The left puts forth candidates running on a "Execute all white people" stance and still can't figure out why 70% of the country matching that demographic votes against them.

Huh. I'm a *gasp* straight white male myself and I haven't heard anything like that coming from any Democratic candidates put forth. Asking someone to defend their actual stances is fair, but asking them to argue against the lies you bought into or just made up in your head is a bit much.

Speaking of not caring about law and order, how many times has Trump gone against the Constitution exactly? Maybe try taking an interest in reality sometime. Trying to solve problems in imaginary worlds tends to cause problems in the real one.

Odd though that Trump can do nothing but appeal to his fringe base (one that is actually, objectively fringe) and yet still get away with it. The real challenge is for the Democratic Party to convince people to take the same scrutinizing standards they use to judge them and apply it equally to the Republicans.

This. I've come to the conclusion that it is immoral to respect someone who argues in bad faith.

When was the last time fascism or racism was categorized as un-American? That's what I'd like to see.

I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

OED says anticlockwise is used 0.09 times per million words. Counterclockwise is used 1 time per million words.

Yes, that will happen when most of the people in the world who speak English aren't actually English. Your single example of the researchers writing in UK English withstanding.

Any time I've read or heard the phrase spoken by Brits they prefer anticlockwise to counterclockwise. One example that quickly springs to mind is the British Global Cycling Network. I thought this was common knowledge.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

And therein lies the problem. People who just want a simple, sane political system feel (correctly) that it's not something they should have to put in a lot of effort to get or maintain. But the horrifying extremists have all the energy in the world to get their nonsense through, and won't expend any energy at all to just step back a bit and consider that their policies might be hurting themselves as well.

But yes, at the bare minimum people should put in the effort to vote and not nope out after buying into the nonsense that politicians are all the same.

It's the difference between a communist state where the government is forcing their people to head in the correct direction on this and a democracy where the people are choosing the wrong one time and time again.

I'm all for democracy. That's why I'm hoping its citizens will improve enough for it to survive.

Indeed. And yet Stephen Miller is still gonna have a tremendous fit. Probably more so.

OK. But I'm pretty sure that generation could have gone to the moon 11 years after without the spousal abuse as well.