How much many more wars over gas or oil do we need to finally just take the energy that (for the most part) is available locally and renewable?!
The petrol era is coming to an end. Our current administration might desperately want to remain a petrol state (for reasons that escape me), but it will only delay the inevitable. The EU is not much better either. The writing has been on the wall, and even since the Russian invasion into Ukraine not much has happened.
What is going on? Are we all insane, or is it just intense lobbying of yesterday's petrol industry?
EVs were on track to being mainstream 20 years ago. See the other story about the 90s GM EV1 and associated documentary. All the technology was there in 1999, but every EV in development simultaneously shut down once they started becoming usable.
We're not going to pretend that energy density in batteries was anywhere near ready for prime time in 1999. Maybe niche around town cars owned by those willing to sacrifice to have something cool/unique.
The EV1 was a $70k car (2026 dollars) with economy car size and fittings, with a 75mi range and 3 hour charge time. There is no conspiracy, the tech wasn't there yet.
the share of renewables of the EU at ~55% of net energy generation is almost twice as high as China's or America's, only Latin America fairs better. Germany essentially front ran this industry 20 years ago. Although as usual it turns out better to be second than first a bit of credit here please.
Seems current admin wants less choice. No imports of EVs from countries that do it better and no support for local EV makers.
As for tax credits, sure, push policy requires spending. But then this admin has spent approximately 100B trying to reduce spending and instead increased spending, so this seems like penny-wise pound foolish
Citation needed that "the people" wanted to end tax credits on EVs. EVs were steadily increasing in popularity and capturing a growing market. In a very real sense consumers had "choice" before, in that the market supports made EVs accessible.
That's not entirely unreasonable. As long as there is a way to enable this in perpetuity for my device(s) and it works for all Android devices it's a compromise I could live with.
Again, can we, please, stop call it side-loading. I'm not sliding in anything "from the side" on the sly, I am simply installing an app of my choice on my damn phone.
Supply-chain risks means "the potential for adversaries to sabotage, subvert, or disrupt the integrity and delivery of defense systems, including software, hardware, and services, to degrade national security".
So now Anthropic is an adversary, because it does not want "fully autonomous weapons" or automated mass surveillance? Sure thing, DoD. Go use Grok or whatever, I'm sure that will go great.
In that sense, at least for me, it was a third place where we could roam to get inspired and connect. We lost that. I was in Akihabara last weekend. And its the same in a way. While there are still a few, most tech stores are now phone/laptop stores that don't sell parts. Making the hunt for tech really boring.
There are a few stores left that sell parts in Akihabara, but only a few and they're not that easy to find. Akihabara now is mostly a place to go to maid cafes.
It’s pretty much for the same reasons. All those stores and types of stores that used to be in SF, Cambridge, Tokyo are all found in Shenzen now. That’s where the critical mass is.
In fact we should not even call it "sideloading", as if we are sneaking anything in "from the side". It is simply installing something I like on a device that I own.
My device can warn me about security consequences and let me be the one who decides what to do (with my device).
With 23,623 (as of today) signatures I doubt anybody really cares, and we'd all rather be cheeple doing the tech companies' bidding as long as we can flop on our couches and consume.
Clearly Google wants to make money off their monopoly (created in part from initial openness) and they are disguising it as some security/safety enhancement bullsh*t. Shameful!
My main question: I chose Android over Apple because of the extra freedoms it affords me. When that goes away, what reason do I have continuing with Android?
Finally some sanity. The administration has use laws about "national security" and other so call "emergencies" to impose tariffs. If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.
The power to impose tariffs rests with the legislator, not the executive.
Of course our congress is effectively useless - we can thank decades of Mitch McConnell's (and others) "not giving the other side anything" thinking for that.
We're currently in the midst of 51 ongoing "national emergencies" [1], dating back to at least Carter. I think something that the next great empire will learn from is to limit emergency powers as well as the ability to create emergency powers, because in spite of their name they inevitably end up becoming normalized and just used as regular powers.
The description of some of those emergencies is comedic: "Declared a bank holiday from March 6 through March 9, 1933, using the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 as a legal basis."
Most of these seem at least plausible to me given they almost all have to do with foreign conflicts, and given that they have to be renewed every year, they can't be too excessive since Trump has kept in place 8/9 of Biden's emergency declarations? and your description of the most comedic one was actually maybe the most important one?
It was to stave off a bank run at the beginning of the great depression, and it was only done as a temporary measure so that Congress had time to write the long term legislation which they did 4 days later on March 9th.
The most dangerous part of the current admin is the fealty he demands from congress and how exploits his popularity to be a kingmaker in local elections.
This is something FDR did heavily in the 1930s to expand his own power and bully congress into passing the New Deal. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/purge-1938 He also used legally questionable executive orders like crazy.
There's a long legacy in America which has led to the expansion of the executive branch. It didn't start with Trump. Almost every power he's abusing was recklessly laid down in prior administrations/congress. FDR caused lots of controversy with how he acted and there was a pull back from executive power, including administrative laws currently slowing Trump down.
There's lots of other examples, such as the various emergency powers, including a large string of them for terrorism during Bush and expanded during Obama.
I've been posting about this issue on HN long before Trump was in power and plenty of journalists were documenting it.
lol you say FDR was bullying Congress, as if the New Deal coalition wasn't the most successful political movement that this country ever had (won nearly every Presidential election (only losing to the man that defeated Nazis in Europe), had control of the House from like 1932 to 1992, nearly controlled the Senate for just as long too).
Attacking FDR, someone who stood up against business interests to defend labor, kinda exposes the game here.
Honestly FDR doesn't get enough credit for probably saving capitalism.
He borrowed just enough of the stuff socialists were promising, and bolted it onto the government to mollify the working class who'd been absolutely ravaged by oligarchs for the preceding decades. You only have to look at the rest of the world to see how things might've turned out without FDR's very reasonable interventions.
There's nothing sane about it. All part of the plan. Next comes ignoring of this ruling (err, looks like that already happened) and they put another log on the fire under the pot.
> If everything is an emergency then nothing is, and that was clearly not congress' intention with those laws.
The state of exception is the true test of sovereignty, and powers that crave sovereignty therefore seek out states of exception. The PATRIOT act created new institutions and authorities like the TSA. Just a few years ago local health departments were making business-shuttering decisions that ruined life for a lot of people over the common cold. Ukrainian war funding provides the EU with opportunities for exports and new experiments in joint funding (Eurobonds). Emergencies and exceptions are how power grows, so everything can become an emergency if you look at it in the right way.
I mean, you're right that a lot of liberties are taken with what constitutes an "emergency" these days, but when every other country on the planet is declaring the same emergency there might be some substance there.
Heh. I once had to make an argument that 256 bit randomly assigned identifiers are good enough without explicit collision checking. People wanted me to add complex and expensive collision checks.
My argument was the 2^256 actually approaches the number of atom in the observable universe (within 1 to 3 orders of magnitude), and that collisions are so unlikely that we'll have millions of datacenter meltdowns first (all assuming we have a good source of random numbers, of course). In the end I convinced everybody that even 128 bits are good enough, without any collision checking required.
I thought my arguments was clever, but this is so much better. :)
The total amount of computer data across all of humanity is less that 1 yottabyte. We're expected to reach 1 yottabyte within the next decade, and will probably do so before 2030. That's all data, everywhere, including nation-states.
The birthday paradox says that you'll reach a 50% chance of at least one collision (as a conservative first order approximation) at the square root of the domain size. sqrt(2^256) is 2^128.
Now, a 256 bit identifier takes up 32 bytes of storage. 2^128 * 32 bytes = 10^16 yottabytes. That's 10 quadrillion yottabytes just to store the keys. And it's even odds whether you'll have a collision or not.
And if the 50% number scares them, well, you'll have a 1% chance of a collision at around... 2^128 * 0.1. Yeah, so you don't reach a 1% over the whole life of the system until you get to a quadrillion yottabytes.
Because you're never getting anywhere near the square root of the size, the chances of any collision occurring are flatly astronomical.
If the mechanism for generating those 256 random bits is distributed and untrusted parties generate ids, then you need collision detection because they may be malicious
If it's not distributed you can just have a counter
If it's distributed but coordinated by a single party (say, it's your servers), you can do sharding on incremented counters. Like, every server are assigned a region of ids
In this case it was distributed without our data centers (10k's machines or so at that time spread around the planet), but the code to generate ids was 100% under our control. Rather than inventing some distributed generation (or collision detection), a stateless approach with random numbers just seemed the right choice.
Starlink hasn't been working in Russia, an aggressor state, for a long time. The issue here is the shutdown of Russian terminals over Ukraine, which are illegally brought into Russia and then flown to Ukraine on drones carrying bombs. Now, Ukrainians register all their terminals, and unregistered ones are not connected. The Russians are working to get a Ukrainian recruit to pay someone to register a terminal in their name, so they can fly from Russia to Ukraine and detonate something. Several such spies have already been arrested.
Russia is sanctioned, SpaceX doesn't sell terminals to Russia or their military forces.
SpaceX now actively works to identify nodes in use in Ukraine believed to be used by the Russian forces or non-state actors working for Russia. It terminates their service.
> I wouldn't have stopped at apparel, but it's a start.
They didn't. You can look at the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) yourself. It's fairly long but it should be easy to scroll until you find some of the lists.
The petrol era is coming to an end. Our current administration might desperately want to remain a petrol state (for reasons that escape me), but it will only delay the inevitable. The EU is not much better either. The writing has been on the wall, and even since the Russian invasion into Ukraine not much has happened.
What is going on? Are we all insane, or is it just intense lobbying of yesterday's petrol industry?
reply