bluGill

Right, retraining often means a major switch. I don't want to go back to college either...

Don't confuse iron weapons with steel. Steel was much better than bronze, but they didn't know how to make steel and so examples were rare. (probably not unknown, making iron weapons does produce a small amount of steel and if you're careful you can separate that out and after a thousand or so iron swords you can make one steel sword. I've seen it suggested that this is where the stories of a legendary weapon comes from - probably not something we could ever know for sure.)

There are many companies that have data centers. They are conceptually easy to build. An ASIC is difficult enough that if you make one someone will leapfrog you while you are still making it (at least so far), though once you have one your costs will be enough lower than the competition that you can perhaps undercut them.

Slight correction, the other compiler/front end writers more or less read the white paper and said "that is what we thought it would be like and thus why we didn't implement it".

Imagine telling your competitors not to copy some feature you have and them listening!

The only data I can find ignores the majority of horses today - recreational riders. If you can find a better citation I'd stand corrected, but everything I can find counts race horses and horses used for farming.

The cities Waymo serves are the exception even in the US, and worldwide it is even more an exception.

Some skilled workers retrained. Many of them refused to learn.

Don't be the old dog who can't learn new tricks.

Waymo still doesn't serve my city. We get too much snow/ice in winter and so they are slow to expand here.

There are more horses today than ever... Oxen got the short end of the deal - almost nobody uses oxen even though historically they were the backbone labor of the farm, while the horse was for the right.

They are more and more adopting modern technology. And where they haven't directly they have found ways to use it and be just as dependent while appearing to not. Go visit one and you discover they want to borrow your phone to buy things from Amazon...

Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.

There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.

Maybe where you live, but where I live the temperature outside is bad for batteries.

Though what is "inside" is debatable. My car can sit outside because it has the batteries in a case that is climate controlled when needed, and so the batteries count as inside even though they are in a car that is outside.

Large production runs (think cars) the tooling is sold to a third party to make spare parts. However that third party will watch what sells and scrape the tooling when sales are not large enough to justify keeping it around. Things that never break have the tooling scrapped early. Things that collectors break the tooling stays around - if it wears out they make replacement tooling.

The SR-71 was not made in large enough numbers to get the above treatment. If the government wants spare parts they need to pay to keep that tooling around.

> The skills can be acquired by new people.

They can be. However it will be expensive to train them. (starting with figuring out what training is needed - probably a lot of trial an error because not all of this was written down) Also you will need to pay people to get this training - they won't pay for it themselves since it is unlikely to be a useful job anywhere else anymore so they have better investments in their time/money.

Generators are generally used outside. There are some rated for use inside, but they also have strict regulations on how that is done. (there are also some used inside but they will kill someone soon)

Data collection is very useful and valuable to you when done right. We need to ensure the data isn't abused, but that doesn't mean data collection is bad when the data is used correctly.

The utility is well aware that power outages happen and make their customers mad. They want to solve them, but they also know cost matters and so that takes many ways to solve power outages out. Data used correctly from systems like this make power more reliable and it can be cost effective. By giving the utility access to this data they can better serve everybody.

Again, the key is that the data is used to serve everybody and not used for any of the abuses it can also be used for.

Isn't the Tesla pack just a bunch of 18650 (or some similar cell)?

I wouldn't expect the home owner to repair them. However they should be repairable by someone with training in how to diagnose and replace failed cells. (which mostly means a battery welder and some safety systems)

lead-acid does not like deep discharge. Also a UPS is typically going to have maintenance free batteries which don't last as long. Many UPSes don't have good chargers and will overcharge your batteries.

You can get decades our of a proper lead-acid battery, but only if you correctly account for all those factors. Start with batteries that you add water regularly (I'm not sure if this is monthly or yearly). Then make sure you have more than enough so that even in the worst case power outage they finish at 30% charge (meaning most don't get close to 50% discharge - the 30% an educated guess but needs more research for your conditions since this needs to be a rare event, the more often you get the worst case outage the more charge needs to remain after). Finally make sure you have a good chargers - modern "battery tender" (a brand name - there are others) makes a big difference.

Lead-acid has been used in major large installation and have a long history of lasting for 20 years when treated properly.

Lithium batteries are still new enough that we don't have a history. We have educated guesses, but those guesses tend to be conservative. Maybe they will turn out to last just as long or even longer. Only time will tell if they are as good or not. However we also know you can abuse lithium batteries and get much worse life. (the Nissan Leaf is famous for significantly worse capacity at 8 years)

There are too many variables to make a simple statement. Lead-acid is a lot cheaper and we know how to recycle it. We also have a long proven history of lead acid lasting for decades in ideal conditions (which a house battery is more likely to hit than in a car).

However lead-acid does not like deep discharge so to get max life you will be using much less than the full discharge cycle 80%-100%, and so the lifecycle costs are very different. In some cases lead-acid can be more cost effective if you manage it well, but I would expect lithium to be cheaper for the typical case.

That is lead acid means your real goal is a cheap home backup, which you have to ride out multi-day power outages, and as a secondary you will sell some power to the grid, but you are not trying to make money doing this. By contrast I would expect lithium to make sense if your primary goal is to make money (or at least pay for your home backup system that can ride out a couple hours of outage but not days). The storage to ride out days could work now, but long term as your neighbors buy the system eventually there isn't the need for that much storage and someone gets limited.

Ideally for people with a battery they would take charge to manage your battery between 50%-80% full, paying you for anything you send to the grid. 36x a year means major peak events only (one assumes with a limit of 36 they will try to be under that just in case the last day of the year has a problem). However a 50-80% policy is nice to batteries and means they can use it for even tiny local peak events. Ideally there would be enough home batteries that between all the renewables (Parts of NC are part of the TVA with plenty of hydro) they go months between using a fossil fuel plant.

I don't know what the modern rules are. I first encountered these machines in the mid-1990s when the obvious expectation is they are not connected to any form of network and you wouldn't be able to reconcile it now with the USPS as required a network connection then it should be trivial to require a unique barcode for everything and they can verify the barcode really exists but I suspect they haven't obviously did all the old machines that aren't network connected and so there's no way to verify

There are lots of ways to send packages. Stamps are used for letters, but a package tends to have various restrictions and so they get a shipping label which is supposed to be proof that you paid the correct postage without having to find the correct stamps which would be really annoying.

Business that ship a lot (which is probably most packages) don't go to the post office for each shipment. Instead they buy machines/printers/software/labels which allows them to print off the correct label, and also combines all the money into something they handle the money in one larger transaction. There are lots of options in the above for different needs, if you a shipping a package even once a week you should look into them - often you get a discount for something that is easy for you to do (sorting outgoing mail by zip code saves them a lot of money and so they will pass that on to you)

Because there are so many options you can find one option and duplicate it easily enough and it will take them a while to catch it.

Most countries when presented with evidence that someone who lives there did something criminal will arrest and turn the criminal over to the country the crime was committed in. Sometimes they will put some stipulation in (Europe commonly won't turn a murderer over until the country promises not to seek the death penalty for example), but in general criminals are turned over all the time. In general a country doesn't want criminals living there even if the crime was done elsewhere and so they won't protect their own who commit a crime.

I don't know Pakistan's polices, but I would expect they would turn the criminal over to the US.

So? My comment was never about what things look like, it is about reality.

That is an interesting question.

The other poster said "to distract from some other issue".

There are various people who point out that winning as most define it was never the objective in the first place, and the US doesn't care.

After WWII England (and to a lesser extent France) decided they didn't want to pay to be the world super power anymore. The US took over that roll, but to appease those who don't like that the US is willing to appear as a fumbling idiot despite meeting their objectives.

There are probably other reads, those are just the 3 I can think of right now.

> US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated on September 27 that between 15 and 22 million barrels of oil currently pass through the strait daily, compared to the 20 million barrels of oil that passed through the strait daily before the war.

> The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy claimed that Iran has targeted 19 vessels that have attempted to transit the strait since September 25, though Iranian media provided no evidence to substantiate these claims.

From https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat.... Now I realize that both Scott Bessent and the ISW are biased sources. However they still are painting a picture of the strait mostly reopened.

They do fix potholes. However new ones happen all the time so there are always plenty to find with a little working.

At least where I live potholes are the natural result of freeze-thaws cycles.

Distance is a factor. I do not know what they were measuring (the main power plant was about 1000km away, but I don't know if they counted that or if that was ignored because someone else owned those lines). They were a fairly rural utility with most of the area belonging to farmers (but they do have a couple suburbs and a few small towns).

I don't know the real details, but my educated guess is they raised the voltage, and also they used 3x as many wires (running 3 phase past every house even though almost everybody only used 1 phase). That is I can visually see their insulators on the power posts are larger than neighboring utilities which allows for higher voltage (but may or may not mean higher voltages were used). Likewise I can see the 3 lines on each power pole while neighboring utilities only used one. It is hard to tell from the ground but I suspect they used thicker wires as well.

Again, because the US has chosen not to do anymore.

The US's objectives have rarely including a traditional win, so that isn't a useful think to ask about.

I don't know where your US rail system comparison comes from, but the US rail system is not stuck in the 1950s, the US rail system is the best in the world and has innovated. You might be thinking about passenger rail, but that is small subset of rail and not useful for most US needs.

Pan American highway or Pan American - these are feel good ideas of questionable benefit. They would sound good on paper, but they would not be useful for much: flying is faster (and probably cheaper) for things that need speed, while the nearby ocean is much cheaper for things that don't need speed.