That's what Mercedes is saying. Solid state batteries are now available as small-scale production samples, not as simulators and not as one-off lab toys. They are still too expensive for truly mass production, but they can be used to actually start designing real products. Engineers can start testing the batteries for real-life performance, mechanical durability, thermal envelope, etc.

Production ramp-up is happening now, but it'll take years to scale up. It turned out that solid state batteries are complicated. Who knew?

Road trips. Enabling EVs for people in apartments (just charge once a month at a fast DC charger).

Another advantage is lighter EVs with more a reasonable 300 mile range.

Because there's no ceiling. You can _always_ keep getting better, especially because it helps with the college applications. For the same reason we don't set the minimal time for activities like track running.

Putnam test for university-level math is a good example of something similar.

The US is waaaay undertesting, so much so that there was a movement to stop using SAT/ACT scores in college admissions (because they're racist, sigh).

Well, yeah. But with a bit more regular people it absolutely holds. I tried asking this question once to my co-workers, and most of the US citizens were able to name their high school sports teams. Might be a good topic for a Slashdot poll.

The problem with the K-12 system is that it's just _bad_. There is no drive for excellence, so students that don't have engaged parents are just coasting. In some places (Seattle) you could graduate with a passing score without even attending the classes and randomly filling out the tests. Then there are busybodies that try to cancel math and magnet schools because they're racist (see: California).

If you have engaged parents like the stereotypical Asian "tiger moms" then you can get good results with advanced placement classes, private schools, magnet schools, etc.

This is really apparent when you look at college admission tests. In the US you have SAT tests that are trivially easy to pass with perfect scores (more than 2% of people get them!), and ACT with a bit more reasonable 0.22% of perfect scores. In China you have Gaokao where _nobody_ ever got the perfect score, in Korea you have CSAT with something like 5 people a year getting perfect scores, etc.

Another thing to look at is the competitions. You can likely remember your high school's football team name, but you probably have never heard about your school's math olympiad teams. Schools in the US spend a lot of money on stadiums and gyms, but hardly any on academic competitions. It's the opposite in China and Russia. Nobody cares about the athletic performance, but schools actively compete academically with each other.

It's mostly an artifact of the way the Science proficiency is tested, the questions are mostly the logic-type deduction questions and require little if any specific knowledge. If you look at physics in particular, the US is far behind China.

China is not a member of the OECD, but they did unofficial scoring for the Beijing-Shanghai area, and they came out in the top 3 countries.

PISA tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The US is below the average while spending more than average per student.

What are you smoking? The US K-12 is the reason immigrants are now the majority of STEM students in the US universities. It's a disgrace.

The US schools are a good place to spend time if you want to dedicate your life to parties, theatrical performances, or an MBA degree. They are useless if you want to work in STEM.

Trump was not sending anything special to Ukraine during his first term.

Biden? He supplied Ukriane with PATRIOT missile defense systems, HIMARS, and long-range missiles.

He was hardly a dictator. He had not even expanded the SCOTUS to rubber-stamp his opinions, or argued that his word is the law.

Yes, Americans would never vote for a dictator. And even if they do, there is Congress that reigns in the worst ideas. Oh wait...

We actually are not. Trump's ICE raids might look tough to some, but the number of deported people hasn't significantly increased. There are about 15k deportations per month, and at this rate it'll take a _decade_ to make a dent in the overall illegal immigrant population.

A drone can fly just a few meters above the ground, out of LoS of the turret. There's talk of using laser turrets against drones themselves, though.

But there's even more, Ukraine now launches "carrier drones" that can autonomously fly for about 300 kilometers deep into the Russian territory and release a swarm of smaller attack drones. And this contraption costs less than 1 HIMARS missile. It can even be remotely controlled through cellular Internet, Russia is trying to combat this by literally switching off all the mobile networks if these drones are detected. Not that it'll help in the long run, it's trivially easy to stick something like a Starlink antenna on the carrier.

What's the difference? When somebody moves closer, this can be only enabled (to the first approximation) by increasing the housing density. And supporting this has been the policy of Democrats/liberals for quite a while (YIMBY, "Stronk Cities", "15 minute concentration camps", "walkable neighborhoods", etc).

Sorry, but you're wrong. The J-curve (and ESPECIALLY if multiple children are considered) clearly shows the correlation. It's published, peer reviewed science.

The tip the J-curve does not reach the height of the other pole, that's what gives it the name.

No, you neglected to even look at the meaning of the term. Never mind putting it into Google and reading the papers.

And yes, the cause is THAT simple: housing. We have more than enough of it, but the toxic urbanisation made a large portion of it useless.

Economic forces, what else?

Urbanism resulted in runaway growth of large cities. Companies in large city cores have a competitive advantage because they have access to a larger workforce pool. This in turn incentivizes people to move closer to large cities, closing the vicious loop.