Do you think the raw materials are found in orbit?

You have to send the raw materials to orbit - then process them in a hard vacuum, with entirely remotely operated equipment without any maintenance available. What is wrong, and it is very wrong, is to think that this is cheaper than simply processing them to final form in a plant here on Earth, then sending the finished material to orbit.

Having long term obsessions and a short attention span are not really contradictions. Having both together is commonly observed - the fixations provide the theme around which the attention jumps.

Take for example the "colonizing Mars" thing you bring up - does he really have a coherent approach to getting to "colonizing Mars"? What we have seen is in 2016 Musk planning to land the Dragon capsule on Mars "as soon as 2018", and a Mars colony by 2024maybe 2028?, or (last year) sending someone to Mars in 2029?

You see here the long term fixation combined with the erratic short term jumps from one imaginary scheme to the next. And the Mars fixation is explained by the Musk's apparently life-long grand delusion that he is the most important person in human history since he is going to save the human race by colonizing Mars. The Verge piece was written more than 9 years ago, but Musk is still obsessing on it. But he really has no plausible strategy for achieving this self-aggrandizing delusional objective. Despite the real achievements of SpaceX the Mars thing is one half-baked hare-brained scheme after another.

So far there has only been one large EMP event ever generated which was the 1.4 megaton Starfish Prime event so this is the only such signal out there (and it is only one single pulse).

A 1.4 megaton high altitude EMP explosion produces an EMP signal of about 5*10^11 J in a pulse 500 microsecond long for a total omnidirectional signal of 10^15 W in a bandwidth of 100 MHZ.

The most detectable repeated emitted of pulses are the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) radars that emit a powerful narrow bandwidth, narrow beam that can be detected with Earth technology out to 250 light years.

The AN/FPS-50 radar has a pulse strength of 10^7 W, which due to the highly directional nature is equivalent to about a 10^11 W omnidirectional signal. It is in addition confined to a frequency band of only 0.1 MHZ. This gives it a relative detectability with a narrow band filter comparable to a 10^14 W EMP pulse. So the Starfish Prime event is a pulse about 10 times stronger, true, but the BMEWS radar pulses 27 times a second every second for decades. One single pulse of strength X or 4*10^10 pulses of 0.1 X, which is really the more detectable signature?

Neither. The cited estimate is from the EIA website where it discusses actual production not any sort of capacity.

There are multiple alternatives to cobalt. The LFP is one, but nickel is proving to be not only a viable replacement for cobalt in current lithium batteries, but actually superior. So even in the medium term, much less the long one, there is no "cobalt" problem.

Could this argument be any vaguer? With any commodity with rapidly expanding demand there are always transient supply pinches, and so observing that we have seen some is not any sort of argument against the viability of lithium batteries, and is not even a price problem for BEVs not even in the short term since they use so little (12 kg in a high end Tesla). Lithium supply does not have any significant "political volatility" (aka Africa) supply problems - probably why you did not name any names. Less than 1% of world supply comes from Africa in 2022, Australia and Chile currently produce 77% of the entire supply. And there is no long term problem either - current known resources is enough to build 9 billion Teslas, and it is expanding rapidly as more exploration is done.

Fairies will make our lithium disappear? Cobalt supply is adequate for the foreseeable future and is on the way out, as you yourself noted above (though you were unaware of nickel replacing cobalt also. By the same token if the fairies stole all of our uranium the nuclear power industry would collapse.

Another one of your long posts of unsupported FUD.

This is a very confused and weak argument.

There is no outrage from just acquiring a nuclear power plant using the existing world system of fuel management (buying enriched uranium from existing producers, and regular monitored spent fuel storage on-site).

And idly speculating that UAE doesn't think solar energy is feasible as a power source because they also are interested in an expensive nuclear plant is bizarre projection. You have argued that nuclear power provides ideal base load in combination with solar for peak power I believe? By this "argument" - the don't believe in X because they are also building Y, one can just easily (and falsely) argue that they don't believe in Y because they are building X.

UAE has money to burn, literally, so they are investing in a diversified power production system - even the very high cost nuclear power option.

Renewable power actually matches up with the needs of fuel production very well since periods of excess production provide very cheap (even free) power to run hydrogen or methane plants that are set up to run intermittently. This is done with aluminium production today for the same reason.

Killer statistic and source. You've read about some dealers currently having trouble selling some BEVs. You don't link to a survey of the actual market because it would anhillate the argument you are trying to push.

From the article I linked to: "BEV sales in all twenty analyzed markets increased by 26% in the third quarter of 2023 in comparison with the same period last year."

Only double digit annual percentage increases? OMG! The BEV market is tanking! Its a fad that is all over! (/s).

Surface transportation uses about ten times the amount of energy as aviation. So you are arguing electric cars are impossible. That argument was lost many years ago. No one seriously questions that transportation can be electrified - it is a matter of discussion of which is the best way to produce the electricity. If you are arguing electrification of transportation is impossible you take yourself off the table as a serious commenter.

So you are arguing that electrification of all transportation, including cars is infeasible? Aviation only uses about 9% of the transportation consumed petroleum. If we can electrify cars, we and have enough electricity to produce fuel for planes.

Simply saying "it takes a lot" is a fatally weak argument.

To start off you can support a significant fraction of regional flights which go from a hub to an outlier airport and back again, with a single fuel load. Do not succumb to the Slashdot disease of arguing that the entire system and all limitations must be overcome at once.

The biggest problem is not permitting very short passwords, but prohibiting long ones that prevent you from using the superior method of pass phrases.

I dunno. Their monopoly ad position gives them the power to force crud down our throats for a long, long time.

This is the driving design criterion?! "We must optimize for people who print maps but don't have a color printer."

Who even prints their Google maps? And I haven't seen a black and white only printer in more than a decade.

Somehow the tech world has become infected with the notion that dark, low contrast color schemes are super-cool! and should be used by everyone everywhere for everything! Like back in the day didn't everyone write of blackboards in various shades of grey chalk?

Because it we currently do not have good models that fit the known structure of the Universe that can explain a particle accelerated to this energy, and be able to keep it long enough to reach Earth from its origin. With particle energies this high interactions with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation field acts as brakes. We do not "need" unknown physics, but it is one of the options in attempting to resolve this problem.