And what happens when the enemy kills your satellites?

Now, I completely agree that stealth is overemphasized, but stealth is just part of a larger problem. The US military, particularly the Air Force, has a seriously bad tendency to rely on "magic bullet" solutions... a hyper-expensive technology that they think will win wars in a single blow.... instead of taking a layered approach that mixes new solutions with old. Which is important, because, war after war, we have to relearn the painful lesson that magic bullets tend to fail.

The F-4 Phantom not only met expectations, but far exceeded them, to the point that the USAF adopted it (even though it hurt their pride being a Navy program). McDonnell started the design in 1955, the prototype rolled out in 1958, and it entered USN and USMC service in 1960. After it was bloody obvious that the F-4 was far better than anything the USAF had in it's so-called Century Series of fighters, USAF adopted it in 1962 and their initial version... the F-4C... entered frontline service in 1963. It would dominate USAF's tactical fighter wings, with F-4's making up 16 of their 24 wings at one time. All on time, and on budget, with multiple versions being developed along the way (notably the RF-4 photo reconnaissance aircraft, and USAF's ant-surface to air missile "Wild Weasel" F-4G versions).

Take away the satellites, and you effectively take away the drones. Don't kid yourself. The destruction of comms satellites will cripple nations, as we've largely gotten rid of backup terrestrial navigation aids like LORAN in the West, while both Russian and China kept legacy nav and com systems as backups, and are even expanding them. The first day of the war, satellites will be the very first thing to go, because you go after your enemies communications first.

I grew up under the (basically) Soviet education system. I can tell that it's waaaaay better than the average K-12.

One easy fix? Have a high stakes gaokao-style exam for the US students. SAT/ACT are about as tough as a wad of toilet paper.

The K-12 system in the US has failed. The conservative fix here is absolutely right: institute a voucher system, with the Federally guaranteed funding level, and let parents choose schools. With obvious allowances for students with special needs, rural areas, etc.

It's quite clear that regulation is getting nowhere fast. Even the milquetoast Common Core requirements resulted in a revolt from schools not able to teach even basic literacy.

Which is unreliable in many situations. I worked on several projects that had issues involving intermittent data loss on a DB9 port, and every time the culprit turned out to be a USB/DB9 adapter. When we'd install dedicated RS232 cards, the problem went away.

For laptops, the answer to this kind of thing should be a standard space where a customer can specify what ports he wants... you get X number of standard ports, and then you can choose what goes into one or two available spaces. But you're just not going to see that happen with manufacturers, even if the customer is willing to pay a greater cost.

Except that I spent some years growing up in dense, street-centric areas, and kids simply played in the streets. Every day. Our substitute for baseball (so as not to damage cars or windows) was "whiffle ball", with hollow plastic balls and bats. In the summers especially, we spent literally all day outside. In the streets. For kids who did this too much, the criticism was literally that "you let your kids run the streets".

Being car-centric has nothing to do with kids activity. The spread of video games and Internet connected culture had everything to do with the modern dearth of outdoor activity by kids. All of my youngest's friends are online in distant places. There are other kids in the neighborhood, but very few of them play outside that I can see. Online is where all the action is. Maybe the answer is for parents to literally kick kids out of the house, they way they used to do ("out, and I don't want to see you back inside until lunch" was a common summer refrain from parents). Maybe if all the kids are turned out, they'll start doing the natural thing, and make their own fun, which is all "outside" is.

You just need to lower down the windows. Easy.

The battery heater in BEVs does NOT use water-based coolants at all because of the risk in case it leaks. Instead, they use glycol. Tesla even has a sensor that will disable the HV battery if it detects a conductive liquid in the battery loop.

Let's get some chemistry to help!

On average, the rate of chemical reactions goes up by 2x for every 10C of temperature increase. If your battery is at -20C then it produces about 12 times less energy than at 15C. A typical car battery can produce about 300kW of power, so that still leaves you with 25kW (or 33 horse power). A typical battery is about 400kg for the cells themselves, and apparently the cells have specific heat capacity of 800 J/kg/C, so heating them at 25kW will require 448 seconds.

But heating the battery _improves_ the discharge rate, so you get a nice differential equation. If you solve it, the resulting time is around 240 seconds or 4 minutes.

In reality, modern EVs drive just fine in Midwestern weather without ANY pre-heating. You get very sluggish performance for the first ~10 minutes while the battery warms up, but the car is perfectly drivable.

This study is BS. I have a 2018 Model 3 with resistive heating, and I did many road trips in sub -20C conditions. Heating a cold-soaked battery from that temperature to 10C takes about 5kWh, or around 7% of the total capacity. You typically can do that on "shore power" while the car is plugged in but you can do that unplugged. After that the battery gets enough heating from its internal inefficiencies.

The major energy sink is actually heating the _cabin_. People tested driving a Tesla Model 3 at -20C without any heating, and the range is around 86% of the normal.

So the range impact has NOTHING to do with the "battery chemistry" or "fundamental problems with lithium". It's just a question of using more energy to drive a given distance. Good news is that it can be solved by just making the battery larger.

Tipping is great in good service jobs. You tend to make good money in mid-to-nicer restaurants as a waiter or waitress. Where tipping sucks is when you work in cheap joints with cheap customers. Or delivering pizza, like you did in college, where your customers tend to be either poor or cheapskates. Poor people can't afford to tip, and cheapskates simply won't. And then there are the groups that simply refuse to tip because they don't see labor or service as a value at all. "If I can't hold it in my hand, I ain't payin' for it".

LOL. A simple EV drivetrain is easy. A modern EV? It's an engineering work of art, with specialized power electrics, electric motors with power density that is insane, etc.

A lot of complexity is not apparent to classic mechanical engineers, but it's no less real. If anything, it's the gasoline engines that require no real expertise anymore.

Semantics. The last years of Chinese schools are focused on gaokao. It's THE test in China, even though technically it's "just" a university entrance test. So pretty much everyone ends up taking it.

There's also Zhongkao which also will cause poor US snowflake students to become a gibbering mess if they had to take it.

The entire country of China. This is the university entrance exam ("high exam"). They also have a zhongkao ("middle exam") to get admitted into the high school.