Just to give you some feedback: this post just comes off as completely crazy, conspiracy theory, drivel. Even if there is a bit of truth buried in there somewhere, nobody's going to see it because they just picture you standing beside a wall full of newspaper clippings, pins, and string trying to connect it all together.

No disrespect to the Chinese engineers. There's some brilliant guys over there. But there are also very large geopolitical forces that shape our world, and engineering can only do so much and so fast. At the global scale, we're shaped by trends that are very, very difficult to change.

I watched that video. I found it kind of ridiculous. First of all, that low end manufacturing left the US a couple decades ago. Any low value item with a high labor content, or that is intrinsically dangerous, makes more sense to off-shore because Americans get paid more per hour than most other people, and American labor laws are more stringent than theirs. Making commodity bolts is, by it's nature, a low value job and you don't want to do it in America. What matters is, does the US have the expertise to make the machines to make those things, and the US is a major machinery exporter, so yes. And Destin didn't look very hard either. I work for a tool & die company and do a lot of work in manufacturing. The US is a big country and there are lots of people who still know how to do injection molding, machining, and tool & die. Destin just didn't know where to find them, probably because he's too young to have heard of the yellow pages.

Why? I get why anything accessible on the public internet should be IPv6, but it doesn't matter for anything behind a NAT box. Why can't my home setup use IPv4? Or the tiny little network on my mobile robot that isn't connected to the internet? There are tons of cases where an isolated IPv4 setup with static addresses is simpler to setup and troubleshoot than an IPv6 network.

Probably French literature or basket weaving. Seriously, though, the US is a major exporter of highly advanced manufactured products. One of the biggest categories is commercial aircraft components, followed by pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and machinery. The US is a highly technical nation. I wouldn't be worried.

There area also a lot of people who say that "nobody is eating cats" and that's not exactly true either. I'm personally sick of the partisan rhetoric. Talking heads blatantly ignore the half of the facts they don't like, and it's pathetic.

China is certainly investing in renewables big time, but mostly that's out of desperation so that they can reduce their dependence on imported oil from the middle east, which they know they can't provide effective security for.

There are a lot of headwinds for China. For starters they have poor geography. Their demographics are very bad. International investment is drying up. If anything they're over-investing in solar, with huge plants being built up in the northwest areas where they don't have industry, nor the infrastructure to get the power to where they do have industry. I'm not saying they're going to disappear, but the overall trend for China is downward. Don't buy into the hype machine.

Long distance power transmission using very high voltage DC lines is something that's still relatively new. It allows power transmission over significantly longer distances. Many of these projects that were unthinkable a couple decades ago are now being considered. But I agree that with the fall of globalized trade, we now need to take security aspects into account. This project is probably a bad idea. But you could power southern European regions from Morocco. That wouldn't be quite as crazy.

LOL. Since I'm the one who actually implements the solution as well, we don't actually have the Jump to Conclusions guy in our company.

Most of my job isn't typing lines of code into a computer screen. It's gathering requirements from the real world (and the people in it) and then inventing/designing a system (or a modification to an existing system) that will actually accomplish the goal. People have an innate advantage over an AI because we live in the world where the problem exists. We understand both the problem domain (the world) and the solution domain (what a computer program is capable of doing) and we're imagining a solution, and even imagining what it would be like for a human being to use that system.

That's even assuming that the AI hype is real and that they're going to reach AGI. I don't see any evidence that LLMs are going to lead to AGI. The current crop of LLMs don't even come close to what an experienced programmer can do. And no amount of simply adding CPU and memory is going to get them there.

You can all avoid getting a CS major if you want. That's great news for my wages when companies can't hire anyone who actually knows how to program, and their vibe-coded solution erases their database and nobody knows why.

I'm certainly not saying you can take a product with a lead acid battery and drop in an LFP battery and be done with it. I just mean the use cases where you are using a lead acid battery (automotive batteries, UPS, emergency lighting, electric wheelchairs) could start using LFP batteries because the temperature ranges are similar, and LFP is just better overall, particularly with longevity. Of course you'd need to change your product a bit to make it work with an LFP.

I thought there was a study on wearables (like the fitbit) a few years ago that says they don't seem to have any significant impact on a person's health. Are you sure JFK Jr. doesn't own shares of fitbit?

Manufacturing is returning, albeit slowly, and in a highly automated way. As someone who's been in automation for the last 25 years, and also done a lot of desktop app development on large LOB applications, I have a hard time seeing AI completely taking over. It's a tool to help with certain problems, but the fundamental day-to-day issues aren't going to be solved by AI. Much of the day involves fabricating and gluing together simple stuff to make a solution. May times in the physical world. I don't see an AI being able to realize that we need to fabricate a little spillway to prevent drips off the machine from falling on the material and soiling it, and then going and doing that. Or swapping out a robot control board. Or shortening a cable so the forklift operator stops running over it. The ability to truly understand a problem and make a solution is still firmly in the realm of human beings. And the dexterity of robots is still nowhere near the dexterity of humans. Don't buy into the AI hype. There's a lot of smoke and few actual flames.

I recommend a separate document printer and a photo printer. For the document printer you can get by with a standard black & white laser printer from Brother (never buy an inkjet) or go for a color laser if you've got the money (never buy an inkjet). The toner lasts a long time, and it's good enough for any schoolwork they have. But for nice photo prints I recommend a dedicated photo printer, like a Canon SELPHY. They produce excellent quality prints.

For those who aren't familiar with LFP batteries, traditional lithium batteries (such as nickel-manganese-cobalt, or NMC) have good energy density and last a long time if you pamper them, but have this problem where they burst into flames if you puncture them. And the metals in them are very expensive.

LFP is lithium-iron-phosphate. They have less energy density (CATL's LFP have 205 Wh/kg compared to 260 Wh/kg or even over 300 Wh/kg in some NMC battery cells). However, LFP are much safer and less likely to explode if they're punctured. LFP also contains no nickel or cobalt, which is a huge advantage. LFP also has better longevity, supporting 3000 to 10,000 cycles vs 1000 to 2300 cycles for NMC.

So LFP is not the highest performance battery cell, but it has a lot of advantages (safety, cost, longevity) that make it a winning product. You're already seeing them in "solar generator" products (basically a fancy UPS box, e.g. the EcoFlow product line) and my understanding is that Tesla's Standard Range Model 3 vehicle has used LFP cells for a while. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw LFP replace most usages of lead acid batteries in the near future since the cell voltage is 3.2V nominal, and you can stack 4 cells to get a 12.8V battery, which would be a drop-in replacement for most lead acid applications.