They're not that expensive used. My 2nd car was a BMW - 11 years old but in excellent shape (and old gentleman owned it and basically drove it from his garage to his company garage twice a week or so). It cost 8000 Euros. I drove it for years and was very happy with it. Then I sold it for 4000 Euros.
Word has it that both Tesla and SpaceX essentially have "Elon handlers" - people who know how to talk him out of or into things so he believes it was his idea.
Matches my own professional experience. I did the same to the head of HR for a couple years, though only now and then and not as a full-time job. It definitely is a very effective strategy.
And I think the crazy and the stupid come together. You often need five stupid ideas to get to the crazy-but-could-work one. The trick is in not implementing the stupid ones along the way.
Shouldn't we introduce a "doh!" section for stuff like "vibe coded software has security holes", because it's... well... I mean, what else did you expect? Have you SEEN the results of vibe coding?
Musk said the least expensive way to do AI computation within two to three years will be in space.
Has someone told him about the heat problem in space? Vacuum is cold, but it's also a near perfect insulation. Getting rid of heat is a constant problem for space craft because there is no heat exchange and radiating it off is the only option you have and it's terribly inefficient. And last I checked, GPUs generate quite a bit of heat.
This, more than any "but you can't see the difference anyways" comment is the core problem.
If there's no content, then there's no point in having an 8K TV.
Where high resolution makes sense is computer displays. I'm writhing this on a 5K display, and it lets me keep text at virtually any size readable. You rarely read double-page text content on a TV.
I think it plausible that 99% of new energy this year come from renewable sources because many of those sources come from renewable types with relatively short construction times.
Up until recently, the US adds about 50 GW of capaicty per year. There's a huge uptick in generation capacity because of energy demands from data centers, so recently it's more like 65 GW/year. The challenge is you can't exploit *this year's* high market prices by starting a nuclear power plant that won't come on line for a decade. Even a combined cycle natural gas plant is going to take five years. But you can have a wind farm up and running in months.
It's not the renewability *per se* that's driving this; it's profiting from the high prices before the AI bubble bursts. Nobody is rushing to bring new hydropower or geothermal plants online, and they're just as renewable as wind or solar.
This move to renewables is not about changing the world. it's about short term financial optimization. But these short term, local optimizations *will* change the world, and planning to handle the transformations driven by short-term market forces is going to take coordinated, long term national action. At present there are regional mandates that will stabilize the local grid against variations in electricity supply. But carving up the nation into small regional markets means higher prices and economic inefficiencies where electricity is transfered from high price areas to stabilize low price areas. Market economics don't work if there are non-market forces (stability) that trump profitability.
Strictly speaking, Gates' name appearing in the files as a "note to self" isn't dispositive of anything. Epstein was a sociopath, and while he was profoundly and disturbingly weird, not a dummy. He'd already been publicly exposed and convicted of child procurement. So he knew he was radioactive. He might well choose to salt his own records with poison pills.
But that's the context we shouldn't miss: Epstein was publicly known to be a child trafficker years before Bill Gates initiated his contact with him. And Bill Gates has people to look out for him and extensive contacts with Epstein's clientele. He must have known. So the parsimonious explanation is that he was seeking out what Epstein uniquely could provide.
As for Gates, he's really smart in a certain way; he's probably usually the smartest guy in the room. But not one-in-a-million smart. I bet a lot of us know people who are smarter than he is. What his history shows is a willingness to act ruthlessly and transgress legal or ethical rules for personal gain, while being aware of reputational risk. I'm not reducing him to a cartoon villain — he may genuinely care about issues like malaria. But he understands the value of curating his reputation. Epstein is a perfect match for him: high school math teacher smart, sociopathic, but obsessed with amassing social capital through connections with academics with tech-bro appeal that opened doors.
It is indisputable that Gates had a relationship with Epstein — Gates himself doesn't deny it. Gates is contesting the veracity of what Epstein wrote in his files, and you know what? I think ithose things are likely false. If Gates needed to score some antibiotics on the DL, he wouldn't need to beg is pedophile buddy. But if Occam's razor serves here, the STD story is just a distraction. Getting or not getting and STD would just be a matter of luck. It wouldn't change the fact Gates sought association with a known child sex trafficker.
And here’s the other big piece of context we shouldn’t miss: while appearance in the Epstein files isn’t strictly dispositive of anything, the unprecedented structure of Epstein’s plea agreement and the resulting absence of federal prosecution constitute a smoking gun for deliberate non-enforcement by law enforcement. From this, we can reasonably infer that powerful individuals were being shielded from scrutiny. Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient deal that explicitly immunized unnamed co-conspirators — an inversion of standard prosecutorial practice, where defendants are typically flipped to expose broader conspiracies. It is reasonable to infer, in the absence of any credible explanation, that prosecutors were motivated to protect those co-conspirators for some reason.
They love those hits. It gives them carte blanche to pull someone over search the car, search them, arrest them, etc.
Good point.
So here's my counter-offer: Instead of an Airtag, put a coupon for 20% off a box of donuts into the car. Make sure to let them know when you report the theft. Now they have double incentives.
Statistics 101 caveat, "all other things being equal". Unless you statistics are reporting on all the stolen cars reported via Air Tags its not relevant.
No, that was all cars stolen. The point was: Airtag or not, 85% of cars are eventually recovered anyways, and the ones that are not you would most likely not recover even with an Airtag. Or do you really think that the cops will unload and search a container ship because you say there's a ping on your FindMy app?
The reporting of its location reducing the likelihood of the bodyshop or container.
Why?
First, police have been repeatedly reported as being reluctant to go where owners tell them their hardware has reported in. We've had this with notebooks and smartphones. Second, you don't need Airtags to get location data. My current car is 7 or 8 years old and I can ask it for current location via an App, or make it flash its headlights or honk if I lost it in a huge parking lot. That's ten times more useful than an Airtag. But if thieves were even one bit professional, they of course know these things. They will disable them first. As for Airtags - they have this anti-stalking feature, so if the thief is driving around in your car for a bit, he'll be told that there's an unknown Airtag following him. At which point he'll stop, locate it and you can send the cops to an empty ditch at the side of the road.
That also raises the question of how big the "tunnel" for the train needs to be.
Two tracks for redundancy and to go both directions. Additional tracks for local trains or freight can go above or below, since we're building vertical anyways.
Then there's little point in having the train in the first place
Disagree. If you have on- and off-ramps, the engines don't have to be in the pods, they can be in the ramp. The main problem with any and all "pod travel" concepts is that instead of one huge engine in front of a train, you now have a hundred little engines. Which is not only less efficient, it's also a maintenance nightmare.
Of course it could be done, but it is not clear what the benefit of building it like that would be.
Along the outside wall you could have the largest graffiti ever.
On a rotating space station though, You wouldn't really drop "down" like on Earth. You would "fall" in a curved path that should hit a wall instead of the "floor"
That's an interesting physics question. Over enough time (a couple years, say), would all the air inside the station spin along with it? My intuition says yes.
But we get away from the topic. It's been an interesting little discussion. Thanks.
We agree that The Line is silly, so not reason to argue that. And one of the reasons it is not just silly but idiotic is the "200m wide" part. There are tons of buildings in pretty much every major city on the planet that are longer than that. So I think we agree that for The Line to be even borderline reasonable, we should at least double that. Let's say 500m. That means if our transport (whatever form it has) runs roughly in the center nobody is further than 250m away from it. Which means with enough stations we can ensure that every place on this Wide Line has one within walking distance. If you're a slow walker or handicapped, just don't pick a home at the very edge.
I think if someone with more time actually thought this through, it could be salvaged as a somewhat working concept. Still silly, but not entirely unworkable.
The biggest question is 'altitude" (basically the distance between the closest and furthest parts of the habitat from the hub) since the "gravity" would be variable through that range.
But isn't that the main fun factor? You could literally skydive for 20 minutes because you only start falling fast near the end.
Scanning or not, it still needs a cop car with at least one cop more motivated to go after a stolen car than after today's 10% off at the donut shop.
I mean yes, technically you are right that reporting it within a day is better than within a week.
But numbers don't lie. The statistics I pulled up just because I like facts say that 85% of stolen vehicles are eventually found and returned to their owners. Mostly because a large number are stolen either for joyrides - and abandoned after a day or two, often within hours - or to use in another crime, think getaway car, again usually abandoned after that.
The 15% that are never found are either stripped for parts or shipped off to another continent.
In other words: What the criminal intends to do with your car is the main factor in whether or not it is found and returned. Most cars are found and returned because the thieves abandon them, not because they are caught.
So yes, technically, you are right. But given the statistics, how much of a difference do you think it makes? By the time you report the theft, in both cases (within a day or within a week), your car most likely has either been abandoned already and is just waiting to be found, or is already in a bodyshop or container. In both cases, you reporting it timely makes little difference.
I can report things to the police within a day of its movement,
There's this excellent bridge I have, barely used, it's on sale only today, 30% off. Interested?
You seriously think the police will give a fuck beyond adding one more number plate to their database of "vehicles reported as stolen".
Neom is meant to be futuristic, right?
So here's a concept: Combine trains and pods. There's a high-speed train going every 10 minutes. It consists of carriages going to different destinations. At each destination, the relevant carriage detaches and is diverted to the station, while the rest of the train continues without stopping. The carriage decelerates, stops, people get off and on, and in 10 minutes it will attach itself to the next train passing by, after accelerating on the sidetrack.
Other than that, without any new or innovative stuff, you could have a high-speed train going the whole length with something like 10 stops, and local trains between those stops each with 10-20 local stops.
Is it the most efficient way? Probably not. But is it workable on the same level as current public transport? Yes, absolutely.
And if we ever want to build large-scale space stations, chances are they'll be a torus for artifical gravity, so that's essentially the same thing as The Line except that it's a closed loop.
If I'm in a given location then if I can access any location within radius R of me, that means the number of locations available goes up as roughly R^2.
Assuming a mathematically idealized city. Meanwhile, in the real world, connectivity trumps distance. The original The Line concept had this linear transport system that might have worked, for two reasons: One, a dedicated high-speed transport is very efficient - compare subways to busses. Two, if everything is along the same axis, there are no missed connections or need to switch to a different line three times. If executed right, the amount of stuff you can access in a given time (instead of distance) could be higher in this concept than in a traditional city.
Basically, The Line takes the basic concept of an urban public transport planner to its extreme: Every location is within X metres of the closest subway station.
There are a hundred reasons why The Line was completely bonkers. But traffic and travel isn't one of them.
No, unless and until they can produce a gallon of gasoline chaper than pumping oil out of the ground, refininging it, and shipping it to the gas station -- an economic miracle if you think about it
This makes sense for remote, off-the-grid locations where you have access to renewable power like solar that you don't pay for by the kilowatt hour. You could make enough gas from a modest setup to meet an inidvidual's needs.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." -- Ford Prefect, _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_
