They pale in comparison to what’s happening somewhere like Paris.

Protests and disruption in Minnesota did a lot at the beginning of this year. There were many violent clashes coming out of those protests. Two protestors were killed, dozens were permanently injured or disabled, hundreds more were hospitalized, and thousands were arrested. And the result of those protests were the firing of the senior official in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, several other immigration officials, and a major pullback of operations, an end to that style of aggressive immigration enforcement operations.

Meanwhile, other action included legal work that got literally thousands of arrestees released and the resignation of many of the prosecutors brought on to try to investigate and prosecute fraud in the Somali American community, a racially targeted and legally unsupported use of law enforcement resources.

The whole operation was also a disaster for the popularity of the ruling party, and we’ll see in the next 16 hours or so just how badly this costs them in the actual power structures of our governments.

To be clear, women’s work before World War II was more than just the dishes. If you look at the guidebooks published for housewives back then, you’ll see that they were expected to have quite a few skills that most households now generally outsourc to external businesses:

• Feeding the family. This was more than just cooking. They were expected to process foods from a much less processed state (much more butchery of meats and cleaning and processing of vegetable products, dairy products, baked goods), and then preserve foods for out-of-season consumption (pickling, preserving in jams/jellies, home canning, drying, and in some cultures smoking). Much of this work is now done by the industrial food processing industry so that we can buy cans or jars or boxes of the stuff that’s already processed or partially processed. Even our fresh foods have been cleaned and sorted and trimmed to mainly just the edible parts.
• Making and maintaining textiles. We see bits of this surviving into knitting and crocheting as hobbies, but back before the rise of cheap apparel it was important to be able to clean and repair clothes that we’d now just take to our local dry cleaner.
• Maintaining the house itself. Home improvement is masculine coded today, but a lot of the stuff that qualifies as home maintenance was traditionally the work of a homemaker. Plus things like heating the house required active involvement of keeping fires burning and fuel on hand.
• Making household consumables. Homemakers were making their own soap, their own candles, and all sorts of little tools.

The economic shifts that come from women leaving the home for the paid workforce are all over, and some of them are pretty pronounced. But it’s important to remember that women worked hard before they ever got paid for it. Life was toil.

Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MWhr? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn’t need to be stored for later.

Which graph? I linked to a PDF with a ton of graphs.

It’s because fuel is such an insignificant percentage of the overall cost of building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power. Increasing the complexity of the reactor in order to make the fuel use more efficient is basically a nonstarter, economically.

Oh, I agree.

I was a big, big nuclear proponent 20 years ago. But seeing how Vogtle and VC Summer played out, and how that “cheaper” and more “scalable” AP1000 design put Westinghouse into bankruptcy, basically turned me off from the economics of nuclear power.

Oh, and because of how utility generation is paid for, ratepayers in Georgia will be paying for the Vogtle construction and cost overruns in their electric bills for the next 75 years, as the nuclear plant is shielded from competition by price regulators (state Public Utilities Commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), so even if newer and better technology comes online, customers in 2080 will still be paying for 2020 technology.

The technology is still neat but I don’t believe there’s an economic future for civilian nuclear power generation. Not anymore.

Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it’s projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.

In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won’t run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.

Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.

Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we’d rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.

Little bit longer than 27 hours. He died after 27 hours, and the authorities never figured out a practical way to retrieve his remains, so he’s been there for 16 years and counting.

Maybe you’re not dreaming big enough on what makes ideal conditions. The fraudulent Nikola company managed to film a semi “driving” a few km without a powertrain, by just letting it roll downhill. I bet there’s a place that has a high enough altitude and smooth enough roads for a long downhill descent where 600km on a 300km battery is possible.

Makes me wonder about the wheel’s rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that’s all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).

Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.

Looks cool, though, I guess.

The hubless wheel is on their current models. It’s basically their signature differentiator.

There’s reason to be skeptical of the company and its claims as a whole, but at least that particular feature has shipped and has been test driven by reviewers:

https://thepack.news/11000-km-in-2-months-marc-travels-rides-the-verge-ts-across-europe/

My “We’re totally different from Enron” accounting report has a lot of investors asking questions answered by the report.

Or maybe use excess power to electrolyze water for fuel cell use later?

Hydrogen storage presents a lot of challenges, because it tends to leak at normal temperatures found on Earth. So we either tolerate a lot of loss during storage, or we use lots of energy chilling it to a temperature where it won’t easily escape.

Yeah, seems like someone could pass the test by only knowing pokemon, which isn’t what we’d want in testing people on their drug knowledge.

Actually, I suppose a name being used for a drug or a Pokémon precludes it from being used for the other, so it is a very shared issue, lol.

Theoretically, unrelated trademarks can have the exact same name in different fields, owned by completely different owners, but that generally only applies to trademarks that are regular words that are already in use: Apple Computer versus Apple Music (which the Beatles owned and ended up selling to Apple Computer), Monster Energy Drink versus Monster Cable versus Monster Jobs, Dove soap versus Dove chocolate, etc.

Still, the law looks to likelihood of customer confusion, and maybe it would be too confusing to have a Pokemon named Ozempic.

Yeah, circumcision is near universal in Muslim-majority countries:

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

Allah = God (Islamic)

Are you under the impression that Muslims don’t circumcize? In many Muslim societies, they make sure the boys are old enough to remember the mutilation, with circumcision around the age of 7.

The average cost of a hospital stay in a U.S. hospital is about $3,000 per day, but it varies significantly by location. So long stays like yours might cost between $250,000 and $500,000.

If your insurance covers it (and about 92% of Americans have health insurance), you’d be looking at your annual out of pocket max, which the law caps at $18,000 for family plans or $9,000 for individual plans, but which most people on employer sponsored plans (around 60% of Americans) have out of pocket maxes around $4,000 to $5,000. Source

So for most Americans, your hospital stay would’ve probably cost the individual patient about $5,000. Insurance would’ve paid another $350,000.

But for some Americans, they’d be looking at a $360,000 bill and then would just file bankruptcy, start over with close to a net worth of zero, at least for non-exempt assets (people generally get to keep their homes, cars, and retirement accounts in bankruptcy so it won’t actually be starting from zero if you’re well into a middle age in the middle class).

Or worse, the hospital would realize they’re not getting paid, and then would find a reason to kick you out as soon as you’re stabilized. They have to keep you alive even when you can’t pay, but don’t have to treat you beyond that for free.

Let’s take home appliances. Imagine you are a person who knows how to diagnose and repair microwaves. You keep all the most common parts for the most common brands in your warehouse. You bring them with you based on the customer’s description of what is wrong, and you’re prepared to efficiently apply to correct repair as soon as you’re confident in your diagnosis.

Your typical job looks like this:

• Get a call, get all the billing information (15 minutes).
• Drive out to the person’s home (30 minutes).
• Talk to the customer (15 minutes).
• Unscrew and disassemble the access panels to the appliance itself (15 minutes).
• Diagnose and test things to make sure your initial hunch is correct (15 minutes).
• Remove and replace the faulty part (15 minutes).
• Put everything back where it belongs (15 minutes).
• Drive back to your office (30 minutes).

There, that’s 2.5 hours of your time to do a 15-minute task of installing a part. At the factory, a much less skilled person (who doesn’t need to know how to diagnose different models, or manage a business) could have installed 10 of those in the same amount of time. Maybe more, because they wouldn’t have had to remove an old one.

Most manufacturing is like this. Assembly is easy. Repair is hard. So repair of heavy/bulky/stationary things is always going to be very expensive. It may be more economical to tow the thing to a central place to be repaired, so that the worker doesn’t have to waste too much time driving from place to place.

Throw in the need to keep an inventory of dozens of parts for hundreds of models, and you’re also paying for the warehouse space and parts supply chain, and the interest on the money spent up front to stock up, maybe to be recovered later when a job actually needs that part.

The economics strongly favor assembling new stuff rather than repairing old stuff for anything even remotely simple. It isn’t until you’re up to the $5,000 range that it becomes pretty normal to prefer an all-day repair job over paying for a replacement.

For $500 devices, it’s gonna be pretty hard to economically repair things.

I’m only generally familiar with the big crime podcast/documentaries that spilled into the mainstream about 10 years ago: first season of Serial, Making a Murderer. And both of those were highly critical of the police work and called convictions into question (and actually got the public attention on the wrongful convictions).

More recently, I’ve seen the HBO series on Karen Read, and it painted a picture of severe police misconduct that at worst tried to frame an innocent person, and at best botched the investigation to make a conviction of a guilty person difficult to impossible.

So yeah, crime documentaries often do show police misconduct and incompetence. At least the ones that hit my radar.