Thanks for confirming my suspicion! When I read phrases like "Battery cells require electrode coating with toxic solvents (NMP), electrolyte handling, and formation cycling. This is exactly why Tesla's Gigafactory went to Reno." I (as someone not very familiar with the subject) thought it's strange that California should regulate what kind of chemicals can be used in an industrial process. Of course, they don't - but they regulate that industry can't release toxic chemicals into the environment. But because Elon thinks it's too expensive to make sure that no NMP gets out of his factory, he goes to his Republican pals in Texas or Nevada who don't worry about pollution...
That's certainly one interpretation. Most of the workers there keep doing what they do to protect the environment though, so it's entirely plausible that they are taking precautions to save the environment, but find the method in which the regulations are implemented to be slow or arcane. If it's anything like cybersecurity in the government, the laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to actually accomplishing the initial goals.
If there's anything I have learned with age it's that regulations have bizarre unintended consequences. The incentives are too numerous and too precariously balanced to muck with without tipping someone's seesaw right into a volcano.
NMP in particular readily biodegrades in aerobic environments, both in water treatment plants and just in water. Bacteria seem to crack it quickly. It's also not volatile. You have to protect yourself while working with it, but it's not comparable to really nasty stuff, like heavy metals.
I'm not aware of many (non-manmade) barren wastelands on Terra. Even the Empty Quarter has wildlife. About the only place I can think of would be something like the Dead Sea.
I guess that with "throughout the country" you mean the US? There, building gigantic new pumped storage systems might work, e.g. somewhere on a mesa in a desert with few people living nearby (OTOH you need some source of water for pumped storage too, so a desert location is not really ideal), but in more populated locations (i.e. Europe) such a project would face opposition and interminable delays caused by all the NIMBYs living next to it.
Besides that: pumped storage is good for regulating short-term fluctuations (between day and night), not so sure about storing surplus renewable energy produced in summer to use it during winter, as the article proposes?
Well, once AI takes over most of the white collar jobs, people will have to do something to put food on the table, and not all of them can be gig workers. Or do you see ideas like Universal Basic Income as an alternative for the US?
That's argument is a bit rough given manufacturing is one of the areas seeing the most automation progress and success. One of the main reason it's not more successful is labor costs can be lower than automation that wouldn't be true if we wanted to replace the income of white collar workers in the US.
If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.
I'll worry about the Deus Ex Machina when it's here. Until then, AI is mostly generating a lot of text and burning insane amounts of energy, and we have bigger problems to worry about. Like a president diverting ten billion dollars of tax payer money into his cosplay UN for crooks and dictators.
Not only one of those types, I can think of at least another one that's (IMHO) far worse than Altman. You know, the one with the social network everyone used to use before he turned it into a cesspool of disinformation, the one with the alternate Wikipedia, the obsession with the letter X?
Cool project! What I miss most about switching from CDs to digital music/streaming is the CD art/booklets. Yeah, I know, that itself was a far cry from the art on vinyl record sleeves (mostly because of size constraints), but still, if I built one of these, I would probably make the cover images bigger - or even provide a sleeve in which to insert a CD booklet (however I guess that would be difficult with a Rolodex?).
> she is able to stroll through immigration without stopping because her P-Comm is dealing with the ID checks as she walks.
We're getting closer to digital ID. But outside of a few experiments, there's no international consensus. However, every modern passport has an NFC chip which can be read by most airports. You still need to hold your passport on the reader, but it's usually quicker than queuing for a human.
As far as immigration to the US is concerned (and I guess it is, because I haven't heard of the term "immigration" applied to business travelers or tourists anywhere else in the world), expecting to be able to "stroll through" it sounds increasingly naive after reports of various unsuspecting travelers being detained for weeks and then deported (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...), and the current to-and-fro around TSA PreCheck and Global Entry (https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/22/politics/shutdonw-tsa-pre...).
Ok, thanks for setting the record straight, I stand corrected. Interestingly enough, while I have been to the UK several times, I don't remember coming across the term "immigration" (probably because most of those times were pre-Brexit, so immigration was much less of a hassle for a EU citizen than it would have been when visiting the US).
Yeah Gemini seems to be good at giving silly answers for silly questions. E.g. if you ask for "patch notes for Chess" Gemini gives a full on meme answer and the others give something dry like "Chess is a traditional board game that has had stable rules for centuries".
With Radon it might even be conceivably possible (not sure how hard it is to get and if any restrictions apply because of its radioactivity), and it would work for a few years, because it has a half-life of 3.825 days (EDIT: this is of course complete nonsense, the "." is a decimal point, so it will only work for a few days). In the quantities needed for a gas tube (and as long as it stays in the tube!), I guess it should also be relatively safe, but I'm not an expert. Apparently it produces red light when used in a tube. Oganesson however has a half-life of 0.7 ms, so, aside from how expensive it would be to synthesize enough of it, it's doesn't stay around long enough for any experiments...
A few years with a half-life of less than four days? I doubt you could perceive any glow after more than a few weeks.
In a year the radon would've undergone about a hundred halvings, so around one 10^30th of the original radon nuclei would be left. Which is to say, almost certainly zero. One mole worth of radon would've decayed down to the last atom after less than 300 days (mostly to lead-210, which would then comparatively slowly decay to stable lead-206 with a half-life of about 22 years).
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