mayama

To discuss more about future, I sometimes think about Taiwan and how they are not pursuing nukes at all costs as existential threat. Nothing else could guarantee their independence than nukes and they should make nukes even at the cost of country bankruptcy if they are serious. I think they probably are not really serious about invasion. They tried it last time and some opposition party exposed the secret to US.

That massive corruption purge is mainly Xi purging rival factions like Shangai and Jiang. Sure, it also targeted corrupt officials, but main target is rival factions in consolidating Xi grip on power. There isn't lot of taboo about corruption if you align with the correct faction.

> What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)?

Soviets had more hardcore ideologues at helm most of the times until SU dissolution. They hardly allowed their ideology to be diluted without challenge, which made plans infeasible without real time feedback. China's Mao era was somewhat similar to that. After Mao, during fight between Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, realistic faction came on top with famous Deng saying "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice". Also China does experimentation at province and city level, with people succeeding promoting to national level, containing pitfalls of bad policy.

F35 is networked heavily, for its sensor fusion and various abilities. It has probably 25 million LOC and is heavily software dependent. It should be viewed somewhat as a closed software product that needs heavy vendor support right from mission planning.

> Our ability to have the world's de facto reserve currency and hence our ability to sustain debt loads way in excess of usual is largely dependent on the US being the world's cop and sole superpower.

Dollar status as reserve currency started unravelling quite some time ago. It started with China's started becoming world's factory, more so after they got in to WTO and started using it to their advantage. My belief is that wallstreet believed that they could influence or coerce Chinese leadership into opening up Chinese economy and profit from that, all that G2 talk. China after 2008 crisis with ascension of Xi, belt road, challenges to foreign companies etc. acted completely against wallstreet expectations. Now, America can either try splitting world economy and be sole power in their sphere or start working towards multi polar world.

To display increasingly prevalent chrome-only web apps, they need new features. Static html style websites should work with old browsers.

Or it could be part of general trend of splitting off internet and creating a firewalled chinese internet. PRC is explicitly favoring this outcome for decades now with explicit incentives via legal, financial and social routes.

It has to do with govt subsidy policy on making EVs that ended couple of years ago. Before that, every company with cash and even local govts entered EV manufacturing to avail the subsidies. Even when their core competency has nothing to do with EV manufacturing and even manufacturing anything. Same reason, some companies filled dumping yards with bogus "sold EVs", since repairing and keeping quality when being used will cost them more instead of making some substandard EV and generating fake sales cert.

Similar policy PRC used when building up solar and battery industries. Subsidise a hundred companies, and few will come out as winners. Reportedly with real estate issues and semi trade war economy is facing headwinds and PRC is scaling down subsidies.

CATL and BYD have more than 50% share of world's battery manufacturing capacity. And the trend is upwards. Same reason china EVs are edging out Telsa and EU EVs out in international market, where LFP is becoming more common.

Fission is pathway to nukes, so every nation with intention of building nukes invests in fission regardless of commercial viability. Fusion on the other hand is pure r&d project and may give bragging rights if a country gets it first. So even in China it is not priority.

> Indian private sector corporations were excluded from the sanctions regime.

Most blacklists are regarding product codes. No separate carve out for pvt companies. Sure after 123 agreement, most restrictions are being negotiated and lifted slowly and India is not being added to new blacklists. But, that is recent phenomenon.

India is on various blacklists of various western govt for military or advanced tech thoroughout cold war and even until recently. Pentium chips were denied even as late as 90s. Sanctions on Indian started to ease after 123 agreement, but India is still on US entity list restriction.

There is difference though, as most major Indian companies hardly invest in R&D and are happy to just keep using licensed IP from west. Indian companies, and general public, have very little risk appetite.

To be specific it's airplane engines, 5th gen turbofan engines. China started building COMAC airplanes too, probably with questionable maintenance and serviceability story, that they can push with govt airlines. They are still having trouble with modern turbofan engines though.

Offriver closed loop pumped hydro just needs two football size fields hundreds of meter apart in elevation. Most continents have plenty of suitable locations for PHS, though they are distributed unevenly. According to the paper, there are 600k feasible locations for PHS world wide, or capacity to store 70% of global energy demand in 2017.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14555-y

Pumped hydro storage is approximately cost competitive with new nuclear. It depends on ease of incentives, building permits and finance mechanisms available for building new hydro vs nuclear. Estimated LCOE of new hydro in India for example is Rs9/kwh(~$100/Mwh) which is comparable to new nuclear estimates of $55-90/Mwh. China is also building pumped hydro at good pace. And pumped hydro doesn't have to fight entrenched anti-nuclear lobby while doing it.

US and EU storage incentives encourage battery storage schemes over pumped hydro though. They either expect cost of battery storage to become less than pumped hydro shortly, or the lack of construction firms lobbying for pumped hydro is making battery the prominent storage option.

https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/t...

If you have mpv or avconv/ffmpeg based video player, you can play and seek the in the gif video file. You can use `mpv http-gif-url` to play it directly.

It is more of installers/maintainers not interested in fixing the chargers. They would already have information about how much is being payed for each charger and from that would know some charger is broken.

The issue is maintaining already installed chargers. Lot of chargers are either physically broken or rated for low charging rate because something inside is broken. And no one fixing it in months. Changing the connector won't fix the issue when chargers are not fixed for months on end.

Even with same lock file, modules that depend on native compilations will have problem with changing c compilers, libraries etc. Some libraries are fixed to minor version of node or node-gyp, so they won't compile with newer node. I had run into these issues both in both python and nodejs.

HVDC will handle moving energy on continental scales. China makes power in northwest inner parts and moves it thousands of kms to the coast for consumption.

Wasn't the emission requirements raised for trucks too? How is it only affecting small vehicles?

Germany is digging up coal and increasing coal power production short term. They have longer term plans to go green, but most of those are highly optimistic.

Can't they just trace back the phone caller id, and file charges for bogus calls? It's not clear in the article, is it spoofed or overseas numbers making the calls? Would 911 service prioritise calls without verified caller id to the level of sending armed swat teams?

ISRO has plans for heavy lifter with reusability, latest iteration of design named ULV. That is waiting on completion of semi-cryo engine they are developing (SCE-200), which is supposed to by complete by early 2010s, but got delayed. With no further updates on the status of SCE-200 after the launch of HSP. With ISRO limited funding and personnel, RLV and ULV took back stage after HSP program went into high gear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Launch_Vehicle

Winged body is supposed to be second stage, sitting vertically on the rocket which lifts the whole rocket. Winged body cross section is almost circular that should match the lifting rocket, reducing the drag considerably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_Flight_Experiment#/...

This winged RLV, vertical landing launchers etc. are research programs that are generally under funded low priority programs. With the launch of India's human spaceflight program, RLV went even further down or priority list. I don't expect anything to come out of this in this decade, until after HSP program launches.

Is wifi calling even supported in your phone? Some carriers disable it.

There are alternatives for grid storage that are being deployed right now. Sodium or Flow batteries, CAES and underground pumped hydro. As lithium prices increase, alternative technologies will be deployed in scale and come down in cost.

There is promising process to burn biomass a low oxygen environments producing biochar(black carbon residue) without releasing CO2. This process is still in testing stages and is not deployed at scale with unclear scaling and costs.

https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/carbon-removal/fact-she...

Nuclear requires less red tape, engineering & construction workers, manufacturing scale among others. UK or west is worse in all these factors. Anti nuclear lobby causes lot of red tape which adds to the cost. Nuclear engineering is not cool or not even being taught in most univs in west and no workers with knowhow after nuclear industry shut down in 80s. To bring up people with knowhow and skills, it would take almost a decade of constant effort. Building first plant costs a lot, second a little less etc. India and China are building nuclear plants in fleet mode, which amortises costs and keep worker pool alive.

Note that energy in the case of ICF is produced instantaneously. There is no approach to capture this energy in production at this moment. Capturing that enery is still ongoing research topic.