What else should one expect from all these red states?

This concept has been around for a while...

The EU is probably too strict, while the US is too lax. Canada may be one country with a better balance. At the very least, the EU countries need to loosen the laws up a bit for business with less than 6 people, since one "unfireable" employee can end up taking down the whole company.

I wasn't aware of the answer myself, but one article (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8d4v69jw6o), from June 2025, I found suggests a number of factors, including:

  - economies of scale
  - battery technology
  - deep integration
  - national vision to build out fore the future (something the US is lacking right now)

Right now I’d make it:

“When gas-fueled cars are outlawed, only non-legacy American car manufacturers will sell abroad”.

Given the state of auto manufacturers and US oil business, with their focus on lobbying to weaken EPA environmental regulations, they will have to play catch-up. Certainly EVs certainly have always to go in terms of battery technologies and reducing costs, but they are improving given the increased investments. The problem for the US is that it keeps on giving up its technology and advantages to China, because local corporations and government are still too short term in their thinking.

Agreed!

One of the challenges with the most EU countries is that trying to create a startup is lot harder. Just consider the extra bureaucracy and stricter labour laws. These often end up playing to the advantage of establish medium to large businesses, who don't have the innovative drive needed in many cases.

If there was some carve out for startups then we could see a more dynamic IT sector, but right now it may actually be better to incentivise Canada to work with the EU to find a solution that works. I say Canada, since they are more aligned with the EU in a number of cases (especially after Trump America Inc) and the risk for creating a startup there is lower.

If I was one of the best devs, I wouldnâ(TM)t want to be regulated to vibe coding.

Maybe I just weird in that I actually enjoy solving problems and trying to think of the way things are put together?

More of this, please. The ongoing dilution of "racist" to the point of parody is improving our world.

Thermodynamics at work! While understanding the concept, the word somehow flusters you..

I think we've all come to hate this. However, this news is about one of the rare instances of the hype cycle ending in an actual product, so you're impotent rage is misplaced.

This isn't real. Sodium's curves are not dissimilar from lead-acid; a solved problem for decades now. The Sodium-Ion curve follows a straightforward, nearly linear drop. This is actually easier to deal with than Lithium's curve from a battery management perspective, but the truth is these are all solved problems today: you're flailing around, looking for rationalizations for your irrational hang ups.

You should stop. It's stupid, it won't pay any bills, and the productization of a legitimate solution won't be the least bit hindered by you and your made up issues.

Things have cost floors. You can't profitably make something below this floor, because even as the cost of your value-add approaches zero, the inputs still cost something: materials, electricity, etc. Lithium batteries, due to the volume of manufacturing and global competition, are approaching this point. However, despite the drop in prices over time, you can see it's leveling off in recent years. This is why. The same pattern is apparent is solar panels, displays, mobile phones, etc. All the things that are made in huge volume by aggressive competitors are driven towards some cost floor.

The batteries are made of materials approaching the cost of dirt. Like everything, sodium batteries also have some cost floor. But the floor is lower.

Right now, sodium is not substantially lower cost. That's because the volume is a small fraction of Lithium cell manufacturing: lower volume and less competition. As volume grows, and it will, because there are objective benefits for real applications, the cost will fall, and ultimately be lower than Lithium.

This is a win for everyone. All the Sodium battery hate seen here is deeply stupid. You'd think this place is full of Chinese Lithium battery manufacturers, which is about the only conceivable rationale I can imagine for this behavior.

SMR will not happen in the US. Nuscale's UAMPS project in Utah is an case study in why such hopes are futile. Costs escalate as regulators embiggen requirements around new designs, and pressure groups spawn like weeds to delay everything until the financing collapses.

What would it take? Two things: 1.) Deep pockets that can fully finance the project without bonds and shifting interest rates, all up front. 2.) Sincere and unwavering legislative support, including legal exceptions from state and federal regulatory sabotage and pressure group legal attacks.

The former is conceivable, but we're talking about someone committing $10B+ for ten or more years, and that's hard for anyone, even Big Tech monsters: Yes, there are trillion dollar companies, but like all such oversimplifications, they aren't so liquid they can easily just sink that kind of liquidity into a nuclear project. That's why they're grifting around, trying to wheedle deals with state government and regional utilities.

The latter is fiction: executive orders and other half measures are not sufficient. What would be sufficient is a bill, passed by the Federal government, signed by a president, capable of surviving challenges in front of SCOTUS, because it will go that far. That model has happened in the US in the past: TVA etc. Today, our leaders are balkanized around extreme pressure groups and vocal minorities, and no rationality is apparent any longer. The US isn't a place where things like this are feasible today.

He kind of has a point though. Many websites force a fixed column layout. You have a choice between stupidly large text size or big borders either side, if your display is landscape orientation.

Yes, I saw crisp text on my 1024x768 LCD display a quarter century ago. But you missed the next part of the sentence, "even at small sizes". As text gets smaller you reach a point where it is no longer clear. On an 8k display even the smallest sizes are pin sharp. They are a bit fuzzy on 4k (as I use at work) and would be headache-inducing mush if you tried to show such tiny text on a 1920x1080 display.

Back in the day there were hand-created bitmap fonts for crisp display at small sizes. Nowadays, for better or worse almost every application uses outline fonts, which look a bit jaggy if rendered without anti-aliasing ("font smoothing") and a bit fuzzy with it. Only on a very high DPI display is this completely unnoticeable. My laptop is 4k and I am very happy with it, but to make best use of a 32 inch screen a higher pixel density is better.

I'm posting this from my home PC with Dell's 8k monitor. It's nice to see completely crisp text, even at small sizes, and certainly a noticeable quality improvement from 4k. But that's because I am sitting a few inches away. I recently bought a new television, and while I was tempted to pick up a cheap used 8k model, in practice it would make no difference when viewing it from the sofa.

Even Dell seems to have retreated from 8k, however. Their newer top-end monitor has a roughly 6k horizontal resolution.