A dozen more pilots were injured?

Isn’t Cuba walkable for the most part?

I haven’t been there, but the videos I’ve seen show that they have a very car-centric culture.

The relatives I’ve had visit have confirmed the classic cars. It isn’t propaganda. It’s that they have a lot of cars from the time just before the US sanctions went into effect. A lot of those cars now have weird engines out of trucks, but because they can’t get new car frames in easily, they’re keeping them for as long as they can.

I don’t think there’s anything stopping them from importing electric vehicles from China

Nothing, except for the money to pay for them.

It seems like you’re living in a dream world where Cuba has a strong economy and great relations with China.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re for emergencies or they’re the main power source. Since the Cuban grid is down, the US embassy could only get power using those generators. So, now they’re as in the dark as the rest of Cuba.

While the Cuban government could still communicate with messengers on motorbikes, the US can hardly do that to communicate with the US mainland, so they’re going to be really cut off.

I assume they have some kind of satellite phone and some spare batteries, but unless they have solar panels or something, once those batteries are gone they’re really cut off.

Cuba is still using cars from the 1950s because of the American trade embargo. Under ideal conditions a transition to pure electric / solar energy would take a decade. With an American embargo in place it would take decades and probably never finish.

Apparently an average fuel tank can hold somewhere between 40 and 80 litres. So, that’s up to (0.75 * 80 = 60) 60 kg of fuel, which can supply 2.74 GJ of energy. If you wanted 2.74 GJ of batteries in your car, it would weigh about 4000 kg. That’s double the weight of an F150, or basically the weight of a F350, engine, fuel tank, wheels, etc. included.

Now, of course, nobody puts that much battery capacity into a car or truck.

The point is, it’s not an apples to oranges comparison when you talk about the energy efficiency of an EV vs. a ICE car. ICE cars are inefficient, but carry around a very energy dense fuel source and can go hundreds, sometimes thousands of km without needing to stop. EVs have much more efficient engines, but have to drag around really heavy batteries that aren’t very energy dense. Their range is very constrained because if you wanted to match the range of an ICE car you’d have to almost double the weight of the car in batteries alone.

Personally, I like mass transit and bikes. But, if I had to own a car I’d get an electric one. Still, I know that the major drawback to electric cars is that battery energy density sucks compared to gasoline.

I was about to cry fowl

What are you, chicken?

The main difference is that a modern battery has an energy density of about 0.7 MJ/kg or 700 kJ/kg, whereas gasoline has an energy density of about 45.7 MJ/kg. So, you need to pack in a lot more batteries to allow an electric car to go a meaningful distance. And, you’re hauling around all that extra weight all the time, even when the batteries are nearly empty.

Oil / Gas is a global commodity, shipped around the world on tankers. If prices are higher in France, someone will take cheaper oil/gas from the US and ship it to France where they can make more money.

In the short term, maybe the US suffers less. But, in the longer term prices well even out as people will sell wherever they can get the highest profits.

There are very few US ships.

Almost every ship from a western country flies a “flag of convenience” from a country like Liberia, Panama, the Marshall Islands, etc. If they flew the US flag they’d be subject to US laws, and have to meet US safety standards, pay taxes to the US government, etc.

The few US ships that exist are there to meet the requirements of the Jones Act which requires that shipments from a US port to another US port be done by ships owned by a US citizen, crewed by US citizens / permanent residents, built in the US, and so-on. These ships only serve US-to-US trips, so they don’t go through the Strait of Hormuz. Incidentally, this is a big reason why prices in Hawaii are so high. Only US-flagged carriers can bring supplies from the US to Hawaii. And, with a population of only 1.5 million, it’s not really efficient to send huge ships from other countries to Hawaii.

It seems to me like the world has had 3 phases:

• Phase 1: People own media on records, tapes, etc. because that’s the only way to listen to what you want whenever you want. The only alternative is radio, where you listen to what the DJ thinks you should hear. If you buy something once, you can listen to it whenever you want forever. (Or at least as long as the medium holds up)
• Phase 2: It was relatively easy to get the media you wanted on demand, but it wasn’t always legal, because the copyright cartels were used to a certain way of doing business and didn’t like disruption. During this phase people still bought read-only media in stores. But, they also sometimes bought blank media and filled it up from their computers at home.
• Phase 3: Everything is now online, and you no longer own media. In this phase you can listen to / watch whatever you want, but you don’t get to own anything, and you have to pay monthly if you don’t want your media viewing / listening to be interrupted by ads. In this phase, media you love can just disappear if someone loses the license to stream it, or the copyright owner decides to pull it or modify it. In this version someone like George Lucas can decide that the version of Star Wars you grew up on should change, and you now have to accept his new version.

Unfortunately, long-term storage hasn’t kept pace with short-term storage and bandwidth. You can make someone a “mix tape” that’s a USB stick, but if someone puts it on a shelf it might not be readable in 5 years. You could save the original version of Star Wars to a NAS. But, if your friend wants to borrow it, it’s not as easy as grabbing a case off the bookshelf and handing it over.

I keep hoping that one of these “crystal storage” mechanisms takes off. Then we can much more easily be data hoarders, keeping everything, and not relying on a continued subscription to a streaming service for our favourite media.

Devils. Being kicked by.

I hope that if the bill passes there’s also an exit tax. So, if you leave California to try to avoid the billionaire tax, you still need to pay if you were in California when the bill passed. Show up in California again and you can be arrested for not paying.

The problem with using statistics is that billionaires aren’t a representative sample of humanity.

Let’s say you pick a representative sample of 100 different small business owners. You come in, and buy out their businesses for $30m, letting them believe that they earned that money on merit.

What are most of those people going to do? Many will retire, many will donate a lot of their money, helping out in their communities. But, maybe one of those guys will say “$30m isn’t enough, I need MORE!” and start trying to get 100x their already vast fortune. Billionaires are weirdos from that last group.

The amount of money here is absurd. $45m is 0.02% of his net worth.

Say you’re a successful doctor and have a net worth of $1m. If you wanted to spend 0.02% of your net worth on something it would be $200.

If the tax passes he’d owe $12b. Subtract $45m from $12b and you’d still have $11,955 million remaining, which rounds to $12b.

Once upon a time this guy would have paid 94% in federal taxes

Federal income taxes. It’s an important distinction between wealth taxes and income taxes. The problem with billionaires isn’t what they’re willing to admit to in income, it’s what they’re able to do with their vast wealth.

With many businesses I’m sure that’s true. But, it might be different when you’re making something artistic. Subnautica has a lot of passionate fans, and it’s a unique kind of game. These guys might really want to finish this game that they poured a lot of themselves into. Maybe not, maybe they just want to move on. But, I think a lot of people who work on games really care about what it is they’re doing.

The headline is pretty accurate.

Yeah. These illegal firings happened around 9 months ago. I doubt these guys had the funds to just sit on the sidelines, doing nothing, hoping that the court would rule in their favour. Even if they’re offered their jobs back, it could be that by now they’ve made other commitments.

That’s half of it. The other half is that these execs think that everybody under them is some kind of replaceable cog in the machine with no special skills. They don’t think their job could be replaced by AI. But, they think everyone under them is so unimportant that their job can be done by AI. They’re managers. They don’t know how to do the work of the people they’re managing. They can’t tell the difference between an accurate result given to them by someone with knowledge and expertise vs. one created by a slop machine that generates plausibly realistic text.

If their $1000/hour lawyers tell them one thing, but the bullshit machine tells them something different, they trust whichever one gives them the answer they prefer.