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).

These are awesome and I would absolutely embrace the upgradeability and open standards fully if they had the devices I use: a rugged laptop (rain, snow, drop, etc proof, covered ports, washable like my Getacs) with upgradable, fully Linux compatible hardware would be awesome. My trackpad and touch screen are both generic mice according to Linux.

Then, pls, make a phablet with optional LTE/baseband (or none, not a phone at all). Short range radios, but zero base band, otherwise a rugged, reliable, durable, upgradable phone-like form factor, super extra bonus points for interchangeable camera modules. Double extra bonus points for easily removed/swapped battery. Add a LoRa radio instead of LTE, why not?

There have been a few projects to make a good Linux phone and while the PinePhone is impressive engineering, it falls short of being a usable replacement for a flagship phone. There's a solid market for brick/tank phones and they have plenty of room to provide usable, all day battery capacity for a Linux device but the current collection from vendors like Blackview, as nice as they are with very useful features like thermal imagers or NIR illumination/sensors and excellent durability are all Android Certified and the Droidocalypse is going to effectively brick them all in September.

Any aggregation of radioactive elements is inherently dangerous, always, no matter what safeguards, simply as a material that is hazardous to health. Most radioactive hazards associated with fissile materials represent health risks with atypically, even for poisonous elements, pernicious qualities. Not many people would be sanguine with health-impacting quantities of fissile materials in their environment, unlike say, lead or arsenic, both quite awful but a whole different scale of awful.

Any intentional aggregation of fissile material is intrinsically a risk to human health and safety. Nuclear advocates (many of whom would qualify as frothing fanbois) dismiss such concerns claiming they know of a "safe" reactor design, some of which are quite clever and are, indeed, intrinsically quite safe when operated correctly. Such fanbois will sometimes make the entirely valid point that the rate of death from even older reactor designs is way below the mortality rate induced by burning coal (true) and that nuclear power is much less carbon intensive than fossil fuels (also true).

There are compelling arguments about a diversity of sources, above the reliability of fissile power, about the longevity of investments, and about immunity to a range of possible weather (storms, extended rain) or geopolitical constraints (international fuel shipments), all of which (and more) have merit and should be considered carefully.

I consider four counter arguments that should be considered when contemplating the relative merit of fissile power generation over other methods:

1) Current advanced nuclear power plants have a projected LCOE of $0.11/kWh (DOE) standard new at $0.118-$0.192/kWh (lazard) while solar currently runs $0.05-$0.06/kWh (lazard) and $0.086 (NREL) for battery-backed 24/7 solar, declining to $0.047/kWh by 2050 (NREL). The economic justification for nuclear power is weak in all but a few geographic locations occupied by humans.

2) Uranium is a finite resource, the cost of which is rising and currently $86.8/kg (tradingeconomics). The total proven proven reserves are sufficient for about 2 years of total human consumption in standard light water fission reactors. Breeders and advanced systems have significantly different total reserve values, but such systems come with significant risks, either in proliferation (breeders) or technological (advanced reactor designs). While it is an entertaining speculative argument to discuss technologies that might extend fuel supplies, solar panels and storage (PSH or grid-scale battery) are well proven and widely available today.

3) National security policy: defense against external antagonist: any centralized civilian facility is a target and nuclear reactors, even intrinsically safe ones, are a particularly tempting target. While containment structures are designed to be robust against, for example, the impact of a large passenger aircraft, they are not robust against "bunker buster" style munitions. Consider the consequences of a relatively trivial drone impact with the Chernobyl sarcophagus. As these sorts of attacks are democratized by the proliferation of low cost, long range, difficult to attribute munitions they will inevitably become more common and the only practical mitigation is decentralization. While nanoreactors such as the Zeus (1-20 MW) might make targeting more difficult, they're still vastly more expensive than a few more drones making them juicy asymmetric targets for any NSAG and proliferate the next concern:

4) National security police: defense against extremist state takeover or occupation: "safe" nuclear reactors assume operation remains in the hands of moderately responsible, reasonable people, an assumption not supported by recent history. There is no fission design that does not rely on a concentration of fissile material, intrinsically radioactive. There is no such concentration that cannot be widely dispersed with a properly engineered application of conventional high explosives. Every nuclear reactor, anywhere in the world, is a pre-emplaced nuclear munition. To quote the (poor) AI transcription of Serhii Plokhy from the Economist's Intelligence podcast https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2026/04/24/an-explosion-still-echoing-chernobyl-at-40 "The taboo on the occupation and military attacks on nuclear sites that existed before 2022 had been broken. It is gone. Now, the war in Ukraine is the war of drones more and more. And the non-nuclear country. Can very easily go nuclear by attacking somebody's nuclear facilities like nuclear power plants." Chernobyl is occupied, Zaporizhzhia is occupied, the Ukrainians got close to taking Kursk; if an occupying force is forced out, might they be tempted to salt the earth they're forced to leave with fissile debris? Might one of the many political parties animated by an Armageddonist eschatology consider a nuclear reactor an inexpensive and readily available doomsday munition, a sort of clarion call to whatever deity they are waiting for? Even if they're wrong about the level of doom a conventional detonation of a fissile core might achieve, the consequences would be far more lasting and terrifying than a fuel depot or even grid-scale lithium battery fire.

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.

Despite impressive results, submarines cannot swim.

I too, call for a ban on time travel.

...it's

The obvious answer is to simply disconnect regions that impose internet-breaking restrictions. If a region believes the rest of the world is responsible for parenting their dumb children, and in particular they're willing to sue when someone else fails to live down to the standards they think their little sheltered idiots need to engage the world and that they're too incompetent to provision themselves, then merely politely tell them their entire region is insufficiently sophisticated to interact and pull their plug.

We really need a FOSS maintained "Gilead regions" IP block list, v4 and v6, for independent operators and national ISPs and DNS providers engaged to banlist those regions from interacting with the an internet that doesn't work for them. They have every right to decide for themselves, but not for anyone else.

FreeBSD powers my personal infrastructure and has for decades. It is easy to use, not bloated (too badly, though you now have to take steps to keep that damn Wayland out of a server, WTF, but you can with /etc/make.conf). Having eventually made the shift to Poudriere, the package and code management is very good. Fixes for maintained packages are an overnight thing, but some of the major upstream dependencies have the same level of responsiveness as in Linux - better than any commercial software, but not as good as pure FreeBSD.

Moving from SVN to git kinda sucked, but now it works well enough and gets the job done and keeps the Linux heads happy.

Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

It's kind of surprising it isn't all squealing nonsense.

Give it a little more time. B-b

We had a lab known to be unsafe. A lab known to be performing gain of function on the specific type of virus that emerged in public. We have a lab in close proximity to the market where the outbreak was traced back to.

We also had rumors that low-paid lab techs supplemented their income by selling test animals they'd been ordered to destroy to the nearby wet market.