Desalination for residential use has been competitively priced for some time. In San Diego CA the greens try to stop new desalination plants because they say that the waste brine pollutes the ocean. As it is, the permitting takes longer than the construction.

One proposed workaround is to build a desalination plant in Mexico at the head of the Gulf of California and pump the fresh water into the USA.

This is potentially big, if they stole the names of the real owners and members of Nevada LLCs. When forming a Nevada LLC, you tell the state who you are but that is kept confidential. What is public is your registered agent, but the agent won't publicly say whom they're acting for.

This reminds me of leaks like Mossack Fonseca.

A Wyoming LLC does not need to tell the state the actual owners, only the agent.

Of course, banks and the IRS need to have the actual owners.

He sometimes sang the classical version of The Elements, "There's Earth and Air and Fire and Water."

Share buybacks are just a tax efficient version of dividends. They both return money to the shareholders. Buybacks as unrealised capital gains. Dividends as income.

The problem is the the actual owners (shareholders) of big companies are funds, not people. People mostly buy the funds based solely on their performance. So, the funds are forced to force the companies to worry solely about the stock price.

Stock buybacks are an efficient alternative to paying dividends. They give the shareholders unrealized capital gains rather than current income.

All that said, compensating executives based on short term stock performance doesn't help.

For several years, IBM has been studying partitioning a computation among several quantum computers. They also combine classical and quantum computers to solve a problem. Whether you consider the job they're partitioning to be a "quantum computation" is perhaps less interesting than the fact that they're solving a problem too big to solve on one quantum computer.

Down to 0.02K. IBM dilutes He3 into He4 to get there. They don't say what it costs.

PDF is not a complete standard.

Widely used generators produce nonconforming files.

Widely used renderers, including printers, don't render the more obscure features, and differ in how/whether they render nonconforming files.

Files can also be legal but weird. Examples include the internal char map, and using a glyph that looks like a particular letter but is semantically different.

Then there's the question of plugins.

I hit some of these problems when assembling a book of abstracts for a workshop. E.g., a pdf file that looked fine to me using okular would have paragraphs turned into white space when printed with acrobat. Copying and pasting a line would have a few chars mangled.

Several comments:

Where I live in San Diego, it's actually worse than that. My apartment complex has no chargers and says that the ADA make installing them infeasible. The closest superchargers are at least 15 minutes away, are often full, often charge 51c/KWH, and might start out at 50KW before dropping. The situation is getting worse because people are buying Teslas here faster than new chargers are being installed. Running the A/C costs 10% of the battery per hour.

OTOH living in a house with a home charger was great.

When I drove round trip across the country on scenic routes, there were not enough chargers.

FSD is still dangerous. In San Diego, it routinely ignores big equipment for the recycled sewage project completely blocking a lane. It routinely ignores temporary closed lane markers. I filed a formal complaint with NHTSA last week about this.

If that article had included a statement that it was based on personal observation, it would have been more compelling. Even on Tesla groups, I see a lot of posting that have a flavor of the writer not actually owning a Tesla.

Could you identify your batteries that can't take hi elevations? Good ones using liquid cooling can.

I drove my Tesla YLR up Pike's Peak (14000 ft) in Sept. It zipped up the steep curves better than most ICEs and recovered 40% of the energy on the drive down.

Half way down, there's a brake check to see if your brakes are overheating. The guy didn't bother checking my car.

Some of those decisions were actually good. I assume you're referring to Diefenbaker canceling the Avro Arrow. By now the internal discussions are public. The big policy error was being afraid to cancel it sooner. It was an overly ambitious project, spending money like a drunken sailor, which was never going to work, and whose mission no longer existed.

NAFTA arguably benefited both sides a lot.

The dollar level is a policy decision. Lowering the $CAD reduces Canadian imports and helps local business (at least superficially).

Also, part of NASA uses metric and another part uses English. The 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because one of these parts didn't realize about the other part.

The metric world isn't perfect. A 2004 Rhine bridge between Switzerland and Germany at Laufenburg had a 1/2 m vertical misalignment between the two halves being built from the two shores to the center because of a units problem. The two countries' definitions of sea level differ by 1/4m. Ok, that's public info. However someone added instead of subtracting. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are two legal defs of the inch, which differ by 1e-8. From

https://www.dot.state.wy.us/fi...

"There are two different conversions to relate the foot and the meter. In 1893, the United
States officially defined a meter as 39.37 inches. Under this standard, the foot was equal
to 12/39.37 m (approximately 0.3048 m). In 1959, a new standard was adopted that
defined an inch equal to 2.54 cm. Under this standard, the foot was equal to exactly
0.3048 m. The older standard is now referred to as the U.S. survey foot, while the new
standard is referred to as the international foot."

False. It works everywhere inside the shell (note: a shell is hollow).

There's more stuff farther away, which exactly balances its being farther away.

I learned this in undergrad math/physics. It was probably discovered by Newton.