rgmerk

7 ms·

121.
by rgmerk 1y ago
Ignoring EVs for a moment, a Toyota Camry hybrid, which can carry five people in more comfort and carrying more luggage than a light aircraft, gets 50mpg on the highway. 22 mpg is not terrible only if your frame of reference is pickup truck
122.
by rgmerk 1y ago
Hmmm. I have a couple of concerns about a large expansion of personal aircraft of the type the original author is advocating. For one, even certified GA aircraft have a fatality rate far in excess of automobiles, let alone public transport
123.
by rgmerk 1y ago
Firstly, most EVs that have strong regenerative braking ("one-pedal") setups allow you to adjust the strength or turn it off. Tesla, as usual, is the outlier in this respect. Secondly, I rented an EV for a week and by the end of i
124.
by rgmerk 1y ago
The ACS is about as scary as a limp lettuce leaf, so don't expect the CBA, or any other Australian company that wants to outsource IT operations and retrench existing staff, to be in any way deterred.
125.
by rgmerk 1y ago
It seems that no one is prepared to point out the obvious - devaluation of the dollar is a cut in American living standards.
126.
by rgmerk 1y ago
My thought is if the plant was on track to success but was killed by corporate politics somebody else would have tried again. The demand for carbon-neutral liquid fuels isn’t going away; long-range shipping and aviation aren’t going to run
127.
by rgmerk 1y ago
There was a bunch of activity in the 2000s and 2010s trying and failing to do this commercially. Never say never but for ground transport BEVs seem like they will eat the market well before anyone gets the technology working.
128.
by rgmerk 2y ago
They also have a much broader range of vehicles than Tesla. Even if they could, they’d never sell a BYD Seagull in the USA, but small cheap cars are still a huge market in Asia and Europe.
129.
by rgmerk 2y ago
It's a while since I had to deal with this kind of thing, but my memory was that as soon as you go beyond the flags that the upstream developers use (just to be clear, I mean the upstream developers, not the distro packagers) you'
130.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Each to their own but there are plenty of Beatles songs that stand the test of time IMO. Yes, there's plenty of dross, particularly on the early albums, but, say, "Strawberry Fields Forever", or "We Can Work It Out"
131.
by rgmerk 2y ago
The book series will never be completed, and wouldn't be if Knuth lives to 120. And that's perfectly fine.
132.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Yep, and Japan, South Korea, Australia etc may take the same view. Heck, Canada might given they're getting treated like some kind of hostile state at the moment.
133.
by rgmerk 2y ago
I'm not sure I'm seeing the relevance here. Incremental advances in battery tech (or even futuristic step-change prospects like lithium-air batteries) won't solve intercontinental shipping.
134.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Hi guys. I don't claim to understand any of the physics and engineering challenges of fusion, but from all the general-interest material published, and the long history of fusion research, it seems that the capital cost of a fusion pro
135.
by rgmerk 2y ago
The US government is not going to replace the foreign markets he's busy trashing.
136.
by rgmerk 2y ago
As I understand it, Musk's stake in Tesla is roughly half his net worth. And while SpaceX currently has a monopoly on the affordable launch market, my understanding is that's about to go away. I wouldn't like to be SpaceX see
137.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Note to aspiring founders: insulting your core customers is not good business.
138.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Chinese cars are already effectively barred from the USA.
139.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Somebody watched Octonauts as a kid... More seriously, this seems like an elaborate troll of space settlement enthusiasts. It's far simpler and less demanding than long-term settlement in space...and you still look at it and go "W
140.
by rgmerk 2y ago
No, it wasn’t. Clearly, I’ll need to give o1 a try at some point to see if it does better.
141.
by rgmerk 2y ago
I'm no professional historian, but every time I try this kind of thing I'm very disappointed in the results. A hobby of mine is editing Wikipedia articles about Australian motorsport (yes, I have an odd hobby, sue me). The vehicle
142.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Or maybe he’s just tired of a specific kind of life which might be fun in your early twenties but is less appealing when you’ve got kids and can’t enjoy the nightlife and culture anyway.
143.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Both of the above, but also your body's ability to adapt to high altitude, which isn't just a question of general cardiovascular fitness. If you build up to climbing Everest more gradually you find this out in places and at altitu
144.
by rgmerk 2y ago
Aside from the difficulty of the actual expedition, the cost and time requirements are prohibitive for many people. The Nepalese government has also limited the number of permits issued to climb Everest.
145.
by rgmerk 2y ago
The problem is that while climbing Everest no longer requires elite-level mountaineering skill, it remains extremely dangerous, both for the people paying and the (mostly Nepalese) guides who take climbers up there. It seems that roughly 1%
146.
by rgmerk 2y ago
This is Evil Genius level work. Congratulations! Did you do the actual coding in Acrobat or is there a less painful way to write embedded JS in a PDF?
147.
by rgmerk 2y ago
You probably could, but aside from the black helicopters showing up at your door, the fuel wouldn't exactly be cheap to purchase.
148.
by rgmerk 2y ago
So let's, for the sake of argument, say that there are two hundred similarly sized efficiency savings to be found in the US federal budget. Congratulations, you just saved 200 billion dollars of expenditure. The difference between expe
149.
by rgmerk 2y ago
It’s not an official figure. It’s a figure calculated by an anti-immigration “think tank”. And even taking their numbers as gospel, it’s 1.1% of the federal budget - and it’s not like you can claw back that 1.1% either, because the enforce
150.
by rgmerk 2y ago
US federal budget expenditures in 2023 were a little over six trillion dollars. Eighty million dollars isn’t even sufficient to count as a rounding error in that context.

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