider and insurer licensing federal so states can't impose different requirements, and set up nationwide medical and nursing licensure processes that eliminate the ability of the AMA to artificially restrict supply. Quality would go up and competition would drive cost down for probably 70% of Americans. The other 30%, however, would be screwed, hard. Well, maybe 20%, or 15%, because prices would come down, making healthcare more affordable for everyone but free for no one.

But because we as a society will not leave the poor completely without care (not even free ER visits), the libertarian pure-market approach won't work. So, instead, we should go the other way and offer a national single payer option. This would not make healthcare cheaper by itself, but it would enable regulatory pressure to begin chipping away at all of the many sources of high prices. It wouldn't ultimately make healthcare as efficient, cheap or good as a pure market-based approach, and likely wouldn't make it as cheap as what other countries pay, but it's the best we're likely to actually achieve.

Look, this isn't complicated.

1. If you're going to claim you know what people should do to be healthy, you should have both formal education and experience in the space.

2. If you're going to be an administrator over a health organization, formal education and experience in healthcare are a very good idea, but what you really need is to know how to be a good administrator.

RFK Jr. wants and claims to be able to do #1, but lacks the knowledge, skills or experience to do so.

If RFK Jr. wanted and claimed to be able to do #2, that would be fine. He's maybe a little out of his depth in such a large and important organization, but if he could bury his ego and work hard at it, he could probably do it reasonably well. But the overriding requirement to do it well is to listen to his subordinates, who are experts in the field, while he's a lawyer with no medical or scientific training. But obviously he won't do that, because he thinks he does know better than the experts, i.e. he is trying do do #1, which he isn't qualified to do.

True, though note that Google does have all the data needed to brute force that password, so make sure it has plenty of entropy. I recommend "correct horse battery staple".

Yeah, but then you have to drive an ICE, which sucks. Slow, noisy and smelly.

True, but if the EVs have decent range (say, 300 miles), a reasonable commute (say, 40 miles) and there's a fast charger in the area, it's easy enough to make sure you never get into a situation where an overnight power outage will keep you from getting to work. Just hit the fast charger whenever you're out and about and your remaining range has dropped below 100 miles, just long enough to get it back above 100 miles, which will only take 2-3 minutes This won't happen often for most people, less often than they have to visit a gas station now.

If there's a multi-day outage this becomes more problematic, but we're well outside of what's common now.

L1 charging even works fine for a lot of people, especially if there's an L3 fast charger in the area for occasional use. If your car is home 12 hours per day, on average, you can put in 50 miles of range per day with an ordinary 120V 15A outlet. That's 350 miles per week, which exceeds the 280 miles per week the average American drives. A sequence of heavier-than-average driving days could leave your battery low, which is why it's helpful to have access to a fast charger, though it won't normally be needed.

If you can also plug in at work (e.g. if you WFH)... L1 becomes all you actually need.

This was less true a few years ago when EV batteries were smaller. I got an L2 charger because I was driving a Nissan Leaf with only ~80 miles of range, which means it had little to no buffer to handle extra errands or whatever. If I wanted to go out to dinner after work I needed significant range added in the 2-3 hours between getting home and going out, but if your car has 300+ miles of range, that's not an issue.

That just means you need to change your business model to one where the longer people stay, the more they spend. In the case of services around EV chargers, the sweet spot is about 30 minutes. You want to structure your offerings so that it takes a half hour to consume most of your amenities. Have a few extra options for people who might stay longer, but 30 minutes is the target.

So, what do you offer people who are traveling (other than fuel)? Bathrooms, obviously, but that only takes five minutes and you can't charge any money for it (not in the US, anyway; people expect bathrooms to be free for paying customers). If you're selling them gasoline, there's not much time left after the bathroom break, so you offer them snacks and sodas. If you're selling them electricity, you still have them for 25 minutes, which is just about right for a fast food meal plus some snacks for the road.

Your advantage with EV chargers is that your customer base is more "captive". With gasoline cars, they'll often stop for gas, then head to a restaurant a few miles down the road, maybe in the next town. But with EVs, they eat within walking distance of the chargers. They'll often do some shopping, too, if you can find the right goods.

One option to exploit this is to build amenities around your chargers, the "travel plaza" model. Another is to find a location with good travel amenities and put your chargers there, getting local businesses to pay you for the customers you bring them.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.