Watts aren't the key to good cleaning. Japanese brands make 300W cleaners that do a better job than 3000W European ones.

You need something to lift the dust off the surface and into the air stream. Basic vacs have little brushes, but you really want moving ones that sweep and beat, lifting dust away from the surface.

It's interesting that the is news. I don't recall it being a big deal when the Chinese space station had to dodge a SpaceX satellite.

Trump is going to be like Brexit. You can make some calculations, and the numbers are eye watering, but the true cost is much higher. The decline of a nation, the loss of soft power, the social problems and the lives permanently blighted by it.

Which is still useful. I was trying to fix an issue with a web app I made (I'm not a web developer, this is just a hobby project) and a bit of googling didn't turn up the answer. ChatGPT knew what the solution was from my description. So as a glorified search engine, it did better than Google and DDG.

Wind and solar don't suddenly stop producing. It's extremely predictable.

And despite government at all levels opposing renewable technology. In the end, economics win out. People wanting energy independence, seeing one of the best investments they can make.

The point of S230 is that platforms like twitter don't have to pre-approve comments before publication. It would be impossible for them to do at that scale, even in the Musk era, without a very inaccurate automated system.

Responding to reports of another thing and not protected.

It's not great but considering where they started from, and the progress they have made, they deserve some credit.

Heavily subsidized nuclear power, built by the communists. They pay much more than 13c/kWh for it, they just hide the cost with taxation.

Depends where you public charge. Tesla is usually the cheapest for some reason, and it's much cheaper than petrol.

There is also work place charging, but yes laws need implementing to make home charging mandatory for everyone.

Can confirm, it was an issue when charging was free in the UK. A small fee soon freed them up for people who actually need them.

More than that, Germany is democratizing energy. A lot of people have balcony power plants and rooftop solar. There are micro grids even.

As an investment over decades, it has paid off with jobs and economic activity.

The nuclear plants were old and outdated, and would have been expensive to keep going, for a relatively small effect. Better to spend the money on transitioning away from non-renewable sources.

Remember that Germany used to be split in two, with half of it communist. The transition was a huge economic project that involved a lot of redevelopment in the east. The grid alone needed major upgrades.

They will probably use Elon's Grok as the benchmark. That thing is pretty far off the deep end.

No story about his fake robot demo being exposed? Slashdot used to love a failed tech demo.

If there was a remote kill switch and China ever got to the point of ordering manufacturers to flip it, you would probably be more concerned about the hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads coming your way.

Plus they would probably start with the western brands using the backdoors they have been saving for just such an occasion.

Funny you should mention decolonizing STEM, because that's basically what has happened here. Even now many people are in denial about what the Chinese have accomplished. They seem to think that only white people can invent stuff or push the state of the art forward, and that everyone else just copies them, steals their ideas and technology.

Many Western countries put a lot of effort into maintaining existing hierarchies. They would rather some people just don't have access to a good education and opportunities, than be more competitive. Education gets defunded by people who can afford to pay for their own kids to get a good one, or who got theirs and just want a supply of disposable, low cost labour, and lower taxes. The risk that someone else might get something they didn't "earn" is too great to fund anything properly.