More like the total opposite, I'd say.

I can't imagine what's the business value of having ChatGPT doing a BloodNinja impression. It's not good for PR, it'd risk exclusion in serious environments, school and the like, it'd risk legal trouble, the list goes on. The potential for trouble far outweighs any possibly benefit, which is what? There's only downsides because it'd go wrong in some way sooner rather than later.

No, doubling down on serious, well paying uses and removing controversial ideas of little worth is exactly what looks like a clear, decent strategy here.

You ask: "And how does *also* allowing non fossil-fuel energy, like wind and solar, hurt any of that?"

Answer: intermittency. Adding wind and solar to the generating system just adds cost for no benefit.

If you want detailed case histories of this look at the UK, the usual canary. You will find that the useless intermittent supply from wind and solar comes in, on the bids, far higher than conventional. Regulation is needed to force utilities to buy it. And that is for an intermittent supply. There is no way to deliver dispatchable power from wind and solar at a cost which is competitive with conventional, ie gas or coal.

You doubt it? Go through the UK wind bids and add up the total cost of the UK electricity Net Zero push. Adding wind and solar to a conventional generation system just pushes up costs. Among the costs it adds are constraint payments. There are wind farms in the UK which are making a majority of their income from being paid not to generate, because the wind is supplying when there is no demand.

By the time you factor in the increase in gas consumption consequent on having to rely on open cycle rapid start gas to cover calms and nights its doubtful you even save any emissions either.

Its a great mystery why people who are persuaded of a climate crisis from CO2 emissions have this blind faith in wind and solar generation. Whether or not there is a climate crisis, wind and solar are not a viable generating technology and are not any kind of solution to it.

Paul Homewood has covered the UK wind constracting process in detail if you want that. Most advocates of wind do not. But here he is, as a for example, on constraint payments:
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

and here he is on the recent AR7 auction
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

Lots more on costs, subsidies and constraint if you explore the site. The political consensus in the UK seems to be turning against the so called energy transition. The situation in the Gulf is clarifying minds. The absurdity of the idea that moving to intermittent wind and solar is either possible or is going to increase energy security or reduce energy prices is becoming obvious.

Never really understood these suits. They ask for damages, but does this mean they envisage Exxon (just as a for instance) carrying on extracting and selling fossil fuels? Because that is where the money would have to come from to pay the damages if they won.

Or do they want Exxon to close down and stop extracting and selling? At which point the company would be worthless, so it would have little prospect of paying any damages to (for instance) the residents of Colorado (just as a for instance) or anyone else.

And then you have the problems of scale and attribution. Take the problem of scale first. If you look at the percentage of total global emissions that are due to Exxon, they are rather small. Chinese emissions from coal, for instance, will dwarf them. So there is a real problem proving that Exxon has caused significant amounts of the current warming. But it gets worse, the current warming is not itself very large, Globally its around 1C. Very hard to prove that this much warming has caused significant damage, and even harder to prove that anything Exxon has done has caused significant amounts of it.

This would be the first defense. But the second defense would be attribution. Colorado, for instance, is suing because of the damage done to its residents. How do you prove it was Exxon's emissions, as opposed to the Chinese emissions from burning coal? And if the remedy requested is to close down Exxon, how much effect will that have on global emissions, global temps and local weather?

They seem to be suing people for unproven damage which may have been caused (though you'd have to prove this) by a global phenomenon to which Exxon has been a minor contributor. And requesting remedies which will be either ineffective or impossible to obtain.

Its completely different from a case where a company pollutes a bay with mercury, it enters the local food chain and poisons the locals who eat the local fish. And then sue for being poisoned. Or asbestos, where the companies can be sued by people who worked with the stuff and got asbestosis. Or tobacco, where the product has harmed those who used it, and they can sue. Or a state government can sue based on damage to its citizens. The harm done by the habit to the damaged is provable.

Here we have Colorado trying to sue for damage which may or may not have been caused by global emissions, which have only been contributed to minorly by Exxon, and where there is no provable connexion between the damage and the Exxon emissions and where an award of remedy will either be impossible to pay or will have no effect on the problem..

Simply do not understand either how they are goiing to prove what they need, or what remedy they can obtain.

Sue China, maybe. China is mining and burning more coal than the rest of the world put together, and is accounting for more than one third of global emissions. China stops emitting, global emissions really do fall by an amount which will have an effect. Exxon,,,?

This is incorrect. Lungs are efficient at mixing gases and so breathing SF6 is safe, as long as you give yourself breaks to re-oxygenate.

Yes, many times. I have a friend from Kenya, so I'm visiting Africa periodically. Solar in Africa is booming, and it's perfect for EV charging. Just like with mobile phones leapfrogging the fixed landlines, Africa will leapfrog global grids.

And the poorer countries will take more time to switch, of course. They'll need to wait for used cars to start coming from China. Meanwhile, people are switching from gas mopeds to electric mopeds. Uber in Kenya now has an option to get an EV bike taxi, for example.

Yes, it is. And Europe pushed back the full EV deadline by 10%, still requiring 90% of emissions from vehicles to be eliminated. This effectively changes nothing.

Outside the EU, EV production is growing as fast as it can scale. Asian countries are the main expansion area right now. For example, last year almost 40% of new cars in Vietnam became EVs, and this year Thailand is probably going to be 60%. Africa is next, these $10000 cars from China are going to be a smash hit there.

And the thing is, once people switch to EVs, they tend to stick with EVs.

This is like watching that section of airplane disaster re-enactment videos where the pilots are confidently flying straight into a mountain. The next section is the sound of GPWS desperately screaming "Pull-Up! Pull-Up!" just before the crash.

The rest of the world is rapidly shifting to EVs, and the US automakers are building a bigger Canyonero. Now with more dead dinosaur exhaust! And we're supposed to be calmed down by the fact that they're bringing an overpriced shitty EV pickup truck in 2 years?

In 20 years, the second Trump's presidency will be seen as the final straw that killed the US economy. Just an example, a company that was trying to make sodium-ion batteries in the US went bankrupt this summer. They had product sitting in their warehouses but were unable to ship it to customers before getting a UL certification. And they couldn't get a bridge loan from the government or investors. The end result: a company destroyed. I'm pretty sure we'll find competing interests in play there.

Ah, I see you're pushing anti-people propaganda. You want cities built for buses and bikes, not for people.

Here's a nice overview article from urbanists: https://archive.strongtowns.or...

Cars are superior to every other transit mode for commutes. It's a simple fact. They are faster, more convenient, and don't require spending time in the company of fentanyl addicts. Or wasting entire lifetimes every day waiting for bus to arrive.

This is the biggest lie from transit/bike pushers. Transit (or bike lanes) do NOT reduce the traffic. Heck, it's in the very foundation of the ideas for forced densification: induced demand. And it's also supported by multiple studies.

You can argue that forcing everyone into 15-minute concentration camps is good for them, but you don't get to claim that transit reduces traffic.

"It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so."

This is complete nonsense. There is no threat to American health from American CO2 emissions. No-one has ever shown that.

Reducing US emissions will have no or minimal effect on the level of global emissions. So even if you think the level of global emissions will produce heat which is a danger to health globally (which is again pretty hard or impossible to prove) you still have no case for the Endangerment Finding.

The EPA is not concerned with the global, but with the American, not with global temps, global emissions, the welfare of the rest of the world. If you could show that US emissions were driving warming and that warming was a threat to health, maybe you'd have a point.

But US emissions are not driving global emissions, so you cannot show that. Its at the level of eat your dinner because of the starving children in Africa. How, asks the kid, will that help them? Don't argue with your mother, is the reply.

There is not a SINGLE study that proves that glyphosate causes cancer in humans. The whole 'glyphosate cancer' is just post-truth nonsense, just from greenie hippie liberals.

I think the idea was the same as the idea of runnng MacOS on generic Intel. People wanted to do that because they liked the OS but did not want to pay over the odds for generic hardware. The Mac people always claimed that the Apple hardware was premium quality, but it never has been, its always just been commodity stuff at an inflated price.

So finally Apple comes up with what seems to be genuinely better hardware - faster, lower power consumption in packages that are at least as good as premium Intel machines. They aren't cheap, but they do seem very nice as hardware.

But, people are now saying, yes to the hardware but no to that awful locked down OS. So they naturally enough try to get Linux working on the hardware.

The difficulty they are running into is the same in both cases. Apple is determined, whenever it gets a market lead in either OS or hardware, to use that to force sell the other. So back in the day we had an OS people really wanted, but which would only run, and later was only permitted to be packaged with, hardware which was either garbage stuff like the Motorola chips or later the PowerPC ones which were too expensive and also real heaters. But the idea was, force them to buy the hardware to get the OS.

Now its force them to use the OS they don't want to be able to use the hardware they want.

The solution is not to deal with these people. Wait a while and the industry will catch up on hardware. Meanwhile just buy the best hardware you can afford and run the OS you want on it. As long as you deal with Apple you will always be in a similar situation, the only thing on their mind is how to lock you in. The specifics will vary, but the song remains the same. Some people are fine with that, some even positively like it, it makes them feel safe and special.

A lot of us don't like it and won't have anything to do with Apple. And then there are the real open source heroes, like the Asahi team, who are ready to throw themselves into a real struggle, Applaud them, support them, and they seem to be winning bit by bit. But its a struggle, its a few guys against one of the largest tech companies in the world. Wish them luck, support them, but its a bit like Wine, its an uphill struggle and probably not ready for production yet, if it ever will be.

Well, the Ford guy toured the Chinese companies, got scared, and decided that it's a good time to squeeze the automakers for the last dregs of profits. Before they go down for good.

Meanwhile, Africa and Asia are getting flooded by Chinese EVs. That are now superior to gas cars on price and reliability. And that can be charged from local solar, not depending on imported gas. The cheapest Chinese EVs are now less than $10k, and you can get a very reasonable EV for $15k.

It's amazing seeing the entire industry self-destructing before our eyes.

It turns out that without ANY content the 8k support is not needed. And there is little content because the HDMI Forum is refusing to pull its head out of its ass and allow HDMI 2.1 to be licensed without heavy DRM and NDA requirements.

Well, the industry shot itself in the foot with 3D, by making it hard to create 3D content. The only supported way was H.264 MVC, with barely any tools that can output it. Meanwhile, saner side-by-side 3D was not consistently supported.

The Microsoft bluetooth keyboard is just about silent, as quiet as you can get, and excellent build quality. Do not, however, spill coffee on it!