...thing where it's decided by committee that a new sequel to something or other 'needs' to be made FIRST, then story, SECOND.

If you've got a great idea, maybe go with it then, but all these forced sequels - especially w/o long term direction (as in the latest Star Wars movies), are just a waste of talent and money.

My wife and I were dining at our local restaurant and I was scrolling through my phone for something when she says, "Hon! Help them, please." A middle-aged out of town couple were seated behind us and were asking their waitress where the nearest charging station was. They were told, 'I THINK there's one at the gas station up ahead...' Bad advice.

It turns out that the couple had rented an electric car from an agency located in a airport about 60 miles away. They had flown up from Florida, dropping everything they were doing, as the woman's mother here in PA, had fallen seriously ill. The problem was, the rental company at the airport had no more gas powered cars. Desperate, they decided on the electric, in spite of never having driven one before.

They had NO IDEA whether it was a Tesla, or not. I asked them to show me, so they took me out and I determined it was a Polestar 2. Being in a rural area, I'd never seen one in real life, but knew of them due to a personal interest and knowledge of EVs (I own a Bolt).

The nearest DC fast charging station (EV America), was back where they came from - about 25 miles back - and according to my apps - there were NONE to the NW, where they were heading. The man told me he LOVED the pickup - which would partly explain why he had only *49* miles charge left, (additionally, they told me it only had 1/2 a charge at the airport!), I gave them the bad news. They weren't happy.

On top of that, when I tried to help the man put a charging app on his phone, he couldn't remember the phone's password to install it. I had to put the address into Maps for him and his wife had to act as co-pilot, holding the phone and giving directions, as they couldn't figure out how to use the car's GPS.

I gave them all the knowledge I could about DC fast charging, showing him the port and describing how to operate it. I don't know if they made it or not. I DO know that the couple were confused and angry - barely knowing enough from the airport that it 'didn't use gas'.

RIDICULOUS!

I'm in a DC fast charging desert out here in rural PA. I got my Bolt and we use it for 95% of our driving (mostly local), and I charge it with my own panels.

This should NEVER have happened! They would've been better off getting an Uber to take them to a rental place that had an ICE vehicle. This is NOT the way EVs should be introduced to the general public - the rental company should have had trained people to give them SOME direction AND had a fully charged car.

Just a reminder to the dreamers out there, there are still MANY places in the U.S. without suitable charging ability - and I say this as an owner: I love my Bolt, but I have a specific use case. They are NOT for everyone... Yet.

Salt water is more than just a better conductor than fresh water. Pure water doesn't conduct electricity at all; it's an insulator, and it's used as such in some specialized applications. Tap water will conduct electricity, but that's because of various impurities, many of which are intentionally introduced for practical purposes, like the chlorine ions that kill microbes and the fluoride added to remineralize your teeth.

A minor nitpick, I know, but I've always been fascinated by the way what we think of as water's conductivity isn't actually a property of water itself.

There are extremely few people who make a living as independent artists. The few who manage to do so -- like my daughter -- make most of their money from commissions, do so full time, and still don't make anything close to a middle class living from it. Almost no one is getting paid to just follow their bliss. In any case, there are three reasons why this is unlikely to change, and Patreon can't do much about either of them.

First, there are vastly more excellent artists than there are people willing to pay for their art. The few who manage to be picked up by one of the marketing behemoths of the entertainment industry and maintain a following are mainly just lucky. Anyone who follows independent artists in any medium knows that there are more fantastic artists out there working shitty day jobs right now than there are in all the world's museums. Even if the general public routinely sought out and supported unknown artists, the balance wouldn't change significantly.

Second, the general public isn't routinely seeking out unknown artists. Most of them are simply adopting the preferences of their peer groups. As a result, most of the money flows to an infinitesimal fraction of the working artists in the world, often without regard to actual quality. See also, television and pop music.

Third, artists who are getting by do so through a large number of venues. They end up selling in a bunch of online outlets, as well as local venues -- clubs, art galleries, etc., in addition to conventions, regional shows, and every last commissioned private sale they can get. And they're always networking and on the lookout for new markets. It's hard, but it can be done, and even then, you'll probably still have a day job.

Patreon can't change the economic fundamentals or human nature. I don't know if there's anything that can, but if there is, it's probably not a retail website.

Mattel's management is plainly asleep at the wheel and ought to be taken out to the woodshed by its major shareholders. All the money that resellers are making off this cheap chunk of plastic is money that Mattel could be making simply by increasing production. Some secondary markets are not important enough to worry about, but if you have a product that is being resold at a price two full orders of magnitude above its retail price, that is definitely leaving a giant mound of cash on the table. It's a rare instance of a situation in which the manufacturer could be nice to the kids and still make record profits.

Ticket scalping isn't even comparable here. Tickets to an event are an inherently limited resource: there are only so many seats, and the show is for one night. Regulating ticket scalping makes sense. But in the case of Barbie merchandise, Mattel's trademarks give it a monopoly, and absent a sudden shortfall in the supply of polyethylene, there is no limit to production. There's no reason everyone who has the money to buy it at retail prices can't have one, and more importantly, there's no reason Mattel and its shareholders couldn't be making that money. The Fingerlings are just the latest seasonal fad, but Barbie is a well-established product line with predictable demand -- given adequate warehouse space, there's no danger of overproduction.

I'm ordinarily pretty open to the idea of regulating trade, but this is one case where it's just sheer incompetence on the part of the manufacturers, and that's hard to correct with legislation. What this situation needs is a revolt by activist shareholders.

The general public has never before misused a technical term. Surely this heralds the end times.

I'm ordinarily okay with scams preying on ignorance of basic mathematics. Most of them are cons where most of the participants get what their irrational greed has earned them, and the state-run affairs like the lottery at least pour money into schools and -- one hopes -- more people who understand simple statistics. Nuclear accidents, on the other hand, affect those who know better as much as those who don't. Gamma rays will be gamma rays, after all.

When someone says that a population of 30,000 people will lose an average of 9 months of life, that doesn't mean everyone loses 9 months of life evenly. This is an average, and injuries from radiation follow a Gaussian distribution. Half of the population will lose less than 9 months, and half the population will lose more. Some will lose a *lot* more than 9 months of their lives. Many may live out their pre-accident life expectancies but do so with various impairments.

The only reason we're talking about nuclear at this point is that there is a shit ton of money invested in uranium extraction and processing and a handful of companies that stand to make billions off of building and running the plants, never mind the enormous sums that the arms industry makes off of the great powers with their wars to secure supply lines.

It's not because wind and solar aren't well on their way to supplying our needs or that we don't already have current and near-future energy storage technologies to avoid shortfalls. It's because a small number of institutional investors can make an insane amount of money from maintaining the current highly-centralized power generation business model, and there's no danger of fed up consumers cutting some or all of their profits by installing their own household nuclear reactors like there is with solar.

This changes the moment we have practical fusion power, but fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.

Programmers have strong preferences about programming languages, and the popularity of languages rises and falls like the rankings of Top 40 pop tunes. Film at eleven.

Six or seven years ago, when I first started using Facebook, it kept suggesting a landlord I'd had five years previously as someone I might know. He was an okay guy, but we never socialized beyond pleasantries when I handed him the rent check and we had no online connections at all. I presume FB is either searching through municipal records or purchasing banking data.

We're not running out of ideas. What has happened in CPU development is that we have made all of the relatively easy advances in transistor miniaturization, and further advances are becoming incremental as progress runs up against the asymptotic curves imposed by the laws of physics. Further advances in processing power are therefore coming to rely upon increasingly multicore designs and sophisticated caches, mainly because that's a less risky business proposition than investigating architectures other than the von Neumann and (occasionally) Harvard architectures.

It's also worth noting that most of the several orders of magnitude increase in processing power over the last three decades has been consumed by increasingly inefficient software as a way of keeping software development costs down.

Nature only provides so many free rides, and humans have proven themselves very good at exhausting them quickly. Ideas, even good ones, are always cheap and plentiful. It's a willingness to do hard (and therefore expensive) work that is in short supply.

The whole idea that SF predicts the future is just marketing speak for SF books and movies. It succeeds occasionally, but so does religious prophecy: make enough predictions, and you score some hits, but at the cost of many more misses.

As far as Blade Runner (and most SF) goes, the writers seldom sit down to prognosticate. Most of them think of an interesting premise and see where it goes.

Or you're resisting a totalitarian regime that might put you in prison or a labor camp for purchasing an unapproved ebook.