Sounds like they're going for the Amazon model — sell at a loss for years until the competition withers, then stop selling at a loss.

Ground effect requires being at lower altitude than the wingspan. Unless that plane is a quarter mile wide, ground effect doesn't play into it. And if it is a quarter mile wide, you'd better hope it doesn't fly into any populated areas. :-)

As others have pointed out, gaining altitude requires some extra energy, but over the duration of the flight, you use less fuel because the air is thinner, resulting in less drag. (This assumes that your propulsion doesn't lose efficiency to match, of course, but I think you can compensate for some of that by changing the blade angle. This is way outside my area of expertise, though, so I'm not entirely certain about any of this.)

One reason not to go to higher altitudes is that it has a range of only 125 miles. The hybrid drivetrain (500-mile range) doesn't exist yet, I don't think. With such a short range, you'd use up half your battery power on the ascent, so the benefit from more efficient travel at altitude would be lost, and you'd likely end up with even lower total mileage.

But 2,000 feet still seems awfully low to me by a factor of four or five. Dunno.

Just wait until it starts training on porn that people managed to upload to Twitch in violation of the terms and conditions. Then your use of the word "rape" in that comment will take on a whole new meaning.

Real-world flight times are likely to be miserable for most purposes. Currently, this plane has a maximum altitude of 2,000 feet. Not sure why. But the plane has a maximum airspeed of 140 knots. For context, a 737 has a cruising speed of 450 knots.

In practice, this means that this plane is only suitable for very-short-distance flights where a jet would not achieve normal cruising altitudes or speeds.

A nonstop flight from SJC to DFW takes about 3 hours and 35 minutes, give or take, for 1440 miles. At cruising speed, it would take 2 hours and 46 minutes. So an additional 50 minutes or so is spent on taxi time and landing at a much slower speed (maybe 140 to 150 knots). Of that, landing takes 20 to 30 minutes and drops the speed to a third, so I'm going to ballpark that as about 15 minutes of added time, leaving 35 minutes for taxi time. So the total flight time is probably about 30 hours at 450 knots.

Assuming that landing speed for the X1 is proportional to the difference in cruising speed (which may not be accurate, but won't make a huge difference), this means that same flight would take 35 minutes plus about 3.2x the flight time, or about 10 hours and 11 minutes.

On the flip side, the low landing speed means that it can fly into much smaller airports, and because it carries a much smaller number of passengers affordably, it could make much more direct flights economically feasible. Combine that with autonomous piloting, and if it actually had enough range to do medium-range flights, such a design would have potential.

When I fly from SJC to my mom's house in West TN, it takes me about 14 hours to fly commercially, thanks to 3.5 hours of driving, an hour of TSA time, and an hour or more of layover, and an extra takeoff and an extra landing. If I could get rid of all of that extra time and fly general aviation rules, then an automated flight with a single passenger to the nearest tiny little air strip would involve only half an hour of driving (3 hours savings), no TSA time (1 hour savings), no layover (1 hour savings), and no extra takeoff and landing (30 minutes savings), reducing the trip to about 13 hours and 15 minutes (12.5 hours in flight, 30 minutes of driving, and maybe 15 extra minutes for landing).

But that all assumes adequate range. With a hybrid range of only 500 miles and an all-electric range of only 125 miles, the X1 would have to make a minimum of four stops to reach Tennessee from California. So this plane, while a great demonstration of the potential for electric flight, still has very little practical use other than ultra-short-range flights. I suppose with this, I could fly into Nashville or Little Rock or Memphis and take a tiny plane to that airstrip if such a flight existed and were cheap, and that might be worth doing if it existed and were cheap, but I'm not holding my breath unless it is entirely automated.

Key difference: You're paying a lot of money for that useless first semester.

I would be supremely pissed to fork over $40k just to get a "pass" in Freshman-101.

If U-M is doing the now-common waste of a first semester packed with "Freshman 101" bullshit, I would agree with you.

If students are taking real classes, then no, I'd call that the second most important semester (with only the very last one mattering more). Why? Because that's when half the incoming class realizes they are wildly unprepared for college and either pursues an exciting career in fast food, or for those only slightly overwhelmed, switches to a 2-year structured a lot more like an advanced version of highschool.

Not everyone should be going to college, that is the real problem here. There's nothing new under the sun, dumb kids exist and they become dumb adults.

You're right that wasn't an exhaustive list - I'm personally a counterexample to my own comment in that I'm a mere peon of a coder... Who is often tapped to assist with M&A, major vendor changes, and onboarding new customers (in the B2B sense). I do have privileged information that would be illegal to trade on.

But this is Slashdot, not Investopedia. The "tl;dr" is, if you have actionable insider information, you're not merely guessing, you damned well know it and almost certainly signed an NDA specifically covering what you can and can't do with that information.

Congress "did not intend" to legalize straight-up gambling nationwide through what amounts to a semantic loophole. There is absolutely no doubt about that, on any side of this discussion (including the CFTC).

It's funny - Online discussions among (real) investors often worry about, and frequently caution each other about insider trading. The reality is, insider trading isn't applicable to the vast majority of us. Unless you're a C-level employee, specifically working in M&A, or maybe as the lead on a truly revolutionary new product (no, your company's Facebook wannabe or thinly disguised open source ripoff ain't it) - You have no insider information to trade on. Sincere belief that your employer's cool new toys are going to change the world ain't it - every company has cool new toys in the pipeline, and most of them are going to flop or at best be just another branded widget.

Thanks to Kalshi and Polymarket, congrats, every single one of us can now have truly actionable insider information. And that's not good, because as the past year has shown repeatedly, the average Joe is more than willing to use that information and has zero comprehension of securities regulations.

And to be clear, I have no substantial objection to gambling. This sham is something else entirely, however, and that something is a naked power grab.

In order: no, no, no, no, yes, no.

The lone "yes" is for illegally obtained. Otherwise you're effectively banning the default situation for every smartphone on the market today.

More to the point, Meta's glasses are in no way unique - And make no mistake, I loathe all things Meta as much as the rest of you. Unmodified, they're no different than using any other camera in public (including dozens of competing smart / camera glasses). Even modified - I hate to break it to you all, but go to Amazon and search for hidden / spy / nanny cams. I get nearly a thousand results and that's from a major, primarily law-abiding (if we don't count labor and competition) online store. If you go to a site actively specializing in spy cams, you can find even more, smaller, and creepier form factors beyond your wildest imagination.

There is, bluntly, zero technical difference between the nannycam in my kitchen smoke detector, and a spycam in your bedroom or a public bathroom. Any meaningful legal solutions here therefore must focus on intent (primarily in production and, secondarily, consumption). Or, as in this FP, we can pretend spanking Meta changes any of what I've just described.

To be clear, I'm not at all defending the creeps or Meta in general. Fuck 'em, and fuck 'em hard. But let's not lump the 99.9% of well-meaning and law-abiding users of recording technology in with the actual criminals.

New air traffic controller hires would all be in the 21-31 years old bracket. The PS3 and Xbox 360 released 20 years ago. These are people who grew up with video games being around them.

I don't understand why they're promoting that they're "hiring gamers" (it's what the gamers would call a "weird flex") but it's not that surprising that new hires would be "gamers" if you define "gamers" loosely enough to include anyone who plays video games somewhat routinely.

And, to be quite frank, the skills that make a good gamer (good hand-eye coordination, ability to keep calm under pressure, routine use of voice chat) likely translate to someone who would be good as an air traffic controller.

Hiring gamers to increase the total number of air traffic controllers certainly seems better than the previous administration's solution, which was nothing.

But in any case, it's not really clear to me that "hiring gamers" is that meaningfully different from "hiring people who are 21-31 and grew up with video games all around them."

That trick works even on accounts with a private profile.

Not to mention third-party search engines couldn't care less about how a profile is set. Though admittedly, Reddit is doing its best to commit suicide - in yet another way - by trying to block search engines except their AI "partners".

So what do these things do if ingested by animals, like humans?

In other words they still have more labor and safety regulations in place than the average state. You know... "known to the State of California to cause cancer" stickers all over everything, etc.

You're assuming they'll lose tax revenue and that they aren't spending more money on Paramount than they get back. Given this country's penchant for corporate welfare, I wouldn't assume that Paramount leaving would be tax-flow-negative. More specifically, after all of the incentives, tax credits, etc. are taken into account, I wouldn't assume that the loss from Paramount leaving would be greater than the loss from Warner Brothers largely ceasing to exist except as an IP licensing subsidiary of Paramount.

If Ellison wants to flee to a 3rd world country with zero labor protections - Good riddance.

Let's see how much talent is willing to follow him to work for slave wages and under truly dangerous conditions.