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).

For what it's worth, a hybrid drivetrain is, mechanically speaking, actually quite a bit simpler than a traditional ICE + automatic transmission. You swap out several set of planetary gearsets, with multiple stacks of clutches and such, for two motors and a single planetary gearset.

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

To clarify, OS X was descended from NeXTSTEP, which was built on Mach and BSD.

I'm happy to pay taxes for a public education system that works. Unfortunately, what we have today is a system encumbered by too many administrators, hampered by unfunded mandates, exploited by public unions, and micromanaged from every level from (superfluous) department heads to district administration to state legislators to the federal government.

From 2010-2019, the number of administrators in public schools nearly doubled, while the number of students and teachers only went up by ~8%. Those administrators generally cost a whole lot more than classroom teachers. To justify their salaries (and their staff), they are always chasing the latest fads in public education, whether it's "social emotional learning," Chromebooks, "student support time," AVID, teaching kids to "analyze texts", abandoning math facts and phonics, or "diversity/equity/inclusion" programs, each at tremendous expense both in dollars and disruption. The amount of inefficiency and waste is staggering.

And that's just on the local level. State and federal mandates, or "money with strings attached," adds tremendously to the cost, while burdening the actual teaching. What have we got in return for these enormous costs? Just about nothing. Part of the problem is that, since it's a government program, all the political incentives are front-loaded, and there's little incentive to review what has been done, and to weed out what isn't working. NCLB didn't move the needle. Neither did ESSA. Common Core was a disaster, and Race to the Top didn't help, either. More standardized tests, and linking funds to test scores, only provided perverse incentives. But we are still operating under the burdens they imposed.

There appears to be an implicit assumption in your post that public school is the only way for kids to develop a sense of civic engagement, social skills, new friendships, independence, meeting people from all social strata.

Certainly, a public school *can* be such an environment. However, over the past few decades, I've watched public schools (at least in the US) devolve into an environment where independence is quashed, left-leaning (or outright far-left) values are taught as doctrine, and students are given little time to actually socialize in meaningful ways, all while teachers' administrative burden (and our taxes to support it) continues to rise and core academic rigor is neglected.

I'd like to offer a counterpoint. The whole "socialization" argument is one of those urban myths that has long outlived any relationship with reality. In our local elementary school, the kids get a single recess per day. When they arrive for school in the morning, they are expected to sit silently in the hallway outside their classroom until the teacher lets them in. Their lunch period is so short that there's barely enough time to down their lunch, let alone talk with their peers.

My kids are homeschooled, but have one foot in the public school world for electives. As a result, we get to observe both sides, and what we see is a dramatic difference in social skills. For example, two weeks ago, at a birthday party, about half the attendees were homeschooled, and the other half were public schooled. The homeschooled kids were generally engaged, respectful, and having a great time. The public school kids? They could hardly utter a full sentence without someone blurting out "6-7!" and were actively trying to disrupt and ruin the party for everyone else, including the birthday kid. Individually, kids from either side can be great. In a group setting, however? I'll take the homeschoolers every time. They've escaped the herd mentality that a public school system engenders.

Because of the time efficiency of homeschooling, my kids have plenty of time for extracurriculars, free time, and part-time work. When it comes to "socialization," (however you define it), that part-time job, working around adults, provides tremendously greater value than being surrounded by 2,500 other hormonal, brains-not-yet-fully-developed teenagers who are trying to define themselves and understand how they fit in the world.

If I may offer a modification to your statement, it would be that car infotainment systems age poorly. Not the cars themselves. I currently own three examples that have aged quite well. All are near or over 20 years old. New enough to have OBD-2 and great reliability and repairability, old enough to be focused on real utility and avoid the invasion of useless (or worse) tech and complication. No $700 LED tail lights or $1500 mirrors with cameras, or everything-is-a-module-connected-to-the-canbus. Now get off my lawn! :)

And since people aren't tech savvy enough to host the data themselves, or don't have proper infrastructure to do so, where do you think all these repositories of data will end up ? Azure, AWS, GCP. Now instead of a free X account or Instagram account, I need to pay Amazon to host my stuff that Reddit fetches to display to people.

This is has been a problem for a long time. In an ideal world, hosting data from one's own personal internet connection, be it from one's phone, work, wherever, should not be as difficult as it is. And it shouldn't have to involve anyone other than one's primary service provider. We should be able to make direct connections, and receive email without a 3rd party service... at least no one other than whoever runs the connections along the route. It should be, by and large, private except to the sender and recipient with the exception of any routing data to get it the correct address.

But although this could in theory happen (and occasionally does from knowledgeable power-users with the right configuration and equipment), for the vast majority, it doesn't. And the problem is legion. No fixed IP addresses, NAT (even worse carrier grade NAT), DDOS attack protection, having to config a DMZ on a router, even just setting up a data source/website are some of the many, many problems. So of course, naturally all this gets offloaded to companies like AWS, Cloudflare, Google, and the big social networks because they make it easy. You likely have to pay, or pay by giving up your privacy, or both, but they take care of everything. You can find your own webhost, but again, it's like paying a third party to get your postal mail for you...because your mailbox is moving around, hundreds of people are trying to look through it or destroy it, or find a way into your house using it.

It doesn't have to be this way. But someone has to make it trivially easy to solve these problems without the big tech companies, and I'm not sure I see that happening anytime soon. Can we ban carrier grade NAT? Can we require internet providers to allow hosting and stop DDOS attacks? Is the cure worse than the pain now? I don't know what the answer is, but he has a point. We need to take back ownership of our data and the web

and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life

I hope you got a good relationship with them! My son can't even talk yet. So, right now, he's just this cute thing that runs around and causes trou^H^H^H^Hgood things to happen.

 

Well, some of that is for classes for people who can't see that default 3-pixel wide scrollbar on Windows 11 in high contrast dark mode. :-)

Fair. Just making fun of Windows 11.

Yeah, you're blessed to have one of each. Until they start conspiring against you, which you KNOW is going to happen.
ha!

Hopefully we'll raise them better than that. And let them see us honoring our parents.