It's not just 14 stations, but also 150 battery-swapping electric vehicles. This could work in certain fleet applications and it sounds like that is their goal.

But it doesn't. For example, the lawyers that keep submitting court filings with fake references evidently have wrong assumptions about what AI is and is not (for now)

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

250 is less than 1/3 of 500?

A more typical use case for now would be using AI to generate some code, and then testing/fixing the code. Not running the AI every time to solve an instance of the problem.

Side note, I wonder if this paper compared AI performance to human performance. You think people can do towers of hanoi consistently?

In 1994 the msrp of the cheapest Geo Metro was $7800 and median household income was $32,260, or 4.1 x the cost of the metro. If a Versa manual is $17,000, 4.1 of that would be $67,700. Instead the median household income in 2023 was $81,000. So, the Versa now is cheaper than the Metro was then.

On the other hand people have long paid good money for pets, racing horses, or cattle with a prestigious pedigree. You want a pure-bred Samoyed pup? That will set you back $14,000. Nobody ever thought the offspring with be born with the life experience of their parents, they wanted the heritable traits of the parents.

Especially when the first example given is beef cattle. That application makes a lot of sense, but it certainly doesn't involve the cattle living forever.

Here is vmware's answer (for state and local governments), although it's a bit old (2020):
https://www.vmware.com/docs/vm...

7 Reasons to Choose VMware Hereâ(TM)s why the VMware Cloud Foundation future-ready, full-stack hybrid and multi-cloud solution is ideal for your agency:

• VMware Cloud Foundation is an integrated, software-defined solution with built-in automated lifecycle management that combines virtualized services for compute, storage, networking, security, and cloud management. It delivers consistent infrastructure for private, hybrid, and multi-cloud demands.
• Kubernetes is now delivered as part of VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu, delivering full-stack, developer-ready infrastructure with a standard Kubernetes API for programmatic consumption of compute, network, storage, and security services.
• IT operations teamsâ"who have different priorities, skill sets, and preferences than developersâ"can offer developer-ready infrastructure while gaining observability and troubleshooting for Kubernetes workloads.
• VMware solutions included in the full-stack hybrid cloud are now optimized for Kubernetes. As a result, IT can configure an enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure with integrated networking and storage within an hour.3
• With built-in Kubernetes, any environment based on vSphere with Tanzu now natively supports both VM and container workloads as first-class citizens.
• The same VMware Cloud Foundation stack is available as a VMware managed serviceâ" with VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud, in your data center, or with hosted providers.
• VMware powers your multi-cloud strategy with leading public cloud providers offering hybrid-compatible services based on the same VMware Cloud stack, including Google Cloud VMware Engine, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. And over 200 VMware Cloud Provider Program Partners offer VMware Cloud Verified hybrid cloud services on the same VMware Cloud stack.

I don't get the "as a character" aspect. Most things we are familiar with being copyrighted are not characters - songs, books, paintings, also movies, e.g. "Gone in 60 Seconds" as a whole. So why would is a car design not copyrightable even if it's not a "character"?

Can you really dig a house-sized cave for less money, energy, or pollution than you can get some solar panels? Seems dubious.

Apple might also like their odds in court.

A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of a President arbitrarily slapping individual companies with huge taxes on a whim, and a lot of them are Republicans.

We play UNO at the kitchen table pretty often so I was surprised when we played with another family recently at how many differences there were in what we thought were the rules.

Now you're telling me no stacking +2 ? Huh.

It's a threat. The US President does not have the right to pick out individual companies based on nothing but a whim to set individual 'tax rates' (or protection money, whatever you want to call it). The Constitution doesn't even give the President the power to set Tariffs at all. This is not the rule of law, it is rule by the whim of the head of state.

The national debt keeps skyrocketing and the payments on the debt have become onerous. Not a problem?

It's inconvenient to uncover the facts because so many released statistics fail to distinguish between HEV's which ultimately get all their energy from gasoline vs PHV's which could get anywhere from 0 to almost all of their energy from electricity, depending on owner needs and habits.