LFP sounds ok too. I belive LFP has better energy density, but Sodium will have lower cost. What I really want Sodium batteries for is my home backup power system. But if we start putting Sodium batteries in cars, used Sodium batteries will be available for home power in a decade, and those batteries are supposed to have a really long lifetime.

I just switched from DSL over copper to fiber broadband provided by my electric company... so I'm pretty sure when the power goes out (as it frequently does), I'm going to lose internet too. If you have backup power, that's sound like a good argument for having Starlink internet.

The cellular networks used to be configured to drop an attempted call if it didn't pick up a dial tone for 60 seconds. After the Loma Prieta earthquake, everybody in the country started calling the San Franciso Bay area, so the land lines all took longer than 60 seconds to put up a dial tone, and no outgoing calls could go through. I believe they have since changed that configuration. I speak from personal experience, I was in San Francisco at the time, and completely unable to make any calls on my cell phone.

Yeah, your "Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY!" signature doesn't make you look like a nut job at all!

Obama was not a perfect predident; no president is. I can think of plenty of things he got wrong. But the divisiveness was due to reactionary racists, not anything Obama did... other than being a black man in America. I'd also say the ADA was better than any alternatives, although Republicans did their best to make it not work. It was based on the principle that the only way to make healthcare affordable for really sick people to force health people to subsidize it. For some reason, that offends the people that don't think they need health care.

I think Obama was one of our better presidents, but the government loaning Solyndra $535 was WRONG. Conservatives are right about some things, and one of them is that the government should not be picking winners and losers in business, because that inevitably leads to corruption as the best way to compete becomes bribing the government to pick your business.

I'm sure AI could _definitely_ design another Ford Pinto!

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

Three of the gas-powered vehicles I've ridden in have caught fire and burned the the ground.Three! I've never seen an EV catch fire. (I suspect all three were due to busted fuel lines leaking onto hot exhaust.)

Actually no, I think Li-Ion is a bad idea, and I am waiting for Sodium-Ion batteries before I buy my EV. In the meantime, I have a couple plugin hybrids. Do I think the Cybertruck was a stupid idea? Absolutely.

I had a jacked-up pickup actually hit me where the lanes were merging together, because he literally didn't see my Honda. The weird thing is it was San Francisco, and it was a black guy in a Bubba truck.

Years from now, people will wonder why they ever put touchscreens in vehicles... and interface that forces you to LOOK AT THE SCREEN to use it! For most people, voice recognition would be lot more safe.

"If you don't like the way I drive than stay off the sidewalk!"

I think a huge part of the problem is that people feel invulnerable in their gas-guzzling tanks, so they feel like they don't actually have to pay attention to where they are going. Which leads to incidents like the soccer mom who simply wasn't paying attention as her huge SUV wondered left, across the oncoming lane, and up onto the sidewalk to kill a pedestrian. She though interacting with her own kid was more important than watching the road.

When I worked for Oracle, their technical people were actually really good. However, their marketing and sales people were scumbags. Unfortunately, I was doing custom programming for their marketing department...

As far as I can tell, Mutual Assured Destruction actually WORKS as a deterrent... even Pootie-poot has never fired a nuke. The good ol' USA is the only known practicioner of nuclear annihilation .

To be fair, properly written Perl is still indistinguishable from modem noise...