Except that the cuts are likely funding none of that, just more $$ for billionaire tax cuts. I did notice that there doesn't seem to be much pork going to member-districts which seems a more plausible explanation for cutting the funding.

the subsides on renewables just level the playing field against the subsides on oil, gas and coal. If you want to remove them all, I'm with you, but removing subsidies just because that sector provided less for your election campaign I have a problem with...

Or we could just tax Besos at a reasonable rate (at least so he pays more tax than most of the people reading this post) and then fund real space science..

All valid, and, if you look at the investors, none of them (that I saw) will really notice the money lost - I have no sympathies for them. And, unlike, say Theranos, it seems that there's still some faith in the founder. I feel 23andme just doesn't have a business model, certainly not one that doesn't involve selling large amounts of private data to 3rd parties, but is not hiding anything, (I haven't looked that closely, so presumably the new investors have a plan).

Brilliant. VC fund a company for $XXX (seems to be about $1B), run the company into the ground. Find some more VCs to buy it at ~1/3 the original price, repeat.

I'd love to ditch Slack/Teams/Meetup/Zoom/etc. etc. etc. in favor of an open source alternative but have not found a suitable replacement.

No, Word wasn't better, WordStar and WordPerfect were both massively superior to the nascent "Word" but MS sold it at a loss ($30 or something) which wiped out the companies who were making a living selling word processing software. Of course, as soon as the competition was destroyed, the price went up to about the price-point that WordStar and WordPerfect had been selling at.

Uber is a similar example - run an illegal taxi service at a steeply discounted (ie non-profitable) price until you have enough passengers that cities change the taxi laws to may you legal. (Then, after you've destroyed the existing industry, up the price, but that's another story).

Have you ever asked an LLM for test code? It usually takes two attempts, the first is the basic level of test that I've seen often, the second is a decidedly thorough test that few of us have time to create (just the typing would take half a day). And it will often create tests for corner cases that an average tester would miss (or just skip).

No question that higher wattage charges should be what's installed in any new infrastructure (although getting that amount of power is a challenge in some rural areas). Lucid claims 200 miles in 5 minutes, although this article says a little longer: https://insideevs.com/news/567... even at 22 minutes for 300 miles you're still in the pee, coffee and hot-dog type timing. A little longer than gas, but on a road trip, you rarely stop for just gas.

The 80% rule is valid, but for a realistic trip, you're probably going to start with the car fully charged, charge to 80% along the way and then charge to 100% at overnight stops. So, for the Lucid with a 500mile range at 70MPH we're really talking leaving with a full charge, and then charging once or twice over the course of a day. If you're planning to drive straight through with multiple drivers, more than likely you'll need a real meal-break, which, even if it's fast food, will get you a good few miles.

BUT this whole discussion is about road-trips which, even thought it's always the "I can't by an EV because...", is not the most common use case. By far the more likely usage is the 50-100 miles a day commuting to work - and a used Bolt will get you that. I have a colleague who traded a Tundra for a Kia EV for a 120 mile RT commute, saving himself thousands a month.

While there's no question that charging at home is definitely a big benefit most of the problems you identify have been largely resolved in the last few years. The modern superchargers will add 200+ miles to the car in under 5 minutes, so you're in the same time frame as a gas-stop. The whole range anxiety and the idea that range in winter is a killer is less relevant when you have cars like the Lucid Gravity with a 450 (probably summer) range. You'll loose some, possibly quite a lot, but you'll still get to work and back.

More infrastructure would undoubtedly help. With luck, we'll see some sane government policy there, but not for 4 years or so. (And before you complain that EVs and EV chargers should not need subsidies, check the subsidies for oil, gas and coal - it's just a matter of leveling the playing field)

The move to EVs is well underway and gaining momentum: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... The dumb business move at this point would be to listen to the current Washington administration and stop investing in the technology - a sure way to cede the world market to BYD or other Chinese manufacturers, or to other multinational auto companies. I suppose with enough protectionism, the US could be the last holdout manufacturing gasoline cars for domestic consumption, but it's not even clear that would work with the likes of Rivian and Slate (and Tesla if it can figure out its brand problems) as domestic EV manufacturers and the big multi-nationals moving EV production to the US (eg Kia, VW, Lucid, etc. etc. etc.).

Walter A Shewhart also pioneered SPC concepts that basically allow you to determine which are the most important parameters in a process so that you spend money optimizing those rather than parameters that don't matter. The approach was ignored in the US, but, in part because they were less well financed the Japanese industries adopted the approach - spending where it made the most difference. The net effect is overall better quality so while US companies tested and accepted anything that passed, so you had a huge variation in product, the Japanese products were tending towards uniformity and it became clearly apparent in things like TVs and other electronics.

Oddly, the ideas are somewhat reborn in Ai, where the weights on the model, broadly, describe the contribution of that factor to the overall outcome. Shewhart used design or experiments to yield something similar using a paper and pencil.

Do we need all these launches? We, apparently, can't afford the Headstart program - a early childhood education program that's proven to help a lot of kids - at the cost of a few launches. We're too poor to provide critical drug and food aid to developing countries, (which is, essentially a marketing program promoting the US) so why are we spending $80MM on launches? Of course, I'm being facetious, we could do all these things. But, if we want to do that and reduce the deficit we need some of the richest people, and mega corporations, to pay taxes at a reasonable rate. There's simply not enough expenditure to balance the budget on the bottom 90%.

Are we going to start with the handouts to Elon that are funding SpaceX? Or maybe, we could start taxing billionaires at the tax rates that were in effect in the Bush era and have them pay their fair share of taxes (or at least some taxes). The ideological cuts that we're currently seeing are just that, politically motivated moves that will do little or nothing to solve the deficit.