In a World where electrical tape and black markers don't exist ...

More to the point, a permanent alteration seems dumb, especially if you ever want a working light or want to resell them.

I imagine they (are told to) say that because Texas gives preference to corporations over its citizens while California doesn't, but that's just a guess. For example, Public School Rankings by State 2026 has CA at #8 and TX at #34 - surprisingly, the latter is lower than FL at #24. (New York is highest at #1, btw.)

String Theory has contributed some useful mathematics but its position as the Only Game In Town (they call it that) appears to have been a psyop to keep Academia out of the work being done at private contractors.

Retired people from e.g. Skunkworks have described corrections and extensions of Maxwell's Equations and the Dirac Equation as the path that has yielded experimental success.

Those guys didn't "shut up and calculate". Their work is under NDA, WUSAP, ITAR, and Invention Secrecy Act restrictions.

Some parallel work, e.g. Exodus Technologies, has started to bear fruit in the public domain, so the psyop is being wound down now. Additionally China has surpassed the US in implementation so they want All Hands On Deck.

What was strategic advantage has become a strategic liability. One can understand this mindset by not caring about the hundreds of millions of lives that could have been saved by resultant technologies. When only State Supremacy (and COG) are factored in the normal human behavior goes out the window.

The impossible need to power AI for a communist surveillance police state may also be playing a factor; hard to know prospectively but somebody has the power source being demonstrated on the slow drip of DoD "UFO" videos.

Most people won't put Space Aliens on the top of the list of culprits when ATS projects by humans will suffice.

The biggest hurdle will be getting Deans and Department Chairs to discard their life's work as meaningless. What a "Good Scientist" should do and what most people will do are not the same. Hence the "funeral to funeral" adage.

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.
 

Depends on what you classify as traditional plants. Solar and wind, you'd have a point. However, coal and natural gas plants emit orders of magnitude more radioactivity directly into the environment in the form of naturally occurring radioactive materials (uranium, thorium, radon, traces of other elements) as a consequence of their normal operations. Fission plants basically only do that during catastrophic failure modes.

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).

TCO is kind of an individual calculation that involves unknown variables though.

Logically speaking, while it may be true in the average case that TCO for EVs remains higher than not, decreasing EV prices and increasing fuel costs, not to mention increasing prices for ICE vehicles themselves, means that as the gap narrows in the average case, more and more unusual cases pass that line.
IE people with access to cheaper than normal electricity, people who have unusual distances to gas stations or rate visiting one more negatively, those that have easy home charging, with longer driving distances that are still within EV range and predictable, etc...

That said, do you have a citation on that TCO for EVs is still higher?

EV vs ICE Total Cost of Ownership Calculator 5-Year - $42k EV vs $32k ICE, 13k annual miles, all default otherwise - EV $9,811 cheaper. Eliminate the fed EV credit and bump gas to $4/gallon, still $3,543 cheaper.
https://oxmaint.com/industries...
40 diesel vans replaced with EV versions, saved $740k in one year. A different operation found it cost them $280k, but that was because they implemented it differently - charging infrastructure, utility rate, maintenance, and route profiles were substantially different.
This was in 2022, things are a bit different in 2026.

TLDR? As EVs get cheaper and gasoline prices go up, more people will tend to choose EVs.

Sounds like Trump, except 8 years older; I wonder how much his family will sue for should he die in office. /cynical

Lithium extraction in like half the world, actually.
But despite both being salt water, the mineral waters from the wells have a lot more lithium than salt water.

If you want to see sharp edges, build an AI Surveillance Grid and send people's home electric bills to $2000/mo to pay for it.

Not that the DC government people can be trusted with any of it. Lies and deception are their standard MO on everything now.

The only way it could make sense is if you use the broadcast data against a one-time pad and then you have a key to decrypt some other data, however distributed.

There aren't enough unique messages to be the data payload itself. Regular key rotation makes some sense.

Instead of a key it could be a pointer to another data source too. Frequency, satellite channel, URL, whatever.

It does seem premature to conclude the content. No doubt there are many other possibilities.

Too soon to welcome our new Colossus overlord?

[Spoiler: It doesn't end well for humanity.]

A Scout is Trustworthy but this BSA has never demonstrated that virtue.

Their PR is difficult to parse as valid English but it sounds like gaslighting of the type "you can only trust what you may not examine."

It sounds incoherent but perhaps that means they have nothing else left.

Most people in Open Source are generally Helpful.

Each token needs a serial number so fake ones can be detected. ;-)