As if 1974 never happened, right?

Is this really a concern?

If your organization is doing (ethically) good work, does it really matter where the money comes from?

Accepting money from the mafia, or from a repressive government, doesn't in any way promote those ideals. And if you *didn't* accept the money it would be used by the original owners which are (per the assumptions) of lower ethical standards, so wouldn't it be better to have the money used by someone who is doing good?

I'm reminded of Mother Teresa, who famously accepted donations from anywhere to further her goals, including people with questionable human rights records. Should she have stopped trying to ease the suffering because of where the money came from*?

I don't see it.

If someone can explain why it would be morally wrong to accept the money, I'd like to hear it.

(*) Some controversy over Mother Teresa's actions, but so far as I can tell it's mostly information. But in this case I'm using her perceived legacy as a paradigm without commenting on whether it's correct or not.

I've driven some SUVs and trucks, and their comfort is miserable, they are a beast to get parked, they are not exactly cornering well, and don't get me started on the car body moving! No wonder U.S. roads have to be so wide and so straight, because otherwise, trucks would so unwieldy only people urgently need their specific properties would drive them.

Not exactly. If you put traffic on EVs, you don't need to subsidize fossil fuels, because there would be enough for all the other uses.

And if I am so foul, why would my company rather keep me and my colleagues employed, albeit remotely, than just hiring officable people?

And this is true for all my colleagues too? if so, why would there be a hygienic problem at all?

Apparently, I am a high performer (and all my colleagues are), because we are full time remote workers.

Hindsight is always 20/20. Back in 2012, when the first Tesla Model S arrived, it was not clear that battery technology would take this path. It was generally assumed that batteries are fragile, expensive parts with mediocre capacity and low charging speeds - prejudices you find in a lot of Slashdot comments until today.

My dishwasher is a Samsung. Never had any problems with it. It does not have an internet connection either.

I would not keep a refrigerator that old around. They are really power hungry.

I don't know anything at all about this technology, I'd not heard about it before. I came to the comments to find out if it was relying on liquification of CO2, which I assumed, or was something else.

First point to note, 80 bar isn't high pressure in an industrial setting and 30C is low enough that there's large parts of Europe where you can assume that ambient air temperature almost never exceeds it. Therefore passive cooling is possible and in many cases, forced air cooling will be is sufficient. (I liquified CO2, indoors, in the summer months, as an undergraduate in the UK with only passive cooling required. I don't recall the exact pressure but it was around 60bar which suggests the indoor temperature was around 20C.)

A long pipe passive atmospheric heat exchanger is almost certainly all that is needed, much like the radiator on domestic fridge.

You don't mention it but the decompression cycle is likely more problematic as, I would guess, ice buildup might restrict the ability to use passive or forced air heating unless you're using dehumidified air (which you might be anyway to avoid corrosion). You also need to avoid the CO2 freezing.

Long term storage - while I suspect this technology isn't intended for long term storage and is expected to cycle in a few days, storing liquid CO2 isn't a problem. CO2 cylinders will store gas for months even after first use. It's not like helium where without incredibly careful setup, you'll lose all the gas overnight once you break the factory seal.

Likewise impurities, The initial loading of the CO2 will require a pure gas and you'll want water vapour in particular excluded. Trace amounts of nitrogen and oxygen probably aren't going to be a problem (I don't know about how they affect the critical temperature, it might be that they also have to be totally excluded but that just makes initial loading harder). But it's not hard to produce equipment that is impervious to CO2, N2, O2, Ar and H2O that can maintain integrity at 100bar (you've got about a 40:1 safety factor for steel at 100bar). If trace amounts of impurity are a problem then you'll probably need to bake the equipment to flush out the adsorbed gasses but I'd guess flushing the pipework with CO2 at high temperature would be sufficient, I doubt you'd need to get to CERN levels of outgassing elimination.

Manufacturers in China have enjoyed a distinct advantage in in lax environmental regulations, low material costs and labor rates compared to US. US manufacturing is competitive on the high end. We just cannot compete with cheap volume manufacturing.

I suspect US manufacturing can compete at much of the low end now as labour costs is becoming almost irrelevant to much of it.

However, the up front cost to build a fully automatic factory is substantial, and it requires constant ongoing capital investment to stay useful. You may not recoup your investment unless you can stay useful for 10 years and initial orders may have an estimated run time of 6 months.

One of the things that would help, but is one of the things that seems anathema to western corporations, is standardisation, A fan motor fails in a laptop, it's usually reasonable simple to replace except that that motor is specific to that particular model of that particular laptop from that particular manufacturer and your best source of parts might be a "not working" laptop of ebay.

There is certainly a case for custom parts like motors in some cases but most of the time, like arbitrary power plugs, it's to benefit the manufacturer and force obsolescence earlier.

Imagine manufacturers getting together to standardise some of these things. Maybe they create a new standard every 5 years. If you want a drone motor you'll know what sort of power supply so what voltage it should take, whether it's a high RPM or lower RPM use case, what power and what weight. Perhaps there's nothing suitable, then you have to have a custom part, but then there can be a "custom part tax" - high enough that manufacturers won't ignore it, but low enough that genuine use cases aren't prohibited until the next round of standardisation.

Even washing machines. I have a small kitchen and there is a space for a washing machine but there's no possibility of rearranging things to make more space. This is an absolutely standard (European) sized space. 20 years ago pretty much every washing machine would have fitted. Now lots don't, and even worse, manufacturers/retailers make it hard to tell if a replacement will actually fit. It's not at all uncommon in the UK to visit someone's house and discover a washing machine that is sticking out from the cupboard line by 8cm or so - because "I assumed it was a standard size and would fit". In larger houses it's theoretically, if not financially, possible to replace the entire kitchen with deeper worktops, but in smaller places this can be impossible.

You don't. The CO2 is reused.

Yes and no. It was always a solution based on a lot of ifs. If capacity of EV batteries remains low, and if charging speeds remain low too, it might be a viable solution (and manufacturers like Nio and Tesla at least implemented the possibility). 10 years ago, those ifs were very present.

But both problems are solved now. You can buy a 180 kWh battery for some EVs already, albeit I would not, given the price, but even standard EVs come with 300 miles ranges. And 4C charging (4 times capacity within an hour) is available, and 6C charging is on display for some EV models, which means charging from 10% to 80% within 6 mins. Given that you need fast charging mainly on long distance trips, you will on average spend less time charging your EV than refueling a gasoline car.

This pulls the rug under battery swapping schemes.

When was the last time you went to a movie theater? The one thing I find most notable about 2025 compared to the previous century is that the previous cheap fold-down seats in movie theaters have been replaced by wide, comfortable seats with plenty of legroom. In most of the theaters built recently the seats recline as well.

For the most part, you also choose your seat when you buy your ticket online, so if the only seats available are in undesirable positions relative to the screen, go to a different show.