I saw a nice little graph the other day of german energy production, and it's basically summarized as 500B+ spent on renewables, and they have effectively the same proportion of carbon emitting energy sources as they did 20 years ago.

Wind+Solar have been a failure, and despite the cries of "batteries" will continue to be that way for at least the next decade or two. Then after overbuilding wind+solar 5x+ and batteries plus a few days of storage the result will likely be the most expensive energy on the planet and the least reliable.

Repeat after me, no one has proven that wind+solar are grid scale technologies. The only places that have majority renewable are using hydro, the rest are playing games with moving backup generation to some other location to greenwash their renewable efforts or they have on the order of 30% renewable with carbon sources backing the whole thing up. The in the spring/whatever they get to announce "this month we produced 100% of our gross energy from renewable" while ignoring that they actually consumed a significant amount of natural gas.

I've pretty much given up on anything being done concerning climate change. We have had 20 years of rising energy prices, which have damaged our democracies/etc/etc/etc. And yet we refuse to acknowledge the simple fact that we could have nearly unlimited, extremely cheap electricity if we just allowed companies to build nuke plants. Instead, the NRC delays and studies, the greenheads sue, and fearmonger any suggestion of actual clean, high-density energy sources. The result is energy austerity, forcing people to spend $$$ on energy efficiency and all that is great, but it's just a symtom of failing to grow the pie. And the oil/etc companies just keep getting richer.

So, we keep fighting over two bad choices for diffrent reasons, while the 3rd choice is the only solution.

both of which will not change massively very abruptly (at least not in civilian use

Pre smartphone (and until maybe 5 years ago?) I carried a tomtom international GPS nav unit when I flew. It would remain powered off until I reached my destination and I was sitting in the car rental lot. That thing could take 10+ mins sometimes to lock up if I hadn't used it in a couple of weeks, and then I transported it by plane somewhere.

My phone recently took about that long too when I flew to MX because I had the location services turned off until I was in the backcountry and decided to turn them on, no cell service + location services off means that it took 5 mins or so to lock up.

So, I don't think people really understand that these days a large part of the fast lockup is because google/etc are providing a rough time/location via wifi/cell location data before the GPS even tries to acquire a signal.

Minor note: Temp compensation has been a thing for a couple of decades now.

ex: https://www5.epsondevice.com/e...

You wonder how they measured whether the devices were tuned properly. Because IMHO these small two stroke engines drift so much and the diaphragms get hard, the ethanol eats the fuel lines clogging the jets, etc so much that they pretty much need regular service every few months.

Of which probably these days about 3/4 of the problems with them are caused by the ethanol, and the manufactures refusal to use or find ethanol safe replacement parts, and the air quality guys removing the ability to retune them by first making the needle valves have tamper proof heads, then completely removing the needle valves to the point where i've got newer devices where I just swap on a new $12 carb every spring because the old one has clogged or the low quality metal orifices are visibly larger than they should be.

That probably has more to do with the ~40V vs ~18V system and the associated size of the batteries. I would guess that a HD 40V blower/trimmer/mower works about the same as your makita's (there are youtube vids of cases where the home store brand equipment actually outdid some of the more name brand stuff). So, there might be some slight differences, but its unlikely that its even a 2x lifecycle difference.

So, the ~40V stuff is fine if your a homeowner who runs the blower for less than an hour each use. I've got one, and I've been pretty happy with it, having used battery based blowers for years. About 5 years ago the 18V/40V systems got good enough that they weren't complete trash, but functionality wise, they still are subpar vs the corded ones when it comes to air volume, and another step below the commercial/backpack devices used by most commercial lawn services.

So, I ran my own lawn service in HS, and I could probably get away with a battery blower these days if I kept a gas/electric handy for bigger jobs. Similarly, compared with the garbage gas devices being sold at the homelowes not having to deal with the fixed orifice 2nd rate chinese carbs that can't even be tuned anymore is probably a huge win for individual owners who don't use a couple hours a day.

The commercial guys are still out of luck IMHO.

80k were Afghan nationals who had been waiting on their visa applications for nearly a decade.

There are parts of the Gov that are just broken, and immigration is one of them. Despite all the homeland security funding it still took ~6months for my daughter's (A US citizen) passport renwal. No matter how much I think about it I can't see how it is anything beyond an automated database check to see if they are going to deny it, and then a printer/programmer should be dumping the thing out and putting it in the mail.

The fact that it took 6 months makes it sound like they still have people flying to the local hospital to verify with the DR where she was born, hand writting the passports and gluing the pictures to them. None of which are true, especially on a renewal which is little more than a picture update.

So, if you ask about immigration processes you will frequently be told they are not public, and to go away. Which is just a load of bullshit, as much as the interviews usually are which are little more than asking the same questions in person they have already asked 10 diffrent times in 10 diffrent forms. Forms which are 99% the same with one or two additional questions tagged on at the end. I guess the whole thing is designed to see if you trip up, which probably only trips up the honest/stupid people who fill out their middle name on some of the forms and leave it off on others, or fill out their birthday in month/day/year and day/month/year.

Why is MS dictating processor lifetimes? Can you explain the feature supported by all these cores https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... that isn't part of say a i7-6950X (A processor that can outperform probably more than 1/2 of that list on many tasks?).

It makes sense to kill off product support when you want to say move the compiler target to use AVX2 universally, but then you kill processors without that feature. But that isn't whats happening here, its just MS giving intel/etc some planned obsolescence and a boost in sales to replace computers which don't actually need replacing. In a way its the same thing the computer manufactures did for MS with respect to win7. Its been proven repeatily that running win7 on a ryzen is possible, yet AMD and MS make it a PITA by intentionally creating driver incompatibilities. Its quite monopolistic behavior and really if these companies didn't exist in a monopoly/duopoly situation it would never fly. MS hiring a couple engineers to assure the win10/etc security patches are backported and that the WQL tests run against drivers probably costs less than the company coffee budget, but they won't because there isn't a really a competitive reason. Its the same thing with DirectX, back when they were fighting the 3D API battles they released drirectX for every windows version in use, but then later they started trying to use it as a way to force people to upgrade windows.

So, I don't really understand why anyone gives them any slack for being lazy and monopolistic.

After silently swapping CMR WD reds, for SMR drives which simply are not fit for purpose in a NAS It became really hard to suggest that WD even understood their own product lines. This just seems to be more of the same behavior, although at least in this case its just _slower_ not that its possible for the system to catastrophically fail.

It does suggest that internally WD is looking for ways to command a premium price and switch the product for something that doesn't perform as well. This isn't entirely uncommon in the computing industry as the laptop manufactures and large OEM's have been playing this game for decades. For example when the I7 was announced the assumption was that it was a high end desktop processor, but then they started putting them in laptops where the actual sustained/etc perf was much closer to the i3 product lines. Similarly for GPUs where the mobile variants were named similarly to the desktop parts but provide a fraction of the perf. So this is probably more of that thinking, sell a product labeled one way hoping that no one notices that it sucks.

AMD has always made "good" processors. They have rarely made the "best" and both times AMD has significantly bested intel was because of major missteps on the intel side. The first time pushing a proprietary solution to replace the "open" one while simultaneously holding back x86 from transitioning to 64-bit or making some fairly obvious moves made by other players in the industry (integrated memory controllers/etc).

This time around its not that AMD appears to have an over the top fantastic product. Its good. but its not crazy aggressive like the M1. instead being the product of a company looking to utilize a core across multiple product segments so its slightly compromised in all of them. If intel was producing 5nm cores right now its likely AMD would be trailing them significantly. Its only kicking Intel's ass because they have been stuck for 5+ years following 5 years of sitting on their ass milking the market.

I think the M1 put egg on a lot of engineering managers faces and the pendulum has swung from penny pinching designs shared across multiple unrelated segments to a more balanced perf+power one. There is a big fall off in product prices for the ones in 3rd and 4th place as amd can attest just being in 2nd place with a product that was frequently not more than 25% slower. If a little company like ARM can design a dozen cores sized from tiny battery powered in order ones up to massive wide server cores there isn't any excuse for intel to be shipping the same basic core design in a laptop they do in a server.

I hear it tastes a bit like pork. Just think of how good a SLT (that a Soylent lettuce tomato) will taste after a hard day's work.

And its renewable, combined with the future population controls it will be fully self-sustaining.

Yah, I can see if they are funneling people into these programs to avoid paying them a real salary. OTOH, I don't see why they aren't just open door job trailing programs for anyone who can pass a basic comp-sci competency test (say a short write some code, answer some basic questions test where everyone above the 70 percentile is automatically accepted).It gives people who might be having a hard time finding a job after college a place to go, and google if they put them on non critical tasks can gain some valuable work experience. Bug hunting/etc is shit work, but it will make one a better programmer if its all self-driven find the bug, present the solution to the senior engineers, rather than have the senior engineer sit around and show them how to find the bug. If its setup such that the interns work in teams to solve their own problems with the understanding that is the expectation then even better.

Yes, thats why i'm telling the green energy, lets live in caves folks to STFU.

I really do think that if they had STFU 20 years ago when Bush suggested more nukes (along with clean coal, another magic pixie dust technology) we would actually be in a better position than we are today. If even a half dozen new nukes were built, it would have had more of an effect than all the green energy in the US.

Just to add more, wind can't even solve the _current_ electric generation problem, much less the _future_ electric generation problem when we all buy electric cars.

I will go for the 20 year nuke cycle lets start today.'

Because the build wind farms plan you have is full of holes.

And just to broaden the reach a bit, imagine instead of spending another trillion dollars at the federal level bailing out a bunch of companies that should probably go out of business for failing to plan for a slight drop in their revenue, we instead cloned that design nationwide. Say it costs us $10B each (which is insane, its a few million in concrete and water pumps for christ's sake) that's 100 plants producing ~2TW, which would remove CO2 from our electric generation.