thinkcontext

That's still a science project, they are piloting zapping a small hole to 100m. Very uncertain whether it will amount to anything.

You brought the conversation in a circle, since the point of this new technology is the geology you speak of is rare.

After the bombardment by Israel last year Russia sent a ton of Manpads, so they are certainly available. We've seen a very close call by an fa18 from a manpads. It's likely that Iran has passive sensor networks that they can use to spot patterns and provide forewarning to manpads teams.

I think you're right about stealth not being quite the game changer that it was. The Houthis were able to give f35s some close calls over Yemen last year. They're of course armed and trained by Iran, so we would expect to see some hits.

They are thinking on a longer timeline than a month. They kept some anti-air missiles in reserve for this phase of the war, where they aren't trying to defend Iran's airspace. They just need to hide and wait for opportunities to occasionally hurt the US, Israel and the other Gulf states.

> F-117 Nighthawk

Recall that the Serbs shot down a Nighthawk when they were in a similar situation to Iran. They kept some good AA missiles in reserve and used a system of spotters and just waited for an opportunity. Its likely that similar tactics were used by Iran.

Also recall that the Houthis, armed and trained by Iran, gave F35s some close calls over Yemen.

https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses...

They were largely being used for maritime patrol against fast boats. I saw a newsblurb a couple days ago that more were being sent to the region.

> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.

Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.

https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses...

> But as API calls get cheaper, it becomes more realistic to use them for completely automated workflows against data-sets

Seems like a huge waste of money and electricity for processes that can be implemented as a traditional deterministic program. One would hope that tools would identify recurrent jobs that can be turned into simple scripts.

You are wrong, the article discusses this in detail.

I won't disagree that Germany's energy transition has been badly managed. However, after many years of needing subsidies in the last few years the economic case for solar + storage has changed. The most vivid example I've seen if that is Pakistan. They are a poor country with no subsidies and had a huge explosion of solar without the government even being aware at first. It's been so dramatic that they've had to cancel scheduled tanker deliveries of LNG because they had no place to put it.

The energy transition is a decades long project. Germany started early in order to bring costs down which took time. You should consider reexamining the economics

The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce.

Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.

I'm reminded of during the Iraq occupation how Dick Cheney scolded the media for not saying how great things were going and said how much he liked Fox's coverage. And how not long after it was no longer possible to deny that things had gone terribly wrong and things weren't actually so rosy.

If I was a SpaceX investor I'd be considering litigation. Saying the core product has to be rebuilt right after it gets bought by SpaceX?! Maybe the SpaceX investors would have liked some diligence about that before purchase but looks like someone had a conflict of interest about that.

Yes, the white genocide and mechahitler episodes have suppressed adoption.

Wow, so many failures of the legal system. While the incompetent/malicious/lazy investigators that used the facial recognition and only that are obviously at major fault, I'd actually put larger blame on the judge that signed the arrest warrant. They are supposed to be a check on such incompetent/malicious/lazy-ness not just a rubber stamp. Unfortunately there's really no recourse against incompetent/malicious/lazy judges.

Of course this would have been bad enough if this had happened where she lived but the holding for 5 months adds a whole 'nother level of insight into brokeness of the legal system. I'd be interested in hearing more about why that happened. Was it just a matter of that happens sometimes if you have a public defender?

Texas is an interesting example because they allowed true unregulated rates for residential consumers. Consumers liked getting lower rates until that winter storm a few years ago had bills for some in the $thousands. Then they didn't like the free market so much.

Agreed, it's a big sovereignty issue. Once a solar panel is installed it keeps working for 20+ years. It doesn't get cut off if there's a political problem that interrupts supply.

> Blame fully the people who saw all this and voted for him twice

Thrice actually

I wonder if the current war will significantly accelerate the roll out of non-fossil energy. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for a few more weeks there's going to be significant pain, not just for energy but things like fertilizer etc. Once you deploy a solar panel it works for 20+ years, conflict doesn't cut you off from energy.

The $130B is only part of the economic costs of the tariffs. Many companies and people changed their buying behavior, either paying more to a domestic company or maybe a company in a country with a lower tariff rate or changed their behavior to not require an item all together. We've also heard about small companies that have gone out of business.

I'm not an economist but I assume economists are writing papers about this kind of thing to estimate the effects.

How do you explain the reports of Robotaxis running into fixed objects? If what you are saying is true that shouldn't be able to happen.

https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...

> and the fact that FSD works so well without it proves that it isn't required

The reports that Tesla submits on Austin Robotaxis include several of them hitting fixed objects. This is the same behavior that has been reported on for prior versions of their software of Teslas not seeing objects, including for the incident for which they had a $250M verdict against them reaffirmed this past week. That this is occurring in an extensively mapped environment and with a safety driver on board leads me to the opposite conclusion that you have reached.

Probably $Bs. Around 100 flights per day from there, so there would be dozens of planes on the ground.

The problem you are encountering is how you are discussing superconductors. If you want to convince people that they are relevant you should explain how they would be used. You haven't done that at all, you just keep repeating "superconductors".

And it would be helpful if you showed some uses of superconductors in space similar to what you propose and not some vague proposal for research that would take decades to realize. I'm not familiar with any use of them relevant to this application and I take the other people responding to you are not either.

A puzzling statement, could you explain? Most of their revenue now comes Starlink which is mostly private clients. Also it's trivial to look at their launch history and see they have plenty of private clients. For sure the USG is their most important client but "entirely" is flat out wrong.

There's reason to suspect that the one's leaving are more likely to be top performers. First, top performers are the most likely to be able to find another job easily so they would take the voluntary buyout or just leave when things get crazy. Also, some of the DOGE cuts targeted probationary employees which include those that have recently been promoted or recently hired, both are classes of employee that the department explicitly wanted to keep.

I admit I thought the fiascos that the 2 AP1000 projects were would forever kill the design in the US. But it now looks like the AI craze will give it another shot.

The largest such effort is China's South - North Water Transfer Project, look into that if you are interested in the subject. Its unbelievably gigantic in scale, yet the amount of water moved is relatively modest compared to the amount of consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...

California is also an enormous plumbing project, much has been written on it.

Nuscale certainly hasn't covered themselves in glory.

Isn't the inland ban due to water scarcity? I thought the plan was to deploy Gen IV helium cooled reactors which don't need that amount of water.