IP acquisition makes stuff like this inevitable. And the streaming companies still aren't good enough at making and sustaining content, while the older companies simply can make better stuff still.
It might be a path to breaking up some of the media conglomerates. Even if it's just different, newer conglomerates, maybe better media and news will shake out for a bit.
But with big tech making EVERYTHING worse it touches with no regards for wetware customers, it's probably a bad thing.
It's where we are. Everything everywhere is collecting data and spying.
If it exists in a database, then the government has access to that database if it ever wants to legally or otherwise. It's been like that since 9:11 and probably before.
All we need now is for the right person to walk in and turn the key. We're lucky that Donald Trump is probably too stupid to understand what he's got under his thumb.
I mean why not just have a whole bunch of floating buoys doing computation on the ocean? They can probably get energy both from solar and from the tidal wave energy. Cooling certainly won't be an issue.
70-75% is good efficiency. So did they use an existing old oil well? What are the construction costs of this? I mean it's great they built it quickly but I'm wondering if they built it quickly because the digging had already been done.
oil, and the inevitable gas from even a spent well would be a huge complication, which I think would get a big mention if they had ALL THAT!, worked out, as there are millions of retrofits then availible, right now
so.I think they are leveraging tech derived from the "drill baby drill" industry in dry rock, and adding water
Regardless of the accuracy of this particular report, the general trend seems to be that Teslas are not improving in reliability, fit, finish, or worst of all, availability of spare parts as time progresses. This is now, what, a 15 year old company?
My biased opinion is that it won't get better in the future, because Tesla has ceased to be a company that aspirational people will work at, and the CEO isn't even interested in being CEO of a car company.
I hope that Chinese EV makers gain access to the US market directly or indirectly, and are able to globally diversify. It's the only way we'll really get the EV revolution and the diversity of models and form factors.
We'll certainly never get it with Tesla. They are years behind in battery tech, they basically make two cars.
If Tesla had a real CEO, they wouldn't just have 10 models of cars, they'd have multiple marques, true luxury cars, entry level cars, probably would have acquired other struggling automakers for production capacity, market access, existing designs to adapt, would have had companies pushing PHEVs with their motors, battery packaging, and battery management.
Instead, they make two cars, and still have a CEO that did perhaps the single dumbest public gaff in the history of corporations with his public nazi salutes and AfD dogwhistling.
Like when I ask AIs to port sed to java, and it writes test cases ... running sed on a CLI and doesn't implement the full lang spec no matter how much prompting I give it.
I think the criticisms are too often dismissed as moving the goalposts or ignorant of potential, but short of recreating the active open bugs in Java, you've created a different thing whose differences have to be managed and it is unclear how helpful that may be despite the working implementations of subsets.
If I (or someone else) can use it as a start point in bootstrap process - that's fine with me. This is not supposed to be a top-tier compiler. Essentially, it needs to be able to build ANT.
It breeds thorium to fissionable uranium from a starting fissionable uranium starter fuel. It doesn't directly use thorium for fuel.
What people need to understand about the cycle efficiency is that when you mine uranium, the fissionable part of uranium (U-235) is only 1% of that uranium, the rest is nonfissionable U-238.
Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium (all isotopes). The MSR uses Thorium to create U-233, a fissionable but not naturally occurring Uranium isotope.
So the "unlimited energy aspect" is that about 200-300x more breedable Thorium exists than fissionable U-235.
A MSR nation could also try to breed U-238 into plutonium, which would provide another 100x more breeding stock, although LFTR never talked about U-238 breeding. IIRC the plutonium may be difficult to handle because of gamma rays, but I don't recall exactly.
While I don't have confidence that even LFTR/MSR reactors can get economical enough to challenge gas peakers, it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design. I wish the Chinese the best of luck, because if they do it will spur the rest of the world to adopt this about-as-clean-and-safe-as-it-gets nuclear design.
China has thorium, and while less than others [1], it’s better than they do with uranium [2].
> it may be possible to make truly price-competitive MSR electricity with the right modular design
Yes. But probably not in the near term with thorium. This isn’t designed to be cheaper. It’s designed to be more available to China than being dependent on Russian deposits.
Eh, U-235 is .7%, not 1%, but also U-238 can be bred into Plutonium. What makes Thorium interesting -besides its abundance- is that U-233 is very difficult to work with, so proliferation concerns are mitigated.
This is interesting posturing, but ultimately I think the Ukraine drone war has made an invasion of Taiwan by China virtually impossible.
- Surface naval assets are extremely vulnerable to drones, so a blockade probably can't be maintained
- a marine assault will get utterly obliterated by drones as well as conventional military defenses
- urban warfare with drones is now even more difficult
- wars like this expose governmental corruption on a massive scale, so the mainland military won't want it to happen
- the Malacca Straits will be blockaded by a deep water navy (ours) that can't be reached by Ukraine-style drones, so China's economy collapses without oil for fertilizer, energy, and transportation
Feel like this is way too optimistic. The Chinese strategy isn’t to actually put boots on the ground - it’s to make invasion inevitable by having a massive mismatch in power. Then they present a fait accompli to the American President, making grandiose promises in exchange for taking Taiwan with minimal loss of life. If the American President is a transactional person who can be bought cheap, it’ll work.
They’ve managed to address a lot of their disadvantages as well
- Energy is a lot less oil dependent as they’ve transitioned to solar, wind and nuclear, while also electrifying cars and buses.
- Of course oil is important, which is why they have a 2 billion barrel reserve. That could last them 6 months with zero imports.
- But in practice they have reduced their reliance on oil imports through the straits of Malacca because they can get oil through Pakistan (Gwadar).
- Exposing corruption is something Xi is very comfortable with. He’s purged the PLA leadership multiple times, even men he’s appointed personally. Certainly a chunk of the military budget is siphoned away, but the spending is so high and their manufacturing so solid that they have enough of everything they need (missiles, transport ships, destroyers, submarines, fighter planes).
- Drones have changed the game, but it is unclear that Taiwan is prioritising them in the quantities they need. Ukraine needs thousands of drones per day of different kinds. They’re going all in on drone innovation and manufacturing and the Taiwanese aren’t (although they could be keeping it secret). They waste money on prestige kit like fighter jets that will never be allowed to leave their airfields.
If Taiwan has 50k unjammable, unhackable drones covering every approach to the island, both air and underwater, with enough personnel to manage them all, distributed across the island, then maybe they have a hope. But my sense is that when America abandons them in exchange for a few soybean sales, they’ll struggle to survive on their own.
In a perfect world of solar/wind, oil is still really necessary, especially to a manufacturing economy (plastics/materials/lubrication), and most importantly: fertilizer.
Sure, China's strategic reserve lasts 6 months. Then ... starvation.
South Korea, Japan, INDIA, and Southeast Asia will probably view China's assault on Taiwan as imperialism,
The US is not going to sell out TSMC production for soybeans. TSMC production loss alone would tank the US economy into a depression for probably 5-10 years.
And I always wonder if an "illegal" invasion happens if the US can cancel its debt to China.... Which I guess is "only" 750-900 billion, but it's still something that can probably be done.
Finally, wars are financed by debt. If China gets international sanctions from an invasion... who pays for it? Russia can't. India won't. China is a bigger house of financial cards than the US is if you believe some of the doom.
Never underestimate the incompetence of large organizations, but drone manufacture on that scale is not a big lift compared to say, tanks and fighter jet design and manufacturing. 50,000 drones fit in how many shipping containers? 20? And yes, drones are now unhackable with fiber optic line leads, certainly for defense of beach assaults. Naval drones are a different story.
China is always some form of warlord confederation. Launching a foolish invasion that fails quickly invites a total collapse of the Beijing power center of the CCP. Starvation from a blockade/sanctions ... invites a total collapse of the CCP. I would argue that Russia's population was tolerant of the Ukraine invasion because the Russian government was in a quid pro quo with the population: we keep the lights on, the oil cheap, and decent enough economy, and you let Putin do what he does.
The CCP does not have the same quid-pro-quo with the Chinese people AFAIK, and has a lot less leeway with them with the COVID lockdowns and general dislike of the CCP. A failed invasion and then catastrophic economic sanctions could topple the CCP very very very quickly.
> Surface naval assets are extremely vulnerable to drones, so a blockade probably can't be maintained
> the Malacca Straits will be blockaded by a deep water navy (ours) that can't be reached by Ukraine-style drones, so China's economy collapses without oil for fertilizer, energy, and transportation
Then don't use Ukraine-style drones. Also, blockading Malacca also tanks the Phillipines, Japan and Korea.
- the US doesn't have to sit IN the Malacca Straits, but oil traffic does HAVE to go that way. The US can park naval assets in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and intercept traffic coming out of the Middle East from the Arabian Sea. They have satellites and tracking to enforce a wide area of denial, far from missile intercept.
- oil pipelines, railroads, and other continental transport modes, in addition to being more expensive, slower, and limited in bandwidth, and extremely vulnerable to sabotage, political interference from countries they have to go through, etc.
I caution against using whatever the Russian army and, especially, navy is going through as a guideline on what can or cannot happen to a competent, well equipped force. Putting it bluntly, their equipment is not only subpar, it is also poorly mantained and crewed by people who were not properly trained for its operation, and commanded by leaders who were almost never promoted for their competence.
> or cannot happen to a competent, well equipped force ... their equipment is not only subpar, it is also poorly mantained and crewed by people who were not properly trained for its operation, and commanded by leaders who were almost never promoted for their competence.
I think it's far from clear that this isn't the case for the PLA -- nobody has any idea because they haven't seen any combat other than harassing fishermen or hitting Indians with sticks since they had to do a face-saving retreat from 'nam in the late 70s.
It's possible they've got Western-style NCOs and their rockets aren't full of water, but, who knows? They probably don't even know themselves, and if you're a Chinese general who's gotten fat off their position, are you really going to sound the alarm?
All this is of course also true of Japan and Taiwan, although one would hope that their allies have managed to iron out the kinks there.
EDIT: It's also entirely unclear how well any of these populations is going to deal with troops getting shot, which is important.
Yes, it is possible that China shares many of the same weaknesses - for instance, a few years back a video circulated from their infantry training that showed their rifles keyholing targets at extremely close range [0], suggesting inadequate equipment, but it would be dangerous to assume this is globally true for them without more evidence. Evidence, which, given China's keenness on saving face at all cost, we are unlikely to get until the conflict actually starts.
The US's master plan for aiding Taiwan revolves around assuming China will magically forget that transport helicopters exist and then dumbly force their entire armed forces into 1940's Higgins boats for conga line suicide charges into Taiwans most defended + mined beaches.
...It should go without saying that these are brain dead assumptions. China definitely has a much better plan than this.
Taiwan is basically a mountain fortress island. And drones only make it far more so. You think transport helicopters could penetrate modern drone flotillas? You think the landing boats of WWII are vulnerable?
Higgins boats are CHEAP and move a lot of soldiers. Helicopters are EXPENSIVE and easily downed and move less soldiers and equipment.
The general tone of the dissenters is that mainland China is competent, and Taiwan is incompetent. If anything, it is likely to be the opposite. The CCP is a purged autocratic cult at this point with full communication and coordination breakdowns in basic government functions.
IMO, Xi and China are coasting on the Deng Xiaoping reform effects. Mainland China is an ossifying and crumbling state, they simply have so much momentum that it doesn't seem like it. Everyone with offshored manufacturing is attempting to move it from China. That's a multi-decade trend, but it's still the trend. Of the entire world.
Did Corregidor have MANPADs? Antiship missiles? Antiaircraft missiles?
Corregidor had improper stocks of supplies it appears.
They were using horse cavalry?
Did Corregidor have its own defensive air wing?
Did Corregidor have 150,000 defenders? Or just 15,000?
The Japanese were a battle-tested navy and army and airforce at that point, after dozens of imperial conflicts as well as the Sino-Russian wars.
The Chinese military are almost entirely untested, and likely riddled with corruption. A Chinese invasion will almost certainly involve a plan that looks like it's what an invasion plan looks like when reported to the CCP, but it won't be an experience-informed battle plan, nor am I sure the Chinese military will be able to handle the "battle plans are great until you get punched in the face".
Is it a sure defense for Taiwan against a full force invasion? Of course not. Is it a guaranteed victory for mainland China? Of course not.
The political risk to Xi is high. Even with a successful invasion, and an embargo/blockade, it could politically topple the CCP. A failed invasion would likely involve a highly destabilizing embargo/blockage that could similarly topple the CCP.
It might be a path to breaking up some of the media conglomerates. Even if it's just different, newer conglomerates, maybe better media and news will shake out for a bit.
But with big tech making EVERYTHING worse it touches with no regards for wetware customers, it's probably a bad thing.
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