Price per kw and price per kwh stored. And price per kwh over the expected lifetime of the battery itself (longevity and reliability and safety and disposal will have to be factored into total cost of ownership).

The ceiling is going to be lower than with lithium. Sodium ions themselves weigh about 3 times more than lithium, for the same +1 charge. So it's not just that sodium is a certain number of years behind lithium. It's that it'll likely plateau at a point permanently behind where lithium will likely be.

in person vs online. I mean videos and magazines have been around for awhile.

The big moneymaker in online sex work or near-sex work comes from interactions, like chats, interactive private sessions, tips for specific things, etc.

30 years ago I knew a guy recently out of college who went practically once a week.

Yeah, but culture has shifted, too. As a restaurant, Hooters has been left behind by the same forces that are killing TGI Fridays and Red Lobster and most other chain restaurants. And its gimmick of scantily clad young women who are still covered up more than the typical person at a beach or swimming pool is just this mediocre half-assed zone between an actual restaurant and a strip club. It's a business model that works for Boomers but not millennials or Gen Z, and has nothing to do with how much money millennials are willing to spend on going out (look at their concert, live show, and sports ticket spending, or their travel spending, or their overall restaurant spending to show it's more of a shift than a reduction).

Titty money is just going online, taking business from brick and mortar. OnlyFans probably makes more than ever today.

Some electric BMWs do the same on the literal automobile, too. It's an EV that sounds like a high performance ICE both inside and outside the car.

Yeah, sounds like a phone call recording app that is allowed to operate on the App Store under the condition that the recording is loudly announced.

Mobile users won't pay AAA prices for their games.

And we're all mobile users now. I know a lot of people who play mobile games on their couch within arm's reach of their console controller.

It scratches a different itch, but it does have real substitution effects in the real world, even at home.

Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?

This is the reason. Television comedy derives from stage shows where the audience sits in one direction from the stage.

A lot of early television comedy programming was often from variety shows, where the live studio audience is an important feedback mechanism for the actual performers. A standup comic needs a laughing audience to respond to (and often, so do other stage performers, including sketch comedy).

So television comedy comes from that tradition, and a live audience was always included for certain types of programs. Even today, we expect variety shows to have audiences. For example, John Oliver's show without an audience felt kinda weird while that was going on in 2020. And even some pre-filmed sketch comedy shows, like Chappelle's Show, would record audiences watching the pre-recorded sketches as part of the audio track for the broadcast itself, while Chappelle himself was filmed essentially MCing for that audience and those sketches.

So sitcoms came up on sets with live performances before studio audiences, just like sketch comedies and variety shows or daytime talk shows. That multi camera sitcom format became its own aesthetic, with three-walled sets that were always filmed from one direction, with a live audience laughing and reacting. Even when they started using closed sets for safety and control (see the Fran Drescher stuff linked elsewhere in this thread), they preserved the look and feel of those types of shows.

Single camera sitcoms are much more popular now, after the 2000's showed that they could be hilarious, but they are significantly more expensive and complicated to shoot, as blocking and choreography and set design require a lot more conscious choices when the cameras can be anywhere in the room, pointed in any direction. So multi camera still exists.

On the other extreme, 24/7 operations have redundancy.

A friend of mine explained that being an Emergency Medicine physician is a great job for work life balance, despite the fact that he often has to work ridiculous shifts, because he never has to take any work home with him. An Emergency Room is a 24/7 operation, so whenever he's at home, some other doctor is responsible for whatever happens. So he gets to relax and never think about work when he's not at work and not on call.

This is wrong, because you're talking about disability insurance in a comment thread about disability discrimination.

Disability is very broadly defined for the purpose of disability discrimination laws, which is the context of this comment chain.

Disability is defined specific to a person's work skills for the purpose of long term disability insurance (like the US's federally administered Social Security disability insurance). Depending on the program/insurance type, it might require that you can't hold down any meaningful job, caused by a medical condition that lasts longer than a year.

For things like short term disability, the disability is defined specific to that person's preexisting job. Someone who gets an Achilles surgery that prevents them from operating the pedals of a motor vehicle for a few weeks would be "disabled" for the purpose of short term disability insurance if they're a truck driver, and might not even be disabled if their day job is something like being a telemarketer who sits at a desk for their job.

Safari support means there's benefit to web server support. Server support means there's benefit to browser support in other browsers. Apple can kick start the network effects necessary to get this standard adopted.

Webp and heic are fine for web, but JPEG XL is special in that it actually has use for print-based and other ultra high resolution workflows, while also having the best path forward for migration from JPEG.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of AI but I'm generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive's Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers). Is training an AI model all that different?

Yes, software that is in a package manager is similarly easy on a Mac. There's an app store, which can be used to install the dependencies for homebrew (which is a good package manager for most of the stuff that Linux package managers maintain, including building stuff from source). Going outside of a package manager is relatively easy (but needs to be enabled, as the defaults basically discourage users from installing software not verified by Apple), but that method of software installation still beats running .exe/.msi installers downloaded from the internet, beats running random shell scripts, probably beats downloading docker containers and flatpaks, and is not that far removed from installing from the AUR or something like pip/conda: you still need to know what you're doing, and you have to trust the source/maintainer. None of that is unique to any operating system, except those that simply don't allow you to install software not reviewed/approved by the manufacturer (Apple mobile devices, Android devices by default).

High DPI screen support in Linux is still troublesome, especially between multiple screens with different DPI/resolution, especially between GTK and Qt programs.

And I haven't played around with Asahi yet, but it'll be hard to top the built-in power/suspend/hibernate/resume behavior and its effect on battery life (especially in being able to just count on it to work if you suspend for days, where it seamlessly switches to hibernate and starts back up very quickly). But on my old Intel MacBook, the battery life difference between MacOS and and Linux is probably two to one. Some of it is Apple's fault for refusing to document certain firmware/hardware features, but the experience is the experience.

I gave up on Homebrew because it was difficult to install.

It just includes as a dependency the Mac command line developer tools, which can be installed pretty easily from what I remember.

And what I like is that it's a normal Unix style shell, with almost all the utilities you'd expect.

you have to drag the icon in to install things.

I mean that's about 100 times better than Windows' default of running an installer that isn't easily reversible.

Nah, that's just anticipating customer rage. When I worked in restaurants I learned very early on that it's better to put things in a smaller container, and put the overflow into a separate container, rather than try to give them a little extra in the next size container that doesn't get filled up.

It's the meme with the kid failing to understand that the amount doesn't change just because the container changes. Only with angry adults who want their money back.

Coal companies are literally going bankrupt as coal plants get decommissioned. When it comes to actual political power, the fossil fuel industry you want to watch out for is oil and gas, not coal.

Mine all the coal you want. If you don't have anyone willing to buy from you, at a price that covers the cost of extraction, you will fail.

So even though the coal companies' bankruptcies are getting them out of their cleanup and decommissioning obligations, the root cause of that is that coal just isn't competitive as an energy source.

until these get produced for real in mass quantities, they are vaporware

The world is already seeing exponential growth in annual completion of grid scale battery storage. Here's some recent data in the US, as products and projects mature from theoretical to small scale prototypes to full scale pilot projects to full production.

And author should compare winter moths

There's also significant developments being made in geothermal, which is actually dispatchable. Plus we actually still produce more grid-connected wind than solar right now, it's just that solar is so damn cheap it makes sense to install capacity well beyond matching peak demand.

Some combination of overcapacity, demand-shifting, and storage will go a long way in reducing the amount of dispatchable fossil fuel capacity that is necessary.

The problem is that we're not getting rid of the other stuff

We are, though. Coal use in the United States has cut in half in the last 15 years, and it's still on a steep downward slope. Even as natural gas (which emits roughly half the CO2 per unit energy as coal) increased over the same time period, our total emissions from energy consumption has dropped from about 6 billion tons to 4.8 billion tons.

The progress we're making might be slower than many of us would like, but we're also at a tipping point where we're making many fossil fuels simply uneconomical. And that's the key: to make polluting costly enough that big businesses won't want to.

I'm not sure that's true.

Well, I'm sure it's true. I've started and stopped Prime benefits multiple times.