Apple's market dominance in the U.S. means that people with Android phones face significant headwinds. Being the only Android user in a group chat is its own special Hell. That lack of interoperability works against Apple in places where Android phones are more established. It is hard to convince people that your phone is so much better than theirs when every time you put a picture in a group chat it looks like you took the picture on a flip phone from 1995. Everyone else's pictures look fine. In these cases Apple is clearly the problem, and it is a bad look for Apple.

That doesn't stop iPhones from being a status symbol, and there are certain parts of the population, where all of the rich and powerful people have iPhones, where being part of the crowd is worth the price of entry. However, in a country where 90+% of the population is using Android you have to be pretty darn snooty to justify buying an iPhone. I suspect that is a very hard market to sell into.

And yet the SmartCar (the original one, not the SmartForTwo) was certified in the EU and uncertifiable in the US. We can argue all day as to whose safety and registration regulations are stronger or in some sense better (neither of which was part of my OP), but the fact is they are different. And the PRC EV manufactures have so far not see a positive return in meeting the US/Canada standards and entering the market.

So far the EV autos designed in the PRC have not attempted to meet US/Canada safety and regulatory certification standards. BYD has an engineering and manufacturing center in the US for their EV municipal vehicles so they could certify a car if they thought they had a market for it, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps the US EV makers could concentrate on making their products more price competitive and improving sales and service so they don't have to resort to a trade war to win the market?

That's a symptom, not a cause. EVs are all newer and built with current technology; there are still many ICE vehicles in production based on 2005 designs, technology, and parts. As those age out of the production system - as they are doing now - they are being replaced by new designs (whether ICE, hybrid, or EV) that use extremely expensive and non-repairable modern technology and parts. Have a fender-bender in one of those, EV or ICE, and you will be hit with a $5000 repair bill. The days of "beat to fit; paint to match" are over.

The article actually does a good job of talking about this. It even mentions recent problems that they had in Alaska with a cable that got cut because the ice got thicker than they thought possible. I actually think that this is a pretty cool idea (pun totally intended), and I am glad to see these guys making 23 million euros to look into it. Good on them for getting paid to study a very interesting problem.

However, I would be surprised if the cable actual got laid, assuming that the current forecasts are remotely accurate. This fiber optic cable is already forecast to cost 4 times as much as a cable that took the conventional route. It is also going to be considerably more expensive to maintain. The main selling point appears to be that it is less likely to sabotaged (unless your adversary has access to nuclear submarines, I guess), and it is also less likely to be cut by an errant anchor.

There's a reason that so many of the undersea cables follow essentially the same routes. That reason is cost. No one wants to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into a cable that is going to have a serious price disadvantage.

Not to be a wet blanket, but no investment decisions have been made. If you read the article carefully you will realize that they aren't even to the survey stage yet. What they have done is that they have hit the EU up for 23 million euro in funding.

So far the estimated costs of the project are 1 billion euro, and that's projected to be considerably more costly than non-Arctic routes. So they have a lot of fund raising to do if they want to actually make this happen. And, let's face it, the easy money has already been raised. The EU is more than happy to pay 23 million euro, much of which will end up in Nokia's hands, to study this. Actual business people, spending their own money, are likely to be more skeptical. Especially considering the fact that comparable cable that doesn't take this route would only cost 250 million euros.

This article is really just a fancy advertisement for something that is probably not a good idea. The article actually does a good job of covering that part of the story. You have to read down a ways, but it is worth it. True to form the EU has already invested heavily in this project. I personally think that says more about EU spending than on the viability of the Northwest Passage for fiber optic cables.

If, on the other hand, you felt strongly enough about the direction that the climate was headed on this planet that you wanted to make a big bet on the Northwest Passage becoming a viable route for fiber optic cables, I suspect that their is an opportunity here to put your money where your mouth is. These people are going to need a lot more money than they currently have if this is to get off the drawing board.

What is this? Sounds like Greenwashing of CC by Bill Gates. What happened to his work on Nuclear energy?

General Motors announced today that it is now selling this data directly to insurers. After all why should LexisNexis and Verisk get a cut?

For a truck that is spectacular gas mileage. The manual transmission helps, but the big difference is that it just isn't that big. Our current regulations make small trucks like the S10 infeasible. That's the sort of unintended consequence that is likely to make this 30 year-old vehicle even more desirable in the future.

And before you mock his gas mileage remember that he has been getting that gas mileage since 1995 when 23 MPG was even more amazing. That vehicle cost around $10k new, is far less expensive to insure than basically anything else. While the S10 is small, it is still a pickup truck. If you take the time to compare his driving costs over the last 25 years compared to yours you will probably be far less inclined to mock his decision. Especially when you consider the fact that his vehicle doesn't phone his insurance company every time he brakes aggressively.

I drive an old 1996 Honda Civic for similar reasons. It gets better gas mileage (and seats more people, at least in a pinch), but it isn't as generally useful as an S10. I'm jealous.

What I want is a new Toyota Hilux. It is like the S10 in many ways (in that both are small pickups). Unfortunately, Toyota can't sell them in the U.S. due to the unintended consequences of some of our stupid EPA regulations. Instead we are stuck with bigger trucks because apparently those vehicles get loopholes.

That is a good point. And it really drives the point home that what we want is reduce and reuse, but what we are sold is recycle. Thanks.

Smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the United States with approximately 500K deaths per year. That is more than twice more than alcohol (200K) with less smokers in the U.S. than drinkers. The mortality data for smoking marijuana is less clear (mostly because it is illegal in most places), but it carries many of the inherent risks as smoking. Any of the papers that talk about the actual risks of smoking marijuana cover this in detail.

It turns out that lighting stuff on fire and then breathing that smoke directly into your lungs is not a good idea. It's 2024, this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone anymore.

Edibles are probably considerably safer than smoking. The probably is because we really don't know. Heck, it is even possible that edibles are good for you, or that they are worse for you than smoking. Feel free to be a guinea pig.

That data is very hard to come by, as we don't really have good numbers on how much marijuana gets used. Canada has very good data on how marijuana impaired accidents nearly quintupled when they legalized marijuana. The doctor that wrote that paper had this to say about comparative deadliness of the two substances:

On it's face this would seem to agree with your assessment that marijuana is less deadly than alcohol. From a driving perspective it probably is. Although the paper went on to talk about how very few of the people who tested positive for marijuana only tested positive for marijuana. Most also tested positive for alcohol and that combination was significantly more deadly than alcohol alone.

It turns out that people that get stoned and drive tend to also be drunk, and the combination makes them even more dangerous than simply being drunk.

It also doesn't take into consideration increased risk factors long term for cardiovascular and other health related issues arising from marijuana use. Right now, admittedly the science behind that is murky. Numbers are hard to get for criminalized substances, and it is very difficult to separate the effects of marijuana from the effects of other drugs that often get used in combination with marijuana (alcohol being a prime example). That being the case smoking marijuana probably has most of the same health problems that smoking tobacco has. From the limited studies that have been done marijuana smokers can probably expect similar if not worse mortality rates. Not to mention the fact that while most marijuana users don't go on to use other "harder" drugs. There is a statistical link between marijuana use and later use of other drugs. Some of that makes sense. I have several friends that have told me that they have been given marijuana spiked with some other substance at one time or another.

It turns out that drug dealers are not nice people. Hanging out with them is a very serious health risk.

Just for the record, I am personally in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana, and I have even helped my niece get a medical marijuana card. I recognize that the science on some of this is still out. I just don't think that when the research is done, that marijuana is going to turn out to be as benign a substance as many marijuana advocates currently insist that it is. I think that it is at least safe to say that it is probably as harmful to your health as cigarette smoke, and long term cigarettes are invariably an early death sentence.

Interestingly enough the U.S. actually tried criminalizing alcohol distribution and use. You can read the history of prohibition if you want. I personally am a tee-totaler, and I spend a fair share of my time trying to convince youth to never drink alcohol. That being the case, even I think that criminalizing alcohol was a mistake. Alcohol is simply too easy to make, and too much a part of most people's culture to successfully make illegal.

That being the case just because criminalizing alcohol was overzealous does not mean that decriminalizing other drugs is a good idea. Oregon has basically proven that it is better for society for some substances to be illegal. Yes, alcohol kills more people, but most drugs (including marijuana) are more deadly. Fortunately all other drugs are simply far less popular than alcohol. The last thing that we want is for these other drugs to become more popular.

As an aside, you really should consider giving up alcohol as well.

I remember when almost all glass bottles were recycled. Milk came in glass bottles that were refilled over and over. Soda came in glass bottles which were refilled and used over and over. These bottles were worth money to retailers, not because the government put some sort of tax on them, but because they would resell them to the distributors who would wash them out and reuse them.

This system lasted much longer in some parts of the world than others. Recycling soda bottles was the norm in Latin America clear into the 90s, maybe longer. I moved back to the United States and I stopped paying attention. Of course, they weren't melting the bottles down or anything crazy like that. They simply washed them out. After a while the bottles would get so worn that they would get hazy on the outside. The still held Coca-Cola just fine.

I suspect that even the most granola of today's customers would be put off by this sort of recycling. And there is no question that gathering and washing glass bottles is definitely more expensive than simply manufacturing brand new plastic bottles. Before plastic, however, that was simply the world that we lived in. Even 30 years ago recycling glass was still economically viable in locations where the packaging machines hadn't been upgraded.

Part of the reason that I am so skeptical of any sort of recycling program is that recycling proponents always seem to gloss right over the history of what societies did before plastics were widespread. Humans have already solved how to package goods in a world less reliant on plastic. But instead of pushing for well known solutions to the problems of plastic we would rather point the finger at Big Oil and blame them for our plastics problem.

The license that Youtube has content providers agree to is incredibly broad. Youtube can basically use that content however it would like, including sublicensing it, monetizing it, and retaining it after you have deleted it from the service. People uploading stuff to Youtube give Youtube an incredible amount of rights over their work.

Github's license, on the other hand, does not grant them extensive rights. Heck, they treat most repos as private. Worse, many of the Free Software licenses that they probably could use to train the AI might potentially create derivative works that would also be copylefted. The lawyers at the FSF has definite beliefs about this (here's the link), and their beliefs just happen to line up with the beliefs of most content creators. I suspect before too long we will have either legislation or case law that will spell this out concretely. To this point the folks training AI models have just moved forward under the impression that they could train their AI with whatever content they wanted, whether it was licensed to them or not. That's unlikely to stand long term.

Either way, however, Youtube has direct access to the motherlode of data when it comes to video, and it is all licensed to them under a very lenient license. That advantage actually is likely to be hard to beat.