So the complaint is that they were promoting their product while downplaying its failings, call me shocked. NPR seems to think this is something unique to the fossil fuel industry. It's not like solar/wind companies provide overly rosy energy production figures while downplaying the environmental/decommissioning costs. Or pharmaceutical companies praise their drugs effectiveness in certain cases while quietly paying people hush money on the side in the cases where the side effects maims/kills someone.

This is a story as old as time, new thing comes out and everyone who does that thing believe that it will cause the end of their livelihood and eventually the collapse of human society. The cotton gin, the steam shovel, the loom, the computer, the rotatory mill, the tractor, on and on. And each time (so far) instead of humanity sliding into chaos and poverty our quality of life increase. From a historical perspective most of humanity lives in the lap of luxury that even the greatest kings of old would be envious of, indoor plumbing, central heating/cooling, easy access to high quality food, etc all of it BECAUSE of these highly disruptive inventions throughout history. I'm sure that there is some point at which automation will begin to degrade the living standard, but if the past two thousand years is any indication we're REALLY BAD at gauging when/how that will happen.

That so many people seem to have gotten it to me suggests that it was in whatever water source they were using to create the mud. Think something like legionnaires disease that is sometimes found in water towers or a well becoming contaminated with Cholera. I wonder if someone thought it would be a good idea to get the water from a local lake or river that may not have been the cleanest body of water. I don't know about California but where I live the health department has to do spot checks on homes in some areas from time to time because raw sewage is ending up in the local creek because someone back in the day connected their plumbing outflow directly to said creek through a tile/drain.

Its a generally accepted practice that those asking for tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in free money (I'm sorry, "Government backed investments") PROVE that their idea has merit before said money is dolled out. This goes for (or at least it should) those actually receiving the money AND those advocating that it be spent.

"With the device being so expensive, not everyone can afford a dev kit"

Anyone who's going to be developing apps for this thing is going to consider $3,500 a drop in the bucket. A lot of Apples computers are more expensive than the Vision Pro. The "on site conversations with developers" might make a little more sense, but I doubt it is the real aim especially with how much they are touting the facetime interactivity. I'm guessing what is mostly going on is that Apple seems to be keeping quite a tight lid on real world demonstrations of the Vision Pro. While they've let more then a few people demo them, they were all under Apples direct supervision and with severe limits on what could be filmed/done. It's a lot easier to keep a lid on things when you control the hardware and environment in which the demonstration/development occurs. I don't completely blame Apple for this, in this age of clickbait articles/takes even if the Vision Pro was perfect (which I'm sure it's not) there would be some trying to coerce it to misbehave just so they could get clicks (see a lot of the AI stuff lately). All that said I'm not likely to purchase a Vision Pro, I don't much care for Apples walled garden approach. Hopefully within a few years of release other companies will catch up with similar hardware that is more open.

Here we go "Whereas NIF's 1990s-era technology is only 0.5% efficient, Campbell says that modern lasers can get as high as 20%."

https://physicsworld.com/a/nat...

If I remember correctly the "net positive" aspect of this is only measured at the testing vessel, all of the energy dumped into the equipment to generate the ignition is ignored. I think NIF uses a bunch of lasers, they start out with some pretty benign "seed" lasers which are then ran through a vast array of boosting banks that turn each low power laser beam into a high power one. It is apparently a VERY inefficient system requiring something like 200-300 times more energy than actually makes it to the testing vessel. With modern equipment (NIF was designed decades ago) it would be possible to bring up that efficiency, but even with that I don't think it could become a true "net positive" generating system.

Huh? They may be simple to work on but they are INSANELY expensive to procure, maintain and replace. EACH train car cost $1-2 Million, and that's just part of the system. Tracks, controls, electrical wiring, signalling run hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. The MTA just wants to upgrade a preexisting system, and its pricetag is $54 BILLION dollars. Now obviously that is for something larger, but but even low balling Vegas Loop ridership (500k yearly) that would equate to an upgrade cost of $20.5 Million. Do you really think it would cost Tesla $20M+ to replace a few dozen cars?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...

Beyond a testbed for the technology, what would be the point of a Hyperloop system with such a short run? A full Hyperloop only makes sense when you're travelling significant distances (between cities). While I can see Hyperloop cars operating intracity as well it wouldn't be at high speeds/in low pressure tunnels. And while from what I have seen the Vegas Loop needs some refinement (automated driving, automatic doors, better routing, etc), the concept of running EVs through tunnels is a sound one. Cars are a relatively cheap, mass produced and well known system that can be deployed quickly. Other systems (trains, buses, hyperloop) may have better throughput but are also comparatively expensive, slow to improve, and slow to implement.

Virtually all of human endeavour involves iteration on previous works. Why do these people think that AI should be singled out from this universal process? I've heard more than a few directors/writers/actors boasting about their use of a previous work as the basis for their own, such as "my story is [insert book/film title] in space". Virtually all of Disney's films are iterations on old folk tales. The common way to educate new writers/directors/actors is to have them read/analyze/portray vast amounts of previous works. Sounds pretty much indistinguishable from programming an AI by feeding in content to me. And if it actually makes good content, unlike the trash they've been pumping out for the past few years, I'm all for it.

"a revelation that means the sprawling search for the vessel was conducted even though senior officials already had some indication the Titan was destroyed."

I've seen at least one source that suggests it was even more definitive than that. Apparently many people "in the know" (James Cameron being one) suggest that the sub reported an alarm had went off indicated the pressure vessel was failing and they had already dropped their ballast in an attempt to surface before communications went dark. I believe the lawsuit with the former employee also notes that Rush boasted about his "early warning system" which he believed would notify the crew in time to surface before the hull failed. I can appreciate that rescuers wanted to hold out some hope of them surviving but it appears that too much information was held onto resulting in a overblown response.

https://www.latimes.com/entert...

"U.S. intelligence had learned that three Wuhan Institute of Virology lab workers had been hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November 2019"

Given the nature of the Chinese government I doubt we'll ever have definitive evidence of where COVID came from (lab or natural), but to say there is "no evidence" for a lab leak is laughably false. The virus outbreak "just happens" to occur right next to a lab doing coronavirus research, some of the researchers working directly working on coronavirus research "just happen" to get sick enough to be hospitalized before the outbreak, and the lab "just happens" to be occupied by the Chinese military as soon as (and possibly before) the virus was identified. While it is "possible" that these are all just coincidences, all of them occurring at once should make anyone with two brain cells to rub together question why the media were so set on it being of natural origin and any inquiry on a lab leak was shouted down/ignored like you were talking about alien abduction theories.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u...
https://theintercept.com/2023/...

Ohhhhhh...... Carbon Fiber.... I don't know about it in terms of submersible design but I do know of a rocket based example of how it can go wrong. Some years ago there was a rocket failure that was tracked down to a structural failure in a carbon fiber wrap for a solid rocket booster. Turns out that during testing they pushed it to flight loads plus a bit which is normal for steel pressure vessels. However carbon fiber, while very strong, is apparently more susceptible to performance degradation on successive stressing. Basically each time it is stressed significantly a few of the carbon fibers break, this can be mitigated with inspections and building it to higher specs but it is a consideration. Metal of course does have its own weakening through stress cycles but it is often a slower process less susceptible to catastrophic failure.

I think you underestimate the destructive capacity (both self and to others) that destitute/mentally unwell people can have. I have a family member with direct experience, they rented a room out to a couple for next to nothing having some housing trouble and they smashed a hole in a wall just to mount a TV. I also deal with landlords in my line of work on occasion, and most have horror stories about low income housing assistance programs that require gutting the whole house (carpets, cupboards, cabinets, etc) and starting from (patched) drywall. And at least one told me that the assistance program he was dealing with wouldn't reimburse any of the damages. While you are probably right that a "majority" of homeless persons won't completely destroy a home (I'm not talking a detached residence, just any kind of housing) if even a few percent do and there isn't a way of dealing with it (reimbursement/criminal charges) your going to have trouble getting any property owners to participate in the programs. And don't think that local/state governments are just going to build housing and "fix" that issue, San Francisco and several other cities have tried to build low income housing and the costs have been obscene, in SFs case on the low end it's costing well over $500K per unit and some estimates are as high as $1.2 Million. And Seattle isn't doing much better with their per unit cost being just shy of $500k each. And that's just construction, I doubt the maintenance costs are going to be any better.

Norways grid is powered by around 90% hydro power, has a very low population density and is pretty high in terms of precipitation. Which means that given enough strategically placed hydro plants and a lack of environmental/bureaucratic red tape they have pretty much free energy falling from the sky and conveniently storing itself in rivers/streams/lakes. There are very few nations which have such factors, here in the US for example we have spent years destroying our hydro facilities to save some random unknown fish populations.