Free speech includes lying.

Merit should always consider strictly value.

They solved 90% of the problem and think they're nearly done, when it's more like having solved 90% of perpetual motion.

No amount of pattern recognition is ever going to be enough.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

Electrodynamic Tether propulsion tests have been conducted that generated more than 4 newtons of force -- 9 orders of magnitude more than a nano-newton.

The tethers were much longer than a shoe box, but achieving milli-newtons of force with a shoebox sized superconducting magnet isn't unreasonable (near the earth).

Although in theory you could push into higher and higher orbits until you reach escape velocity,
I think this is only going to be good for station keeping -- basically just enough propulsion to cancel air friction/orbital decay, or maybe lift from NEO to GEO over a long time.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

I remember a story a while back, diamond couriers were losing too many packages due to theft. Their solution? Send the diamonds via regular mail.
Losses in the mail were tiny compared to targeted thefts.

I wonder if it's mail that's the problem, or if it's banks cashing checks they really shouldn't and trying to blame their customers for the banks own negligence.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Statism creates billionaires.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

The greater metropolitan area of Mexico City uses around 7.5 billion kg (liters) of water per day.
(25,000,000 people using 300 liters)
Lithium is about 100 parts per billion in sea water.
So if you desalinated enough water to supply Mexico city, and sorted off all of lithium, that would be 750 kg per day, or 270 tonnes per year.
Annual global lithium production is about 290,000 tonnes per year.

Desalinate water for all of Mexico city, add an extra 0.1% to lithium production.

Color me unimpressed.

Democracy is for retards.

Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.

This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.

Like you.