rsuelzer

But, I like the stock.

Let's hope it doesn't happen in a blizzard. :)

Yeah, I haven't seen any actual data. But it seems widely accepted that American automakers in the 80s and 90s lost a lot of market share to foreign makers over (real or perceived) reliability issues.

I have the 2019. I needed AWD, as I have 10 miles of muddy roads to get to my house. I now regret not buying a Subaru for the 10k above MSRP or whatever the ransom was back then. The milage on the Outlander PHEV is comically terrible once the battery is empty. Yet somehow, it's a "clean air vehicle" (LOL) It's also crazy to me that "SPORT" utility vehicles don't have a trailer hitch by default. What are people using these things for? Oh yeah, automakers have convinced people living in cities that they need an oversized disgusting SUV to be safe, increase their odds of running over children, pets, and having catastrophic rollovers. The automakers like it because SUV's have much almost no safety standards compared to cars and no gas milage CAFE requirements!

I often hate myself for owning an SUV, but it was most practical vehicle for the rural area I'm in that was available at the time for a reasonable price.

Biggest annoyances with the Outlander 1) 12v system dies even when you have enough energy on board to power a house for a day. 2) It's a cargo ship with no cargo room. The front seats don't go all the way down, so I can't fit anything in this environmental disaster that I couldn't fit in a Ford Fiesta Hatchback. The back seats have things like cup holders and weird design features blocking the ability to use it to move stuff. 3) Why did they reinvent how you shift into gear? I need to explain to people who use my car how to put it into drive and park. 4) No spare tire! Now, I drive around with a spare floating around in the back that I purchased since not having a spare is a disaster waiting to happen in a rural area.

</rant>

Yeah, I will drive this into the ground and never buy an SUV again.

Haha, this is true. What's frustrating is that my PHEV has 12kw of battery, but I can't let it sit for more than a week without needing to jump it because they can't charge the 12v battery off of the drive-train battery system. DOH!

Agree with all of this, however, I remember when an American car making it to 100k miles without major problems was nearly unheard of. Or at least, that's how I seem to remember it. My parents had several Dodge / Chrysler's in the 1990's that had catastrophic failure before reaching 100k miles. The exception was our Ford Escort which lasted to 180k miles before the engine needed a rebuild, which likely had something do with a sibling not changing the oil for 25k miles.

It seems like we have more reliable engines, drive trains, and less reliable $2 chips that turns those things on.

Isn't Tesla touch handle doors? Not sure who else has them. Not sure what benefit they add anyway. I'd imagine there is some sort of manual override for when the 12v system dies and you can't get into the car?

Today

Correctly migrated several stupidly complex docker files. I spent several hours on Google trying to figure out what to do, then I just asked gpt-4 to figure out what was wrong. It was perfect.

It then added complete TS documentation to several dozen files, because documentation is for suckers. It will use this documentation in the future.

Updated about half of my API documentation, fixing my speeling errors.

And we had a nice discussion about how to start saving money for an early forced retirement and about the specific tasks it would be doing when it replaced me.

I wrote plugins for Code to add TSDoc comments to all my methods. Also, right click refactor and comment. It's nice now. Soon it will make me unemployed.

So is your mental image of Joe Biden, unless you know him personally.

So, is any sort of creation that relies upon copyrighted or patented works copyright infringement? Is any academic research or art that references brands or other creations illegal? This is such a clear case of fair use that it could be a textbook example.

What is the pay structure for the attorneys bringing this lawsuit? My guess is they will get about 40 percent of any monetary awards.

And if the US thinks it can make a nuclear response without a larger nuclear response... Remember the mindset of Putin. "What good is a world without Russia?" It's better to have no world than a world where Russia is not a central player.

This was never about Ukraine, any settlement would be met by further escalation when he felt ready. Probably when the west was more fractured, insular, nationalistic and our democratic institutions more fragile.

I agree, NATO will never respond with nukes, even if a nuke is launched directly into NATO territory. NATO understands this is a 0 sum outcome. And it's not needed.

I think the risk is that those around Putin (regime), and Putin himself to an extent, believe that a world without Russia is not worth having. And to the regime, Putin is Russia and Russia is Putin. The question is, if there is a 100% chance that should he lose this conflict that his regime will collapse and a 99% chance that Russia could survive a nuclear war on equal footing with the west which will he choose?

Even a full scale nuclear war will not end the world, many millions, likely billions will survive. It will just be nothing like the world before.

The west makes the critical mistake of seeing this conflict as about Ukraine. Putin sees the war as a single front in a much larger pending conflict with the west. He firmly believes this conflict must occur for Russia to have a place in the future geopolitical order 100 years from now. In his mind, there is no distinction, or tactical advantage, between using a nuclear weapon in Poland versus Ukraine. I argue, Putin is far more likely to use a nuclear weapon against a NATO target in a Baltic state than use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine. A nuclear attack on a Baltic state would be far more palatable to the Russian people versus using a nuclear weapon against people who are viewed as "Russian". More importantly, he thinks about history in terms of decades and centuries. Using a nuclear weapon within what he considers Russian territory is untenable in the broad historical arc he has created.

The printer space ripe for distruption. I have had really bad experiences with HP Printers, specifically related to force installing software / drivers on PCs. I consider the HP SmartPrint app to be malware as it completely locks down the printer if it detects a non-HP cartridge. Or at least it used to, before they were sued. Now it ensures you are constantly harrassed about buying genuine ink, gives false low toner messages, and flashes various warnings designed to scare consumers into overpaying for toner. I assume the same is true for all brands. I'd like to see a printer that isn't agressively marketing toner to me or at least offers it at a fair price.

If they have excess inventory that they are losing money storing, why not dramatically lower the prices? I'm afraid I know the answer to this...

Well I bought TWTR at it's peak... I'm voting my shares against a buyout (won't matter), mostly because it locks in a loss that I feel would have been recoverable in the next 5 years...

Good riddance. Too many people in the labor movement who are not there for the right reasons.

I'd appreciate the net gain of a few left leaning Senators.

To be fair, many, if not most, of the failed experiments in California are voter enacted conservative pet projects (Prop 8, Property Tax Cap, Ban on Affirmative Action, Making Uber drivers unable to be considered employees...) Either way, the idea of governing by Constitutional amendment seems like a terrible idea. We ostensibly elect leaders so that they can be deeply informed on public policy and make wise decisions. Personally, I feel uneasy voting on the 20+ propositions each year, since I don't have the time or capacity to fully research and appreciate the public policy implications of my votes. I'd much rather offload this responsibility to an elected Representative (and their staff) who broadly shares my worldview.

I've been remote for 5 years. I have been happy to take a 50% reduction in what I could be making. In the past, I would wake up in the morning and find myself willing to pay more money than I would make that day in order to not have to go into work. The economics of that didn't work out. I also work for a mission driven organization that is on a tight budget. I make enough money, but more importantly, I have not had a single day in five years where I didn't want to go to work. That's pretty priceless.

Doesn't youtube have an option to allow the copyright holders to monetize the videos in these cases? i.e. Get a cut of the AdSense revenue that would otherwise go to the uploader? Did this user choose not to split that revenue and instead opt to take down the videos, or did the record label force the takedown? It seems to me that it would be interest of the record label to take a cut of the profits off of recordings that would otherwise not make them a dime.

It is hard to dominate the messaging space when Apple does not offer messaging service to android users.

The latest trick is for spammers to send MMS and then see who responds. I am still getting texts from people on the thread to stop responding, although now it devolved into a political fight with two numbers constantly texting "Trump won". There is no way to remove myself either... I had to disable GV forwarding, but apparently this is enough of a problem that they are disabling forwarding anyway.

You must be in a large city...

$5 of electricity is a LOT of electricity to get only 1kg of Lithium. That's like 50kWh or almost 2x the amount used per day in the average home. Are we currently using more energy than this to extract 1kg of Lithium?

$5 of electricity is a near meaningless metric. The real question is how many kWh does the process require to get the 1kg of Lithium? Electricity prices vary widely, so I don't understand why they would use dollar figures, especially on an engineering site.

If we know how many kWh of electricity is used to get the Lithium, then we can compare that to how much energy the Lithium would be able to store and release over it's usable life. Some rough numbers in my head, the total weight of Lithium in the average 18650 battery is probably 25 grams (the other components being other metals like Cobalt).

This means that the 1kg of Lithium would be able to make about 40 or so 18650 batteries.

The average 18650 battery has an average watt hour capacity of 11 (a good one). So with 40 batteries you have 440wh of storage.

The average lifespan of the batteries would be about 1000 cycles... so 440kWh of capacity over the lifetime of the battery.

I will assume that the electricity rate they use for the $5 figure is a very cheap $0.10/kWh. Meaning that it would require 50kWh in the extraction process alone to extract enough lithium capable of storing 440kw over it's usable life.

I have no idea if this is a good return or not compared to how much energy is spent mining lithium.

Walmart really started the race to the bottom, killed countless good paying retail jobs (many union), so I choose to hold them accountable, even if it's irrational at this point given their competition (Amazon) is arguably just as bad or worse.