I don't know about anyone else. I don't think anyone particularly cares when a suit talks about leveraging our synergies. Fine, whatever, everyone knows what that means in normal English.

What gets in the way as a grunt engineer is knowing what all the TLAs and project codenames mean.

According to the Wiki article about it, it's only really been in use since around 2000. It seems it really picked up steam around 2010. Near as I can tell, the current SCOTUS really believes Congress has to be explicit in delegating authority.

I don't think the doctrine has been in play long enough to say who it affects more. Problem is, many cases take years to hit SCOTUS so the president causing the problem may be long gone by the time a decision is handed down.

Given that every POTUS this century has been pretty happy exercising unbridled authority, I don't think there's really a partisan bent.

The SCOTUS has been increasingly using the major questions doctrine to limit executive action. The major questions doctrine, for those just joining, says that if the President wants to make a substantial and nationally significant decision about how to interpret a law, that interpretation must be supported by clear language in the bill indicating that was Congress' intent.

In this case, the CIHPS act was passed to give money away. It does not say anything about buying a stake in the company. That seems like a pretty large change to me. If Congress wanted to buy companies, they could have clearly said so in the bill.

That said, I haven't read the CHIPS act to maybe there's some ambiguous language.

Beats the heck out of me. The bedrock principle in American politics these days seem to be "My team, right or wrong." It drives me bonkers.

...is right twice a day.

This is the first time I've heard of Vance doing something I approve of. I don't like the man or his opinions but he's on the right side of this one.

Thing is, we've heard those same arguments every single time a major productivity breakthrough happens. Steam-powered looms, tractors, cars, shipping containers, computers, the Interwebs, now AI, they all have dramatically affected the labor market, lots of pre-existing jobs vanished and new jobs were invented. Employment shocks, when they happened, were brief and people adjusted. I'm a programmer and the current job market is disconcerting. I'm glad I'm not a new college grad because it's going to be much rougher than in the past finding a first job.

But humans are resilient. I get a lot more done not having to spend hours trolling documents, Stack Overflow, and whatnot trying to find the right syntax to make framework X do thing Y. In the end, everyone is going to have more software doing more things (hopefully with good quality although there will be lots of horrible vibe coded apps out there). We'll get through this transition just like we've gotten through a dozen other transitions.

As a consumer, he can go f*** himself and his union with a dildo imported from China.

Abrasiveness aside, your BIL is protecting his job and income. Yay for him. But he and his union are hurting everyone else in the country by making the cost of shipping higher than it could be. The recent labor action preventing ports from automating or expanding hours is a great case in point. US ports are quite inefficient compared to other world ports and labor unions have a big hand in that.

You'll forgive me if I don't look favorably upon his union and their monopolistic arm twisting.

That's kind of exactly the point: there are a number of medical procedures and activities which you go to a nurse now and in the future an AI might be able to do. That's what the unions want to head off.

Personally, I'm a bit skeptical about AI replacing nurses: I don't think Claude is going to draw blood or change a bedpan any time soon. It's possible there's some amount of grunt work involved in nursing, filling out paperwork, double checking dosages, things like that, where I could imagine an AI assisting a nurse. I'm not a nurse so I really can't say.

I find it hardly surprising that unions would want to protect current jobs regardless of any deleterious effects on the general public. That's their raison d'etre. You'll forgive me if I ignore their self-serving opinion.

I find it especially noxious they want to essentially ban self-driving cars, even when the car isn't being used for hire. I personally can't wait to not have to drive myself to work. My kids can drive and I'm dearly hoping any grandchildren they produce never need to learn. That's probably optimistic but there it is. The crazy thing about their position is it won't be long before a self-driving car is safer than their proposed a human safety driver, especially when the safety driver routinely reads a news or plays Wordle while the car does all the work.

That's fine, there now are a ton of other companies producing plug-in hybrids and battery EVs. If there's demand, someone will build the cars. It doesn't have to be Tesla.

The sub headline of the article ought to be "and most of the growth and sales were in China." I'm not sure what that tells us. Either the Chinese cars are really good (which I've heard they are) and/or they're really cheap (which I've also heard) and/or the prices are being subsidized by Chinese taxpayers (which I have no idea whether that's true or not) and/or Chinese drivers are somehow being coerced into buying EVs (again, that's pure speculation on my part).

Allow me to jump in here. I thought neutrinos had typical energies in the single-digit eV range, not PeV. I have no idea how you get that much energy in a close to massless particle.

I visualize neutrinos as being pretty close to photons, energy-wise. A visible light photon has something like 1-2 eV. X-ray photons are in the 100-100,000 eV range. I don't know what you'd call a PeV photon.

This is the downside of regulating prices. It doesn't let prices drop if supply is too high or demand too low. Free markets are very good at finding the market clearing price.

Let's be polite, please. I didn't insult you.

Demand goes up, supply not so much, you'd expect prices to rise. This is a surprise to anyone?

Well, maybe. What Walmart is really good at is squeezing costs out of everything it sells and dropping their prices. Their gross margins are really thin. The net effect is their customers are the ones who benefit most from cutting costs, not their shareholders.

And given these numbers, that means if there are clouds (admittedly rare in Mojave), it generates at half it's nominal daytime capacity, and the batteries last for four hours at that half capacity.

That's an impressive amount of juice but still not really good enough for base load generation. It's great for peak power in mid-afternoon.