I live along the Colorado Front Range. The Goodyear blimps don't fly here because of the elevation (reduces lift) and number of wind events with gusts to 60 mph. I will be curious to see if drone delivery is practical.

Yes, you can. If you want full physical separation, it gets pricey. Back in late 1960s, early 1970s, the Bell System did it for their switches. They were a regulated monopoly, so they earned 12% on whatever money they spent on network infrastructure. So far as I know, no private company has done the full separation thing since.

The Texas grid which is separate from the rest of the US has a size issue with balancing and peaking that ha shown up from time to time. Their grid collapse a few winters ago would (probably) not have happened if they were connected to the big grid like everyone else is.

There are two other US grids, the Eastern and Western Interconnects. They are not frequency synchronized, and there are minimal AC-DC-AC interties connecting them.

The big collapse in Texas involved about 30GW of generation going off line. Even if Texas were connected to the Eastern grid, it is unlikely that there would have been 30GW of spare capacity and 30GW of available transmission to draw on.

Perhaps relevant, ERCOT and the Texas PUC have approved the Southern Spirit 3GW HVDC transmission line that would connect ERCOT and the western edge of the TVA's transmission network. The other states that would be affected have refused to approve the project because they believe Texas will screw them over and drive their electricity prices up.

Worth saying: In Texas, it's easy to find 3.75 square miles that's so desolate it's not useful for anything else. My local power authority here in Colorado has a power-purchase agreement with a solar farm about that size. The land it's on is so poor no one has ever trying either growing crops or running livestock on it. With the panels channeling rain water into narrow strips, it might now support enough grass for a small number of sheep, but probably not enough to justify the effort. Even more convenient, the land was adjacent to an existing transmission line, so the connection cost was a smallish substation. The authority's first battery farm is going in right next to the substation. There will probably be more.

My GP was ahead of her time. Many years ago she used to tell me, "Climb ten flights of stairs over the course of each day, don't worry about your heart."

The particular bridge at issue is the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge, used for the Sound Transit rail link across Lake Washington, and also used for I-90.

Sound Transit could not suffer the same fate as the SF Hydro in Norway, simply because that was a ferry, and the Sound Transit rail link is a bridge.

While the Murrow Bridge did sink in the past, that was in 1990 in the middle of a reconstruction project. The bridge was closed to traffic at the time. The sinking was due to a number of human errors that resulted in the watertight doors of the bridge pontoons getting removed, combined with a big storm that hit the area that Thanksgiving weekend, which proceeded to fill those open pontoons with rain and lake water.

Provided no one repeats that particular bit of idiocy (opening up the pontoons), the bridge is unlikely to sink a second time.

For details on the bridge sinking, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_V._Murrow_Memorial_Bridge#1990_disaster.

I checked at the web site, and like all the other AI chip designers, actual fabrication is by TSMC at 5nm and 4nm. My understanding is that TSMC's fab complex in Arizona can do 5nm parts, and will be able to do 4nm relatively soon. Also that they are at Arizona's capacity for those nodes doing work for Apple and AMD. So FuriosaAI's parts will be made in Taiwan.

The US AI stock bubble is hideously dependent on a few fabs in Taiwan.

...I remember when companies wanted to accelerate depreciation, so they could take the write-off sooner.

I also remember the days when the tax laws made me a depreciable asset in my role doing tech research. I never quite worked up enough nerve to call the accountants and ask what happened after they had depreciated away my full value :^)

I work in localization. Technical writing is often easier for machine-translation systems, because the writing is (ideally) deliberately clear, concise, and structured.

The terminology issue you mention can be addressed at least partially by feeding any such machine-translation system a list of words and phrases to keep as-is in the target text.

Fiction, meanwhile, often involves complicated and subtle wordplay, which no AI system is going to handle very well.

Already thrilled to learn what erotic literature..

.. will read like, after it has been dragged through the automatic translation process. Even the automatically translated descriptions of sex toys on Aliexpress are hilarious, and those are really short and not sophisticated.

I can see it now:

"I put on my robe and wizard hat..."

How about giving the choice for an analog control and taking the wasted extra money spent on computer chips + design + digital display and making the motor last longer?

I would love it if some manufacturer would produce tried-and-true analog designs without all the extra add-on, planned-obsolescence, enshittified bullshit. I suspect this approach would do quite well in the market, at least in certain product categories -- blenders, ovens, washing machines, etc.

Actually, this reminds me to take a look at Lehman's catalog, see what they're getting up to these days. I bumped into them quite by accident ages ago when a relative was living in Amish country. Poking around their website just now, I see things like ovens and hand-cranked mixers. A bit pricey, but no "ET phone home" rubbish and solid workmanship.

• https://www.lehmans.com/

(Crikey, slashcode still doesn't render bulleted lists correctly. How stupidly embarrassing.)

The Fort St. Vrain commercial reactor in Colorado was gas-cooled and ran on a Th232-to-U233 fuel cycle. Fissile U235 was used to get started, but almost all of the energy output was from fissioning U233 produced in the reactor.

That's going to be expensive as hell.

I thought that was the entire point of consumer IoT goods? Rent-seeking by manufacturers?

(Serious question, not just snark.)

Current iron-air batteries have efficiencies around 50%. That is, put 2 kWh in, get 1 kWh back out. That ruins the economics of a lot of potential applications.

PhbGPT

Oo, oo, I know, I know! "What is Bill the Cat?" :D