There’s only one way to be sure: nuke it from orbit.

Had a friend who used to put his super-workstation laptop in his backpack. It would randomly turn itself back on and get HOT in there at times, like firestarter hot.

Battery lore has been cargo-cult woo since the NiMH days… most of it feels like manufacturers saying “oh, I’m sorry you didn’t get our advertised life, you must have done something wrong.”

I don’t know why private companies don’t fund their own shit rather than steal from taxpayerS through NASA.

It’s not that they can’t fund their own: it’s “why would they, when they can use their wealth and influence to get it funded by taxpayers?” https://youtu.be/kTlhIQeBWHI?t=20

There’s all kinds of power and influence of people through the press is a very traditional kind of indirect power for people to wield. When I talk about money as power it definitely includes the power to influence how people think and vote and act without putting an actual gun to their heads. Twitter is the new TV and TV was the new radio and the radio was the new newspaper… All kinds of wealthy and powerful people in the past sought control of the press, not only for their own desires, but also as a bargaining chip with other people with power: “do this for me and I’ll make you look good on my platform…”

for some reason people STILL treat him with credulity.

They WANT to believe.

just about enriching himself. Of course that’s a big part of it.

Can’t make the big changes without big $$$ to make things happen.

Unfortunately, he looks like a delusional moron with the life experience and grasp on reality of a suburban 14 year old. So, a couple of good ideas in there, but absolute disconnect from the realpolitik necessary to effect true change.

a system to eliminate, not support and elevate the poor here

If you look at human population growth and resource consumption over the past 500 years, the curve can’t continue - we’ll need thousands of Earths within the next 1000 years, and Warp drive just isn’t ready yet.

If “being poor” means living like the bottom 20% of the U.S., then, yes, the poor must be eliminated somehow. Pesky thing about the poor, they still have children, often at higher than replacement rates. It’s good for happiness from relative circumstances: lots of people “born poor” can work their way into a better condition for them and their children, but it’s an unsustainable model. Just like capitalism in general.

That’s not money, that’s power. Money quits being money somewhere around a million dollars a year-ish, call it 100M lump sum. Above that, more money isn’t an abstract thing you buy goods, services and real-estate with, it’s power: the power to command other people to do your bidding.

Hugo Drax had it all figured out in Moonraker. We just need a higher natural resources per capita ratio, then it all works out easily.

It’s also not hard for the IRS leadership to direct their agents to skip all that time consuming audit and verification stuff and just start slapping seizures on everybody who owes more than $1000 in presumed tax liability.

I can imagine the IRS could start seizing bank accounts and other assets like they already do for tax violators, but if it got to be a crisis they’d step up their pace.

In today’s climate I can also imagine ICE coming to your door to kidnap whoever they can get their hands on, if you’re a tax violator who posts the wrong kinds of messages on the internet (including brown skinned selfies.)

A really small house can hold 50 gallons of diesel and a generator, be towed to a filling station, and follow you thousands of miles…

If you want a 200 mile round-trip limited EV that you always charge at home, you can buy those today from all kinds of sellers.

He needs an excuse to rage quit.

It’s so sad, because we could make really great shitbox econo cars now. China, Japan and India are doing it, meanwhile in the U.S. we’re needing side-step assistance to climb into our tower-viewing position $80K+ ROADMASTER trucks and SUVs.

Bonus: you can always circle back and pick up the recharge pack, and if you put solar cells on top it can trickle in a (tiny) extra charge when you’re away. More practical: plug it into the grid for slow charging of your big batteries while you zip around town in your lightweight configuration.

. I just don’t understand why they need all that.

Power sells, they can give that insane 0-60 sprint for very low cost, so it gets people to buy their product instead of a 6 liter V8.

Put the big battery pack (and maybe an ICE powered generator + fuel) on a trailer for cruising, then have a “ditch trailer and escape” button for that 20 mile sprint at the end of the trip.

Our IT department and leadership are more schizophrenic than usual around AI. Top leadership wants it bad, pushing big initiatives. Risk management layer, predictably, is more cautious - requiring analysis and approvals and so forth - this is driven into IT with things like redirects from open internet AI services to internally hosted alternatives (sensible), but the internal services aren’t completely up-to-speed with tools like Cursor. So, I have approval for Cursor, and IT is helping me make it work around their filters, but then again - once in a while the Cursor software magically uninstalls itself overnight. Luckily, the work in progress is still there and when I re-install Cursor it picks up where it left off.

We clearly have conflicting interests at work behind our company computers.

If you ask an AI agent (like the one on Google search) how to disable the prompt dialogue it will usually tell you something that works. This is actually nothing new, back in Windows ME days I spent 8 hours with search engines figuring out how to de-feature Windows ME until it worked like Windows 98SE, that was actually a pretty good computer/OS for the day - after I turned off all the ME garbage.