Actually, they do.

Within one year, from April 2023 to Jan 2024, market prices per kWh dropped 50%, from about $200/kWh to $95/kWh. And this is no fluke powered by one-time events. A lot of progress in the last few years was indeed technological and came not from new chemistry. The Cell-to-Pack and Cell-to-Blade processes, which allow very large but still stable cells made the LFP cell viable for automotive application and Sodium cells at least for stationary use. Doting the LFP with Maganese, creating LMFP cell types can add another 20% of capacity within the same technology. Anodefree cells (where the anode will form itself with the first charge) will allow for even cheaper production. Organic cathodes might boost the capacity of sodium cells up to 600 Wh per kg, but are currently very expensive compared to iron phosphate - but if the organic compounds are cheaper to made, they will become competitive.

You won't find many of the new ideas in your everyday cell. But that's not because the ideas are not viable. It's because the current cell types are progressing themselves so fast, that they are still the most marketable option. But whenever the development slows down too much on them, the other options are ready to shine.

Hopefully the NTSB's tier 2 people are ready; since they did in fact try turning it off and turning it on again and there's still more to the situation.

So all we have to do to vindicate our investment in glorious AI is keeping firing the expensive labor until we get the team down to people so ignorant of the code that their guess is worse than the bot's guess; and they'll have no reason to doubt the bot's output?

Sounds like a win-win to me!

Because Sweden does not need them (yet). Thanks to its geography, Sweden has many pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants.

It would be amusing if it weren't so annoying; but you often see people who embrace both positions without a hint of awareness of the contradiction: when condemning the non-breeders they are 'selfish' and 'hedonistic' and so on; but, in the same breath, children are their greatest pleasure and most fulfilling experience and so on and so forth. What's it going to be? Are children the cutting edge of indulgence and everyone who is missing out will die bitter and miserable; or are the people failing to pay the flesh tithe to our civilization repulsively self-centered for avoiding a massive hassle that one undertakes only as a grim duty?

I'd be curious what, if any, role the increasingly obviously hollow promise of progress may have.

In absolute terms residents of low-income countries are usually more fucked than those of high income ones; but in terms of trajectory they often have a somewhat rosier picture: if GDP per capita is really low you don't really have an option but to be really poor, there's just not enough productivity to support being otherwise; but there's a fairly straightforward alignment of incentives: unless there's a local supply of mineral wealth to skim, even the local elites generally want everyone to be more prosperous because there's just not that much money to be gouged out of subsistence mud farmers; and there are a variety of plausible avenues toward greater productivity in the form of people looking for new manufacturing areas and the like.

Similar things hold for various quality-of-life stuff. Low income countries tend to see a lot of morbidity and mortality from lack of relatively cheap and simple medical interventions; but have a corresponding selection of relatively cheap and simple improvements that will improve population welfare if realized.

Wealthy countries are, obviously, absolutely wealthier; but are often harder to write an optimistic trajectory for: if most of the obvious productivity improvements have already been made and you still feel squeezed it's a lot less plausible to believe that you will grow out of that problem(both because there are fewer evident paths to notable growth; and because feeling poor in a wealthy society is often a good sign that someone who isn't you is good at capturing value; and will probably remain good at that even if more value is unlocked); and if most of the relatively simple, relatively cheap, improvements in things like medical interventions and occupational health and safety standards have already been made it becomes much less evident how your children will do better than you did.

My impression is that, among people who actually reason their way toward parenthood, there's a general desire to see good outcomes for their children. This often involves heavy doses of irrational optimism regardless of location; but there are definitely some contexts where at least expecting your children to have it better than you is within the realm of the plausible; and others where you need to be hitting the copium pretty hard to imagine that they'll beat the odds dramatically enough to do so.

I assume I'm not supposed to ask what 'our own civilization' has done to deserve our care; and just swallow the implication that suffering as an end in itself is totally sensible?

If you think that AI is good enough to replace education; do I want to know what jobs that pay for family-size houses you expect people to be working?

Most of the time economists respond to data about individual choice with a "meh, revealed preference, obviously"; then "It becomes possible to do sex without 9 months of creepy endoparasitism and a couple of decades of very high cost parenting; turns out people are up for that" hits and suddenly it's a crazy mystery what is driving such a change...

There's one confounding factor with a lot of enterprise tech announcements: the people who make the purchasing decisions or act as executive sponsors for splashy projects don't actually have to use whatever they are purchasing, and are often at fairly modest risk of real consequences(especially if the failure is readily contained: if the COO announces a bold plan that ends up destroying the ERP system he's probably going to use that golden parachute whether he wants to or not; but if a little NFT faff can be described as an experiment in unconventional marketing and then quietly dropped in 6 months when it's time to announce a 'digital twin' AI-centric approach to airframe maintenance, that's entirely survivable); but the those people are the ones looking to build 'personal brands' get treated like 'thought leaders' and industry conferences, and so on. So there's a temptation to do trendy nonsense with only the slimmest business case because it effectively means that you can spend the company's money on burnishing your own resume. The most overt cases are where the speaking gig is directly related to the thing you are buying: get real hyped about Salesforce Agents, sign the contract, get your own little keynote at Dreamforce for being such an innovator.

That's what is a trifle puzzling here: 'crypto' is basically a generation old as a "things the degenerates of linkedin think will make them thought leaders" item. Even the guys who are still just talking 'generative' rather than 'agentic and context aware' are starting to look out of touch and behind the curve; so it's a weird time to see an announcement.

When you can use other people's money as the stupid money there are sometimes reasons to remain in the market longer than if you are working entirely on your own account; but the most obvious of those reasons requires that the stupid money still be pouring in because it's trendy; which NFTs definitely no longer are. 'Crypto' has settled into a fairly lucrative but somewhat less glamorous role as the deeply, deeply, shady side of 'fintech'; but nobody cares about NFTs and 'web3'.

And still, White Phosphorus is deadly in doses of less than 1 ppm. Enumerating elements is completely meaningless when talking about toxicity. What matters is the substance which contains the elements. And two chemically closely related substances can be harmless and absolutely toxic. Botulinum toxin, often called Botox for short, is deadly in doses above 2 ppt (or about 150 nanograms for a grown adult), and all it contains are the very same amino acids, which make up about 15% of your body weight.

Same silly argument.

But still, it's a different place, and different people in charge. Intellectually knowing that flash flooding can happen and applying it to your immediate environment, where you never experienced it, or the last event was decades ago, are two very different pair of shoes.

Still, Renewables grow faster than Coal in China. 25 years ago, 80% of all electric power in China were generated by Coal, in 2024, it was less than 60%.

Phosphorus, especially in its modification called White Phosphorus, is one of the most toxic substances known to Man. Also, copper is pretty poisonous.

Luckily, posphorus is quite reactive (that's why it was used as an agent in matchsticks), oxidizes fast, and will form phosphoric acid when exposed to air, which indeed is not toxic. It is similar for copper, albeit some copper oxides are themselves toxic.

Especially everyone supervising the operation of the Mystic summer camp should be made aware beforehand that they are in a flooding area, which would be under water even with less rain (but not catastrophically so), and be alert to the weather forecast for a possible evacuation. But people forget, and 20 years no flooding feels the same as totally impossible, and flooding itself is often seen as getting wet feet. The idea of being washed away by 45 feet of water was completely out of the minds of people.

Germany, which is known for being well organized, had a similar catastrophic flooding in 2021 (184 dead) in the Ahr Valley. Also here, the Weather Service had warned about heavy rainfall and possible catastrophic flooding, but it did not register with the people responsible for civil protection.

That's a real problem with once-in-a-century events. People just can't imagine the possible damage, and are completely unprepared or even consider preparations as wasteful and an obstacle to business, development or personal freedom.