Great news: someone lied to you... BEVs didn't need battery replacement every seven years.

As it happens, my daily driver is a seven year old BEV, a Tesla Model S. Its estimated range was 335 miles when new and is 315 miles now. Assuming we can trust the car's estimate (I, for one, do trust it) my car still has 94% battery capacity after seven years.

My car is far from worthless, but it's not for sale. I like it and I am keeping it.

Basically, Israel wants the land that Gaza (and West bank) sit on, and wants the Palestinians that are there right now either gone, or dead.

If this is true, why did Israel give Gaza to the Palestinians, forcibly removing Israelis, in 2005? Wouldn't it have been easier to keep it than to give it away and go to war to take it back?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza

If Israel just wants everyone gone or dead, why didn't they just bomb Gaza flat? Why do they bother "roof-knocking", setting up evacuation corridors, and sending their own troops into harm's way?

Is it a coincidence that Israel was in a cease-fire on October 6, only going to war after Hamas committed an act of war (killing over 1100 people, wounding many more, and taking 253 hostages)?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war_hostage_crisis

Goal posts: moved!

Now we have gone from "it's impossible to combine renewable energy and storage to get reliable power" to "only rich people could ever afford it".

In my case, I have a ten-year loan making the monthly payments possible for me. I know someone who has a 20-year loan. These long loan periods only make sense because solar panels and lithium batteries last for decades.

My home isn't that large but it's all-electric. Electric stove, electric clothes dryer, heat pumps for heating/cooling the house and for heating water. It's why the solar company recommended I get 30 kWh of batteries. If Tesla Powerwall 3 had been an option when I got my system, two would have been enough.

And you must have missed the part where I said the costs are falling. When the Macintosh computer was first sold, it cost about as much as a new economy car. I guess computers are only for rich people even today, right?

You really didn't contribute anything to the discussion.

the largest battery farm you can reasonably buy for a residential system.

Really? How large are we talking?

I have 30 kWh on my house, and that easily lasts all night. Even while cooling the house in summer.

In winter I don't get much power from the solar panels, but for about 2/3 of the year my roof can charge the batteries while running the house. I live near Seattle... I'll bet people in California and Texas really could run their homes year-round from solar.

In short, my personal experience disproves your claims.

Now, I am fortunate to be able to afford the large batteries and solar power system... but the price has already been falling and it's expected to fall a lot more. So I am not some 1% elitist. My point is that if my house is as good as it is in gloomy Seattle, there's huge potential in places like California, Texas, India, etc.

Until recently grid-sized batteries were science fiction. Now, Google "Tesla Megapack" and see how many utility companies are buying them.

I get Comcast Business. I don't hate it.

It's expensive but it works and they haven't done anything to enrage me.

Going to the moon is way more expensive than going to LEO.

Two quotes come to mind:

Robert Heinlein said something similar to "Once you are in orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system."

Jerry Pournell said "Once you have a space station, you can go to the Moon on half-shifts and weekends."

Build a space station, a reusable "Aldrin cycler", and some landing craft and you can go to the Moon cheaply and whenever you wish. And you might be able to just build a few extra Starship stages and use them as the landing craft.

You are very welcome. ^_^

I have used the Microsoft Natural Keyboard for many years. The most recent time I needed a keyboard, I had to find a new one.

I found the Perixx PERIBOARD-535 and I recommend it. Same layout as the classic Microsoft Natural Keyboard. Offered with your choice of three different keyswitch mechanisms... I got the "brown". Perfectly supports Mac but can be switched to Windows compatibility mode, and has "macro" buttons to give you extra options.

https://perixx.com/products/px...

I'm probably not going back to the Microsoft keyboard when the new version comes out.

Jokes aside, some kind of pack-swapping machine is probably the way to go.

Forklifts have counterweights so they can lift heavy things without tipping. I think the battery pack could double as a counterweight, getting a benefit from the weight. And then there's the energy efficiency and less danger of fiery death.

Given all the disadvantages of hydrogen, I have to wonder whether a battery swapping solution might not be better.

Battery swapping has problems as a general solution for transportation, but for forklifts in a warehouse it should work pretty well.

I read the article and what jumps out at me is that Amazon is buying hydrogen forklifts from a company. So at least they are going with an off-the-shelf solution that they have already tried and is known to work. The only real news is that they are getting their own hydrogen production to avoid buying the hydrogen.

But if I ran Amazon, I would have someone looking into LFP battery forklifts with a fast battery swap station.

No car company founded after Ford survived. Until Tesla.

Yes, Tesla relied on some government money to survive until they got the Model 3 into successful mass production and became profitable. You love government, so you should be trumpeting Tesla as a success story. "Look! Government works!"

Instead you are posting angry rants. You need to go touch grass or something.

Elon Musk is definitely guilty of repeatedly being over-optimistic about ship dates. But he has an excellent record of delivering what he promised... eventually. As he joked: "At Tesla, we make the impossible late."

This is different from Trevor Milton, who just made stuff up. He told people that Nikola had a working gadget making hydrogen on their roof, when they didn't have any such thing. He said they had a working truck, but it only worked to roll downhill. He straight-up lied to investors.

As for range: even a 2012 Tesla Model S had an energy use graph that showed exactly how much power the car actually used and how far it would go based on that. And Tesla cars have better range than their competition, except for the breathtakingly expensive Lucid Air. The EPA estimated range of a Tesla might be unrealistic but all the EV makers use the same formulas to calculate their EPA ranges. If you want to claim Tesla is dishonest, cough up some evidence to support your position or shut up.

As for SpaceX: if Musk is such an idiot, why is there no other company in the world, even now, that can come close to reusing rockets? Did Musk just get lucky somehow?

Tesla has the best EVs in the world. SpaceX has the best rocket technology in the world. Surprising that an idiot loser just got lucky twice like that.

As for GM, compute the Altman Z score of GM and Tesla and see which one looks more likely to go bankrupt soon.

The article refers to the device as a "robot" but I hope here on Slashdot we can use the correct technology. This is clearly a "mecha":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecha

They're "pivoting" to mixed reality, interestingly only after having their balls handed to them by a _pre release demo_

I'm pretty sure that they must have worked on Quest 3 for years before releasing it. They didn't have enough time to watch the Apple demo and then change their product design.

Elon promised us a Vactrain

When? Where?

He has talked about "Hyperloop" but I don't recall him ever promising to build it. I guess with Tesla, Boring Company, SpaceX, Neuralink, X/Twitter, and xAI, maybe he has enough going on at the moment.

I think the average canal would be a LOT longer than 10 miles.

I guess this is the disconnect between your thinking and mine.

I'm not imagining that the microinverters would be enough to drive the power all the way to the end of the canal... I'm just imagining wire runs some reasonable distance to a backbone power distribution network that would involve transformers.

As little as I know, I'm still pretty sure you can't have one transformer per panel. You will need to have a few strategically-placed transformers, and you just need the wire runs to make it from the panels to the transformers. The transformers would be hooked up to distribution lines. Again, since I'm not an expert, I'm imagining this basic power distribution backbone to resemble the power delivery lines system in my neighborhood. Presumably at 4 kV or higher.

Microinverters, a few thousand feet of cable, step-up transformers. Assemble together.

Alternatively: strings of panels, string inverters, a few thousand feet of cable, step-up transformers.

I am not any kind of electrical engineer but I think it's just common sense that if you want power to go literally miles you are going to need AC stepped up to higher voltages, for the very reasons you listed in your posts.

If I were put in charge of this project, the first thing I would do is find someone who is an expert in this stuff and discuss a sensible basic strategy. If you compute that it's infeasible to send power ten miles at 240 Volts, then... don't plan to do that.