Only MS DOS^WWindows is immortal.

That's crazy? California has huge amounts of solar generation, but no cheap mid-day tariffs ?
I'm seeing 15c/kWh for SDG&E at night. Hang on, you have no choice. Privately owned for-profit state-protected monopolies -WTF?

Here in Perth Australia, same climate as LA, its 6c/kWr from 9am-3pm if you choose the appropriate tariff. (us0.36 peak)
So if you live in an apartment and can't install your own soalr panels, you can benefit form excess from others.
So I guess the reality in California is if you want to charge from home, install your own solar panels?

And a home battery, if you drive to work every day, so can't charge direct from solar. Ah - I see 2/3 of new solar installs in California include a Powerwall or equivalent. Makes sense now.

It's the battery. The only reason we did not have electric cars 100 years ago (they existed before ICE cars) is the battery.
EV minus battery should be cheaper. And the battery should be cheaper than gasoline.

In Australia, a BYD Atto 2 small SUV is around us$22k. So already cheaper than non-Chinese petrol competitors.
Cars used to be far more expensive in Australia - until they abolished the tariffs.

(from Claude)
Actual Purpose (The Legal & Practical Impact)
While the stated goals focus on "security" and "waste prevention," the primary practical function of the bill is to resolve ownership disputes and expand the rights of coal operators at the expense of general mineral owners. Key "actual" functions include:

- Granting Automatic Mineral Rights to Coal Lessees: The bill effectively changes the default terms of any coal lease, "whenever granted." It stipulates that a lease for coal is now deemed to include all critical and rare earth minerals contained within that coal unless they were specifically excluded in writing. This retroactively grants coal companies the right to valuable minerals they may not have originally paid for.

- Protecting Facility Owners (Coal Ash Ownership): The bill clarifies that coal ash and byproducts resulting from combustion or gasification belong to the owner/operator of the facility, not the original mineral owner. This secures the "downstream" value of these minerals for the utility companies.

- Limiting Liability: It includes language protecting facility owners from being held liable for "waste, conversion, or destruction" of minerals during the combustion or gasification process.

- Legal Retroactivity: By making these changes retroactive, the bill seeks to bypass potential litigation over existing contracts where the ownership of minerals like lithium or uranium found in coal seams might have been ambiguous under older laws.

In summary: The bill uses the high-profile justification of "national security" and "rare earth production" to codify a legal framework that ensures coal mining companies and power plants have the primary right to profit from these materials, even if those rights were not explicitly secured in their original land-use agreements.

YKWIM

I'm sure "ground-based telescope using astronomers" already loathe the moon as much as vampires hate the sun.
 

You doubt? You clearly know even less about orbital mechanics than I do, so why post ill-informed guesses?
  The scientists and engineers say that 70 km makes a difference.

  That "slightly-further-down orbit" has something like an order of magnitude lower air density. And I'm sure you know that drag is proportional to that.

Two closely related reasons why lower orbit is safer:

1) there is less debris there now, reducing the chance of collisions damaging the satellite.

2) if a satellite lost control, or was destroyed by an impact, it or the debris will return to Earth much faster, avoiding cascade risk.

Petrov is a prolific and successful youtuber, not a scientist. His dramatic claims do not accurately represent the paper he refers to.
You can read it here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.096...
(Jump to "discussion" on page 7 to avoid the math)

Technically, we already have a Kessler Syndrome in higher orbits . Based on what is already in orbit, collisions are generating new debris faster than the debris is
returning to Earth. But this plays out over decades, centuries and millenia. Not the Hollywood apocalypse that sensationalist click-bait youtubers imply.

The paper says that if all control of the exiting Starlink constellation was lost, a collision would likely occur within days.

Two observations:

#1 More often than not the frozen stuff they cook and give you a sample of at the store tastes nothing like what it does when you get it home. You end up having one serving and the rest stays in the freezer until you throw it away.

#2 You can be risking your life to get a sample. Some percentage of the shoppers there act like they haven't seen food in a week when the nice/crotchety old lady pushes a tray of cut-up eggrolls or sausage or whatever. The remarks about "mostly acting like adults" doesn't apply there.

Does anyone care to validate this experience?

With the U.S. in the mindset that it can do whatever it wants anywhere at any time as long as it says its own "National Security" is threatened I'm not sure that "sovereignty" really means much no matter what words someone writes down on a piece of paper somewhere and votes on it.

Trump a) thinks he can annex Greenland, b) commit open murder in international waters, c) do the same thing in Nigeria, d) invade Venezuela, e) ... you get the idea. But it is not like he was the first one. The Cheney administration just fabricated total lies and got a supine congress and a credulous and frightened public to go along with a 10 year set of wars.

So why would anyone think that this same rouge government would not feel inhibited from invading wherever it wants to get access to a data center if it wants to? Either cyberattack or physical. It doesn't matter. Trump has demonstrated over and over again that there is no consequence for doing so even if the operation is botched.

Go ahead and pass a law. It will matter to regimes that are not lawless.

It looks a lot closer to Trump University than anything else.

If Stanford (right up the street you know) can't find jobs for its CS graduates -- far more extensive knowledge and training -- why the hell would anyone expect to found a career out of a positive-cash-flow marketing project?

I have to wonder if you wouldn't get better bang for your buck at one of those "Code Ninja" shops down at the strip mall.

There are more than a few commenters here that are always willing to step up to defend, justify, and extol as righteous everything Trump does.

Is it just me or are they strangely underrepresented today? Why do you suppose that is?

They think they are going to control this but they are barely being able to control regular internet access. They can for the docile segments of their population (and they no doubt take great comfort from that) but that isn't what matters.

So their choices are to ban the technology altogether or continue to shovel shit against the tide. And if they reject AI embedding into their culture they will lose whatever chance they will not be able to sustain their technological parity with the barbarians.

Let's see what they choose.

In Australia, we call those idiots "bogans". Its a bit like redneck, but not necessarily rural.