It's such a shame. My wife has an early Model 3 from 2019 that's now over 100,000 miles. It's been a great car, no major issues and no maintenance for 6 years. 100,000 miles with nothing but new tires and windshield washer fluid is amazing to me. We're not in a position to unload our Tesla for something else right now, but without major changes at the head of the company it will likely be the last Tesla we own.
I've toured a couple of ATC towers recently and my impression was they were surprisingly low tech. A tech upgrade seems like the most viable solution at this point. There are processes for writing and testing software and hardware for environments such as this, but the government needs to be willing to make the investment.
I've been using a Garmin Forerunner GPS watch for years, and what I've found I like the most about it is actually the Garmin Connect app on my phone. I don't think Garmin gets enough credit as a software shop. Connect is a great application for tracking your workouts over time. A fair number of runners even use Garmin's workout plans from the app. Even compared to running apps exclusively for iOS and Android I think the Garmin app is one of the better ones around, and is free to use with no monthly fees. Combine that with the fact that I don't even have to take my phone with me, I just wear my watch and it syncs with my phone when I get home. Running with a phone sucks, I have yet to find a way to carry one that isn't annoying.
This pretty much reflects what we get in the US as well. Obviously with the size of the US we have a ways to go before we get to ICE level of coverage but it has gotten much better the last 2-3 years. The only thing Google maps lacks over say the Tesla app is being able to see how many chargers are available at a station. I’ve changed my trip a little bit a few times when it’s clear one station is a lot busier than another one that might be 20 miles down the road.
Tesla actually had $1.74 billion in revenue from its charging network in 2023, Bloomberg estimates that they probably made about 10% profits from that or $174 million. They are predicting that to grow to $7.4 billion in revenue by 2030. In my neck of the woods many of the Tesla superchargers I see are empty most of the time, presumably adding 3rd party vehicles is a way for Tesla to increase it's profits on their already built out network. Of course Tesla is still adding to their network but presumably as that investment decreases and the fact that they are charging more for non-Tesla vehicles, their profits will increase. It seems like it's turned into a nice little side business.
One of these years the Colorado mountains are going to get a fraction of the snow they normally get and it's going to be a disaster for the entire southwest US. It almost happened in the winter of 2020-21, the snowpack statewide was just 30-40% of average at the end of winter. A heavy, wet, late spring storm dropped a ton of snow in the Colorado mountains in April of 2021 and saved the day, but man if that storm hadn't happened...imagine the 60 odd million people from Colorado to Mexico fighting over just a third of the normal amount of water they have to work with?
Rocket Lab mentions “human spaceflight” on the Neutron page, that’s the only mention I’ve seen of it. I haven’t seen any plans for a spacecraft for carrying humans or how they might handle re-entry.
It's not just that the weight is gained back but the rate that it's gained back. Imagine someone loosing 100 pounds on semaglutide and then gaining 70 pounds of it back in 1 year when they stop taking it. That's over 1 pound a week of weight gain, likely much faster than that individual gained the 100 pounds originally. That type of rapid weight gain is associated with even worse health effects than carrying the extra 100 pounds probably was, and that's just at 1 year, where will this individual be in 2 years, 3 years etc? Will they really keep that other 30% weight off? We don't have the data yet, but it doesn't seem likely they will. I'm not saying we shouldn't use these drugs, just that we need to understand that they are only the first step to a much longer strategy to improved health.
The biggest problem with semaglutide is once you stop taking it things like blood sugar and body weight start to go back to where they were before. On average people gain back 70% of the weight they lost on the drug within the first year when they stop taking it. It seems likely this is going to be true with other addictions as well such as alcohol. While the effects are impressive, without addressing the underlying causes such as psychological factors that cause people to overeat or abuse other substances like alcohol it seems like we are just replacing one form of chemical dependance with another, albeit a healthier one.
One proposal I've seen involves putting asteroids into an orbit such that their gravity pulls the Earth outwards a tiny bit each time they pass. Over an extended period of time (millions of years?) we could move the Earth outwards from the sun before the sun expands and cooks it. Obviously the Earth would pull the asteroid inward as well so we would have to adjust the asteroid's orbit after each pass. One proposal I've seen would be use Venus to keep the asteroid in a stable orbit. Essentially each pass of the Earth would slow the asteroid down a little bit, but each pass by Venus would speed it back up again, essentially pulling the Earth away from the sun while pulling Venus closer to the sun. In theory we could set up a system like this and just let it do its thing over a very long time, the change would be imperceptible over a human lifetime.
In some ways this whole industry creates it's own problems because airlines don't want to get pay to get their pilots certified for new planes. So Boeing tried to engineer their way out of the problem and hack in some changes to make an entirely new design fly like an old 737-800. Southwest Airlines was a major contributor to this as the largest purchaser of 737s in the world, because you know, god forbid Southwest's pilots had to get certified to fly a new plane once every 50 years.
I think it's worth noting that the 3 body series were originally written in Chinese and translated to other languages. Some of the issue with characters and dialog can be attributed to Chinese culture where people cannot or will not speak their mind in public or to their superiors for example. I think in some cases where a character in the books makes outright puzzling decisions from a western perspective probably makes perfect sense from a Chinese perspective. Some of these issues can probably also be attributed to the translation as well. Personally I really enjoyed not only the hard sci-fi aspect of the books but the predominately Chinese perspective you get from the books. I loved the way he tied the story historically back to the Cultural Revolution in China for example.
I have read the creators of the Netflix series have adapted the story to make it more of a global epic, changing some of the characters from Chinese to other nationalities and you see that in the trailers as well. I think this probably makes a lot of sense for Netflix given their target audiences but I hope they still keep a lot of the Chinese aspect of the books and some of the characters as I do think it's important for the story.
Minimal orbital speed is somewhere around 25,000-28,000 kph. The fastest air breathing plane every built (SR-71) had a top speed of about 3,500 kph. So for the added weight and complexity of adding an air breathing first stage (wings, air breathing engines, landing gear etc) you are only getting about 14% of the way to the minimal orbital velocity needed, and that would be if your air breathing first stage could match the performance of the fastest plane ever built, keep in mind the SR-71 carried almost no payload. It is far more likely that any realistic air breathing first stage is going to get to less than 10% of orbital velocity, and that would likely be for launching a fairly small rocket. On the other hand the Falcon 9 first stage usually doesn't separate until 6,000-9,000 kph which is closer to 25-35% of orbital velocity, and that's while carrying almost 23,000 kg of payload plus the fully fueled second stage.
I still use a dumb watch (the classic Timex Ironman Triathlon) when I workout sometimes or when I'm coaching and I just need a stopwatch, I have yet to see a smartwatch that makes a very good stopwatch. Even some of the exercise specific smartwatches like the Garmin Forerunners don't do stopwatch as well as a Timex.
As a coach I've been seeing a lot of smartwatches on kids lately that are maybe a little young for a smartphone, they seem to be the go-to choice these days for parents to keep track of their kids. That seems like a decent fit, by the time the watch dies the kid will probably be old enough for a smartphone anyway.
In the US there has been significant cutbacks in USDA programs like the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that paid farmers to keep certain pieces of land fallow and to plant native plants and grasses to provide food and habitat for wildlife. These programs were popular with small farmers and ranchers as it gave them some guaranteed income each year, and allowed them to follow good practices like rotating crops etc. Many of these programs were created after the dust bowl to provided incentives for better land management practices. We've been seeing reduced investments in these kinds of programs over the last couple of decades with the most recent farm bill in 2023 being one of the worse cuts yet:
https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/26/apartment-rents-denver-fa...