The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.

Playing hardball.

But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.

Thanks for the analysis and insight!

I found at least one of the posts, and you’re right, that’s not really what impressed them. It just stuck with me because I’m a hardware girl.

I’d believe it because I remember the same being true for TikTok.

I don’t have the links on me right now, but I remember clearly that when tiktok was new, engineers trying to figure out what data it collected found that the app could recognize when it was being observed, and would “rewite” itself to evade detection.

They noted that they’d never seen this outside of sophisticated malware, and doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.

In hot weather, I use silica gel neck wraps, which slowly release water to keep you cool (if soggy). I really want to try making an equivalent out of sodium sulphate gel and see how it compares.

Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.

Yeah, this matches my experience.

A supercapacitor buffer will cost around twice as much and deliver around 1/10th the watt-hours of a similarly-sized lead acid battery. And lead acid isn’t exactly great to begin with.

Capacitors are useful, but only in applications where the total amount of energy stored is more-or-less unimportant.

Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.

Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not batteries.

Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.

Transportation is a necessity, and I believe every inelastic market deserves a nationalized alternative to prevent price gouging. Like how the USPS keeps UPS and FEDEX in line. With that being said, nationalization doesn’t fix this particular problem.

China is run like a giant capitalist cartel (in all but name), and appropriately, their ultimate weapon in their hunt for global monopolies is the provision of slave labor. The number of slaves in Xinjiang alone is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and their labor has been credibly linked to the production of cotton (face masks), polysilicon (solar panels), and aluminum and lithium (EVs).

It’s no coincidence that these are the industries being slapped with tariffs. No amount of subsidization or nationalization can level a playing field that’s been tilted by slavery. You don’t outcompete slavery, you either penalize goods suspected of involving it, or you go full John Brown.

Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.

A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That’s a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.

Lets drop this whole “lesser of two evils” thing […] it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments.

I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.

I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole “lesser of two evils” thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.

When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no “greater evil,” you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).

Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism – after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.

Toyota’s been promising that solid state batteries are just around the corner for about 13 years now. They keep bumping the goalposts back every few years.

Mass transit is the only way that is sustainable

EVs cut lifecycle emissions to about 45%. [UCS][ANL][MIT][IEA]

Public transit cuts lifecycle emissions to… about 45%. [IEA][AFDC][USDOT]

Neither is a magic bullet. Both get their asses kicked by bicyles. Both get better with increased passengers per vehicle. Both can be fueled with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both can be manufactured with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both take surprisingly equivalent amounts of steel, aluminum, and glass.

Public transit offers unique advantages from an urbanist perspective and the liveability of cities, but that’s objectively different from sustainability.

Exactly. Hertz vocally blames higher repair costs and long repair times for the Teslas that make up the bulk of their EV fleet. Other EV manufacturers don’t share those problems.

So let me get this straight. VW’s US sales (EVs in particular) have failed to meet expectations because people don’t like their overdependence on buggy, outsourced software.

…and VW’s response is to outsource even more software while incorporating a technology base known for being unreliable.

I’m trying out some FOSS games.

Mindustry. I expected Mindustry to be a Factorio clone, but it’s uniquely fast-paced and messy. I find it difficult to tell the buildings apart, though, so I may have to hunt down a graphics mod.

Beyond All Reason. I really enjoyed Planetary Annihilation, so this seems like a natural pick. I’ve barely sunk my teeth into it, but I’m impressed so far.

We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with.

This is such an important point. We are too late in the game to have the luxury of choosing a single sector or a single solution to pursue before the others. We need to hit all sectors with a diverse barrage of solutions, and we need to do it yesterday.

To quote UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, “In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts – everything, everywhere, all at once.”

we don’t have the grid capacity

For those not in the industry, “grid capacity” here doesn’t refer to power generation, but power distribution. With renewables, generation is comparatively easy (storage notwithstanding). But getting the power where it needs to go is not. Right now, thanks to a grain-oriented steel squeeze, the lead time on transformers is longer than the commissioning time for an entire solar farm. Switchgear is also hard to get your hands on, especially with SF6 being phased out.

The good news is that these long lead times are caused by demand. Right now, utilities are racing to expand and reinforce the grid in preparation for the next 30 year’s worth of EV demand, renewable storage/transmission, and distributed generation. Utilities are risk-averse by nature, and do not move without conviction, so it’s rare and noteworthy to see this kind of industrial momentum.

Source: I design MV distribution equipment in the US.