Yes. You misunderstand the purpose of these studies. Studies like this exist so you can call out politicians who are pandering and ignoring the obvious.

It's like that time Brian Cox was on a panel on climate change with known political piece of shit liar in Australia - Malcolm Roberts, where the piece of shit said there's no evidence that climate change was real, to which Brian Cox replied: "I brought the graph" holding up an a4 print of the data, and sending the entire media into a frenzy about how the piece of shit got intellectually annihilated on a talk show.

Data matters, even when something is "obvious".

Today I Learned that you could install a .deb file from a GUI or with the Software Centre. Seriously I've never tried this. I simply figured that literally anyone who would download a .deb file would be running dpkg from the console.

Nothing's changed. If you lament the "old ways" then you'll be happy to know the same process you used to install debs on the "old" systems still works on today's modern systems. You don't *need* to use snap or flatpack. dpkg -i still works like it always did.

That said a generalisation of "worked better" is just demonstrating ignorance of the complexities of package managers and why snap or flatpack exist in the first place. Each has benefits and downsides. None is inherently "better".

I was going to say, iterative design. Starship suffered pretty extensive damage the first time they sent that up, the only difference is that everyone was expecting it to explode.

No just look at the actual raw numbers. If you feel the need to assign a label to them simply because they disagree with your world view then you are the problem, not the numbers.

You are correct. It is actually not a fact at all.

To be clear RFK Jr should loose what he ultimately tries to do, but the single sided report in this Slashdot story just shows a complete lack of understanding of law. On the one side he claims First Amendment protects all posts. It doesn't. Defamation is still a thing that exists irrespective of the First Amendment. (Mind you RFK Jr should lose the defamation case). But there are no "chilling effects" of the judge's ruling. They are already well established in law.

Then they pivot to talking about Section 230. Then they pivot to their own First Amendment rights. Make up your mind, either you are protected by 230 and the First Amendment is irrelevant, or you recognise that 230 doesn't apply and need to rely on the First.

Fuck idiot politicians in general, but the way this guy is presenting himself and his blog makes me actively root for RFK Jr.

Yeah to add to the averages, the average commute in the USA is 42miles. If you can plug in your car for 10 hours at home you'll be fine.

Yeah, somehow Americans have unique problems that people in Finland don't. *shrugs*

Nope. Absolutely not. Not even a slow L1 charger puts you in that situation. Hint: if you're putting 2kW into your battery pack just for heating then you're going to burn your car down.

Then they should go find a L2 charger. I have none. Zero. No ability to charge my car at home what so ever, and yet charging my car remains a complete non-issue.

They really don't seem to know what to do with Ahsoka as an adult. I guess they don't want her to do anything too interesting as it would screw up continuity, but she made basically no difference to anything in her TV show. She might as well not have been there.

Maybe part of the problem is that Mark Hamill is getting on now, and it's expensive to employ and digitally de-age him for too many scenes. There is an obvious conflict there - Luke trying to rebuild the Jedi Order, Ahsoka having seen how flawed it was and wanting nothing to do with it even before Order 66.

She just doesn't seem to have a purpose or an important role to play in anything now.

The problem is that they are often smart enough not to cross the line into criminality. They just rely on radicalizing people until one of them snaps and goes on a rampage, which they disavow publicly but aren't too upset about privately.

I think that's the essence of it, yes. For the time they were pretty good, but now we can't be wowed by VFX so much (although Star Trek is looking pretty spectacular these days) the writing needs to be a lot better. Disney doesn't seem to understand that, or is incapable of reliably making it happen. Andor seems more like a fluke than intentionally brilliant, at least at the corporate level.

Empire is good despite itself. Lucas decided he wanted the movies to be even more kid friendly, e.g. he changed the way lightsabres work so that there would be no blood. At the same time though, the tone was darker and more serious. Competing designs that somehow worked out really well.

Can we get a bonus for every battery story that's total garbage?

Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction.

"Earth-scarring extraction" - what sort of nonsense is this? The three main sources of lithium are salars, clays, and spodumene.

Salars = pumping up brine (aka, unusuable water) to the surface of a salt flat, letting it sun-dry, collecting the concentrate, and shipping it off for purification. When it rains, the salt turns back into brine. It's arguably one of the least damaging mineral extraction processes on planet Earth (and produces a lot of other minerals, not just lithium).

Clays = dig a hole. Take the clays out. Leach out the lithium. Rinse off the clay. Put the clay back in the hole.

Spodumene: This one actually is hard-rock mining, but as far as hard-rock mining goes, it's quite tame. It has no association with acid mine ponds and often involves very concentrated resources. Some of the rock at Greenbushes (the largest spodumene mine) for example are up to 50% spodumene. That's nearing iron / alumium ore levels.

Lithium also is only like 2-3% of the mass of a li-ion battery. And the LD50 of lithium chloride is only 6x worse than that of sodium chloride (look it up).

The hand wringing over lithium nonsense gets tiring.

rough a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption

The US has no shortage of lithium deposits. There's enough economically-recoverable lithium in Nevada alone to convert 1/4th of all vehicles in the world to electric. The US has had (A) past underinvestment in mining, and especially (B) past underinvestment in refining - as well as (C) long lead times from project inception to full production. Sodium does not "solve" this. As if sodium refining plants are faster to permit and build?

What it does do is introduce a whole host of new problems. Beyond (A) the most famous one (lower energy density - not only is the theoretical lower, but the percentage achievable of the theoretical is *also* lower), they usually struggle with (B) cycle life (high volumetric changes during charge/discharge, and lack of a protective SEI), (C) individual cathode-specific problems (oxide = instability, air sensitivity; prussian blue = defects, hydration; polyanionic = low conductivity; carbon = low coloumbic efficiency / side reactions); and (D) the cost advantages are entirely theoretical, and are more expensive at present, and are premised on lithium being expensive and no reduction in copper in the anodes, both of which I find to be quite sketchy assumptions. When you reduce your cell voltage, you're making everything else more expensive per unit energy stored, because you need more of it.

That said, it's still interesting, and given how immature it is, there's a lot of room for improvement While sodium kind of sucks as a storage ion in many ways, it's actually kind of good in a counterintuitive way. You'd think that due to it being a larger ion diffusion speeds would be low, but due to its low solvation energy and several other factors, it actually diffuses very quickly through both the anode/cathode and electrolye. So it's naturally advantaged for high C-rates. Now, you can boost C-rates with any chemistry by going with thin layers, but this costs you energy density and cost. So rather than sodium ion's first major use case being "bulk" storage ($/kWh), I wouldn't be surprised to see it take off in *responsive* load handling for grid services ($/kW).

Also, it's tiring, this notion that you just add the mass of a battery to that of an ICE car to get the output mass. Meanwhile, a Model 3 is roughly the same weight as its performance and class equivalents on the BMW 3-Series line.

An EV is not just a battery pack.
An ICE vehicle is not just a puddle of gasoline.

You have to compare full systems masses - and not just adding in powertrain masses either. Everything has knock-on impacts in terms of what can bear what kind of loads / adds what kind of structural strength, what you need to support it, what you need to provide in terms of cooling air / fluid or other resources, how it impacts the shape of that vehicle and what that does to your energy consumption, and on and on down the line.

You'd be happy to know that problem has been solved. Not only does it not take 30min to fast charge an EV (closer to half that), but 99% of EV owners won't ever actually use a fast charger; Myself included, and I live in an apartment. I charge at work once a week. In the 8h work day my EV is full again from a standard L2 charger. If I had a garage at home (like most Americans) I'd probably never charge anywhere other than my garage except for those times I drive internationally, and then I just charge at the hotel.

EVs charge fast enough. Even if you're on a road trip, relax, pull into a fast charger, get a coffee, and chill the fuck out. It's not a race.