If you wash away the salt deposits, that implies using water and thus generating brine. Brushing the salt away might be better. Main thing would be avoiding losing the salt to precipitation, as the idea seems to be to avoid it returning to the ocean.
Figuring out how to economically purify the salts, including separating out the lithium, would be a neat trick.

Drone just means autonomous. Drones we use today all we are doing is giving them commands. Flying drones for example automatically compensate for level, drift, speed so that their behaviour matches the operators inputs.

It would be near impossible for a single person to control each of 4 rotors on a common drone. Onboard electronics take care of that for us.

This is the "autonomous" part.

On the moon it would be a rocket propelled or wheel based device that would to give commands. From as simple as travel this fast this direction to go fly here and pick up that rock and bring it back.

It's accepted that Lithium is not rare.

There are however 3 big issues.
1. Cost and Toxic waste associated with extraction. ( This article shows progress in this regard. )
2. Stability, Lithium batteries have an issue with nasty fires.
3. Density of viable lithium related ores. EG in the west most lithium ore is from 2 areas. Canada and Australia. Both locations are actually rather remote in each country.

Lithium is not a good battery base. Why? It's not stable. Energy density is pretty good. But as we know when you push the limits you can get issues. Samsung did this with a series of phone batteries. They ended up with a lot of fires and a very expensive recall. So something that is energy dense but has a significant risk the health and life. It no longer is a good option for batteries.

For reasons like this lithium will ultimately be deposed as the king of batteries.

That said this process is welcome. As it has a dramatic reduction in toxic residuals from processing. So this is a major plus.

If this was discovered even 2 years ago my personal belief is the investment in the process would be huge.

However,

With recent industrial progress on Sodium batteries investors are going to have to weigh the pros and cons. With many big investors actually holding money back from both until they see real results from both systems.

I want to invest but I'm definitely holding back myself.

Have a look at the recent developments around Sodium batteries.

If the momentum holds for sodium they will replace lithium in a very short period of time. BYD in China is already using them in cars.

They have many significant advantages over lithium. One of them being the ignition problem.

I remember reading about the fight between polished aluminum planes and painted. The paint adds weight, and thus increases fuel consumption, but the paint lowers maintenance costs.
A dirty airplane can absolutely burn a noticeably larger amount of fuel.
A car is operating at much lower speeds, generally, so the effect is probably much less.

The biggest issue is trusting the collector of this personal information with the information.

Most do not trust big tech. How will this information be used to exploit me in the future.
Few trust the government with my personal information and app / internet usage.

The general thought that drove the bill is that if the os holds the personal information the informatikn can then be seperated from big tech/gov from the appli ation owners. This should i theory protect the leakage of personal information.

This falls apart quickly however. As big tech owns the os in most cases. There are no standards or compliance requirements that govern what can be collected and how it is managed. So over reach in data collection is likely and expected.

In addition not all users are interactive.

Lastly any data collection method will certainly be defeated in moments.

More effort needs to be put into standards around identity and identity attribute management. So that laws can be based on accepted standards rather than vague wishful thinking ideas.

I'm surprised at appealing. That will likely cost more than the fine.
Still, not wanting the precedent is a thing.

NASA contracts out missions, they don't really do missions in-house. SpaceX is currently winning the launch and visit ISS missions by a mile. Competition like Boeing is more expensive and less reliable.

$500 hammer was actually a set of hammer, shovel, and pick. It had to be non-magnetic, non-sparking, yet durable enough for work. Intended use was for digging out old unstable explosives that the government had let sit around for far too long after WWII.

Pencil that could write in space - standard pencils use graphite, and shed graphite dust when used. Graphite is carbon, it is both conductive and flammable as a powder. Can one see why that might be bad in zero g constrained atmospheres?
The Fisher space pen was developed by Fisher, on his dime, and subsequently sold to both space agencies, US and Russia.

The USA is not "literally Russia". There might be the occasional commonality, but the problems Russia faces are far more severe and deeply run.

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Weekend fun car would be the summer car.
Remember, the winter car is used for dirty tasks even in the summer.

ISP Routers are typically locked such that the end user update the firware. And if they could the process is often extremely difficult for even technically minded people.

In some cases the ISP installs very specific software to do other things.

Example: In Australia Telstra issues routers that create and entire second network on the router. Which allows them to setup roaming wifi connections that the ISP subscriber can use. So a subscriber can walk around town and never lose their wifi. As the simply are hoping between routers stashed in homes/business/public access points.

Other companies put software on the routers to implement tracking networks that constantly scan for wifi and bluetooth broadcast identifiers etc. Then they send this data to the mother ship to create air tag like functionality.

So the problem is now bigger. Not only can't you just simple as a user update to OpenWRT, The ISP is often now stuck with the problem of migrating functionality to a complete new device / OS with little time to implement it.

Note ISP's do not retain the Intelectual property any more for these addon services. They claim they do but generally these things are implemented by contractors or vendors and the knowledge of how to actually put it all together is generally lost. So this makes it even harder to migrate to a "US" made router.

And on top of that internent subscribers do not upgrade their routers often. They are used untill they break or are bricked or the subscriber changes provider. This time line is usually well over 5 year time frames.

So moving to OpenWRT is very unlikely on mass. ( I actually run OpenWRT on multiple devices and I'll likely never go back to a vendor supply router software stack again. )

You do have people doing that in the UK, but it is more people with million pound incomes.
I also lived in the midwest and never had seasonal cars. Now I have a car and a truck. I drive the car unless I need the truck.

In this case, the prime manager, the mayor, had just been replaced inthe election.