I actually have owned two robotic mowers, one from Kress' RTKn line and the newest equivalent from Segway. Decided the tech had matured enough to give it a shot, since they're now satellite guided and actually plan routes rather than using a wire and bouncing around like an old Roomba. I've got about 3/4 of an acre of actual lawn to mow, relatively easy but in a climate where grass grows something like 8 months out of the year. In peak growing season it's really 2 mows a week minimum unless you've planted very specific types of grass that don't naturally grow well in this climate and require a ton of irrigation.

I'll say confidently that these mowers are no longer gimmicks. Honestly I'd be surprised if just mowing a yard is much of a job in another decade.

The Kress as a machine was pretty good, but their gimmick is the owner can't program them themselves and needs a dealer... and the dealers just didn't want to support after a sale. But the new Segway Navimow is impressively good, and fully programmable. Cost $2200 for a model that can mow an acre. Extremely good mapping, easy setup, good interface. Uses multiple cameras for not just collision detection but also to physically reference objects around it and use them to correct for potential drift. Fast enough that it can mow the entire lawn in a long day (about 18 hours, counting charge time).

So in my case, if you figure an annual average mowing of 50 times a year (about 1.5 mows a week during the 8 month growing season), the mower actually pays itself back pretty fast. I was getting quotes around $100 for a service to come in, per mow. If you already owned and maintained the equipment maybe you could get a local kid to do it for half that or less, but certainly no adult making a living would do it... and even at $30 a mow for a high school student the payback is easily less than two years, realistically one full growing season you're about there. Even if other folks are in a northern climate with much slower growing grass you're talking only a few years to pay back.

The main hangup has been that the technology kind of sucked before now. That's pretty much resolved. The only real barriers to adoption now are sunk costs in traditional equipment, unfamiliarity, and difficult yard issues (mainly dense tree cover messing with satellite signals). It's not perfect, but I think we're at the point of "good enough" for widespread adoption.

That's a pretty ignorant take.

As someone who has worked around, in, and consulted for the electric industry for decades at this point, I can say with confidence that private versus public utilities really don't have any meaningful difference in outcomes at the meta level. It's been studied pretty extensively, and there are high profile examples of under/over performance under both models as well as conversion between the models. It's such a heavily regulated industry that whether the government controls it directly or not doesn't really matter. In areas where private utilities have really had bad outcomes it was underpinned by poor regulation and lax government oversight. Which is the same reason publicly owned utilities fail, and there's no reason to think the same government that couldn't manage the private electric utility would have done any better running it outright.

People think their bills are set by the utility, but they aren't. They're set by the state. Virtually all costs and incentives are codified for privately owned utilities, and can only change with government approval. Fluctuations in your bill are caused by passthrough costs like fuel and power purchased off the market, which the utility makes $0 on and simply passes on to the consumer. In fact it's very common for a private utility to actually be subsidizing those consumer costs by incurring the full cost up front but passing it on prorated over time for the sake of bill stability. Sometimes the utility even eats a portion of the cost recovery as a loss simply to appease regulators.

The major argument for privately owned utilities that the government regulates is that public utilities have a tendency to become a political football, and that gives incentive to hide poor performance. People don't like to see their bill go up, so there's a natural incentive for politicians to subsidize utility operations out of general tax funds. And because poor performance reflects badly on the government there's also a tendency to not report it. The consumer ends up paying for that regardless, but because those costs get hidden they're hard to address. While some of that exists with private utilities too, because of the adversarial nature of the government relationship it's much harder for private utilities to hide issues. Most states have an office dedicated toward arguing against private utilities on behalf of the ratepayer, in addition to extensive auditing power.

Beyond all of that though, in this specific case with data centers, there's a lot of hot air. Grid operators like PJM in the American North East have been ignoring criticism that they were allowing too much firm capacity to retire for two decades, well before the data center boom. We saw MISO's capacity auction go berserk two years ago in similar fashion, well before these big data center deals were inked. We all know what a shitshow California and Texas have been. These grid operators are actually fortunate they've got the scapegoat of datacenters now, since most industry insiders have anticipated these same issues arising without datacenter loads. Wholesale markets worldwide do not have adequate market constructs to actually ensure grid reliability, and do not have good forward-looking planning or processes for anticipating transmission build. These market construct weaknesses were first seen with large-scale wind and solar deployments, and now datacenters have massively amplified the issues.

You're assuming eventual US replacement of production capacity, but realistically a lot of stuff just won't get bought. There are many teenagers who refuse to wear the same outfit twice for fear they'll have the same outfit on in two social media posts. They buy clothes that literally disintegrate after a few uses for a few dollars, and either throw them away or "donate" them. Nobody is going to replace that production here, the culture will just shift away from disposable clothing and the consumption will go away. There's a lot of stuff like that in the US, and I'm certainly guilty of throwing things away that still largely usable simply because a replacement was so cheap the inconvenience didn't feel worth it. Its a really toxic culture honestly.

A huge proportion of US spending is discretionary, and its likely that a lot of these cheap imports just dont get replaced. That money will shift to other sectors of the economy, maybe even to offset cost increases on actual essentials. Its why economists have been pretty squirrely about trying to predict the exact impacts of these tarrifs... its very hard to predict the economics of changing consumer behavior due to a change this big. A lot of impact could be offset by consumers simply keeping products longer (via repair, tolerating minor defects, etc.) and being less wasteful, and thats a hard metric to forecast.

Yeah, while a lot of trade policy under Trump has been handled pretty stupidly IMO, reforming de-minimis isnt in that camp. Direct shipment of some random $3 piece of crap from Asia to your front door with zero standards, liability, and subsidized by the somewhat bizarre international postage rules that heavily discount shipment out of developing nations, is a relatively new phenomena. And as you outlined there are good reasons not to let it happen.

The real issue isnt this change, which is overdue. Its that the Trump administration is creating cheap-shit withdrawal in the US. The young and poor have grown dependent on these cheap imports; as wages have failed to keep pace with cost of living broadly these cheap goods offset increases in other areas like rent. Cutting off access suddenly while also simultaneously "reforming" programs that give other low-income subsidies (medicaid, student debt forbearance, food assistance, etc.) is a little like kicking the bottle out of the hands of a fat alcoholic and forcing them to run a marathon... its more likely to kill them than whip them into shape. The shock at the lowest rung of US society will be seismic as these policies bite over the next year or two.

Its a weird spot to be in. A lot of what Trump is doing is actually aligned with old-school left wing thinking on economic policy, and frankly I agree with in principle. But the implementation is so fucking stupid and callous that its hard to see how it possibly works out.

There's two element to this argument. The first is extremely reasonable: you should have to get explicit permission to use someone's voice for AI training, or to reproduce the voice of a person in media using AI, and all instances of either should be labeled/credited. Thats really not out of line with what's already done. There's maybe a little fuzziness around reproducing the voice of a "character", but its not a heavy lift to work those logistics out. Pushback against this is purely greed.

The second is more in the spirit of why copyright and patents exists. Copyrights and patents exist to encourage creation. They aren't moral imperatives, theyre rules we as societies created to make sure that human beings continue to create and enhance society technologically and culturally, by being rewarded for their efforts. They did not always exist, and while some creation happened the level and availability of that creation historically is nothing like what we have today.

There is an argument to be made here that AI may stifle creative enterprise so badly that people will simply stop creating in meaningful amounts. At which point youre back into the kind of patronage systems that existed centuries ago, with most art and technology being the purview of the very wealthy. Cultural stagnation.

Of course, the AI positive spin on this is that AI tools will democratize creative enterprise so much that virtually everyone will create. What we've seen so far though isn't encouraging... so far these tools are simply enabling really low quality garbage to "flood the zone", hoping to steal a small slice of attention. That could change. It doesn't feel like its going to though.

Not just the US south. Large portions of the US are basically swamp, including fairly far up the US east coast. Even if the temperature only routinely gets into the 80's of degrees Fahrenheit the humidity and still air can raise the heat index to uncomfortable or even dangerous levels. Then much of the US plains and West are arid or semi-arid and can get extremely hot in the summer (well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit), although with dramatically lower humidity.

It'll be a pretty big change for Europeans if they embrace AC, I remember how abnormal it was to stay places that had it when I've traveled there. When you look at why US energy use is so much higher than the average European air conditioning is a very big part of that.

Pharmaceuticals, plastics, and a fairly large amount of high-end electronics and machinery are directly imported. The bulk of Canadian goods still come via US ports, even adding a couple is unlikely to change that. The real sting is on the other end though. Canadian trade in things like lumber, metals, cereal grains and finished goods would struggle to find export markets anywhere near the size of the US.

In general, large trade barriers between a small nation and a much larger adjacent nation don't tend to go well for the smaller nation. If you believe otherwise then you should talk a bit to British folks about how Brexit has treated them so far.

It would be better to just sort this out, it's unlikely US trade policy doesn't shift in 3 years when Trumps gone. Remove the dairy tariffs to give him an ego boost and call it a day, most Canadians won't buy those products anyway currently out of spite.

There is the argument that this is functionally a tariff, which Canada is just calling a tax. And frankly it is. The thresholds were calibrated to hit foreign (mostly US) companies, and the implementation is designed to make those companies the "bad guy" when they inevitably raise the price of goods in Canada to cover the tax. Other places also have a digital services tax, and it's always designed to target US companies because they dominate the space. I mean, apply the same logic to Canadian aluminum... if Trump had announced a "big, beautiful" tax of 50% of American derived revenue from Canadian Aluminum refiners would that have been fine, while the the current tariffs aren't?

There are many, many protectionist measures instituted globally that are functionally tariffs, or at least are accomplishing the same thing as a tariff. It's pretty common in agriculture to have "health and safety" rules tailored to keep out foreign products, which conveniently get waived if there happens to be a shortage of a particular agricultural product. There are the kinds of tailored taxes on foreign companies discussed in this article. Or even something as simple as an artificial bureaucratic layer that holds up delivery of foreign goods too long for them to be useful. As stupidly as Trumps trade war has been executed there were legitimate gripes that protectionism and trade barriers were unfairly applied to US goods and growing in number.

In the end the Canadians can do whatever they want, its their country. But lets not pretend this isn't the same thing in spirit that Trump is doing, and it predates his election.

You should google/chatgpt "ELCC", and how it relates to wind, solar, and batteries. Anymore it's a multisurface calculation of what a type of resource is "worth" to the grid from a reliability perspective, both in isolation and in conjunction with multiple other intermittent technologies. ELCC values for small penetrations of wind/solar/batteries can be "ok", say 60% of rated capacity, but rapidly drop with increased build out. We're talking low single digits %. Versus nuclear, thats rock solid at 90+% by and large. All that to say, no, wind and solar do not provide baseload equivalent power. If they did, the ELCC math wouldn't work out like it does.

The reality is the power market structures are warped, and were designed by basically grain commodities traders (power is "perishable" by a certain logic, like grain) who didn't appreciate the idiosyncrasies of the energy industry. That reality has really become understood in the power industry, but changing those structures is hard and controversial. Which is why you see states in the US "subsidizing" nuclear power. Stories like this are examples of people "in the know" navigating what the experts are telling them is the reality, while balancing public perception.

The only way I can rationalize such an outwardly dumb decision is he legitimately doesn't know what the company will look like a year from now. So they're going to remove as many of the outside layers as they can to expose the core buisness, then as that reconfigures its the contractors headache to manage the impacts. Eventually when you hit a stable buisness model you can bring the work back in house.

Or... its to enable easy scrapping and selling of the company for parts if he can't get market traction. Less baggage and uncertainty in a sale.

Wildly undervalued if you don't know much about highly technical work. As someone that tried to manage humidity in a non-semiconductor lab to within the tolerances of the machines in the building, it's a fucking nightmare if the outside climate is humid. You run into issues like if you run too much air through the dehumidifier setup it makes drafts that fuck up the scales. Substantially easier to add water to the air IMO.

A very dry climate is kind of like having a natural vacuum... yeah you can manufacture an environment like that, but if you have it naturally it sure makes life easier.

Which... isnt true. And youre ironically proving why people should be skeptical of AI "news."

The Iranians have claimed damage to three hospitals, but have themselves stated it was secondary damage from attacks on nearby "workshops." Presumably for weapons or electronics components. Israel has not been accused of directly targeting hospitals in Iran, nor has the Israeli government stated they consider Iranian hospitals legitimate targets. That could change of course, as the Iranians blatantly targeted an Israeli hospital and the Israelis are not above a tit-for-tat.

Your AI seems to have mixed up attacks in Gaza, where hospitals have been considered valid targets by the Israelis due to the claimed presence of combatants in or under them. There's legitimate questions of proportionality in some of those strikes, but there's also hard evidence of fortifications under Gaza hospitals and video of firefights with militants in hospitals. Regardless its an entirely seperate issue from Iran.

And these are the kinds of mistakes AI makes frequently. I had a friend of mine try to prove to me AI was perfectly fine for reading the news by having claude summarize for him a long article (really blog) I had sent him, and posted the bullet points to "prove" he didn't need to read the underlying piece. It got about 60% of the basic premise, missed the core premise entirely (it actually concluded the opposite of it), and added a bunch of general internet discourse on the underlying topic as though it was in the article. It basically spit out something plausible that lined with what he expected to hear, but wasn't right.

That's not really how refiner credits work, it's just the popular narrative pushed by anti-farming interests. There's a very wide array of groups that would like to see commercial agriculture end in the US, for reasons as simple as "why don't we just take all that land and make it a national park!" Vegans in particular hate US farming, as they see it as enabling the consumption of animals. Unfortunately one of the giant reasons there is so much climate change skepticism in the American Midwest is the same old groups that were attacking rural people as evil for decades changed their messaging from "animal cruelty" to climate change, and the reflexive reaction was to discount it. Had the message been delivered from less adversarial sources with a plan for involving those communities instead of attacking them you might have seen a broader embrace of climate-positive policy. But I digress.

The US has some of the lowest agricultural subsidies of any industrialized nation. Subsidy for agriculture is fundamentally necessary: crops are perishable, and their production varies wildly based on environmental conditions. If you don't have some mechanism for subsidy during times of overproduction then people go bankrupt and land is fallowed, and suddenly in times of underproduction (drought, pests, whatever) you don't have enough food to go around. And since crops can fail very suddenly, sometimes well into a growing season, these effects are very unpredictable. The worst case scenario is people starve, and that was fairly routine in most nations prior to about 100 years ago.

The way the US manages this is not via explicit subsidy (typically), which is what most countries do (Look at Europe for example, the tv show Clarkson's Farm is a goofy look at this but the last episode of the first season really hammers it home). The US initially tried to manage production via mechanisms that took land out of production, sort of calibrated to what the government thought the country needed. Think payments to make marginal land into wildlife habitat rather than plow it. That practice was deemphasized under President Regan, where the idea shifted to production-maximalism and the government just bought and used surpluses. The idea there was basically to drive small farmer under in favor of hyper-productive megafarms... you know, because efficiency is all that matters /sarcasm.

Biofuel mandates really became an outgrowth of that production maximalist approach to agriculture (as are things like government cheese production to deal with milk surpluses). Ethanol and Biodiesel are ways to eat surplus. The "mandates" are actually extremely flexible, which is why fuel at a gas pump in the US will often say "UP TO 10% Ethanol." Why the "Up To?" Because sometimes that gasoline has very little ethanol in it. What ends up happening is blending requirements are routinely waived by the government depending on the price of the crops in question. If prices are below the cost of production for farmers the government will use ethanol blending to raise the prices to nearer to break even. If prices are very high already, the blending requirements get waived. It's a shock absorber. Unrelated, but functionally animal agriculture works the same way... when grain gets expensive animals are fed less grain, slaughtered earlier, and fewer young animals are raised, which takes meat out of production but increases the supply of staple grains.

Biofuels may very well be the answer to things like aircraft de-carbonization. There are many environmental interests that hate the idea of that, and would rather just see air travel decline entirely. When you look into the arguments against using biofuels they’re extremely cherry-picked. Typically they’ll reference that fossil fuels are used to power agricultural equipment, which is true but also not something intrinsic (there’s no reason you couldn’t transition agriculture to battery-electric production eventually, probably with smaller autonomous equipment rather than giant human driven machines). They’ll reference fertilizer use, which again is not intrinsic to producing grains and could be supplanted with cover-crops and non-fossil derived fertilizer. And finally they’ll complain that fermentation produces CO2, which is true but perfectly manageable. It’s not like it creates carbon atomically, at worst it’s a closed net-zero carbon loop and at best it’s an active carbon sink (you capture the CO2 off-gassing during fermenting and inject it into the ground). Ironically there have been attempts to create large CO2 pipelines from ethanol refiners that would run to North Dakota to inject into old oil wells, but “environmentalists” have fought it tooth and nail. Environmentalism has many, often competing, factions and goals.

Ultimately for things like aircraft there is a certain energy density required. The same with heavy equipment, rockets, whatever. Chemical fuels have a very high energy density, and are an obvious solution. Growing those fuels isn’t an unreasonable way to manufacture them. I’d guess that ultimately biofuels would be produced primarily from things like switchgrass, with grain biofuel filling the same role it does now: a sink for excess grain production.

Im not aware of anyone that keyed a tesla and got any serious charge. I am aware of people who set fire to teslas getting arson charges. The Trump administration tried to spook people protesting and blocking tesla dealerships by threatening domestic terrorism charges, but of course nothing came of that because its fucking ridiculous and a transparently corrupt abuse of power meant to try and save the buisnesses of a high profile ally.

If we start seeing mass job displacement from AI and robotics come too quickly without other economic avenues opening to take those workers, I have little doubt you'll see mass vandalism of those machines. Probably even attacks on datacenters and AI infrastructure. Probably won't change the outcome, but it'll be an outlet for rage.

Its wildly incorrect. California has about 40 GWh of batteries.

Mark Johnson, for the record, isnt a good source of information. He has made his career advocating shit other experts find laughable: 20 years ago he was claiming the wind technology of the day could power the US affordably without issues, which still isnt true today. His grad students regularly churn our what I'd consider highly misleading papers on reliability. I'd call him part of the new wave of "science advocates" who have a policy position and use their credentials to try and advance it on moral grounds.

Im glad California is blazing this trail, it saves other states the headache. But the batteries they have are really only useful for load shifting under ideal conditions, not for reliability. Displacing peaking gas will help a lot for global warming, but its far from a panacea. And dispatching those batteries is still an area of active R&D, its a legitimately hard problem to solve.