That's unusually bad, even for a year ago, but FSD has improved enormously since then. There were some huge updates around ~August that made it go from "Workable, but you have to watch it like a hawk" to "Really quite good, though still needs light supervision". I use FSD all the time and almost never have to intervene. It even passes the wife test now, meaning she uses it nearly all of the time, too, and I'd have said that would never happen.

OTOH, I used Waymo all last week for commuting around the bay area, and it was nearly flawless. There was one time it seemed to get confused because there was an emergency and there were sirens coming from multiple directions but none of the emergency vehicles could be seen. Apparently Waymo uses external microphones to listen for sirens. Anyway, it kind of stopped partway through a left turn through an intersection. It wasn't dangerous; all the human drivers were also slowing/stopping while trying to figure out where the emergency vehicles were, but it would have been better to continue through the intersection, then pull over. After about five seconds of hesitation, the Waymo did exactly that, but I'd have done it without the hesitation.

Neither does an EV. After 8 years an EV's battery pack will have degraded a little; perhaps it'll only have 85-90% of the range that it had when new (the 8-year warranty generally guarantees 80%). But the degradation curve is actually front-loaded; you lose the largest amount of range in the first year, less in the second, and so on. By the time it's 20 years old it will probably only have 75% of the range it had new. At 30 years, 70%, and so on.

Barring some manufacturing problem or catastrophic event, an EV battery should continue functioning long after an ICEV will need an engine replacement. The ICEV will maintain roughly its original range until it fails while the EV will lose a little range, but the EV will last longer.

As a driver of an EV, I disagree. I'd appreciate it if the PHEV (and EV!) drivers moved their vehicles when they are full, but as long as they're actively charging I don't see a problem with it. I suppose if the chargers are oversubscribed I'd appreciate PHEV drivers leaving them for the EVs, but that just means more chargers should be installed.

Hotels should just make them free, but room key-activated, so only guests can use them. And, of course, they need to install enough that they aren't oversubscribed.

If you're doing a road trip in an EV, being able to charge overnight while you're sleeping (just like at home) is marvelous. When I'm road-tripping I try to stay only at hotels with free chargers. There are actually plenty of them, at least in the US, so I succeed in staying at a place with a charger about 90% of the time.

Being able to charge overnight and start the day with a 100% charge means that I generally don't have to charge except during lunch and dinner, which means I can drive several hundred miles per day but spend zero time waiting for charging. I just have to make sure I stay at a hotel with a level 2 charger and eat lunch and dinner at places near superchargers. Not starting the day at 100% changes the dynamics significantly, requiring two quick supercharger stops for partial charges in the morning (if you're trying to minimize time spent charging, you only charge to about 60%, which takes about 20 minutes, vs an hour to get to 100%).

Maybe originally, but now the demand for gasoline far outstrips the amount naturally found in crude oil. That's why they invented cracking.

If one day there ever were an excess of light components in oil, they could simply transform it into higher-weight molecules. Along those lines, one of the biggest uses for natural gas is for building polymer chains.

The instruction to "eliminate political bias" is in fact an instruction to require political bias. No government AI will be allowed to think thoughts that Trump doesn't approve of!

Well, I'll have to admit, I didn't have "learning that someone on Slashdot believes that the Cold War was a myth" on my bingo card for today.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

What on Earth are you talking about? Nobody is trying to make other countries poor and dangerous. People come to the US from these countries because even jobs that are tough and underpaid by US standards are vastly better than what is available at home. Creating a formal system just eliminates the worst aspects of it: the lawlessness, the sneaking across the border in often dangerous conditions (swimming across rivers, traveling through deserts), "coyotes" smuggling people in terrible conditions, and so forth. The current US system is the dumbest way you could possibly handle it: people wanting to work, US employers wanting them, the US economy benefitting from it... but still making it illegal, chaotic, dangerous, and unregulated for those involved.

Or, more concisely: Countries should aim to be poor.

To be fair to the nutballs, their proposal will actually slow it down as compared to not limiting immigration. That is, from their nutball perspective the proposal is an improvement, just not a total solution. For a total solution, they need to go full right-wing nutball and also ban women from working so they'll stay home and have proper Swiss babies.

Also, point of note: it's unlikely you'd actually grow plants and humans in interconnected habitats anyway. You might pump some gases from one to the next, but: agriculture takes up lots of area / volume. If you're talking Mars rather than Venus, then you're talking large pressure vessels, which is a lot of mass, proportional to the pressure differential. Which is expensive. But plants tolerate living at much lower pressures than humans (and there's potential to engineer / breed them to tolerate even lower - the main problems are that they mistake low pressure for drought, and that's a response we can manipulate). So it makes much more sense to grow them in large, low-pressure structures with a mostly-CO2 / some O2 / no N2 atmosphere, rather than at human-comfortable pressure levels.

That said, you don't want human workers having to work in pressure suits, so ideally you'd use a sliding tray system (we use them on Earth to save space in greenhouses) or similar, except that you'd move the plants through an airlock into a human-comfortable area for any non-mechanized work. Obviously, mechanized systems can operate at any pressure level, and also obviously, some work would still need to be done in pressure suits every now and again (maintenance, cleaning, etc).

None of this applies to a floating Venus habitat, where in your typical Landis design your crew - and potentially agriculture - are just living in your lifting envelope, at normal pressures. The envelope is massive, so you have no shortage of space for agriculture, all well-illuminated from all angles if the envelope is transparent. The challenges there are different - how to support them, humidity management, water supply, falling debris, etc.