Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.
It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.
Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.
I assume his point is that calling Manchin or Sinema “liberal” isn’t super accurate.
Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.
Edit: The paper is called
Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.
Crosswords have clues going across and down.
The words just use common letters so they’re things puzzle creators wish were real words. They’re not currently words.
Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.
The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.
Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.
That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.
It’s not that there’s anything unnatural about water. It’s just not a remedy for anything but dehydration.
Oh, yeah.
If your point is that ICE car batteries have problems in the cold, so cold batteries is a problem for everyone and worse for ICE cars, that’s fair.
If your point is that ICE car batteries suck therefore EVs suck, that’s not really valid logic.
Lead-acid batteries aren’t lithium ion? And the car starter battery isn’t equivalent to that of an EV?
You might as well say that I have trouble starting my gas weed wacker, therefore cars are hard to start.
The main problem is just that getting a product from a one-off in a lab to a cost-competitive mass-market product is hard and can take a lot of time, to say the least.
For example, Don Sadoway initially published about a molten metal battery in 2009. He gave a Ted talk in 2012. They’ve run into assorted setbacks along the way and are apparently just starting to deploy the first commercial test systems this year.
It’s less that these breakthroughs are bullshit, and more that commercializing these things is hard. The articles about the breakthroughs are often bullshit, though, or at least way too rosy.
He wasn’t perfect, sure. But I think you’re simultaneously giving him too much and too little credit.
Presidents are figureheads. They get blamed for a lot of trailing indicators they have little control over, and are limited by the particular congresses they have to deal with.
Recently, for example, Biden was pretty limited by the fact that any climate legislation has to get voted on by Joe Manchin.
Obama’s policies were impacted by what he thought he could pass.
Look at healthcare, for example. Obama was 32 when universal healthcare blew up pretty spectacularly in Clinton’s first year in office. Insurance companies, in particular, spent tens of millions on very successful FUD ad campaigns. Unions were against it, because they often negotiate for “cadillac plans”. Much like how Trump moved on after ‘repeal and replace’ failed dramatically, Clinton did as well.
Obamacare had the advantage that it wasn’t an existential threat to the insurance industry. Obamacare was deliberately something Obama thought he could successfully pass, while still being an incremental improvement. And, of course, it did actually pass.
Could Obama have passed Medicare for all instead, or would we have just seen a repeat of Clinton’s failure? Honestly, it’s impossible to know for sure.
Nope. The idea in no till is just adding stuff to the top and letting worms and roots handle the tilling.
I’ve had good luck just dumping a foot or two of finished compost on the ground and growing in it.
Another solid no-till approach is sheet mulching. You put down a layer of cardboard (to kill weeds), then layers of carbon and nitrogen like straw and kitchen scraps. Wait a few months, then plant. So you could do that in the late summer or fall to prepare a site for spring planting.
A lot of these things depend on location, though. Something that works great in Pennsylvania might not work as well in Utah.
It’s partly about it being preventable, but mostly about it being expected.
The expected outcome of drunk driving or speeding through crosswalks is hitting someone. It’s preventable by not driving drunk or not speeding.
A careful driver in the Netherlands killing a cyclist in a city center on a 20mph road is unexpected and fairly surprising - that would be a true accident. A drunk driver hitting someone on an American stroad is depressingly normal. It’s hard to call it an accident.
Colloquially, accidents are random events without intention or fault.
That’s why there’s a push to use neutral terms like “crash” that don’t imply that the “accident” was just a random accidental mistake.
And fault is often a bit of a misnomer. Many crashes are the result of bad design, but the courts would never say “this pedestrian fatality here is 40% the fault of whichever insane engineer put the library parking lot across a 4-lane road from the library but refused to put a crosswalk there or implement any sort of traffic calming because that would inconvenience drivers”.
It doesn’t have to be on purpose. Accident implies that something was just a freak occurrence beyond anyone’s control. You can’t fix accidents. You can fix crashes.
If you’re driving negligently - drunk driving, not paying attention, etc then it’s not an accident.
If it’s due to bad road design, then it’s not an accident.
Ish.
There’s ye as in “hear ye, hear ye”. That’s a y. It’s an inflected form of you, much as they had both thee and thou.
Then there’s writing þe as ye.
7 million is “retiring doctor” or “retiring Google engineer” rich.
It’s generally considered safe to withdraw 4% of your nest egg the first year, and adjust that for inflation moving forwards. $7 million can sustain a $280k/year retirement. That’s certainly rich, but there’s a world of difference between that and a billionaire. A billionaire can safely spend $40 million a year.
I’m not sure that it does. All the articles I can find word it as something like “has a range of 710 kilometers (441 miles) on a sunny day.”, without actually explaining it. I’m assuming that’s going from 100% charge to 0% charge, plus all the range gained by charging during the day.
They don’t actually say anywhere I can find how quickly it charges.
Also, looking up some other articles about it, apparently there’s a bunch of extra fold-out solar panels in the trunk
If you wanted maximum range, you’d start before dawn, drive most of your battery away, park somewhere all day to use that solar awning for all its worth, then continue driving at dusk.
It’s not that it’s far-fetched. It’s just impractical. Solar panels don’t really generate that much power per square foot. Charging a car with just the roof can take days.
One model of solar roofed electric car on the market recharges ~20 miles per day with the roof.
Charging stations are a way better idea for road trips in electric cars, as is plugging the car in overnight. This is great for a remote hermit, but more interesting for the hack value than a practical option.
If that’s something that regularly happens in the US, do you have any examples from the last decade, instead of three examples from 55-60 years ago?