Posts by gecho 122 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2013
In Canada the import threshold for taxes is $40, and $150 for duty, usually accompanied with a minimum $10 processing fee. Duty can be a surprisingly big hit, like 25% for clothing and they charge consumers on the retail value declared which is probably double / triple what a wholesale importer pays.
Everything that comes out of Musk's mouth is a shameless stock pump. I'm surprised he hasn't run afoul of the SEC again. Of course he's supporting Trump in the hope Trump will eliminate the SEC among other federal agencies in return. Oh and subsidize every Musk company with public government debt.
I think the industry jumped the gun on full BEVs at scale gambling that bypassing hybrids was worth the risk. Though given product development timelines it was unlikely they'd manage to time it just right. This backward step will likely only last a few model years before batteries make BEVs better in terms of cost and performance.
If you ever listen to the way some people order, particularly the elderly it often comes across as complete nonsense and confusion. They'll ask for non-existent products, or describe them in bizarre ways and a human will somehow steer them to a valid choice. Often they'll refer to a deal they heard about that might have been for a totally different company. Countless times I've heard people order a sausage mcmuffin from a fast food chain that isn't mcdonalds, but the cahier does the conversion.
The local right wing government in my province has embraced SMRs as an alternative to doing anything to reduce reliance on gas / coal. Toss in some token research dollars and sign onto a coalition, and they get to kick the can down the road 15-20 years when it will be someone else's problem. The magical promises of SMRs has surprisingly broad support across the political spectrum.
I loved buying from Wiggle to ship to Canada until Shimano banned them from selling stuff to North America combined with them changing their shipping options which lead to more fees. I could get bike stuff for less than local bike shop's wholesale price. I could get 3 tires for the price of one locally. Also stuff from the UK would rarely get taxed, while stuff I ordered from the US got taxed nearly 100% of the time. Though Wiggle did some kind of shady shit. They had their own brand of bikes, but would order vastly more bike components than bike they sold, then re-sold the OEM components cheap. Order a set of pedals and they'd come in a bag instead of retail packaging.
The bike market in Canada is fucked up, there is a duopoly at the wholesale distribution level resulting in massive markups. It effectively eliminates many brands from being available here at all. Trek / Specialized sell directly to bike shops and provide smoking credit deals, so they've got most of the market share as shops are highly incentivized to just carry those brands.
>This launch was set to be the 100th flight of the Atlas V rocket, and notably the first carrying humans.
The Atlas V is no longer being produced. Boeing purchased enough to fulfill the NASA crew contract. So far Vulcan has only launched once, and it sounds like ULA is waiting for someone to foot the bill before they human rate it.
Sandy Munro went on an unhinged Youtube rant yesterday. Going full conspiracy nut railing against Wall Street, the FED, and the fake news media. He's done this numerous times in the past, probably when his wife asked how his Tesla stock is doing. I think he bought a large amount just before the Twitter thing cut the stock in half.
Once solid state batteries hit the market in volume around 2027-28 I think most vehicles with liquid electrolyte batteries are going to take a huge value hit. On the plus side those batteries will be much smaller and cheaper, so it might be possible to put one in an older vehicle, while at the same time significantly reducing the vehicle weight. Vehicles like some of the newer Teslas with structural battery packs would be problematic. Structural battery packs probably should have waited until the batteries were good enough to last the life of a vehicle.
The Win95 testing story came up in an interview with Dave Plummer, along with the USB cart of death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vJQv4rgHYE
He also told a story about how Pinball had no frame limiter so it would internally redraw as fast as it could, pinning a core on any CPU not matter how powerful. He also mentioned that he likes to keep 6 months of blog posts queued.
The telescope will cover the entire night sky every few nights. The data center computers will compare the new images with old ones looking for anything that changed. Within the first year it is expected to find millions of new objects in the solar system. It will to send out alerts for new object detection within a few minutes of the new image being taken, useful for stuff like new supernova.
I watched a few videos about the ASML EUV machines used for the state of the art process nodes, and those things are more complex than I could have imagined. The light is borderline X-ray and is readily absorbed so they can't use lenses in the system. The entire focusing chain are special 100 layer mirrors, even the chip mask is a mirror. The machines total power consumption is 1MW. To generate the light they need to hit tin droplets traveling at 70 meters / second with a laser once to flatten the drop and a second time to vaporize it at a rate of 50,000 times per second.
So much cope in that Cybertruck owners forum. You've got people calling the original poster a liar / bot. Then others blaming it from metal particles from being shipped by rail. And pollen. Cultists can't bear bad things being said about the totems of their leader. Of course the owners will gladly shell out extra money to get the entire vehicle wrapped in paint protection film.
I truly cruel social media "prank" would be to encourage people to throw iron powder at Cybertrucks, nothing I'd encourage myself.
I think its important that any automaker that wants to continue existing have a mature EV platform that they can rapidly ramp up production on since it takes years to roll out a new product. Mass adoption is still dependent on further battery energy density improvements that will reduce size, weight and cost. Perversely there seems to be a last mover advantage, waiting for battery prices to fall further. Toyota is only now just starting to think about EVs. I think the Japanese manufacturers in general have been holding out for solid state batteries.
I bought a color HP printer back around 2006 on sale for under $400. Today a set of official HP toner cartridges would come to $1100. A set of refilled cartridges is about $200. Crazy price spread. I've had a few problem cartridges over the years so I've been keeping a few known good ones around to swap out rollers and the printer is still doing fine after 22,000 pages. I think toner is priced for businesses who are less likely to care since they can use it as an expense for tax purposes.
I use Notepad when copying and pasting to remove text formatting before pasting it into another program. I was going to mention that in the Wordpad article last week, but figured there had to be easier way to accomplish that task. A quick search indicated that Ctrl-Shift-V does that in many apps.
Billionaires like to perpetuate the myth that they are paying for these things themselves when it is really investors doing the heavy lifting. SpaceX isn't funded by Musk but billions and billions from investors. Throw in a small fraction of the money for a large fraction of the ownership. It is a trickier dance for publicly traded companies as it is easier for investors to pull the rug out from beneath you.
There should be a pretty good chance of the next launch succeeding. The first stack was strong enough to flip end over end at supersonic speeds and survive the FTS detonation for a time. It launched with engines, and a thrust vectoring system that had already been due to be replaced with something better.
And the launch pad concrete is considerably more beefy with a water cooled steel plate on top.
I wonder if something like the AMS experiment could be salvaged and moved to a new station. They went to the trouble to repair it, so it must be sort of important. A commercial station would certainly have a much different orbital inclination favoring launches from the US as there would be no need to accommodate Russia. I get the impression changing the inclination of an orbiting object is much more complex than changing its altitude.
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