One reason is the dopamine rush that one experiences when one buys something new. It's addictive and if people aren't otherwise happy with life they are going to chase after all kinds of things that provide this rush.

The natural, unenlightened, mind believes that happiness is attained by fulfilling desires (and chasing that dopamine rush). This only works in the short term and the effect weakens the more one indulges. Overcoming this requires education about this, self-awareness, discipline, and the means/motive/opportunity to create a fulfilling life by more sustainable means. Absolutely none of this arises naturally in a path-of-least-resistance life.

Marketers know this, and exploit it gleefully for profit.

"Nuclear dreams are now in a race with batteries, basically - if batteries get down to $20/kWh as the CAPEX, keeping around enough batteries for a dunkelflaute every few years, starts to compete with $100/MWh of baseload."

Every few years? Every other week in the winter. 8000 tons of batteries to get one 50 MW data center through a 15 hour winter night, and I keep hearing about much larger date centers.

I have my doubts about molten salt being safe with any metal. EBR 2 passed all its safety tests, but whether it could be scaled up is an open question.

I've appreciated the cheap, practically new equipment on Ebay for pennies. But yeah, it's absurd. I've had a total of 2 ports fail on a switch in the last 18 years. Just run them till something goes wrong. Why else have redundancy?

It's like the old adage: The architect 2x's the design for resiliency, the engineer doubles it again for extra redundancy, the carpenter reinforces it 2x for safety and suddenly you're 8x instead of 2x.

But it's also an argument for the disability-access arguments which are that increasing access for people with disabilities generally helps everyone.

The old fill in the bubble testing has long been obsolete. If you come up with a superior method of testing that is adaptable easily to people with special needs, you'll end up with a superior learning experience for everyone.

Crosswalks are dangerous.

A particular danger at crosswalks is cars making turns. It's often hard to see pedestrians when other cars are blocking the view. (And bicycles are always something to watch for.)

The anti-theft system in For Your Eyes Only was also very effective. I'm sure Q had the parts numbered for just such emergencies.

Because the JTEC is an evolved version of the older AMTEC, Alkali Metal Thermal-to-Electric Converter, in which the working fluid was liquid sodium. The version with hydrogen is much easier to work with. AMTEC looked great in small-scale lab experiments, and for a while in the 90s they were heavily pushed as the successor technology to thermoelectrics currently used in radioisotope power systems, but turned out they were too hard to work with. (I still kinda like the technology, though. It's thermodynamically elegant.)

There's also a JTEC variant that uses oxygen, I believe: https://www.researchwithrutger...

No one at Porsche thought to test this out in a mountain canyon? Or does no one take their Porsche into the mountains on a multiday camping trip?

I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme, with a transfer at Rotterdam. ;) But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds ;)

That said, I have no reason to think that it won't be. Yasin isn't a well known brand, but a lot of other brands (for example Hatchbox) often use white-label Yasin as their own. And everything I've seen about their op looks quite professional.

Web search is trending on a path similar to TV. At first, TV was free with no ads. Very quickly ads were introduced. Then came cable TV where you could pay and watch ad-free. Fairly soon after that cable TV had ads too. Then streaming did the same thing. The quest for every-increasing profits will have the same end result for paid search, eventually.

I'm thinking that all the GPS jamming and spoofing Russia is doing to try to mitigate drone strikes is the most likely factor. This would be a reasonable QA test case for Porsche to have missed.

Well there is a way to test this hypothesis. Placing the computer a couple dozen feet underground and repeating memtest a few times should do it. This is an interesting case and I look forward to an update in due course.

They don't really know what caused the glitch.

The cosmic ray hypothesis is just a conjecture.

So, they're rolling back to the previous version until they can figure it out.

If they're doing memory scrubbing, they might want to bump up the frequency.

If they aren't using semiconductors made with depleted boron, they should be.

It's more as if there were a Diagnosis of Seeing Manual (DSM) that redefined the definitions to merge blindness with other vision problems into a single category, a spectrum "Visual-acuity spectrum disorder". So people who previously said "I'm blind and need accomodation" now get put in the same category with people who say "I have visual acuity spectrum disorder" because their vision is 20-40.

Autism most certainly does exist. The difficulty here is that in the most recent DSM, autism was redefined as a spectrum, and the "mild" end of the spectrum manifests as socially awkward. But there's no clear dividing line anymore; neurotypical behavior can shade into socially awkward behavior by infinitesimal degrees. And, worse, in the popular conversation about autism, most people talk about the mild form, previously a separate diagnosis of "Asperger's", and the profound version gets ignored.
https://www.hawaiitribune-hera...
  https://www.economist.com/scie...
  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/1...

  (apologies for the paywalled articles, but those are the ones that go into better depth).