Your words all make sense but your points don't.

First: trucking is NOT efficient. Railways are far more efficient for moving bulk goods.

Consistent grades are still grades and waste a ton of fuel that can't be recaptured - except with an EV and, to a lesser degree, a Hybrid.

A hybrid will improve efficiency vs ICE in local delivery/traffic but a full EV is still significantly more efficient.

Putting a hybrid drivetrain into a trailer is ridiculous for the vast majority of situations. There are about 3 semi-trailers for every semi-truck to start with so that's simply wasteful and expensive.. If you only using them for 'special' runs then you complicate logistics which gets expensive fast.

Substations catch fire? I mean, sure. So do fuel stations...which ironically to your point also don't operate without power. So yah, win for EV there.

The /best/ approach is to build out the rail system and leverage EV Semi's for what would then mostly be local/regional delivery.

We won't do that so the next-best approach is to continue building out EV Semi's while focusing on where their immediate strengths are - local and regional shipping. As that continues, the 'charger deserts' become less and less ... while technology evolves to support higher speed charging and more energy dense packs. The need for long-haul diesel diminishes.

These trailers are just a solution looking for a problem. I'm sure they'll find some niches, but just that. It probably makes more sense adding a diesel generator to an EV semi than adding batteries to a semi trailer...but I'm not about to math that out.

I've noted the comments here about how this is old news: that's true. But it will be novel to some people who didn't live through it, and even for those who did, it's a necessary reminder. Microsoft is ruthless, unscrupulous, and unethical: they will do anything. They're not the only ones, of course, but they're arguably the most dangerous because of their size, wealth, and longevity. They're the enemy of open standards. They're the enemy of open source. They're the enemy of open protocols. They're the enemy of Unix. They're the enemy of Linux. They're the enemy of security. They're the enemy of privacy. They've always been the enemy and they always will be, because it's in their DNA: it's impossible for them to change.

So any time -- ANY TIME -- there's some statement or initiative or announcement that they're going to support open standards/source/etc., any of the things I listed -- the first things that should come to mind are these wise words of Ash: "It's a trick -- get an axe."

We were still buying VAXes because we would put the VMS tapes aside, install a second CPU (the "PurDual" modification), install BSD (Berkeley Unix), and run them nearly 24x7 for years at a time. "We" included the (large) university I was at, but it also includes a LOT of other universities, because -- thanks to DEC's academic discounts on hardware -- this was one of the most cost-effective ways of deploying a lot of computing power. (For the time, of course,)

Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, all these large companies have huge numbers of employees and contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. And with few exceptions -- at the top -- they treat them as disposable, as we see in their headlong rush to replace them with horribly broken AI systems. Many of these people are elsewhere in the world and are paid far less than their US counterparts.

All of this creates a rich ecosystems that's ripe for bribery; it's an inexpensive and effective way to get things done. It's not rare: it's commonplace and unremarkable. Of course these companies will claim otherwise because they don't want to admit that they're created a culture of corruption, and every once in a while they'll throw someone under the bus so that they can claim they promptly investigate all such activities, that's all bullshit. The systems they've built are functioning as designed and intended, and as long as massive amounts of money keep flowing to corporate executives, they have no reason to disturb them.

Everyone foolish enough to put their personal/company/organization data in clouds run by these companies should consider that all of their data is quite likely available to anyone who can put $5K or $20K or whatever in a manila envelope and slide it across a table.

...who are spending some of their time researching Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) in an attempt to reduce their value to zero.

This isn't a particularly well-funded or dedicated effort, it's just something being done ad hoc. So it may go nowhere. But if it does succeed, then it'll be quite amusing to watch every crypto bro cry as their "investment" suddenly becomes worthless, even to the other fake money criminals.

Although to be more precise: I saw enough about LastPass years ago. This is the N'th security incident that they've publicly admitted. No doubt the number of incidents they're aware of is higher, and no doubt the number of incidents they're not aware of is still higher.

I think at this point it's safe to presume that any information shared with LastPass has been compromised or will be compromised shortly. Part of that is because they're incompetent, but most of it is because there's no way for any operation to do what they've set out to do: the threat model is completely against them. What they've built is one-stop shopping for attackers, so it's worth much more time, money, attention, and risk than many other operations. Obviously attackers know this and have planned/executed accordingly.

The right thing to do -- which won't happen because almost nobody does the right thing -- is to admit failure, issue refunds, and shut down.

Your claim is trivial to disprove.

Installed Solar capacity might go as low as $1/W at scale ... but you get 5-6Wh/day under ideal conditions. If you want 1W average output across the day, you need 4x the capacity PLUS GWh scale batteries.

So $4/Wh/day * 1GW = $4B for the panels
Batteries will run another $billion per GWh...

The possibility of nuclear fallout remains zero for nuclear plants.

About 25 years ago, I began to take a serious interest in climatology. I started buying textbooks and reading them - and for the most part, that went smoothly, because I could easily understand the math and physics. (I struggled a bit with some of the organic chemistry, and had to spend a couple of years coming up to speed on that.) After a while, I could read all the reports and some of the papers being published, so I made my way through things like the IPCC reports -- which are thousands of pages. Eventually, I got to the point where I could read almost anything published in the field -- but admittedly, some of the material still takes me a long time to get through.

And the single biggest takeaway from all that work is: climatologists, as a field, have been consistently underestimating how bad things are and how bad they're going to get. This is because they're scientists, and all scientists are trained to be conservative in their assessments. Whereas a non-scientist might write "X proves Y", a good scientist will write something like "X suggests that Y may be happening" or the equivalent. This approach implicitly acknowledges uncertainty and the possibility that future work will yield different results: it's how science self-corrects over time.

This mindset is commendable: it shows intellectual honestly. But unfortunately in this particular discipline, at this particular time, it doesn't ring the alarm bells loudly enough. We need a Samuel L. Jackson moment: "The world is on fire, mXXXXrfXXXXXrs" We need radical changes, e.g. all fossil fuel production and consumption must end. We need vast reductions in energy consumption. We need sweeping societal changes, e.g., an end to daily commuting as the norm, it should be an exception. And even if we do all of that, it may still not be enough, because this is an exponential process with a huge amount of momentum -- in other words, we're going to keep sliding up the curve for some period of time even if we do everything that we should have done decades ago.

I've said, for all these years, that I'm not going to live to see the hellscape that's coming - the mass starvation, the killer megastorms, the wars over water, the refugee crises, the political, economic, and societal chaos. Now I'm not so sure.

"[...] Sanger invited his 91,000 followers on X to influence that discussion."

should read:

"Sanger invited 91,000 racists, misogynists, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes, and fascists from a well-known Nazi bar to influence the discussion."

Get back to me when places like NY and CA stop letting repeat violent offenders out on 'cashless' bail.

If you're accused of assaulting someone for the 2nd (or 3rd and more) time before your first case even makes it to court, you should not be free to continue your rampage.

Equally, we should not make any conviction a lifetime sentence of un-/under-employment. People need the ability to rejoin society and a normal, productive person who made a mistake.

Lastly, when a significant portion of the money spent on prisons is going to corporate profits, we are doing something very very wrong. It's a race to the bottom for everyone but the shareholders.

The irony of you being the only one here going on about the n-word and calling people fascists.

Assuming anyone who rejects this unhinged nonsense is a bot is just another way to reinforce your echo chamber. It's much easier to label someone a racist and dismiss them instead of considering the garbage you're spoon fed (lol AP) is unbiased and accurate.

It's easier to just believe and repeat than take a few moments to think...and then possibly disagree with your "friends".

This is made even worse by the pervasive way cancel culture has seeped into every day life. It's not the rock star getting canceled for hospitalizing their wife for the 3rd time. Sadly we skipped right over that and went to cancel someone unknowingly using a commonplace but mildly offensive term.

Now it's people deciding you can't be friends because of an all-or-nothing approach to every political belief they hold - with zero room for a nuanced discussion.

I'm more worried about the 2/3 (actually much less) that you didn't mention ... who mindlessly believe any nonsense that comes their way if it aligns with their political (dis)beliefs. The idea that the left has a monopoly on "the truth" is comically out of alignment with reality. Worse, the pseudo-religious dedication prohibits any kind of rational, neutral conversation. This isn't to say the right is always...right. They've got plenty of stupid too but generally seem more open to conversation or even criticizing their own without being excommunicated.

That aside, flock cameras need to be broadly outlawed. Otherwise illegal surveillance shouldn't suddenly be legal if a private company does it then sells the data to police/gov't officials. Honestly the same for revenue cameras...aka "speed cameras". If pols actually followed what the public wants, none of this would be permitted. But when there's reelection money on the table we all get told what we want. The only choice is if your moron's name is highlighted in red or blue.

Kind of waiting to see the large-scale rejection of surveillance/plate readers where people "adjust", cover, or otherwise disable them.

All true - but also a young arrogant engineer who completely failed to read and learn from people who have entire closets full of computing awards (including Turing Awards) for a reason.

There are only two valid use cases for systemd: first, as an interview question. I use it as a fast and easy way of classifying candidates; anyone who thinks systemd is in any way, shape, or form a good idea may safely be dismissed from any further consideration. Second, as a security wedge: there is so much new, poorly-written code in systemd -- with more being shoveled in all the time by Poettering's submissive kneeling fanboys -- that it provides all kinds of opportunities. (I'm being snarky but also serious: read the damn code. It's absolute crap, so much so that one could argue that the number of security holes exceeds the corpus of useful code.)

Every single person involved in Polymarket is a scumbag -- to the bone. They should be shown no pity or mercy when the scam they're orchestrating turns on them -- and it will.