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.

True, misinformation coming from "trusted" sources is much more damaging than some idiot with a blog posting nonsense, simply by the fact that it's framed as something trusted by so many others.

False dichotomy. Nobody here is talking about an idiot with a blog posting nonsense.

False information coming from sources that "look" trustable but are actually not are very damaging - on purpose, as that is literally the intent.

Incomplete/biased information from trustable sources that are not deliberately attempting to mislead (as in sources that adhere to the ethics of not presenting information that is factually false, even if the picture is not "complete" as you suggest) is a slight wrong, and has existed since the dawn of the printed word - it's editorial in nature - but its effects on creating social problems pales in comparison to weaponized disinformation campaigns.

Hand-wringing about the later as if it's some kind of new thing, or something most people don't know about strikes me as super naive. The insidiousness of the former is simply that people don't appreciate the scale to which it's happening.

No, but treating two wrongs as the same degree of wrongness is pretty dumb.

Or just shit like this: https://www.wsj.com/business/m...

yes yes "i'm old and cranky"

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.

Any article that mentions the decline of teen fertility as a problem is a propaganda piece. Its authors are awful human beings and deserve to rot in hell for all eternity.

In 2026, teens should not ever be getting pregnant. We don't live in that world any longer. Whoever that bothers needs to rethink their life choices.

Or more like "cloud infrastructure running within physical and legal jurisdiction of the EU is running locally to the EU" if you prefer .. if it's software they've written, running on hardware within the EU's physical and legal reach, voila, "sovereignty".

"The only way to ensure sovereignty and control is with software running locally with NO cloud dependency."

They're not talking about personal sovereignty. Cloud infrastructure an organization owns is "running locally" to that organization.

that particular amendment was voted down, bozo - the system works, no hand wringing required

doesn't mean hate speech doesn't exist

I'm pretty sure corporations are worse for the environment than people.

You're confident in suggesting that corporations don't cater to the demand of the market, the customers of whom seems to be waiting for the heads of those corporations to take the bus before they can be bothered to stop pissing in their own pools?

Tragedy of the commons to a tee.

I don't disagree with your first point.

I don't admire billionaires at all. I don't think they should exist. Wealth disparity is unchecked.

But that doesn't prevent me from operating within my own set of principles rather than in a sort of "you first" manner, which strikes me as quite child-like.

If every wealthy person on earth did the right thing, our environment would still be fucked, because they're vastly outnumbered by non-wealthy people.

So you're stuck on a sinking boat with a rich person, and you refuse to plug a hole until he or she plugs a hole.

The funny thing, by the time you smugly drown, they've already left the boat on a helicopter. The wealthy *be definition* will not feel the effects of worsening climate. You (and your kids) will.

I think it'd be far more intellectually honest to admit you just don't care. Nothing wrong with that, per se. It's a hell of a lot more logically defendable than your stated position.

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.