This seems slow. Current radio technology exceeds that by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude. Plus, lasers tend to have problems with cloud cover.

What am I missing?

But they do. Congresspeople from both parties who sit in closed door committees regularly engage in trading in the very industries they're (ostensibly) regulating. They've publicly admitted as much, and have said "So what, big deal. We have the right to make investments." So the issue isn't *catching* them, it's completely changing the system so that they can't do it as a "matter of course" with total impunity, and (I'm not holding my breath) holding the POTUS and other high-level officials to that same standard when it comes to trading immediately before/after geopolitical/military maneuvers.

If they then want to play games with blind trusts and sharing inside information with the people in charge of those trusts, they're free to commit crimes, like anyone else, if they think they're worth the risk, but if the SEC and other bodies actually had any power (or at least willingness) to hold them accountable, I'd imagine they'd at least think twice. I think most of them probably don't even see what they're doing as criminal. In their minds, they're just using their privileged positions to "strategic advantage". In a much less insane world, such actions would be *easily* traceable and would, at worst, result in public disgrace for those involved, and at best, doing hard time.

I realize that this may (at this point at least) be a pipe dream, since the whole bloody thing is stacked in favor of the people making the rules. It's always been that way, but nowadays it's approaching totality.

AI claims that you can still buy AZW books and read them on one of these old Kindles. The claim is that if you buy from your PC account for the old Kindle it will be supplied as AZW, which will be readable on the device after transfer to it from the PC by USB.

The claim is that what has changed is that you can no longer buy directly from the Kindle, because purchases are now KFX only. But that you can still buy books for it over the web using your PC and they will be supplied as AZW.

If this is really true, the change is not only not a bad thing, its positively a good thing, because the account details on the old Kindles were stored very insecurely so it was a real security hazard wandering around with this very stealable device with all your Amazon credentials stored in open format.

Is it true? It was true before the latest change, but is it still?

Paying ransom ought to be criminal. Moreover, they have zero guarantee that the data is really gone, no copies anywhere.

The problem with this kind of trial is that it's all about personal motivation, and personal memories. Insight into motivations is difficult at the best of times, and there is little way to prove them.

Memory is worse. Human memory is fallible. Especially in cases of conflict, we unconsciously edit our memories to cast ourselves in the best light, and our adversaries in the worst light. As a personal example: We have a couple next to us who are a$$hole neighbors, who have (imho) deliberately sought conflict with us multiple times. At one point, i went back to the correspondence we had on one issue and...it was very different than what I had "remembered". They were still jerks, but my memories had morphed to make things far more black-and-white than they actually were.

So Musk saying what Altman wanted, and Altman saying what Musk wanted - you can believe as much of it as you want, but likely very little of it is accurate. Remember that there are three sides to every story: What person A remembers, what person B remembers, and what actually happened.

The industrial revolution saw a huge shift of workers from agriculture to factories. Transitions are always hard, and factory working conditions were not always the best. Still, over the course of a generation or two, the industrial revolution lead to a huge increase in the average standard of living.

AI has exactly this potential. We are still in the very early days, seeing some of the initial pains of transition. However, the potential of an equally huge shift is definitely there.

Ransomware would completely die out, if people simply refused to pay. No profit to be had, criminals would spend their time elsewhere.

As encouragement, paying ransom should simply be illegal, with severe personal penalties for any administrator or managers who approves such a payment.

Your comment about administrators is absolutely right.

I'm in Europe, where the problem is less pronounced. Still, over the last 20 years, the ratio of non-teaching staff to teaching staff has gone from 2:3 to 3:2. Those numbers don't look dramatic, but consider: It used to be that 100 teaching staff had 66 admin staff. Now that same 100 teaching staff have 150 admin staff, so 2.5 times as many. Not that our teaching loads have been reduced - much the contrary - our classes are now larger. You have to fund the bloat somehow.

I am reminded of the famous quote: "The bureacracy is expanding, to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy."

So most houses have fatter wired than they usually use. But comes the day they do use the capacity, and...what happens? Plus, you now have to maintain hardware distributed over zillions of different structures. Plus, you have to build those structures. I can't see how this can possibly be cheaper or more practical.

Who is suggesting any nation get 100% of their electricity from nuclear? I certainly made no such suggestion.

I've seen similar claims before, I have my doubts on the practicality of running a national electrical grid with that level of renewable energy sources on the grid. The reason I have doubts is those that make a counter claim would show their work while those that argue for all renewable have a more "trust me, bro" attitude on the calculations. Another reason to have doubts is the recent Iberian power outage, an outage that impacted a lot of people with an over reliance on renewable energy as the primary suspect as the cause. Certainly there was a human factor in this, likely people that wanted "bragging rights" on reaching some kind of record on renewable energy on the grid. The human factor could instead be improper training and/or protocols on managing the grid that were lacking in some way.

If it were that simple to run a grid on 90+% renewable energy then I would expect some nation would have made it work by now. Wind and solar power isn't new, it's not like there wasn't time in the last 50 years or so to make that happen. I'm picking 50 years somewhat arbitrarily, this is about the time when concern over pollution and such from energy really got going as well as about when solar PV was something that was low cost enough that it found uses beyond powering satellites in orbit. This is also about the time that Three Mile Island had a meltdown and created opposition to nuclear power among the general public.

50 years have gone by and nobody has made it work. Those that made the most effort on an all renewable grid have seen rising energy costs and blackouts.

It's not just oil and natural gas impacted by blocking off trade bottle necks like Hormuz. Oil and gas can't get out while also nothing can get in. Well, it would appear that there is allowances for food and medicine to get in as the war is with the leadership in Iran than the innocent citizens of Iran. Which gets to the next point...

If China does something stupid that could cause nations in the region to blockage ships carrying solar PV panels and battery-electric vehicles then there could be all kinds of issues getting energy in any form. France decided long ago to build a large fleet of nuclear power plants as they have very little in fossil fuels, not much in hydro, and so on. They needed to reach some level of energy independence or see their national wealth evaporate from having to export cash for energy imports. It's the same motivations driving China to build dozens of nuclear power plants at a time.

There's only so far that buying solar PV, electric cars, and such can go in reaching energy independence. It would be impractical to run a nation on only wind, water, sun, and geothermal. Nuclear power will have to be included as part of the mix of energy sources, it is a need to have technology than a nice to have technology. One hurdle to avoid fossil fuels and nuclear fission is like France where they lack the geography, geology, climate, and so on to rely only on renewable energy sources.

I expect to see large reductions in CO2 emissions as something of a happy accident while nations wake up to the need to reach a point were disruptions in trade won't leave them in the cold and dark. Nuclear fission, onshore wind, hydro, and maybe also geothermal, are all options that have proved to be competitive on price with fossil fuels. I'd expect someone to reply on the costs of nuclear power not being competitive if I didn't point out what should be obvious, as the global trade in fossil fuels are restricted due to blockades the price will keep rising until it reaches whatever cost people believe nuclear power costs. We can plot out the costs of fossil fuels to nuclear fission over time on a graph as blockades impede trade in fossil fuels, when those two lines meet then it would be economic suicide to not build nuclear power plants.

As nations build nuclear power plants to replace electricity from fossil fuels their CO2 emissions will go down. As nations gain experience in building nuclear power plants the costs for nuclear power will go down. Concern on CO2 emissions is a luxury, something that a nation will only look to addressing once more important issues have been dealt with. The same goes for opposition to nuclear power, that's a luxury that can only be maintained so long as energy costs are tolerable.

To those that believe nuclear power plants take "too long" (in scare quotes because that is subjective) I can make two points on that. First is that we've seen nuclear power plants go from planning to putting electricity on the grid in under four years, which is near parity on the build time for large solar and wind projects. Second, if there wasn't the irrational fear of nuclear power then we could have plausibly seen many nations able to be relatively unconcerned about fossil fuel prices, even if we assume a nuclear power plant takes more than a decade before it puts power on the grid. The need for nations to maintain some level of energy independence isn't new, what is new is that the fears of restrictions on the global energy trade has become real.

Those trucks do not claim to have a 500 mile range on a single charge like the Tesla Semi. If the Volvo examples given could get 500 miles on a charge while retaining a cab-over design then you would have a point. They claim 700 km, or about 435 miles. That might be only a 15% difference but I have a suspicion that it would be enough to force a significant redesign of the truck to get to 500 miles, to the point that it could no longer retain the cab-over format as it is currently understood/defined.

Maybe we could see some new battery chemistry that can allow for all kinds of new capabilities but this will come at a cost, and not necessarily a monetary cost. In the search for batteries with increasing energy density we are seeing batteries that are made in ways that make them increasingly more delicate, and should there be damage then they can burn in ways that are difficult to control. This has lead toward a trend in battery-electric vehicles to use battery chemistry and construction that give up energy density so as to be more durable, use less expensive materials, and address other concerns. It is because of these trends I'm suspicious of battery-electric long haul trucks seeing success in wide adoption.

I recently saw a video on YouTube singing the praises on gains being made in "solar fuel" technology. This is the same fuel synthesis technology that has existed for something like a century now but this time the heat and electricity for producing diesel fuel, jet fuel, or whatever, comes from sunlight. Is the goal to move cargo by battery power? Or move cargo in a manner that doesn't add CO2 to the atmosphere? Solar fuels will allow using the same diesel trucks we have now but with carbon neutral fuel than fossil fuel.

I believe we should be looking at new fuels than new trucks. Solve the fuel problem and we make all existing vehicles carbon neutral than set ourselves up for trying to replace what took us a century to build in logistics and infrastructure. Change the fuel and we could reach carbon neutral in a decade or two. Changing to all battery-electric vehicles will likely take more than a century. If I were to make a bet on which comes first then I know where I'd put my money.

That worked well for the time because routes the trucks took were short so the range requirements were minimal. Then is that with deliveries being in the early mornings, while people were still asleep and wanting milk with their breakfast, being quiet was important. The load needing to be carried was relatively small and light and so no real concern on the battery-electric milk truck being so big that navigating tight corners in residential areas could be a problem, or so heavy that there could be a concern on breaking the pavement.

Does any of this apply for the Tesla Semi? A Class 8 vehicle? These are trucks meant to haul 20+ tons of cargo over hundreds of miles. These trucks are not meant for tight confines seen in residential areas but the wide open highways, no need for the shorter cab-over designs common in Europe. It might be difficult to make a practical cab-over battery electric Class 8 truck given the volume the battery required for the range and power demanded of the vehicle.

Isn't there a rule that allows electric trucks to exceed the normal weight limits for Class 8 trucks? I recall it is about an extra 2000 pounds over the limit for a diesel truck. I expect this was necessary or the Tesla Semi would be dead on arrival. Without that allowance for extra battery weight then the people operating the trucks would have to make up for it by reducing the mass of the cargo carried. Since trucking runs on moving cargo mass over miles that would make a dent in profits that few companies and owner-operators would tolerate.

I have my doubts that any Class 8 battery-electric truck will prove successful. Had this been something like a Ford Transit or GMC Topkick, Class 6 vehicles at most, then I would have higher expectations for success. These are trucks that would do the kind of work that the old milk delivery trucks would do, as in short hauls with "light" loads (at least "light" when compared to Class 8) and long periods of being idle for a recharge. Short haul semi trucks are certainly a thing but these are also the cab-over trucks that tend to be popular in Europe because these are the kinds of trucks that make that "last mile" delivery to grocery stores and such, and so need to be able to navigate in tighter spaces. The size of the battery, as I mentioned before, is certainly incompatible with this shorter cab design.

The United States Postal Service tried to experiment with battery electric delivery trucks. The problem they ran into was getting enough electrical capacity to the overnight parking lots to charge all the trucks. Issues like that could pose problems for wide adoption of the Tesla Semi and similar vehicles.

"it is common for liberals to do things like put up signs in their yards that say they stand with the homeless while simultaneously voting for zoning policies to defend their property value"

So much this. Where I live, the politians are pushing to house 200 illegal African and Middle Eastern immigrants in a town of around 1000 people. Let's be real: that will destroy the town.

Why not house them in the affluent suburbs where the politicians live? We all know that will never happen...

We also pay people not to grow food. It reminds me of this quote -

Conservatives are often the biggest hypocrite.