Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight

Actually, one of main applications for batteries in the near-to-medium future is gonna be grid storage to supplement the explosive growth of renewables, and home backups to make the grid more distributed and replace diesel/gas generators during blackouts. For those purposes you don’t really care about the size, really don’t care about the weight, and a cheaper, more stable, less fire-prone chemistry suddenly becomes very appealing.

I agree with you that lithium is not going anywhere for a while, it’s the best fit for many applications like EVs, drones, etc. But I wouldn’t be surprised if its share in the battery market drops significantly over the next 10-15 years.

Can’t wait for one of them to be chasing me down for the crime of “thinking unfavorably about Peter Thiel”

Ah yeah, that makes sense. But I feel like it may be a bit easier to run away from a ground-based drone than it is from an aerial one. For one, they’re much slower so you’d probably have a more advanced warning.

Many labor movements throughout history started out due to advances in automation resulting in unemployment and rising inequality. This time around there’s also a huge cost of living crisis too, so things are lining up (you might hear “contradictions are sharpening” in marxist circles). If anything I’d have expected violence to start sooner and be more widespread, if someone gets laid off due to AI in this job market they literally have nothing to lose at this point.

It’s been happening for a good 20 years already. Do you think US drone strikes were all military targets? Do you think both russia and ukraine didn’t absolutely dronefuck multiple population centers? Do you think israel didn’t use drones to carry out its genocides? There are probably tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dead civilians due to drone strikes already.

And the moment they have a nuke and show it off, all hell will break loose

As you can see, all hell has been broken loose for them already even though they don’t have nukes and weren’t planning on making them. I think it’s time they armed themselves against the aggressors, with the only weapon those aggressors actually fear.

Nukes are the epitome of hard power tho. There is very little need to understand anything apart from “if I bomb that country, they nuke me (or, in this case, israel)”. I’m sure the financial markets would not appreciate a nuclear war either, so the profit incentive is there too.

Iran not getting nukes ensures that this war will happen again too. The only ways to keep sovereignty in the face of imperialists are:

1. Be economically irrelevant (a-la Cuba)
2. Kick their ass in a land war so hard that they are scared to even try (a-la Vietnam)
3. Have nukes (a-la North Korea)

If you don’t have any of those three you’re bound to be coup’d by US-backed fascists at some point, see: history of South America and West Asia.

Iran has oil and control over the straight of Hormuz, so (1) is out of the question. (2) is more likely but I’m not sure if the US leadership is dumb enough yet to just go head first into another land war in asia, and in any case this would lead to hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. This leaves us with (3) as the most viable strategy.

I’m pretty sure the model of train is a proper name and it’s named after the satellite. I don’t think I would describe any train as a literal “sputnik” of the rails.

Also Russian is full of composite words like that. “Explorer” in russian would be “исследователь” (issledovatel’) - ис (completely) + след (trace/footstep) + оват (make, imbue) + ель (he who). Literally it would be “he who makes (places) completely (covered in) footsteps”

If the “pa” part of “companion” comes from path

It doesn’t though, it comes from French compagnon/compaignon and then Latin com (with) + panis (bread). It probably originally meant “someone with whom you share bread (eat together)”.

And actually, looking at wiktionary, Old English had a word “ġefēra” (with the same meaning) which is constructed very similarly to “спутник”: ge (‘with’, still the same prefix in german e.g. ‎Gebrüder) + fera (‘to go’/‘to fare’, e.g. in seafaring)

Great assessment TBH. Iran is clearly posturing here, they haven’t won yet, even though the US did lose already.

US plutocrats don’t actually care that much whether the stock market is red or green in the short term, they will make money from it either way. I think the existing strategy of jacking up oil prices (which will impact the economy long-term) and also hitting their assets directly where possible (e.g. datacenters and refineries) will have more impact.

However, it is also possible that with some reshuffling of the demands the ceasefire might actually hold. If they allow Trump to not lose face, they could get most of their demands practically met and be the ultimate victors in this. I hope this is how it goes, otherwise we might see a worldwide famine due to fertilizer shortages by the end of this year.

It’s still super fucked up that you’re basically gifting some other person a sizeable chunk of your income just because they were able to put up a down payment and secure a mortgage. Landlords are rentseeking middlemen leaches that should not exist even by capitalist standards, see Adam Smith.

I really think we’re gonna lose a carrier to swarm drones before this is over.

Paraphrasing donald trump, “inshallah”

Yesterday I was thinking that trump might get angry that Iran is letting through some ships and try enforcing a complete blockade… this seems like the first step towards that

This is not misandry, in just the same way as having a woman antagonist in a story is not misogyny. There is no direct or implied generalization here, it just shows a single guy being an asshole. If you feel attacked by this comic, it’s time for some serious introspection.

Trying to imagine the poor kids trying to study history 50 years from now. Either half the quotes from him are censored, or we drop the “decency” standards a few notches

The actual answer is “stop supporting US/israeli war effort”. The strait is already open for everyone who’s not helping the empire bomb Iranian schoolgirls

If you’re running your own system you can change your birthdate to whatever you want since you have access to sudo.

Best part is that you can just not set it at all and then literally nothing changes for you.

Other PRs from this developer which make useradd ask you for your birth date with no way to opt out… Yeah that’s bad.

US was built on rail, and it was way less dense and urban back then. The problem is not how “compact” a country is, it’s simply a question of priorities and budgets. China and EU are investing in rail (to varying degrees), so they get rail with all its benefits. US is wasting more and more money on financially unsustainable car infrastructure, so it is getting failing car infrastructure.

The bigger story is that modern western societies still require most people to regularly interact with gasoline or diesel. If you think about it, regularly purchasing and burning toxic, polluting fossil juice just to get around is super fucked up.