No one should ignore Trump’s tariff threats. Tariffs would hurt the economies of both countries involved. Literally no one wins in a trade war.

The last time America passed large blanket tariffs like the kind Trump is threatening was the Smoot–Hawley Act of 1930. Which had the effect of reducing both imports and exports by almost 2/3 and was broadly considered to have significantly prolonged the Great Depression.

I’m not sure why Trump thinks tariffs are a good idea. He talks about it like it’s a way to get other countries to pay money to the US… but that’s not how tariffs work. Tariffs cause inflation for the US consumer, which is bad for the economies of both the USA, and the country being tariffed.

I suspect Trump framing of this as “external” revenue will be used to justify income tax cuts which will predominantly benefit the wealthy in the US and the expense of both middle class in both countries.

Countries being threatened by Trump should focus on diversifying their trade partners to mitigate the damage,

Americans should be calling their representatives and demanding they put a halt to this nonsense.

I’m confused friend.

The article you linked to says:

… Canadian lumber producers would not be able to absorb this, the price of lumber will adjust upwards ….

Is that not, quite literally, a direct contradiction of your earlier statement that:

90% of the tariffs will be absorbed by Canadian companies

And if the price increases, is that not the consumer paying the tariffs?

Ummm no.

In the real world consumers ultimately end up paying the tariffs.

Domestic suppliers have a tendency to raise prices is response to increased demand and decrease competition from imports.

When Trump implemented a tariff on Washing Machines in 2018 during his first term. The price of imported washing machines went up, the price of domestic washing machines went up, the price of dryers… which weren’t tariffed went up.

Eventually it did led to more washing machines and dryers being manufactured domestically. Which did lead to a small increase manufacturing in jobs. But it was a net loss for the consumers.

Tariffs function as a flat tax on goods. Like all flat taxes this benefits the wealthy and hurts poor and the working class.

We can’t manufacture and install enough solar farms and storage to get us off of fossil fuel within 20 years and more importantly available investment capital isn’t the limiting factor.

Investments in nuclear power are not taking money away from investments in solar.

We can do both, and it gets us off fossil fuels sooner.

It’s not quite as crazy as it seems. The older/larger floppy disk formats were more reliable due to their lower track density.

There was more surface area per byte of data. The old floppy disks could be written once and read for years in harsher environments. New floppy disks we more prone to failure after a few years.

I’m not defending Microsoft… but if we’re going to go after a tech company for leveraging their other assets to give themselves an unfair advantage can we also go after Google?

In the first releases of Edge, Microsoft tried to build a new web browser from scratch to compete with Google Chrome. By google kept changing YouTube’s code so that videos would playback janky on Edge. Microsoft eventually gave up trying to fix for YouTubes ongoing changes and now Edge is based on Chromium (the same open source web browser maintained by Google, that chrome os built on). Google leveraged YouTube to prevent completion from Edge.

And now Google is blocking ad blocking extensions so that users are forced to see more google ads in their browser.

Microsoft’s has leveraged their unfair advantage to get a little over 5% market share.

Google’s leveraged their unfair advantage to get 66% of the market.

Both companies need a hard smack down, but I want to see Google taken down too.

Your math checks out.

Charging a 600 mi battery in 9 minutes would require a charging station that can output somewhere north of 1.2 MW.

We need major upgrades to the electrical grid as well as doubling our electricity generation capacity for charging stations and vehicles like that to be common place.

I remember a time when ads weren’t crazy intrusive. They weren’t being shoved into every os and app and website.

There wasn’t 20 of them on every page, and advertisers weren’t trying to harvest my data to the point where they knew every last detail of my personal life.

And I didn’t mind having them in order to have “free” content. But they got greedy and now I’ll block them in every chance I get.

Maybe forcing ads into everything isn’t the answer.

Yes somewhat… the formula has several factors that are constantly in flux, Bitcoin mining is a random process the value can be off entirely by chance. But it’s designed to self-adjust over the long run towards that formula, individual fluctuations cancel out in the long run.

For electricity price specifically, wholesale prices of electricity tend to be fairly close everywhere bitcoin is mined. Bitcoin mining is more profitable where electricity is the cheapest and is uneconomic in places where the price of electricity is above average. So it only happens where the wholesale price is globally competitive.

The economics of Bitcoin mining at scale force it to find an equilibrium where the cost of mining a Bitcoin is just a bit less than the current market value of a Bitcoin.

Electricity is the only significant variable cost at scale so the amount of electricity needed to mine a bitcoin ends up being a little less than however much a bitcoin can buy.

Thus one can estimate the total amount of electricity very accurately by simply taking the block rate (6/hr) times the block reward (~6.25 BTC) times the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity. You’ll get the upper bound for the amount of electricity being consumed.

Which by the way works out to around a TWh costing tens of millions of USD every single day. Which is more electricity than a small country

The only thing that will stop the waste is if the price of bitcoin drops. You can legislate it away, that won’t stop it, it will just move when it’s happening.

The old 8” floppy disks were more expensive but known for being incredibly reliable.

The newer 5.25” and 3.5” floppies used cheaper and mass produced coatings on the magnetic surface, plus the smaller and higher density tracks had less surface area per byte and less material to hold the signal.

The net result was the newer floppies often couldn’t be reliably read after a few years of use.

It’s not at all surprising they stuck with the more reliable system for so long.

No.

MW is the maximum capacity not the average.

A nuclear reactor runs at close to its maximum output pretty much 24/7/365.

A solar farm only operates during the day, and even then it only operates at maximum output in the middle of a clear sunny day.

The overall average output of a nuclear plant is typically around 90% of its capacity.

The overall average output of solar farm is 20-25%.

This massive farm will still only output a bit more electricity than what a single nuclear reactor outputs.

A nuclear power station typically has more than one reactor, so compared to a typical nuclear power station this isn’t even close to the average nuclear plant.

Though it does beat a few of the smallest nuclear plants that only have a single reactor.

Nuclear outputs a fuck-ton of electricity for its size.

Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.

Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.

If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.

There’s a manual release that can be used to open the hood from the outside even if the vehicle has no power.

It’s a safety feature for first responders, as also under the hood is a loop of wire that can be cut to permanently disable the high voltage curcuts prior cutting open the car with saws.

There is a manual door release that works without power, but only from the inside. She had just loaded the child in their car seat, shut the door then went to the driver door to get in and couldn’t open it.

The doors are on the 12V side of the system, you can use jumper cables to connect an external battery from another vehicle (including ICE vehicles) to power the door under normal circumstances. But with a kid trapped in the car in AZ, I wouldn’t wait for that either.

It a pretty rare combinations of circumstances, but there’s something to be said for manual keys still used on other vehicles with keyless entry.

Most large corporations’ tech leaders don’t actually have any idea how tech works. They are being told that if they don’t have an AI plan their company will be obsoleted by their competitors that do; often by AI “experts” that also don’t have the slightest understanding of how LLMs actually work. And without that understanding companies are rushing to use AI to solve problems that AI can’t solve.

AI is not smart, it’s not magic, it can’t “think”, it can’t “reason” (despite what Open AI marketing claims) it’s just math that measures how well something fits the pattern of the examples it was trained on. Generative AIs like ChatGPT work by simply considering every possible word that could come next and ranking them by which one best matches the pattern.

If the input doesn’t resemble a pattern it was trained on, the best ranked response might be complete nonsense. ChatGPT was trained on enough examples that for anything you ask it there was probably something similar in its training dataset so it seems smarter than it is, but at the end of the day, it’s still just pattern matching.

If a company’s AI strategy is based on the assumption that AI can do what its marketing claims. We’re going to keep seeing these kinds of humorous failures.

AI (for now at least) can’t replace a human in any role that requires any degree of cognitive thinking skills… Of course we might be surprised at how few jobs actually require cognitive thinking skills. Given the current AI hypewagon, apparently CTO is one of those jobs that doesn’t require cognitive thinking skills.

Or… you could just… you know… stop using it.

What the Internet Archive is doing seems to be to be a pretty textbook case of fair use to me.

The claim that the publishing and recording industries are somehow harmed by a site that can only make copies of content that was made freely available and isn’t being resold is ludicrous stupid.

Yes you’re correct. I will qualify my previous statement as hydrogen powered road vehicles don’t make sense for now.

The problem at the moment is that electricity generation is not carbon free and in most countries not even close.

Unfortunately the transition to a carbon free electric grid is being significantly retarded by policymakers that are, as you say, myopic. As a result it will be at least two more decades before hydrogen makes sense.

The carbon footprint of lithium battery manufacturing, is small compared to the carbon footprint of electricity generation. Until that changes significantly lithium batteries will continue to be a better choice than hydrogen fuel cell.

Hydrogen may make sense in a future where we’ve eliminated all fossil fuel electricity generation and there’s an abundance of carbon free electricity that can be used to create green hydrogen as a form of energy storage. Though by the time that point comes, we may have developed battery technology or some other energy storage technology that doesn’t carry the same carbon footprint that lithium ion does today.

Hydrogen doesn’t make sense and never did as a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in vehicles.

Most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, and has a lot of emissions during manufacturing. But even green hydrogen, which is made by using carbon free generated electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen doesn’t make sense.

If you’ve build new renewable power it’s more efficient to use it to charge batteries than to use it to generate hydrogen.

There might be a case for compressed hydrogen, In vehicles where batteries are too heavy like aircraft.

But for road vehicles, batteries are more effective at reducing emission.

If you’re building any new renewable power, you’ll reduce more emissions by using it to displace coal power, the to generate green hydrogen.

Some day when we’ve eliminated fossil fuel based electricity generation, Green hydrogen might start to make sense. But anybody trying to do it right now is not being as helpful as they could be.