> 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.

If Texas were connected to either of the national grids, they would have been i compliance with federal standards for their infrastructure and would likely not have had the failure in the first place. The only reason Texas hasn't joined the rest of the nation is because they don't want comply with federal regulations.

The HVDC interconnect - which Southern Spirit would be the third and by far largest - allows them to trade power with everyone else while still avoiding federal oversight for their own operations. They will continue to mismanage their own infrastructure and leech off their neighbors when shit inevitably goes sideways again.
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> What are you *talking* about? EREVs are common and are extremely efficient, because the small engine can be run at an optimal RPM for efficiency while recharging the battery

It will always be less efficient to convert the engine's power output into electricity, then charge the battery, then discharge the battery back to electricity to drive a motor. Every time the energy changes form you lose a chunk of it.

For example;

> The i3 had an EREV variant

The i3 aux power unit (the "range extender") did not charge the battery. Instead, the APU would generate electricity to supplement the remaining charge in the battery; the engine does not run if you aren't driving and it never produces more power than you are consuming for any length of time.

> LEVC taxi is an EREV

Don't know much about this vehicle but according to LEVC's own description it works with the same a the i3; the engine maintains the battery charge but does not charge the battery. Probably because that's bad for efficiency. You drive on pure battery until it reaches a lower limit of SoC, then the engine kicks in to supplement the battery decrease the rate of discharge.

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The Business Reform channel on YT reviewed a couple of ultrasonic jammers that kill the audio on these recordings.

$400 for the better one but if you need it maybe that's cheap.

I didn't know about the technology so I was surprised.

The guy who runs the channel would fit in with the dominant privacy culture on this site.

Good points.

nVidia is talking about paying homeowners to install a 10 GPU unit in their backyard along these lines, going highly-distributed.

The trick with the "data center jobs" is the estimate that 70% of them will be new H1B workers so even those claims to the locals whose politicians already waived taxes is that they're looking at maybe a few dozen local jobs for a huge data center.

It's worth watching the Tucker/O'Leary interview to see the mindset of these people. "Corruption and screwing the locals is how business in America is done, Tucker!"

Slightly paraphrased.

I suspect it's a straightforward incentives problem. If you can get away with making it the grid's problem there's not much incentive to pay for more expensive facility power setups. Presumably this is why ERCOT is testing current and prospective customers and making noise about it; and why there are at least some standards for how ill-behaved a load can be while still being allowed to hook up; with some awkward interactions between very large sites that also have the ability to shut down rapidly at relatively low cost. If you are 'mining' crypto you presumably prefer the gear to be online because it is depreciating by the minute regardless; but the risk and inconvenience of shutting it down and booting it up again isn't particularly dramatic compared to having to cold start an aluminum smelter or something.

> Legal to record in public in USA

It's not so clear-cut. First, what you probably meant to say is "there is no expectation of privacy in public" which is absolutely not the same as "legal to record in public."

First, obviously, you must be in a public space. The moment you enter private property - which includes all businesses and even spaces like most parking lots - you have no right to record there. If a person has "a reasonable expectation of privacy" at a location, even if it's a public space, you generally do not have the right to record them. Many government facilities also have policies that prohibit video recording even if they are technically public spaces.

If your video recording has audio as well, then you may be subject to wiretap laws. If your state is a two party consent state, then all parties involved in the audio recording must be aware of and agree to being recorded, even in a public space, if that conversation can reasonably be assumed to be private. So if we're in a two party consent state, and you engage me on the street and strike up a conversation with me specifically, and try to record it without my permission, congratulations you're doing a crime... likely a felony.

If you are recording for commercial purposes, such as filing a movie or tiktok video, you may be required to have every person in that recording sign a release giving you permission to use their likeness.

And of course, nobody who plans to record video for honest and upstanding purposes should be worried about hiding the fact they are recording to begin with. The only reason to do this is to be a little shit about it.
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String Theory has contributed some useful mathematics but its position as the Only Game In Town (they call it that) appears to have been a psyop to keep Academia out of the work being done at private contractors.

Retired people from e.g. Skunkworks have described corrections and extensions of Maxwell's Equations and the Dirac Equation as the path that has yielded experimental success.

Those guys didn't "shut up and calculate". Their work is under NDA, WUSAP, ITAR, and Invention Secrecy Act restrictions.

Some parallel work, e.g. Exodus Technologies, has started to bear fruit in the public domain, so the psyop is being wound down now. Additionally China has surpassed the US in implementation so they want All Hands On Deck.

What was strategic advantage has become a strategic liability. One can understand this mindset by not caring about the hundreds of millions of lives that could have been saved by resultant technologies. When only State Supremacy (and COG) are factored in the normal human behavior goes out the window.

The impossible need to power AI for a communist surveillance police state may also be playing a factor; hard to know prospectively but somebody has the power source being demonstrated on the slow drip of DoD "UFO" videos.

Most people won't put Space Aliens on the top of the list of culprits when ATS projects by humans will suffice.

The biggest hurdle will be getting Deans and Department Chairs to discard their life's work as meaningless. What a "Good Scientist" should do and what most people will do are not the same. Hence the "funeral to funeral" adage.

> Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar

There in lies the misconception. Toyota's drivetrain specifically has an engine (modified Atkinson cycle) that is literally incapable of powering the wheels without input from at least one of the two electric motors. It also has no transmission to speak of - just a single ratio planetary gearbox and differential. Also, neither of the motors are directly attached to the engine. It's actually kind of funny that almost everything you want in a hybrid already exists, and Toyota has been building them for like 20 years.

This is why you should read up on how hybrids actually work... hybrids, plural, not just one example like your Ford.

> What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s)

This is the worst arrangement possible for efficiency and that's why no auto manufacturer does it. Yes, diesel-electric locomotives use this arrangement, but they are not built for efficiency. They're actually kinda shit for efficiency, saved entirely by the steel wheels on steel rails being so much more efficient than rubber tires on pavement that it more than makes up for how comparatively shit the drivetrain is.

There is no scenario where using an internal combustion engine to charge a battery is optimal. It's something to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Even the Toyota hybrid drivetrain, which again *requires* input from at least one electric motor to move, relies as much on regenerative braking to maintain battery charge as possible and will only recharge off the ICE in the edge case and only to the minimum amount deemed necessary.
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You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

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As an EV owner for just over 5 years now, I have the receipts that it's about $60/mo cheaper ($80 with current gas prices) than my previous car that got 30MPG just in "fuel" alone. Insurance is about the same. Maintenance is functionally zero vs. nearly $3K I spent on the previous car's final 5 years... and it was overdue for a timing belt so that was another ~$1200+ I managed to avoid.

The only way an EV wouldn't be cheaper is if you absolutely had to rely on public DCFC, and even then I'm not sure it would be.
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I'm sure that there are worse options, probably being actively considered since this is no longer getting them what they want; but an opaque 'public/private partnership' slush fund that spends its time slathering a thin layer of dubious military justification on random projects seems like a very, very, dodgy way of doing things.

If you want to see sharp edges, build an AI Surveillance Grid and send people's home electric bills to $2000/mo to pay for it.

Not that the DC government people can be trusted with any of it. Lies and deception are their standard MO on everything now.

The only way it could make sense is if you use the broadcast data against a one-time pad and then you have a key to decrypt some other data, however distributed.

There aren't enough unique messages to be the data payload itself. Regular key rotation makes some sense.

Instead of a key it could be a pointer to another data source too. Frequency, satellite channel, URL, whatever.

It does seem premature to conclude the content. No doubt there are many other possibilities.

> That said, if the water is simply being evaporated for cooling, then it's still part of the natural water cycle - holistically, no significant loss, right?

On a global scale maybe, but on a local scale this can be devastating. Just because the water will rain back down somewhere eventually does not help the people who need the water here and now. Water that evaporates is functionally gone forever.

> then dumping the water down the drain to flow out to wherever it'd be significantly worse

That depends entirely on where the water goes once it's released. If it goes back to where it would normally have gone, such as a river, that's not bad at all.

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A Scout is Trustworthy but this BSA has never demonstrated that virtue.

Their PR is difficult to parse as valid English but it sounds like gaslighting of the type "you can only trust what you may not examine."

It sounds incoherent but perhaps that means they have nothing else left.

Most people in Open Source are generally Helpful.