The oil from the tar sands isn't really good for petrol that you put in a car, and we let our refining capacity wane over the years as it is.

Everything we're doing here in Canada (I'm also Canadian) is such a boondoggle. The pipeline that Trudeau bought will never be profitable, and any other pipeline we pay for will be a similar money-loser. (If pipelines were as good investments as Danielle Smith claimed, oil companies would pay for them.)

I'd be willing to see EV subsidies go away if the government would also get rid of oil and gas subsidies, AND get rid of the tariffs on Chinese solar panels. Like, everything the government does right now is a tilt towards some ultra-profitable oil and gas donor, and we could save a lot of tax dollars just doing a reset and not subsidizing anything. On that basis, EVs would almost certainly win on their merits.

(I bought a used EV. It was still the most expensive car I've ever bought, inflation adjusted. But it costs $2/100km to drive for the electricity. The only other thing I need to maintain are the tyres. The running costs are ridiculously low.)

Yeah, my argument against deregulation is probably relevant here: big corporate is just big government by another name, except with even less transparency. Never fully trust any entity which has enormous power over your life; even the most well-intentioned mega-entity is still prone to accidentally ruining lives through bureaucratic oversight. So I would hope people protesting government intrusion would also realize that e.g. Facebook is a de facto global governing structure of sorts...

Though this might work for some things, unfortunately, I think it is susceptible to Nazism. "Does this video make society a better place" could get a "yes" from plenty of people who have just sat through a video telling them how $marginalized_group is the root of all evil and must be "dealt with" =/

I think the global numbers are low, honestly, and that's mostly down to this misadventure in Iran. Countries that had to ration oil and gas are seeing people flee to solar panels and Chinese EVs.

I actually kinda think that's what's going on already, tbh. My Ioniq 6 gets 100% of the claimed range at 90% charge, as near as I can tell. They've definitely fudged it a little.

Used EVs are such a good buy. My Ioniq 6 came with 40k km on it, and that's basically brand new. Certainly the interior and exterior look pristine, and without many wearing parts, the thing rolled off the lot with 100% of the claimed range (actually, a bit more) and hasn't given me any trouble at all.

It costs me about $2/100km of driving. I've seen petrol and diesel up to $2/L here on bad days, and even in a very efficient car, you need 5L/100km.

(One hiccup: someone literally stole my charging cable while the car was charging in my driveway. My fault, though. I didn't see the setting to keep the cable locked to the car unless the doors are unlocked. They just disconnected the power and it unlocked itself. But L2 chargers are so cheap, I'm only paying a 30c premium over home charging.)

Actually, yeah. Their reputation is on the line, and they won't survive as a company if they're wrong. It's not anonymous, it's not a think-tank generating faux reports to bolster some politician's opinion. Their name is now attached to this information, and if they're lying, that's it for them. They're not big enough to eat that kind of bad press and come out okay on the other side.

Valid concern, though the reality is that'll just leave the door open for 3rd party battery swaps. I bought my EV used knowing that the battery would probably outlast the body of the car, but in the off-chance that it doesn't, I'm actually a bit hyped for the potential to put a better battery in, with either longer range or less weight (though I assume a lighter battery would mess with the driving dynamics the car was designed for).

Image models take a lot more memory, as one would expect. If you want to run a text-only generative model for coding or knowledge, or as a database for all your books or manuals or whatever, that works great. Fits in 8GB of memory, has more than enough context for simple projects. The more memory and CPU you have, the better it gets.

You've just got the most expensive use case that takes a lot more hardware. It's still not actually out of reach per se (or it wasn't, before the price increases) but the outlay to start is much bigger.

You're right, it's NOT free, it's SOMETHING YOU ALREADY PAID FOR.

The really insane thing is that the USA spends more money per capita than ANYONE and still gets worth healthcare coverage and worse overall results, with lower life expectancy. There's even this effect where rich people don't get as good care as average people in other countries for a number of common conditions or procedures, because the whole system is so bad you can't even PAY for great service.

But that aside:

Solar is so gobsmackingly cheap, it'll pay for itself in almost zero time. The real cost is the grid, but generating enough power is so stupidly trivial it hurts. You put a solar panel out in a field and it collects electricity and that's the end of the story. You pay for that panel once every 20-30 years and it generates electricity for you. You don't dig things up out of the ground or fight wars, you just let it collect the electricity.

Technology Connections did an excellent video on renewable energy, and using just the figures for putting solar panels on corn farms that produce corn for ethanol and not food, his back of the envelope calculation was that you could produce 7700 TWh of electricity a year, which is considerably more than the 4100 TWh that the US grid currently produces.

The reality is there doesn't need to be any energy crisis at all. AI data centres don't even need to be an environmental problem, you can just hook solar panels and batteries up and run them and they'd even use less water than the corn fields that were displaced for the solar farm.

The whole discussion is ridiculous. More solar panels. Solar panels everywhere. It's effectively free. The only reason governments don't do it is so they can keep lining their pockets with oil and gas industry kickbacks.

Here's the video link to the right time stamp, if you want to check what I'm saying and review his math.

https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?s...

Not that the article bothered to say, but scanning the docs shows that the purpose of this is to display hardware performance graphs and maybe some other statistics. Maybe that's obvious to people who are in the loop regarding Steam Machine news, but I'm not and it wasn't.

eInk seems like an odd choice for this, since it's meant more for static displays than constantly updating ones. If you don't want to play with the eInk hardware I expect someone will eventually re-implement it as a tablet or phone app.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

Risk without labour is just jumping off cliffs.

But hey, let's talk about risk. Most of these ultra-wealthy people don't know what risk is. Some of them really did come up from nothing, sure, but Musk had millions of dollars backing him in the form of his wealthy father. Trump, famously, would have made more money investing the money his father gave him in a stock ETF than going into real estate.

And further, I think it's reasonable to make a profit on some risk. I'm sure that the folks that own my favourite local coffee shop took on some risk to do it. You can't be sure a shop is going to succeed. I'm glad they have, and I wish them every success.

Of course, they've also worked VERY hard at making it a success. For those people that do take risks, it's their own LABOUR that makes these businesses work (that, and a bit of luck--opening up a month before COVID would have been bad luck, and nothing to do with risk OR labour).

But once you get in to the many hundreds of millions of dollars, I think we should be able to agree that there's never anything risky in their lives ever again. I'll keep repeating this every time I get a chance, but you can't make a billion dollars on a salary. $5000/day for 500 years is still not a billion dollars. It's a level of wealth that is impossible to accrue by any work of your own. It takes the work of other people.

As I said in another comment, if you have Jeff Bezos and no workers, Amazon is nothing. If you have all of Amazon, but no CEO, you can probably make a lot of money. The labour of the people at Amazon is what made it huge, and what made him rich. It is necessarily the case that those people produce more value than they are remunerated for--that's what a profit is. But when you have such a huge profit value, it tells you that the gap is *enormous*. Why is that okay? Why don't we think that those people that actually made the software and delivered the packages--the things that define Amazon as a company--don't deserve the value that they created?

It used to be that a CEO would only make 20x what their workers did, and they would be paid a real salary, one that could be taxed. Now they get paid hundreds or thousands of times what their workers do, just in stocks so it can't be taxed. They have an endless army of lawyers and accountants. They'll pay $80 million to avoid a $10 million tax, just to show you that they actually HAVE the money, they just refuse to give it back to the governments and people that provided the conditions to make them so fabulously wealthy. The roads, the education system, the laws, the safe borders--all these things went into the building of these hoards.

Work is how you make value. You have to plant crops and harvest them; or drill into the ground and extract and refine the petroleum; or write the software and fulfill the orders. All of that is labour. I have plenty of ideas and if I never execute on any of them, the idea is worth zero. That's why I'm banging on about wealth.

It's not impossible to tax; that's loser talk for defeatists. We made these laws, we've created these monetary fictions, we can write new laws and come up with more equitable systems. Stocks and bonds don't HAVE to exist, but given that they do, I think we can figure out a way to make sure that people don't become extremely wealthy and leave the rest of the country fighting for scraps, living paycheque to paycheque, hoping that their insurance premiums don't bankrupt them before the medical expenses do.

And hey, it doesn't have to be a wealth tax the way I define it--I think the things you suggested are de facto wealth taxes. But based on what you're saying, it sounds like you also believe in the necessity and the moral correctness of taxing them, especially when you and I are paying much higher proportions of our comparatively meagre holdings.

It's small segment of the population, the 0.1% and the 0.01%. They can be taxed. They are not special.

Not to mention the most '70s guitar riff ever to grace the small screen!

Awesome effects, awesome sets, awesome props, awesome music. All they needed were some awesome screen writers, which they unfortunately didn't have.