> The cost of development for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy were incredibly low

Which is to be expected since governments spent on the order of a trillion dollars and 50+ years developing the technology. Just about every aspect of their operation was conceived, developed, and trialed before Musk was even born.

SpaceX deserves a lot of credit for refining that tech, but do not dismiss the fact they are standing atop a mountain of taxpayer funded R&D without which they wouldn't even have a business model, let alone working rockets.
=Smidge=

Difficult is not equal to impossible. Heat can be used to boil working fluids, which can be used to drive turbines, which can create energy, which can in turn be used to run AI chips, which give off heat, which can then also be harvested to boil working fluids...Not really a perpetual motion machine, but the inefficiency in the system can be used to suck more heat out of the heat pumps anyway. Inefficiency in this case is a feature.

My answer to environmentalists claiming this is "You first". Stop being hypocrites, eliminate your own fossil fuel usage- including wasting fossil fuels storing articles like this in data centers.

Would this be the same China that is building coal fired plants at a rate of 95MW a year?

Nuclear power is a renewable.

Fission and fusion are replacements, carbon free.

Not the solution. Heat is energy. Energy is needed to feed AI. The clear solution is to figure out how to harvest heat directly, cooling the planet by feeding heat to data centers as electricity.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.

This could have been even funnier if, instead of French for "Viva la revolution", you used the Esperanto "Vivu la revolucio!".

We never needed "AI" or LLMs to think we're nothing more than machines.

What we need is a 2nd study, using 400 students, separated into four groups:
1. Using Google ONLY by looking at the 3rd page of results (the first two pages are now taken up with Gemini AI and targeted advertising).
2. Using ChatGPT Only.
3. Using inventory computers in a large metropolitan library
4. Using old fashioned card catalogs and books.

I wonder if we chose a significantly esoteric subject, with a 100 question exam given after a week, if any useful clustering could be detected.

> First, this isn't a law, it's a clarification of an existing set of laws.

So... it's a law. A piece of legislation voted on by congress and signed by the president. That's what a law is.

> Second, it doesn't make any stipulation about what means of payments must be accepted on anything, let alone gas stations

It's literally about the implementation of digital payment methods, and interoperability with other systems. That's exactly the issue raised with "Imagine if every gas station required you to use their shitty payment app before the pump worked."

> Like this?

That's not an adapter, dumbass. That's a level 2 EVSE.

> Chademo was the only existing one at the time

IEC 62196 connectors for DCFC were in use years and had several revisions before Chademo was created.

> NACS specifies both the physical form factor and the communication protocol.

It does not. You clearly have not read it. Tesla has since removed the files from their site but they've been reposted on the user forums. To quote the document: "For DC charging, communication between the EV and EVSE shall be power line communication over the control pilot line as depicted in DIN 70121." That's it. That's all it says. you know what DIN 70121 is though? It's the same protocol developed for and implemented by CCS. Consequently, NACS is going to have all the same problems as CCS does unless and until someone takes the reins and enforces interoperability.

As for ISO 15118; that's more or less where all the problems are. The ISO and DIN standards overlap but are not compatible, so some DCFC stations speak one or both, some vehicles speak one or both, and there's no guarantee they'll be perfectly compatible because - again because I cannot stress this enough - there is nobody enforcing interoperability testing in the US. That's the very heart of the reliability problems.

> What the hell are you talking about? Tesla alone outnumbers all other cars on the road nearly 2:1 even to this day.

There are more non-Tesla charging locations in the US than Tesla ones. Tesla barely eeks out a lead if you count individual cables because they have some large installations, but Tesla Supercharger locations are out numbered over 3:1.

> I don't know why the hell Eurotards keep bringing Europe into this when that was never the context of the discussion

I'm American. I mention Europe because we are talking about standardization and reliability, and European laws have played a pivotal role in standardizing EV charging across the globe. The EU formally standardized and they have no reliability issues to speak of, the US let the private sector figure it out and it's a shitshow. It's extremely relevant to the discussion.
=Smidge=

" could seep upward into the Alsace aquifer," implies that the aquifer is *above* the depth of the mine. So the question becomes, what is this magical mine where gravity works backwards?