The US needs a model for stronger state and regional authorities that plan and implement mass transit and zoning. In California in particular, cities and counties have consistently bungled planning, locking entire communities into single family housing with low height maximums, ceded walkable downtowns to freeway strip malls dominated by a handful of national retailers, and few updates to mass transit since BART was built in the 1970s. The example of the North Bay NIMBYs blocking BART expansion sticks out to me in particular.
Also: From what I understand the LFP battery degradation is essentially corrosion that is removed by recycling and you can retrieve 99% of the essential LFP elements and make it into a new battery. So economically we only need to extract the LFP related materials for each human user almost once, instead of oil over and over again.
I have the same question. It makes sense that they might need bespoke software, but how could they possibly be more efficient at creating chips than an AMD/Nvidia?
I think the larger question is why are we all (or most of us?) still using Gmail? Why can't an average person host their own email server with open source software with straightforward security upgrades instead of trusting BigCo or the latest SmallCo?
>Why can't an average person host their own email server with open source software with straightforward security upgrades instead of trusting BigCo or the latest SmallCo?
The average person isn't qualified to administer a server and would rather pay $1/month or whatever for a hosted solution.
I think its fundamentally more difficult to host communications services where spam is possible and there is no auth/contact system in place before first communication can happen.
I'm not an expert in this area but from what I understand what was once novel content spam filtering is not at all novel now, there are easily trainable model strategies (BERT?) that get you to 99%.
A whitelist, auth/contact is ideal for messaging without spam and is more workable with a large federated group that can adopt an evolving open source protocol.
I'm an average person who uses fastmail with a custom domain with a separate registrar. Fastmail does all the right DKIM, DMARC, etc. magic.
And still my mail sometimes goes to spam essentially because it's not "@gmail.com" This is a really real problem that will never go away because everyone in a position to do something about it being so monopolistic cannot understand it.
Do you mean average person around here? Or average person in general?
Too many unknowns and moving parts.
Have you ever worked with the general public and computers?
The average person was wondering why their wireless router needed cables. They did not update their computers for the entire time they owned them. Somebody else ignores big red text saying this will delete everything and hits next anyway, then wonders where their photo collection has gone.
I cannot believe the average person would be capable of registering a domain and configuring their DNS to point at this simple mail server they’re running.
If somebody else is taking care of all of these parts, I am not sure they’re really hosting it themselves.
Maybe we need a new protocol and we can replace all of this? How do we get everybody on board?
Especially with all the codified footguns (or the "Tyranny of the Default" — as Steve Gibson would put it) where a lot of critical apps ship with very insecure defaults, and even a seasoned Dev that's an expert on one domain doesn't have time to muddle through the whole of man pages + mail archives + stack overflow threads for every option.
Most folk don't know how or don't want to. A mail server is mundane to admin and most folk probably have higher priority things in their lives going on.
Is there a self hosted solution that will allow me to back up all my Gmail emails including attachments? Something like paperless but for my old emails.
The constant pestering by Google to buy storage space has started pushing me to deleting everything more then a few years old as a stepping stone to leaving Gmail completely.
After market electric engine heaters and remote starters are typical for ICE vehicles in cold climates (e.g. Alaska). Not sure why you consider this to be a hack for EVs if its builtin to the battery pack design.
It's typical for those trades to have extensive licensing requirements. In my state (OR) plumber and HVAC licenses require four years of apprenticeship.
Additionally the HVAC trade has gatekeeping around the EPA refrigerant licensing and supply distributors/manufacturers who will only sell to contractors.
I got my EPA 608 license from like two days of cramming and an online proctored test. Skillcat, was like $0 or $50 if you want the card. Can order unlimited refrigerants straight to my doorstep.
No place around me to install mini-splits for cheap so I just got the EPA 'licensing' and did it myself. As long as you don't offer the service commercially, in most states, I think that's all they need.
I also got my 608 cert online for $25. I found no real need to study or cram, most of the answers were common-sense or easily googleable real-time. I got a $40,000 quote to install a 4 zone heat pump system. It was roughly $6500 worth of equipment, $500 worth of tools, a $25 EPA cert, and 2 weekends of my time. Basic carpentry and electrical tasks, some minor special skill development to get the copper flares just right, a nitrogen pressure test, vacuum evacuate and chill.
These systems were designed so that people with a basic education in third world countries can install them. It's not rocket science.
Yeah if you just do part 1 you could probably google real-time.
The universal is proctored, so you have to have the *FCs and limits somewhat memorized, it's definitely just rote memorization and if you have exceptional memory you might just remember it all the first time without any 'study'. A person like me with relatively average intelligence would probably take a couple days, but it's definitely a lot better than needing 4 years of HVAC apprenticeship or something.
Technically you need part 2 or universal to do most home HVAC systems, but part 1 (or even an EPA 609 probably) would get you the refrigerants, so it's largely a moot point.
Since changing the constitution is difficult, maybe a reasonable remedy to this would be to significantly increase the number of states by population. In 1776 there were 13 states with a total population of 2.5M. There are now 50 states (3.8x increase), with a total population of 340M (136x increase). If we increased the number of states proportionally to the population in 1776 that would result in ~1768 states, almost one for every two counties.
Only takes President + a simple majority in the Senate to make every US citizen a Supreme Court justice - and the Supreme Court can conjure and erase legal obligations at will.
In my state (OR) it takes 4 years to become licensed to do the work for others but homeowners can do the work themselves.
My experience is that it’s not generally well understood how simple it is to install mini splits. The supply companies won’t sell to you directly outside of d2c web companies like hvacdirect
My state has a program where they give you big rebates but only if you use some one on their list of approved installers and since there aren't many installers it creates a big backlog. Homeowners who could install them themselves miss out on the rebate.
I don't think this is exactly accurate. The matte was a ~$80 upgrade option after they released the glossy. I definitely preferred the matte screens and still do. For coding reducing glare in uncontrolled environments is way more important to me than color fidelity, but to each their own.
The problem was they needed to pretend be a technology company (with FSD, and now robots) to juice the stock price/earnings multiple. If they were simply a car maker with EV motors, the stock would have a much lower multiple.
I don’t think they _needed_ to do that. They chose to do that. It’s been fairly successful in the short to medium term but the jury is still out on what happens if/when the market acknowledges that they are in fact just a car company.
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