Been a while since I've flown a budget airline. On the normal flights I've taken, there's always a few people (usually older people) with paper boarding passes.

Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

Copper is actually about to become MORE expensive than fiber for a second time - pay attention to the metals market. Copper had a bad dip but it's recovering and will soon once again climb back up into double digits per pound price, at which point fiber is the penny pinching alternative.

For an additional fee.

THAT, I believe, is the main part of this change. Ryan Air already doesn't even break even on the pure ticket cost. It's the horrendous extra fees that make it profitable.

Which cost, exactly?

We are speaking about paper boarding passes the customers themselves print. The gates read the barcode and don't care if it's on paper or a phone screen.

So which cost, exactly?

That's putting it mildly.

Smartphones can crash, run out of battery or any number of problems. On important trips I usually have a paper boarding pass with me as a backup. Only needed it once, but I'm just one person with fairly normal travel amounts. Multiplied over the number of people flying Ryan Air, statistically speaking this happens constantly.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a gimmick to milk the customers for more money. Someone at Ryan Air has certainly done the calculation, estimated how many people can't access their boarding pass at the gate for whatever reason, and how much additional money they can make by forcing all these people to pay the additional fee for having it printed.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

Exactly this. Airlines are now essentially banks with a side hustle flying planes.

I've used Firefox Beta as my primary browser on my Android phones for years and have never encountered this. Maybe there's an issue with some specific features used by sites I don't visit. Doesn't prove anything but I guess one anecdote deserves another.

> Sure, do this instead of better tech

Regardless of what you think of the new mascot, do you really think the same people responsible for drawing pretty pictures of foxes are the same ones designing "better tech" and writing code and fixing bugs? Groups of people can do more than one thing at a time.

And I'd guess this is also an attempt to raise some money and awareness to the browser. At this point it doesn't matter how great Firefox "tech" is, they have lost the popularity context against Chrome and Chromium knockoffs, and will never get it back. Google will do and spend whatever it takes to keep Chrome on top, so Mozilla is probably looking for ways to at least retain what they have and keep the lights on.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

You do know what direct line of sight is, yes?

Go look at some airplane designs from profile view and note the engines hang well below the fuselage, thus meaning one can blow and throw shrapnel straight at the opposite engine.

In fact, the FAA has reports of exactly this happening.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".