Now if they'd just pay similar attention to solar power equipment.

Nearly all solar power smart electronics is not just contract manufactured in China, but is actually rebranded Chinese designs or Chinese/US co-designs, with the base firmware having been Chinese even if tweaked by the US brand.

It has long been suspected that there are "remote brick-it" back doors in it, suitable for shutting down solar power installations should some US-China dispute arise, both shutting down residential, small industrial, and solar farm power and destabilizing the grid by making much of the (currently substantial) solar power input disappear.

In November, Deye (manufacturer of the premier model of their own branded "all in one box", also that of Sol-Ark (USA/North America), Sunsynk (UK) and inverex (Pakistan)), proved it existed by activating it, bricking a number of Deye branded systems, mainly in Puetro Rico.

This appears to have been fallout of a dispute over regional exclusive marketing and non-compete agreements with their OEM rebrand customers. But it shows the world, including state actors and ransomware artists, that the backdoor is already there and exploitable in their products, and raised again the issue that the CCP may mandate such remotely-exploitable backdoors in ALL Chinese-manufactured solar equipment.

(It also exposed that, even though the cloud-"Service" remote administration "features" of Sol-Ark had been moved from a Deye server in China to a new service on a Sol-Ark server in North America, the Sol-Ark box still "phoned home" to, and could be administered by, BOTH servers. Not due to the bricking, but by a user noticing, years after the move, that the old account and service still worked, and posting about it in the discussion, and by others using traffic monitoring tools on their networks.)

I read once that a grid scale D-T fusion plant would burn through the world's supply of tritium in a matter of days to weeks.That's why most fusion plants would involve a lithium lining in order to generate more tritium.

The "stripping reaction" D + D -> T + P is nuclear-scale exothermic, too. (0.9389 MeV vs. about 17 MeV for D + T -> He + N) So some approaches involve two reactors, one to make a little energy and some tritium to feed the other - or alternatively do both in one reactor in multiple steps by feeding D and not cleaning out the "ash" for a while.

Plants, stupid. Eat fucking plants.

My car won't run on unprocessed plants, (even if they're actively reproducing).

Plants, stupid. Eat fucking plants.

If you don't eat a LOT of the RIGHT plants you get sick and probably die.

Even if you DO eat a LOT of the RIGHT plants, in the right (and rather large) variety, you still get sick unless you eat synthetic B12, some bugs, a whole LOT of shiitake mushrooms, or some particular breeds of seaweed or algae...

How much of that (if any) is more chips and how much is inflation raising the price (denominated in cheaper dollars) of the chips?

... you notice their electric's not connected to any national grid?

Yes it is. Several of them. (And during the weather crisis a few years ago the other states and/or their power companies decided to save their power for themselves and keeping their own customers running, rather than feeding large amounts of power to Texas.)

It doesn't synchronize its frequency with other grids. So it's an island whose frequency and phase drifts with respect to its neighbors (as do several other divisions of the North American continent). That means the interconnects require frequency conversion, which makes them more expensive and also fewer. Given the distances involved, getting the grid to be stable if it WERE synchronized would be difficult and tend to lead to collapses and outages.

One of my big gripes with solar power systems is nearly all of them are built overseas - mainly in China. They have firmware running on the main inverter or all-in-one electronic system central box, the battery management systems, and sometimes other substantial components. Even if some of the firmware is written by the nameplate company that commissioned the particular version of the OEM platform, much of the underlying firmware is apparently built on libraries, development platforms, and application samples from the manufacturers. Most nameplate companies require them to be internet connected for management, monitoring, and software upgrading, and some of them also have radios for control and monitoring via cellphone applications.

The electrical code requires them to have a "rapid shut down" feature to protect firemen in case of a house fire.

I can imagine a scenario where the Chinese Government has embedded a backdoor in the devices so that they can be bricked, made to self-destruct, or even start a house fire by commands delivered over the internet or by radio from a fly-by, drive-by, or even a satellite. I can also imagine a ransom ware gang reverse-engineering the systems and shutting down people's utilities, or state-level actors developing such tools and deploying them for law enforcement, out-group suppression dirty tricks, or cyberwar.

Nothing says "I care about the environment" like cooking your own christmas turkey!

  * Photovoltaic solar panels don't bother birds. They don't get particularly warm - especially since they get less efficient as they heat up - even a few tens of degrees - so they're mounted so they are cooled by the air, staying cooler than an asphalt road. (Nice place to land or make a nest on the underside and supporting structure.)

  * Point focus concentrating solar systems ignite them in flight, creating "smokers" falling from the sky..

  * (Not sure about line focus systems. They only come up to the temperatures of process steam, so I expect that, even if the birds could get near the focus line, they'd be OK or escape with minor burns at worst.)

As far as I can tell, this site is using photovoltaic panels. No free roast bird dinners falling into your lap.

Would more computers have helped with that? Maybe maybe not.

The computer program would not have forgotten to configure the flaps and slats for takeoff.

This year battery peaking plants are deploying far faster than fuel peakers and have almost caught up with the rate if increase in daily peaking needs.

Second solar and wind is intermittent. So if you want clean electricty you will need nuclear.

Third only building solar and wind guarantees a place on the grid for fossil fuels.

That's getting SO out of date.

Solar and wind were ahead of it, and their peaks don't match the demand curve well enough to avoid the need for late afternoon/early evening peaking. So the rapid deployment of solar and wind as their exponential growth took hold led to the construction of more peaking plants. (Mainly Natural Gas, which is half the carbon output per kWhr of coal and about 2/3 that of oil.)

But grid-scale battery technology is now getting cheaper, better, and deploying even more rapidly. Time-shifting part of the solar and wind power by a few hours flattens the daily curve nicely. This year battery peaking plants are deploying far faster than fuel peakers and have almost caught up with the daily peaking needs. I expect this to continue until more fuel peakers aren't needed for daily issues (IMHO within the next year or two), then continue to be expanded to start displacing them to deal only with shifting power over multi-day weather cycles, then start taking over the major 3-ish day weather cycle shifting, too.

Batteries were behind until electric cars upped their game beyond laptop computers and handheld appliences. But now the innovations are coming thick and fast, but we've just passed the point where it starts to be profitable to actually build and deploy a bunch rather to wait because your new factory will be obsoleted before it pays off its construction costs.

Such systems should be good at avoiding incidents like the Northwest flight 255 crash at Detroit Metro airport:

1. Crew turns off breaker to silence annoying redundant audio voice alarms/warnings.
2. Forget to turn it back on before takeoff.
3. Get interrupted by a radio call from the tower during checklist and miss lowering the flaps and slats.
4. Plane is pretty much fully loaded and nearly fully fueled. With flaps and slats not in takeoff configuration it doesn't have enough lift to achieve flight by the end of the runway with sufficient altitude to clear the fence, cross the adjacent interstate, and pass above the several (heavily occupied) multi-story hotels just on the other side.
5. Pilots try to take off with flaps and slats still up. The think things are a bit sluggish because of the load, and get far past the takeoff point of no return before realizing the flaps and slats aren't deplooyed. It's far too late to stop or change their setting. (They do figure it out: Nearly the last thing on the voice recorder is "Flaps! Flaps!")
6. To avoid killing the people in the hotels they fly the plane UNDER the freeway, through the airport entrance underpass. This tears off the wings, stops the aircraft body, and kills the crew and all the passengers except one four year old child.

Personal experience: Not having heard details of the crash, I was planning to drive to and from the Worldcon, which was at Phoenix that year. But I checked the airfares and was quoted a REALLY low price, so I booked the flight instead. Was puzzled when the plane only had something like three passengers. Turns out it was the (renumbered) replacement for the flight in question, a week later. Found out about it at the Con, but wasn't worried going back. I figured that if there was ANY flight they were REALLY being careful about, it was that one. B-b

The Tenth amendment was an attempted answer to Hamilton's argument, trying to keep unenumerated issues falling under rights rather than powers.

Actually: To try to keep them out of the "powers" of the new federal government. It doesn't distinguish whether they fall under a power of a state or a right of a person.

The text you quoted says "powers" not "rights."

Terms of art. In the Constitution people have "rights" and governments have "powers".

As already pointed out, the Tenth Amendment makes it clear that powers must be enumerated but rights do not, The default is that doing something you want to do is a right unless an enumerated power can be interpreted to give the government a license to limit or suppress it.

There was a big argument between factions among the Founders over the Bill of Rights. Hamilton argued that the proposed Constitution already had the "default is it's a right" property and that enumerating some of the rights would cause it to act like the default was switched, so the government would act as if ONLY the enumerated rights existed and ride roughshod over the population. But others insisted that SOME rights were so important that they NEEDED to be explicit.

Enough of the states were worried about the fed growing into another totalitarian empire that they wouldn't ratify without a commitment to pass a collection of Rights amendments that the Federalists agreed to it. Twelve were proposed and ten ratified (and one more of them over a century later) The Tenth amendment was an attempted answer to Hamilton's argument, trying to keep unenumerated issues falling under rights rather than powers.

To some extent both sides were right. Congress and the president DO tend to treat unenumerated issues as falling under "powers", using the "necessary and proper" clause (a.k.a. "elastic clause") and the commerce clause to cover nearly anything. (Examples: Feeding your pigs grain you grew yourself rather than bought affects the price of grain, so it can be banned. Possession of items (drugs, guns) can be banned if they, or their components, ever were sold in interstate commerce.) The Supreme Court has only rarely rejected a law or a conviction based on a "right" that wasn't enumerated. But the enumerated rights have produced a LOT of case law striking down laws and government behavior, and these have stuck very well over nearly a quarter of a millenium.

So I, at least, prefer the federal government WITH a Bill of RIghts.

Is all the processing done on the phone? Even if so, how much of the audio, if any is sent to Google's servers? Is it saved? Is it accessable to law enforcement?