Oh, I agree with that. SpaceX has been on an amazing streak of progress. Sooner or later they will kill somebody - hopefully much later, but it will happen. Then it's going to be back to post-1986 NASA for a long time, I fear.

SpaceX IS far and away the leader in the commercial space market. ISS kinda sucks and Boeing and Starliner are worse than that.

The problem is that Musk's government work creates a conflict of interest that is so huge that it is blatant, outright corruption. This cannot stand.

They do to an extent. But hidden pricing on everything would be a big step in the wrong direction.

The consumer does have some recourse, I shop at the Walmart Corner Store and their straightforward pricing is a big reason why. I absolutely loathe the gimmicky pricing, memberships, and combo deals at other grocery stores.

Yes, Amazon also famously played with pricing discrimination, and arguably still does it with special offers etc.

I don't think it's as bad online, where you're generally shopping for larger items one at a time, and can more easily compare options between websites. Like when you go to buy a car or a home, it is expected you are going to get squeezed on individual pricing and have to put some work into it.

But that isn't practical when you're scooping up an armload of groceries that are a few bucks each. You can't take the time to do all the comparison, and it's not efficient to split your order across 3 or 4 stores to drive around and get them all. So you need the collective pricing pressure that comes from working 'in league' with all the other shoppers by virtue of all having the same prices visible.

This remark on a density/safety tradespace, while not new to science, was interesting to me.

That safety advantage is key, because Chinese firms figured out they could pack LFP cells closer together inside a battery pack without risking a fire. That meant they could cram more energy into LFP batteries and nearly catch up to the range of NMC batteries. Last year, the Chinese battery giant CATL made the first LFP battery with more than 600 miles of range.

So, Wh/L is not such a simple objective thing in an actual design, as opposed to the figures and graphs of competing technologies that we see.

Surely not? It would pretty much destroy the only real consumer protection - the buyer's market which enables shoppers to collectively exert price pressure.

And I do think they would do it. Oh, it would be called a 'discount' for some instead of a penalty on others, of course...

Anything to pump up the estimated number of dollars "saved."

It's like watching Chairman Mao redirect agricultural output to smelting homestyle pot metal to drive up "production" figures.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. At the kickoff of the Great Recession there were a lot of high-level late-night emergency meetings to make sure the bank clearinghouses could settle each day. This resulted in some funky shotgun weddings and incestuous public / private partnerships which is, as you noted, less than ideal. But the nightmare of the public experiencing empty ATMs did not occur on the whole.

The specific form of this will no doubt be a little different next time since nobody uses cash or checks any more, but that seems if anything to facilitate the process.

Unless we're talking about a zombie apocalypse scenario in which all electronics have failed and we're trading beans and bullets?

C'mon man. $USD in FDIC-insured banks are the most proven and secure way to store value. The full faith & credit of the United States may be tarnished, but it's miles ahead of the alternatives including and especially crypto. Uncle Sam will make sure you'll get your dollars. Everybody wants that to happen, including Wall St.

Deliberately forcing a 15 min wait is just stupid: you will end up with operators you are paying sitting there waiting for a call

Oh, I suppose they staffed the call center so it was still understaffed and subject to long additional wait times, even after trying to drive customers away with the initial penalty box.

It seems like they have probably run the numbers and discovered that "telephone-people" are not lucrative customers on average.

For reference, at the height of the industrial revolution in the United States, steel workers made the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $85k per year.

Trying to equate what steelworkers made in the latter 1800's to $85K per year in 2025 is a dodgy calculation to say the least.

In what way were they better off than anybody today? Better food? More living space per person? Fewer working hours? Longer life expectancy? No, no, no, and no. It's meaningless.

I like it that higher-end civil and structural engineers are licensed, for what seem like obvious reasons. But it doesn't mean the same system would transfer over and provide value for software engineering. They're different.

Way too soon to predict this will be the time it never comes back which it was so strong for so long. Maybe too strong for too long. Seek medical help if you experience an erection lasting more than 4 hours!!

That's what the stock market exists for - to give companies a time to grow into profitability.

I'd love to think Rivan will pan out, replacing Tesla. And the government seems pretty committed to locking out Chinese imports, for better or worse in the long run. However, the domestic EV's including GM are getting better. So I think Rivan's window of opportunity may be closing.

If your fallback to ChatGPT is a search engine anyways, just tell ChatGPT to make sure to include a source, and then click on the source and see if ChatGPT's interpretation is correct. It's still better than reading the garbage web to find those sources.

For information search, I find that ChatGPT tends to hallucinate at the same point at which google would just return garbage irrelevant results - because sometimes what you want just doesn't exist.