Well I’m actually sitting at a computer right now so I might as well provide citations in support of what I was saying.

It wasn’t a close case back then

Here’s the judicial ruling. Note that the plaintiff lost on three independent issues, each of which was enough by itself for Pepsi to win:

• Advertisements are almost never binding offers, and this ad didn’t fall within the requirements to be a binding offer. In fact, even order forms and pricing lists/catalogs printed by the merchant aren’t binding offers by the merchant to sell the items on the list at the listed price, and must be affirmatively accepted by the merchant in order to form a binding contract.
• No reasonable person would understand this joke as an offer, even if it weren’t an advertisement, so even if analyzed outside of the advertising context Pepsi would still win.
• There’s no written contract, and contracts for the sale of physical goods worth over $500 require a written contract. The actual written materials in the points program all indicated that the only items available are those within the points catalog, and there was no Harrier jet in the actual printed catalog.

Then, on appeal, three other appellate judges unanimously ruled that the district court got it exactly right.

I did a paper on that in uni and was wondering why the hell Pepsi did not lose. It was a technicality but I don’t think they would win again in this day and age.

You’re way off on this. It wasn’t a close case back then, and since then the law has since shifted considerably towards Pepsi on this (advertising is very rarely construed as an actual offer in the contractual sense), so that it would be an even more lopsided win for Pepsi today.

High voltage DC lines lose about 3% per 1000km, so this project with 4300km of lines could theoretically be set up to lose 12% in losses. There’s also some experimentation with ultra high voltages that would be more efficient, but probably more complex to engineer.

Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.

That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.

This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.

An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.

Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.

There’s not enough oxygen in water to support our metabolisms, even if we had gills.

Fish are adapted to conserve and use less oxygen, from slower metabolic rates to more options for anaerobic respiration that doesn’t poison oneself from within.

So even with those ultra unrealistic assumptions (100kg people, 1 step per second, 100% efficient energy capture), 9.8 watts just isn’t enough.

Lighting needs about 0.6 watts per square foot (6.46 watts per square meter) in an office. That means you need someone like that generating 9.8 watts every 16.3 square feet or 1.5 square meters.

There’s an inherent tension there, where sufficient density to make that work would require people to take fewer, shorter steps.

A basketball court is 4700 sq feet (436.6 sq meters). That means you’d need 288 big people stepping that fast, jammed into a single basketball court sized space, just to keep the lights on in that space. If any of the people stop moving even for a second, the system fails to keep up.

The numbers don’t make any sense.

A 100kg (220 lb) person whose steps compress the tiles by 1cm (0.01m) per step would be transferring 100 kg x 9.8 m/s^2 x 0.01m = 9.8 joules, or 0.00272 watt hours. That assumes 100% perfect efficiency in capturing that energy.

A watt is a joule per second, so someone who steps 1 step per second is generating 9.8 watts. That’s not enough to light the station, much less run the computers and signs and the fare gates and escalators and elevators.

And of course it wouldn’t come anywhere close to running the trains. After all, if it were easy to take people’s biomechanical power to run trains, that would mean that humans could push the trains effectively.

So they’re trying to put 2GW of dispatchable (can be dialed up and down on demand), carbon-free electricity by 2028. If you include the last year and a half of the exploratory drilling work they’ve done on site, that’s about 5 and a half years.

They’re also saying that each well is about $5 million, have about 30 wells planned for the 400MW project. Not sure how much going up to 2 GW would increase the cost, but that’s $0.33 per watt for the 400 MW plan.

In comparison, Vogtle added 2 nuclear reactors for 2 GW of capacity in Georgia, and it cost $35 billion and took 16 years. That’s $17.50 per watt.

Solar is somewhere between $1 to $1.20 per watt, but isn’t dispatchable.

Ongoing operational costs might be different between all of the different types of generation, but the up front costs are important enough to where they should be a significant part of the discussion.

So if they can pull this off in a few places, this will go a long way towards actually going to zero carbon on the grid.

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

The Navy gives its pilots call signs, essentially chosen by that pilot’s peers in flight school.

Having already been a SEAL and a doctor, and only being sent to Navy flight school as part of his astronaut training, his peers gave him the call sign “Sidequest.”

I know you’re making a joke, but it’s not funny specifically because of what a piece of shit his dad actually was.

In Jonny Kim’s senior year in high school, his dad died in a shootout with the police after the pistol whipping his mom and repeatedly threatening to kill her (in front of their high school age son). This dude joined the Navy a few months later, in large part to get away from an traumatic home life.

localizing and streamlining production

These are two distinct goals, sometimes that work against each other. Localization is often a tradeoff between saving energy on transport and logistics versus economies of scale in production, and the right balance might look different for different things.

The carbon footprint of a banana shipped across the globe is still far less than that of the typical backyard chicken, because the act of raising a chicken at home is so inefficient (including with commercially purchased feed driven home in a passenger car) that it can’t compete on energy/carbon footprint.

There are products where going local saves energy, but that’s not by any means a universal correlation.

They’ve got a good, but not perfect, track record of actually uncovering illegal conduct by their targets.

• They exposed Nikola’s fraud (including exposing the video they published pretending that their prototype rolling downhill was moving under its own electric power) and their findings led to the Nikola founder’s indictment about a year later.
• They alleged fraudulent disclosures and financial statements by Nigerian conglomerate Tingo Group, and the government ended up indicting the founder for securities fraud.
• They showed that Lordstown Motors was drumming up fake demand by literally paying potential customers to sign letters of intent to join the waitlist for their not-yet-created electric truck. The SEC ended up charging them with misleading investors, and brought action against their auditor who had conflicts of interest.
• They exposed the obvious fraud of EbixCash, a gift card network, and tanked its IPO, by showing that they were lying to investors about the existence of their partners (using photoshopped buildings and fake addresses and phone numbers), lying about app downloads, and almost all of the revenue was from their own sister companies. This exposure brought down its parent company, which ended up in Chapter 11.

They’ve had less success accusing two huge well-connected investors of fraud:

• They published a report that billionaire Carl Icahn was manipulating the share prices of his fund by using a sophisticated ponzi scheme structure that paid old investors using new investors’ cash. The SEC ended up investigating and settling for a disclosure violation about failing to disclose their pledge of more than half the stock as collateral, but didn’t actually find facts confirming the meat of the Hindenburg accusation.
• They’ve gone after India’s Adani Group for accounting fraud and stock manipulation, but that hasn’t led to anything actually uncovered. India’s security regulator has concluded their investigation without findings of wrongdoing, but Hindenburg has doubled down and says the regulator is compromised by corruption. Adani’s founder is close to India’s Prime Minister.
• They alleged that Block/Square was aware of, but doing nothing to stop, widespread fraud in its Cash App and debit card transactions. That wasn’t enough to actually move the stock price, because it was kinda a weak accusation, they didn’t really show that Cash App was any different from any other similar fintech product, and Block is a much bigger company that has lots of other business units.

The problem is that most of us on the outside looking in just see accusations, some of which are proven years later, and some of which never get proven, so we don’t have a good sense of which ones are real or not, whether anything is overstated, or whether it actually makes a difference to the underlying company.

Lots of people want to switch to EVs but there basically aren’t many options for 7-seaters (the Tesla X and Y both have 7 seater configurations but the back row is basically useless for actual normal sized humans). So the 7-seater+ gasoline powered SUV still sells like crazy in the U.S. market.

Are you trying to say that only American culture has fine dining?

Sears kinda used to be like that in the U.S.

Craftsman, the tool brand, was an in-house brand for Sears, along with Kenmore appliances, Die Hard batteries, Land’s End clothing, etc.

But the whole reason why there is a style of house called Craftsman homes is because Sears used to sell house kits as huge Ikea-style pre-cut lumber to be assembled on site according to their instructions.

Sears also sold insurance under its Allstate insurance subsidiary, houses under its Coldwell Banker real estate brokerage, and all sorts of consumer finance through its Discover card.

Mitsubishi even manufactured carrier based fighters (aka the Zeros) for the Japanese Imperial Navy, for the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Realistically, a lot of it could just be continuation of existing Biden policy:

• Aggressive antitrust enforcement from the FTC and DOJ, slowly changing the inertia of the last 40 years of allowing consolidation and the neutering of century-old antitrust laws.
• Continued pro-labor rulings from the NLRB to give workers more bargaining power as we unionize at Starbucks, Amazon, and other major workforces. Big union wins at automakers, airlines, logistics companies have emboldened new unionization drives at places like VW provide the momentum that need to be backed by government. Even places where unions have seen setbacks, like Mercedes Benz in Alabama, management has been running scared and trying to stave off unions with promises of unprecedented raises (which they’ve since reneged on after the union vote failed). We need to keep the pressure on, especially as the business cycle potentially turns to a tougher job market.
• Marijuana rescheduling is proceeding along, and hopefully will be complete by the end of Biden’s term. The next administration will need to defend it in court, and implement the details for things like banking and medical research and licensing.

Some Biden policies need to be bolstered with a combination of both continued executive action and new laws passed through Congress:

• Many of Biden’s environmental regulations have been rolled back in the courts. A Harris admin should keep pushing on these fronts, but with coverage from Congress where possible.
• Same with economic/workplace regs. The Department of Labor’s minimum wage exemption guidelines are being challenged in the courts right now, with Biden trying to push for the minimum salary of overtime-exempt workers to be at least $58k next year (the $44k minimum took effect on July 1, 2024). The FTC’s noncompete regulation, which would prohibit noncompete agreements for almost all workers, is tied up in the courts now.
• Biden’s Department of Education has tried to implement student loan forgiveness, and lost at the Supreme Court. Now their watered down measures (easier repayment plans, interest forgiveness for certain borrowers) are in the courts, too. New legislation could fix this.

Abortion, contraception, and family planning in general needs a combination of both strong executive action and new legislation:

• Biden’s administration has fought, with mixed success, to make sure that state bans on abortion don’t interfere with federal priorities. DoD has official policy that pays for servicemembers and their families to travel to states where abortions are legal, if necessary to get care. DOJ and HHS are fighting to make sure that states can’t prevent life saving care that some extremists believe constitute abortion. The FDA has expanded access and availability of abortion medication through telehealth and prescriptions by mail.
• Legislative areas worth fighting for include bolstering the authority of Medicare and FDA to preserve access to abortion and contraceptive care, including across state lines, removing the ban on federal funding for abortions, etc.

These are all pretty modest, but very important. The actual machinery of government is immensely important, and we need people who are effective at making sure everything is working for the people.

So just fuck the 700,000 who live there, then? Don’t give them the right to political representation that everyone else in the country has?