Oh, and LFP batteries come from China (Tesla will be using LFP for the batteries in its Chinese Model 3, after receiving government approval to do so. (https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-china-electric-batteries/tesla-wins-china-approval-to-build-model-3-vehicles-with-lfp-batteries-ministry-idUKKBN23I0VT)) So that's good, source another dependency from China. Because that doesn't have national security concerns at all. And we have never had supply chain issues with China.

From your own article (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2020/07/11/teslas-shift-to-cobalt-free-batteries-is-its-most-important-move-yet/?sh=6578b93846b4):

"The company is placing a huge bet on rechargeable battery technology that doesn’t use cobalt. This is one of the main elements making lithium ion batteries so expensive. It’s also fraught with political issues, since the mining can be in conflict areas like the Congo, and its production is considered quite polluting of the environment. But cobalt is used because it enables the energy density required in batteries intended to last for hundreds of miles per charge."

"Except cobalt is the main critical ingredient of lithium ion batteries..." Check - Cobalt gives lithium ion batteries the density they need to be batteries.

"...and it is in short supply, comes from politically unstable countries..." Check - Cobalt comes from the Congo.

"...and is bad for the environment..." Check - "and its production is considered quite polluting of the environment" from your article.

"Yes, except for the fact you need many orders of magnitude more fossil fuels than cobalt." Misleading statement - you will need orders of magnitude more materials for batteries if all vehicles and industries that use fossil fuels are converted to electrical power that requires battery for energy storage. So again trading one for the other.

Except cobalt is the main critical ingredient of lithium ion batteries and it is in short supply, comes from politically unstable countries, and is bad for the environment, likely worse than fossil fuels. Mining for any material contained in batteries is just as bad for the environment as coal mining. You are just trading one bad actor in fossil fuels for another one in the components for batteries. https://electrek.co/2016/11/01... https://www.washingtonpost.com...

That's nice. Massachusetts must figured out how to make lithium ion batteries less polluting than fossil fuel cars? Yeah, I think not. https://www.industryweek.com/t...

Exactly. If those positions are hard to fill from the US labor pool, the company should be willing to... train the US labor pool on how to do the job. In just about every H1B case, you could take someone from the US labor pool that has an entry level skill set (speaking to tech positions, such as a help desk, junior programmer, junior hardware engineer, etc...) and train them up to more complex topics through a combination of university and in-house training. With all the money and IP these companies generate, a lot of it through government grants and partnerships, how should it not be on them to educate the US public? That was the great thing about the technology boom in the 1950s and 1960s. Companies acquired one or two great minds in the field and then internally trained and developed staff to build up a workforce of people who went on to be great minds in their own right.

He didn't predict or model anything. The paper was published 3/16, two months into the US response to the virus. US states started quarantining the first week in March. US officials were already putting his so called recommendations in place and proving they don't work. Self-isolation has not stopped the spread of the virus because the whole theory of you can kill it off by preventing people from getting infected by it is false. In fact the opposite is now true, more and more people who have had it, are getting re-infected. As soon as that is determined to be the case in general, mass isolation is no longer an effective solution nor is it sustainable. You can't isolate the entire populate of a country indefinitely. You have to change tactics and isolate only those who are most at risk. But even then that is a short term solution. Ultimately all those measures are only to give vaccine developers time to develop a vaccine in enough quantity to prevent infections and re-infections. That's the only solution. This is a war and people die in wars. People need to grow a sack and realize we aren't going to be able to save everyone. It makes no sense to bankrupt the world and cause more issues (food shortages, conflict over scarce resources, failed governments) when that is the reality.

I am pretty sure the US has already done pretty much every extreme measure they can do, right up to quarantining in place. If they do nothing else, we have a slightly higher death toll than the average flu season and the country is virtually bankrupt from all the overspending. If they didn't do anything in the first place, we'd have a moderately higher than average death toll than the average flu season, we'd all still be living our lives as normal, and we'd have $2 Trillion less dollars in national debt.

Pretty much the same thing as every other day... Doing my remote programming gig, watching today's politicized nonsense on the talking head networks, getting outside and enjoying the nicer than usual weather. Best part, I don't have to do the once-a-month west coast travel to the client's office for the foreseeable future. Honestly, win-win. So please, keep up the #masshysteria that is affecting less than 0.002% of the world's population, it's working for me.

Bingo, you think maybe Covid-19 spreading on a Ballistic Missile Submarine might be a reason to have a classified briefing?! Trump haters are so blinded that they can't even think of common-sense scenarios that might require classification that would apply to administrations of either party.

Gruesome, no. That's called Pneumonia, which kills around 50,000 people a year in the US and has a mortality rate of 15%. Covid-19 by comparison has a mortality rate of 3%. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta... and https://ourworldindata.org/cor...

Clearly candor does not work, given the current run on the market. People who invest/divest based on fear shouldn't be allowed to trade on Wall St.

You went the conspiracy route. I just referred to the fact that there are obvious governmental level concerns that would necessitate a classified discussion.

Given all the past leaks and the fact Washington bureaucrats don't seem to be able to act professionally, I can't say I blame him. Obviously something more must be at play with this virus, given the actual symptoms are for the most part mild (read common-cold), unless you have very specific underlying issues. Certainly not worth the hype and over-reaction that it has been given, nor the trillions of dollars lost as a result.

Software ideology has nothing to do with ethics. As a developer, I need to know two things: 1) Is it secure? 2) Is it reliable? Bonus #3, is it free (as in beer)?

Doesn't change the fact that it is not free. There is a cost to do the delivery. Just because you didn't take cash out of pocket at the time of service, doesn't mean it was free. Somebody paid for it.