The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

definition of "socialism", which is: worker ownership of the means of production

Bzz, false. The dictionary definition of the term is:

a way of organizing a society in which major industries are owned and controlled by the government rather than by individual people and companies

See? No "worker ownership" — government ownership. Schools don't need to be owned by the teachers for public education to be socialist, they need to be owned by the government. And they are!

Same goes for retirement financing, and medicine for retires — with millions clamoring to expand it ("Medicare for all!!") — what GP enumerated. The "single-payer healthcare" — another euphemism — would be exactly that too.

Workers can own shares of their employers — indeed, Anthrophic employees do (and anticipate to profit handsomely). That's not socialism at all — not by the dictionary definition.

I blame the libertarians for making the definitions unclear

I blame you for pulling the definition from under your tail — and the morons upvoting you.

"anything the government does that benefits the people instead of corporations."

That's spelled "KKKorporation$". Make a note of it. Benefits the people, eh? The per-pupil spending nationwide went up (inflation-adjusted) from $9083 in 1989 to $13790 last year. And what did this expense buy us — the barely literate population unable to even define such terms as "socialism" correctly...

And they've adopted the word "democratic socialism"

The term (not "word"!!!) was adopted by "former" Communists, who've proudly elected a Senator some Congresswomen and, most recently, New York mayor. Who immediately proceeded to establish a government-owned supermarket.

some wondering if they were being picked on by President Trump

Seriously? "Some wondering" — and it is on front page... What a contrast to Trump's supporters accusations, his electoral win was stolen in 2020 — no, any time someone mentioned those, a bunch people would jump up to add: "unproven" and "without evidence".

AKA: mass layoffs.

AKA: people doing stuff, that does not need doing, having to find something else to do.

it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones

Bot-sitting does not require as much attention as doing it myself requires. While the AI is handling the tedium, I can do something fun — both work-related and otherwise...

A co-worker next to me is doing cross-word puzzles, for example...

Apparently a *lot* of people on Slashdot are completely fooled by the CCP propaganda.

And some of them are CCP propaganda, using multiple "sockpuppets" to both post and moderate.

Decades earlier — during Vietnam war — USSR was financing all of "peace" movements in the West in particular, while attacking the "Capitalist way of life" in general. It'd be quite foolish for China to not be doing the same now. Even more foolish would be for us to not realize, that they do.

You mean like all those US voters that elected Trump in large part because of his "no wars" promises?

I don't know, what voters you're talking about. I voted for exactly the kind of aggressive stance Trump is showing, thank you very much. If anything, I'd like him to be still more aggressive — long years of appeasing foreign assholes have made them too confident, America's "red lines" can be ignored with impunity.

Looks like they lost control pretty quickly.

Do you seriously think, Chinese citizens have better control of their foreign policy? Or are you going to claim, America is "the same" or "just as bad"?..

How many American companies have ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex?

US military is controlled by American voters, such as myself. The rest of the world, make a choice already!

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology -- one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond

Indeed!

If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing

No, it would not be. I want more people's lives — my own included — improved by those developments. And I want it yesterday.

Imagine Wright brothers sabotaging airplane-development, because it would allow people to travel too far too fast? Or the early automakers fretting over "implications" of using internal combustion engines for personal vehicles — because millions of grooms and coachmen would lose their jobs?.. Electric lamp? Wow, nice — but what about the candle-makers?