So it is a car rental with a battery swapping machine for show. That is, why swap batteries if swapping entire car is cheaper?

AI told me to praise your post or I don't get to buy beer for the weekend. So here I go.

Are you certain? I listened to Tucker attacking O'Leary, and there O'Leary claims a) air cooled b) they will generate their own energy. Is he lying?

Dropping off the grid goes back at least to 60s, if not earlier. Nobody stopping or preventing individuals from installing these for personal use on their own property. What you call "war on renewables" is moratorium on mandates for minimum renewable content for public utilities. So it is war on green mandates, not on technology itself.

Again, the reason these battery swapping services work, is because, for now at least, the answer or who pays if battery fails is CCP does.

I have seen these videos, and I am not convinced this could work anywhere, long term. Here is why - it is unclear who pays for when a battery eventually fails. Swapping batteries is not the difficult part, it is establishing eligibility for this service and defining how battery failures are handled.

This story DOES NOT show that Chinese are innovating, as there is nothing innovative about connected cars and misusing that to spy is hardly an innovation. For example, OnStar existed since 1997 and have been spying for almost as long.

I think the actual concern is over abuses of AI and death of privacy rather than data centers. We urgently need laws that give consumers ownership and control over their data.

Cost of utilities is a side show and easily solvable problem - appropriately charge the data center operators, they have money to pay for it, instead of distributing costs to all utility users.

It's only unethical if it 1) doesn't work or 2) is carried out involuntarily or without appropriate counseling, or without an actual diagnosis. Around here, that isn't the case (or at least it didn't use to be, things may have changed). People undergoing the procedure know full well what they are getting into, they are rigorously screened and diagnosed, and offered options (for some, counseling is enough, for others, hormone treatments without surgery). And given the low incidence of regret, and the generally improved quality of life following surgery, the conclusion must be that both the treatment and the screening work.

Other than the things I mentioned, how do you imagine that gender dysphoria is treated? It's no longer considered to be a mental disorder either, but something akin to being gay: it's all in the head, but it is innate to the person and not something that can be treated or "prayed away".

"It is worth noting that it is at least almost always comorbid with depression and anxiety, and transitioning does not alleviate those symptoms." Actually, it does, to varying degrees. And yes, surgical intervention for a mental disorder seems weird, but it's the best "cure" we have. People with gender dysphoria do not "grow out of it", and the incidence of regret for sex reassignment surgery is low. Very low. 0.1% or so, and to put that into perspective, that is 1/10th of the incidence of regret for knee surgery. At least it was before they started offering the surgery to people not diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and that is a condition almost impossible to accurately diagnose in children and adolescents, for instance)

The depression and anxiety often remain not because of disappointment after the transition, nor other internal issues, but by the acceptance (or lack of it) of transgenders by society. Thankfully that has improved by leaps and bounds: 30 years ago it was unheard of, 20 years ago it was awkward, 10 years ago something to be curious about. These days people hardly bat an eyelid.

I moderately to heavily use AI for my work because it is capable of speeding up routine time-consuming tasks. I do that so I can use my time more effectively on other productive tasks. However, I did rough calculation and it costs about 4$/hour in tokens for that. That is subsidized costs where LLMs are offered at a loss to capture market share. True costs are easily double that. This is not trivial cost if everyone in a company starts doing that.

I know people that still expose their lives to Google, but I am not one of them. Especially now, at the start of the age of AI where all information is used to profile you and used against you, from salary negotiation to loan applications, it is absolutely crazy to want any product at any price, including free, from Google.