You can get a DrinkMate which can carbonate anything, no need to dilute. It has a built in pressure release, and is easily cleanable by design.

Don’t use a sodastream, it’s not meant for anything but water. It’d make a mess and be very hard to clean.

Citizens United was the final straw in the downfall of America democracy.

It’s been inevitable since.

Unless it’s overturned it’s over, and I don’t think they can overturn it.

Never do your own Crypto

Figured this needed repeating not at the bottom

Cop: WTF happened here?

Driver: It drove itself onto the tracks

Cop: Okay, but what about the other 49 feet of the 50 feet it’s on the tracks?

Driver: …

How the fuck do you let any level 2 system go 40 to 50 fucking feet down the railroad tracks.

We’re they asleep?

Up and down isn’t a hard problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s expensive and doesn’t offer much benefit which is why people generally haven’t bothered.

Going up and over at orbital velocities and coming back is the hard part, and none of these new spaces companies have done that successfully yet, and SpaceX has now done it with 2 vehicles and reused them both.

New Glenn from Blue Orgin might be the first after SpaceX but it blew up coming back on their first attempt, but it’s been designed to be orbital and reusable

The answer might be no today, but always seems like a stretch.

Okay, but could ChatGPT be used to vibe code a chess program that beats the Atari 2600?

The FCC revoked that award before the money was handed over because starlink wasn’t meeting the speeds they needed to meet for the deadline 3 years in the future and they didn’t think they would make it. The speeds that money was supposed to help them achieve launching the satellites required to meet it.

No one else had that made up requirement put on them in advance.

The goal that was 3 years in the future, which would have been around now or early 2026, required them to meet their speed (100d + 20u) and latency (<100ms) goals for 40% of the 650k rural users.

They had 1.5 million US customers at the start of 2025, not sure how many are part of this rural 650k but id imagine the majority are, and only 260k of the rural ones have to meet the requirements.

Ookla did a post about starlink in Maine where it shows many of the users are meeting those requirements

https://www.ookla.com/articles/above-maine-starlink-twinkles

Median DL: 116.77 (over the required 100)

Media UL: 18.17 (just shy of the required 20)

90th Percentile DL: 250.96

90th Percentile UL 27.17

If Maine is a representative example, then they are probably meeting their 40% target of 260k rural users despite not getting the money which would have accelerated things and made launches more focused on meeting the goals.

Edit: extra details.

Edit: I was just looking up more info on the program, and the deadline to report would have been in January 2025, so it would have been with the 1.5 million users they had at the start of the year, not around now, or 2026 as I’d said. That Ookla report was December 2024. We should get a report from the FCC (this summer?) that outlines how many others met their respective 40% target.

I wish there was more municipal fiber. It’s absolutely insane that the big ISPs fight it and often win.

It depends on the distance, but yes. Those laser interlinks are fast.

The problem with fiber is it isn’t direct, and the satellites do use lasers (light!) to travel longer distances. The longer the distance the bigger edge satellite internet gets.

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I think it was the crab boss on the original S/NES blaster master. 3rd or 4th boss. They’ve since made the game a little more forgiving.

You barely saw it in the news compared to VW as well. Even if an article would bring it up, it’d usually be headlines with VW in some way or another.

It’s a shame so many of our choices for cars out there are run by bad people at the top 😞

It wasn’t just VW. It was like a dozen of the major brands all doing it in some way or another.

E.g BMW was involved as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_emissions_scandal

No doubt there that R&D is being spent differently now, and a lot of it can fail and end up being a waste.

A lot of it is going to their new batteries though which they’ve stated are now cheaper than all their suppliers. That doesn’t mean it’s cheaper to produce than others, but they don’t have to pay a profit markup, so it ends up being cheaper. The refinery is just going go make those even cheaper, assuming that is successful as well.

That kind or investment will pay off if they keep it up and stay in that position, and long term, is transferable to the energy business which could prop up bad car sales (but that part would be many years away as they don’t have it scaled to that yet)

Then yes they’re spending many billions on the cybercab, which might be a failure, but the whole new manufacturing process they’ve created for it is transferable to other vehicles if they have to admit failure on the cab itself due to FSD failure. But the whole new process itself could also be a failure. That would be very bad catastrophic for them as the new process is how they plan to reduce costs moving forward. There’s an additional 2 partially designed vehicles using that new process which were put on hold, so as long as the process itself isn’t a failure, they could admit failure on the cab and pivot to those sooner than later.

The cybertruck is a flop, but a lot of the tech is transferable.

Optimus is an easier problem to solve than FSD at least for commercial stuff IMO, and it derisks their heavy R&D into AI stuff as now there’s 2 things counting on it instead of 1. But yes still a huge risk, and yes both AI things could fail which would now be very bad.

There are a lot of gambles right now on certain things absolutely, but I wouldn’t say all the R&D is wasted.

They can only have so many failures / flops though while also going through a dramatic sales slump. If that worsens they’ll rearch a point where they have to reassess their goals and plans or it risk becoming a dire situation, but it’s not dire yet.

If everything keeps going bad, they’ll have to kick Elon out, or he’ll have to change course, or it will actually become dire and they’ll fail.

The year is 2039, Florida has been perpetually under hurricanes for 3 weeks straight as hurricane after hurricane makes landfall. After careful review, it’s been determined that the hurricanes have caused $0.00 in damage. There’s nothing to be concerned about. FEMA has not been dispatched as there is no emergency.

Then they spend 400-500m less on capital expenditures or research and development. It means slower growth and give others an advantage, but it’s not the end of the world.

That or they say fuck it and eat into their 35b cash for a bit.

I mean we’ll have to see how bad things get, but there’s a long ways to go from now to sales so low even the energy business can’t cover the costs of the facilities and staff even if they stop most of the capital intensive projects, idle the lines, and try to turtle while working on kicking Elon out and reorganizing.

Edit: just to clarify, the commercial energy business isn’t going to get hit as hard as the consumer vehicles market. I don’t expect to see such a huge slump there compared to the consumer vehicles.