Of course.

Its the midwest pragmatism that sells it.

I just do what he says because it sounds so practical.

A magnetron, some sheet metal and an idiot dumb enough to turn on something I wire together, and bam, you’ve got a tool for knocking drones out of the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6XdcWToy2c

Look at what the little militias aka the police are using on us.

Its enough to make one want to start hording microwaves.

New Technology connections video drops:

I’m going to go buy a kill-a-watt.

Well I’m happy to be done with this exchange

I mean, it’s had value for others certainly, to spark thinking on the relationship between how we think about power and the role that has in how we choose to which technology to develop and how.

It also puts you on display as a vapid and worthless void, fully absent of a thought worthy of responding to, so we all benefit from knowing more in that regard.

I can now see that you are too dense to have a conversation on this matter. In the future, please, just be an obtuse buffoon earlier so I don’t have to waste my time putting together respectful, thoughtful responses for an idiot like yourself.

Them not being capable of thermal runaway is the big game changer imo. They explode, but don’t catch fire in doing so.

The arguments I’m making are fundamentally about the philosophy that underpins the assumptions that the decisions you’ve outlined above, are the right decisions to be making or even the right framework for making decisions.

Core to what I’ve been saying is that how we think about power; how we think about force: how we think about these things and the assumptions we make sets the stage for how we’ll think about technology, development, how to fight a modern war, or what a modern war would even look like.

This scene from Dr. Strangelove demonstrates the ideology clearly:

We wouldn’t want a doomsday gap would we? Look at the big board!!

Although satire, this movie highlights the basic mentality both the US and Soviet union had, which established both the soft power aspects of diplomacy, as well as the conclusions each country made around what military technologies to develop, how to develop them, and what the future of war and projection of force would look like. What we think about the world dictates how we behave in it.

Just try to see within what you are saying, the ideological assumptions you are implicitly making about war fighting, about the use of power, about projection of power, about soft versus hard power. You are treating them as immutable inevitabilities when they aren’t.

Take the scene even further; the Russian diplomat:

In the end we could not keep up with the expense of the arms race, the space race and the peace race, and at the same time our people grumbled for more nylons, and washing machines.

The current Russian federation is a perfect example of how a country (the Soviet Union) had one attitude towards war fighting, soft power, hard power, use of force, projection of power and pivoted to a completely different mentality with regards to how to do all of the above (The Russian Federation). And now, they’ve effectively beaten their age old enemy without even having to launch a missile. They’ve rendered the F35 inert, because they changed their philosophy of power, and were able to effectively capture the US government by proxy through imbeciles, nationalism, and stupid red hats.

Its also greatly telling how in the Dr. Strangelove scene, the Dr. quotes the “BLAND” corporation, which is a play of the RAND corporation; a consultant firm which has effectively dictated how the US government will develop itself militarily into the future for nigh on 60 years. My point is that the manner in which the US have developed itself militarily wasn’t selected for based on its effectiveness: its been demonstrated since Vietnam to be highly ineffective. Its only Hollywood blockbusters that keep any charade of the US military being able to accomplish its goals up. The manner in which the US military developed itself was selected for in a manner which would optimize profits for the Defense contractor industry.

The F35 is an incredible piece of technology. Like I said before, I’ve never experienced anything as loud. But it misses the moment in terms of what war fighting will look like in the future of now. Its not next gen fighter jets winning or losing in Ukraine (or that won in Afghanistan, or Iraq).

I think there is more to structure level battery support that you might consider which highlights why appliances with batteries could catch on faster.

I don’t need a permit to get an ac that has it’s own battery pack. The overhead and total investment (let’s say 500 for a basic AC and 1k for one with batteries) is far far lower.

You aren’t wrong at all with your current critisism. I’m just at saying that I think the benefits to end users are sufficiently high and the barriers low enough well see wide scale adoption of in appliance batteries fairly soon l.

A couple things, and to be clear I’m really narrowly focused on appliances/ immobile applications. I don’t think these heavier batteries are quite yet ready for things like phones, drones, scooters, EV’s.

I think specifically this battery technology addresses your issues directly.

Firstly, there are actual reasons why current battery technologies are not allowed to be used in specific indoor applications, and that is thermal runaway (effectively your third criticism). Generally, LiPO’s are not legally allowed for use in permanently installed indoor environments. The reason why is thermal runaway.

Here is a video of an idiot puncturing a lipo cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzBFCufUDq0

Here is a video of an idiot puncturing a sodium cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ya_ls1zkA

Spot the difference? Its the fire. The only reason we don’t currently have LiPO’s acting as stores of power for current technology is that you DO NOT WANT lithium fires to happen indoors. A sodium battery will explode (see idiot A). But it will not catch fire and will not create a thermal runaway situation.

Secondarily, appliances are already heavy. Adding weight for something like a battery isn’t an issue because you don’t need to move the thing very often. The amount of additional design complexity is small, and something we’ve basically already solved in so many ways. We don’t need the portability we would need for a vehicle or cell phone.

Thirdly, I think the complexity is trivial. Complexity hasn’t stopped producers from adding what amounts to a small computer to everything from a refrigerator to a tea kettle where literally a simple switch would do.

I don’t think you need to wait any years. This is happening right now.

I think I’m being well enough specific. I’ll give you two examples of mistakes that highlight the philosophical issue.

A Teledyne hornet costs 200k. A very very capable fpv drone with night vision can be manufactured with off the shelf parts for 2k. You can probably put a Temu version together for 1k.

It’s not that the Teledyne isn’t better. It’s that it’s not 100x better. It may only be 15-30% better. Even if it’s 100% more capable (twice the vision, twice the range, half the acoustic profile), I can still buy 50 fpvs for every one Teledyne.

But I can outfit every unit with a 2k night vision drone. I can’t outfit every unit with a Teledyne. And fundamentally, it’s the same parts and plastic going into each.

Another example will be the f35.

Part of American exceptionalism has been the ability to sell a vision of “this is what the future holds, so you’ve got to do it this way”. The entire “next gen fighter” development project is predicated on the notion that the people asking you to pay for it’s development know what they’re doing and are right about their predictions in the future.

And the F35 is amazing. It’s one of the loudest machines I’ve ever heard. It can do ridiculous things in the air and to watch one take off is both frightening and awe inspiring in a terrible way.

And maybe this is me getting a bit over my handle bars, but if Kiev had the option of one f35 or a fleet of f16s, which do they choose?

The f16s are going to be easier to repair, easier to train for, more reliable, and probably in the range of 80-90% as capable as the f35.

But the extra billions, they go to that extra 20-30 % capability.

70% capable costs 10x 50% capable. 80% costs 10x that. 90% 10x that. 95% 10x that. 97.5, 10x that, 98.75, 10x that. Maybe 90-95% as capable is plenty.

There are diminishing returns from a focus on the “highest of the high” technology. An F35 or Teledyne are more capable than their off the shelf counterparts. But not 100x as capable. Often only a few percentage more capable.

My argument was that philosophy lost those wars. The the philosophy of war fighting we applied in those conflicts is the culmination of 60+ years of cold war, “super powers” Mckinsey consultant thinking.

And the thinking was wrong. Or maybe it was right for a while, but it’s wrong now. Super power technology may or may not be the way to win a super power v superpower war, but it doesn’t really help you in a guerrilla, insurgent conflict.

In metaphor, it’s depth versus width. We went incredibly deep on our tech stack. We should have gone wider. The technology that is showing itself is that which can be made cheaper, faster, and is less dependent on specialists. The US tech stack is the opposite of all of that, because it was selected for by the military industrial complex not for it’s war fighting capabilities, but to enrich and entrench existing manufactures.

Yet we love devices that keep their power with them.

Curious.

I think we had that one.

I don’t agree with induction roads. Its simply not necessary and makes roads far more complicated to build and maintain.

just batteries is plenty.

We saw a USB pack similar to this released by a Japanese company earlier this month.

If these prove to be as viable as they appear to be, the age of oil is over, because as interesting as these may appear for vehicles, mobile-ish electronics (read, they aren’t great in terms of energy density), where they’ll shine is immobile grid scale or structural scale or immobile device scale storage.

Your oven might end up with a bank of these. Your fridge. An air conditioner. A heat pump. A power wall for your house that holds 4 days worth of electricity. These have way way way higher cycle reliability than their lithium counter parts. They’re good for something like 5x-10x as many cycles. But they are heavier per unit energy. But they degrade slower.

I’m trying to not get to hyped but the bits of news of these getting into consumer technology is extremely heartening. The biggest and frankly, only middling issue, with renewables is where to stick the energy in the between times. Grid scale or microscale storage is the answer, but honestly, lithium hasn’t been a great technology for that. Its good enough to get started, but the cycle time isn’t great and the consequences of failure are high. Lithium fires arent nothing to fuck with.

As far as I know, these sodium batteries basically can’t catch fire the way lithium can. There is no thermal runaway potential.

They don’t consume (as much) hard to get, planet destroying minerals like lithium or cobalt.

They’re very young, but even in these first generations, are coming in price competitive with lithium comparables. Remember how expensive lithium was in its first generations?

We’ve already spent a few decades setting the world up to run on lithium batteries. Sodium should be a drop in replacement.

Maybe you’ve missed the point of the comment. Lets put drones aside for the moment.

The US basically lost both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why?

We’re tits over handlebars, ass-over-tea-kettle, on a strategy for global war-fighting, that is still predicated and fundamentally structured for fighting/ challenging an opponent who is approximately on relatively equal footing in terms of high military technology.

The problem, is that you can’t “high-technology” your way out of a local insurgency/ guerilla war. The philosophy which underpins US war-fighting is incredibly vulnerable to insurgent, local, non-linear approaches to fighting. The US taxpayers has effectively paid trillions of dollars in taxes to develop and maintain a war-fighting force that is not adequately built to win the two previous direct conflicts that the US has engaged in.

This is the story no one is talking about. Trillions invested in the US millitary industrial complex in terms of r&d, strategy think tanks, you fucking name it.

And yes, 1 fly boi w/ some 3d printed parts beats their ass. Not that the US approach to militarism is irrelevant, but a country can produce 10k drones for the price of 1 tomahawk. The US went way too far over its handlebars in terms of its monolithic approach to “high technology”, treating it like a moat. Afghanistan was the MS thesis publication on this, but man, Ukraine has been the PhD work.