There is no motivation to do anything in Russia. The war is most definitely not perceived as "defending the motherland" internally, so the only remaining real motivation is monetary.

And Putin managed to build a system where regular engineers are treated as scum, while the real money gets siphoned off into the right people's wallets. This was recently demonstrated by the leak of the internal emails and source code of the system designed to send mobilization notices. It's supposed to be a part of the "digital GULAG" so that the government can send mobilization notices to the people whose disappearance is not going to be highly visible. With centralized tracking and all the related good stuff.

Its leading developer was paid around $700 a month. And was battling to get reimbursement for an extra $100 spent on a hotel in Moscow during a business trip to present their system to the chief of staff of the Ministry of Defense.

And of course, a lot of good engineers left the country in 2022 or soon thereafter.

This is easy to fix! Pentagon should just publish the list of the assets that they want satellite companies to avoid taking pictures of. To make it easier, they can provide bounding boxes and maybe tag them to make sure companies blur the images enough to not be recognizable.

It reminded me this classic ad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

No, we don't actually need housing. It's a stinking lie that is perpetuated by Democrats.

We have 1.1 units of housing per family right now. And we're near the absolute record on per-capita housing. Don't believe me?

What we need are _jobs_ that are not concentrated in the Misery Centrals (aka downtowns of select large cities).

No, kWh is not a better measure. They have a battery that can charge in 7 mins. You can then add as many of them in parallel as you want.

If you insist on another metric, then gravimetric and volumetric density would be interesting.

They should. Calculators have no place in school.

Well, yeah. It's a dirt-cheap disposable device for content consumption.

A more fundamental reason is that they switched away from Android to Vega. It's a custom OS with a React.Native-based UI. There is literally no infrastructure in it for side-loaded apps.

Pushing more and more people into dense urban landscapes that are hostile to life does not lead to happy people? You don't say...

Unironically, yes. A whiteboard or a blackboard is all you need. No videos in classroom except for special occasions.

This is incorrect. Lungs are efficient at mixing gases and so breathing SF6 is safe, as long as you give yourself breaks to re-oxygenate.

Yes, many times. I have a friend from Kenya, so I'm visiting Africa periodically. Solar in Africa is booming, and it's perfect for EV charging. Just like with mobile phones leapfrogging the fixed landlines, Africa will leapfrog global grids.

And the poorer countries will take more time to switch, of course. They'll need to wait for used cars to start coming from China. Meanwhile, people are switching from gas mopeds to electric mopeds. Uber in Kenya now has an option to get an EV bike taxi, for example.

Yes, it is. And Europe pushed back the full EV deadline by 10%, still requiring 90% of emissions from vehicles to be eliminated. This effectively changes nothing.

Outside the EU, EV production is growing as fast as it can scale. Asian countries are the main expansion area right now. For example, last year almost 40% of new cars in Vietnam became EVs, and this year Thailand is probably going to be 60%. Africa is next, these $10000 cars from China are going to be a smash hit there.

And the thing is, once people switch to EVs, they tend to stick with EVs.

This is like watching that section of airplane disaster re-enactment videos where the pilots are confidently flying straight into a mountain. The next section is the sound of GPWS desperately screaming "Pull-Up! Pull-Up!" just before the crash.

The rest of the world is rapidly shifting to EVs, and the US automakers are building a bigger Canyonero. Now with more dead dinosaur exhaust! And we're supposed to be calmed down by the fact that they're bringing an overpriced shitty EV pickup truck in 2 years?

In 20 years, the second Trump's presidency will be seen as the final straw that killed the US economy. Just an example, a company that was trying to make sodium-ion batteries in the US went bankrupt this summer. They had product sitting in their warehouses but were unable to ship it to customers before getting a UL certification. And they couldn't get a bridge loan from the government or investors. The end result: a company destroyed. I'm pretty sure we'll find competing interests in play there.

Ah, I see you're pushing anti-people propaganda. You want cities built for buses and bikes, not for people.

Here's a nice overview article from urbanists: https://archive.strongtowns.or...

Cars are superior to every other transit mode for commutes. It's a simple fact. They are faster, more convenient, and don't require spending time in the company of fentanyl addicts. Or wasting entire lifetimes every day waiting for bus to arrive.