I made a point to follow Solid Energy Systems many years ago, to see how one such battery technology panned out. They went dark in public media for a while. But they’ve recently gotten more publicity again.
Turns out they got some industrial customers for their battery cells in some demanding niche. Since they didn’t need to attract investors anymore, and I guess they had enough customers to fill the capacity they had in that period, they had no reason to publicise their activities.
Now they’re out there again with interviews and such. I suppose they’re looking to scale up.
Feels like there’s a lot of companies like that these days. Ones that you might heard about as a breakthrough 5-10 years ago and then nothing.. while they’re busy using the investments they got figuring out manufacturing at scale. That’s just the time it takes. Many of them now seem to have pilot/demonstration manufacturing plants up and running now.
In another 3-6 years I think we’ll start to see several of these chemistries in consumer products.
Its just academic research papers that get brief press coverage. Its very hard to actually commercialize these and compete (performance and economics) with the incumbent technologies. Some stuff makes it in specialized applications (satellites, earbuds, etc).
You could also find your way into automotive and never achieve more than 40% of the battery market. What works in cars and flashlights is different, and by the time you got automotive penetration, grid storage would also be at volume, sucking up as much production as vehicles, and without having to worry about power density and max charge rate.
Some anecdotal evidence to support what you're saying.
I remember friends telling that gallium nitride was the future a few years ago. 2022 came and went and *poof* I haven't heard a peep out of any tech trade resources (magazines, podcasts, blogs, etc) since then about it
Like you said, these technologies came out when tons of flash and circumstance and within a few months get memory holed out of existence.
Gallium nitride is a replacement for silicon in transistors, and you haven't heard anything because they've won. Any USB-C PD charger you see that provides more than 50W or so and isn't a gigantic brick is a GaN charger. Take a look at any reputable manufacturer's site and you'll find a section about how their chargers use gallium nitride transistors, e.g. https://www.belkin.com/products/product-resources/gan-charge..., https://www.anker.com/ganprime, etc.
The funny thing about big innovations like GaN is that they become mundane and invisible after the hype, but end up in a lot of places without most people realising it (like for Apple users, it's not GaN chargers, it's just the MacBook charger).
Even graphene has a lot of real-world applications that are far removed from the sci-fi marketing of speculators, but offer a great advance over past technology.
Should someone get a ticket for going 66 mph in a 65 zone? I don't really think officer discretion is avoidable to a certain degree. Laws can never be written perfectly. There are always going to be ridiculous edge cases like this where a reasonable person would know the law shouldn't be applied. This is why so much legal precedent is based on what a reasonable person would do or what a reasonable person would assume given a certain situation.
I do agree that the neighbor should not be let off on this, nor am I trying to excuse their behavior. But there are always going to be Karens that call the cops for no reason and the system has to be able to deal with that.
> Should someone get a ticket for going 66 mph in a 65 zone?
Speed limit laws should not even exist in the first place. They are a paradigmatic example of laws that are unreasonable and should not exist. The fact that it is impossible to enforce them as written, or even with light-years of as written, is one reason for that.
> I don't really think officer discretion is avoidable to a certain degree.
To a certain degree, yes. But it should be limited. In the system we have now, it's not; the scope of laws on the books is huge, to the point that all of us are probably technically violating multiple laws every day, and we are all relying on a huge amount of discretion on the part of law enforcement to allow us to go about our business without continually being interrupted. That's not good.
> there are always going to be Karens that call the cops for no reason and the system has to be able to deal with that.
Yes, and the way to deal with it is to have the law be reasonable. It is not to have lots of unreasonable laws on the books and then hope that law enforcement exercises discretion in practically all cases, only actually prosecuting the "really serious" ones. It's to not have unreasonable laws on the books at all, so when a Karen calls the cops for no reason, the cops can just say "Ma'am, that's not against the law, nothing for us to do."
So you think there’s nothing wrong with blowing through a school zone at 150mph? Speed limit laws are clearly flawed in many ways but there is a clear reason why they should exist.
> So you think there’s nothing wrong with blowing through a school zone at 150mph?
I have said no such thing. Do you really believe that the law is the only thing that defines what's "wrong"?
> Speed limit laws are clearly flawed in many ways but there is a clear reason why they should exist.
No, what is clear is that the law should be written to penalize actual harm. Speed limit laws don't do that. They penalize people who have caused no harm, and because they can only be enforced arbitrarily--who gets stopped for speeding has nothing to do with actual risk reduction--they reduce people's respect for the law in general.
A properly written law for "rules of the road" for speed would be something like this: The posted "speed limit" on any public road is advisory; you cannot be stopped or ticketed simply for driving faster than the posted limit. However, if you are in an accident and it is found that you were exceeding the posted limit, you are presumed to be at fault. (You can still rebut the presumption, but that requires going to court and presenting evidence and having the judge rule in your favor based on that evidence.)
By this logic they should let you drive drunk until you hit someone too. I think doing things in your car that have substantial and easily preventable risk to other people should not be allowed.
> By this logic they should let you drive drunk until you hit someone too.
I have said no such thing. The only implication of my position for drunk driving is that the law should not be able to punish you for it if you cause no harm. But that in no way means that, for example, a cop who sees you driving erratically can't pull you over, give you a breathalyzer test, find out that you're too drunk to drive, and lock your car, making sure that it's safely parked, and then ask you who to call to come pick you up and take you home. He just can't write you a ticket that forces you to either come to court or pay a fine.
It also in no way means that other people have to let you drive drunk. Bars don't have to sell you drinks if you're going to drive. Friends don't have to let you drive drunk. And in a sane society of responsible adults, those kinds of preventions work better than any law possibly can. The fact that our society has so many nanny state laws that micromanage all aspects of life is a sign that we don't live in a sane society of responsible adults.
> I think doing things in your car that have substantial and easily preventable risk to other people should not be allowed
I think you are way too ready to give power to the government, which will abuse it, and the costs of that abuse of power will far outweigh any possible benefit from such laws.
I am not sure why a cop pulling you over for driving erratically is any different in principle than a cop pulling you over for traveling at an unsafe speed (again, for the purposes of this example, imagine a truly unsafe speed, not 5 mph over).
First, if a cop pulls you over for speeding, it's not for "traveling at an unsafe speed". It's because you were going faster than the posted limit. The law says nothing whatever about such a speed being unsafe. In practice, cops usually don't pull people over just for speeding, but only for going significantly faster than the general flow of traffic. But that's only usually; cops in most jurisdictions have monthly or quarterly ticket quotas, and if it's getting close to the end of the quota period and they're behind on tickets, it's simple to go out to places where people routinely speed and start pulling everyone over. I have seen this happen.
"Driving erratically", unlike "going faster than the posted speed limit", is always a subjective judgment on the cop's part (in most jurisdictions it's something like "reckless driving" or "driving in a clearly unsafe manner"), but the whole point is that it's supposed to be rare; by definition most people on the road will not be driving recklessly and this kind of law can't be abused in the way I described above just to make a ticket quota.
However, the important difference I was talking about was not between speeding and "driving erratically", it was about under what circumstances the cop can write you a ticket that forces you to either pay a fine or come to court. Under our current laws, a cop can do that whenever he pulls you over--there will always be some traffic law you were violating. ("Driving erratically", or something similar, in itself is a traffic violation under current law.) Under the libertarian system I have been describing, the cop could not write you a ticket that forces you to either pay a fine or come to court unless you actually caused harm. He could take steps to prevent you from driving if you hadn't caused harm but were clearly not capable of driving safely, by an objective test (such as a breathalyzer), but he could not impose a fine or court appearance on you.
My entire point here is that just because the system now allows the cops to be capricious doesn't mean we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater and say there is no speed that is so unsafe that it warrants punishment.
Speed limits (in North America) are simply the 85th percentile speed of drivers on a specific type of road. The onus should be on the civil engineer who designed the road to make it physically impossible to go 150 in the first place - e.g. narrow/curved lanes, speed bumps, concrete bollards, trees on the sides, etc. If roads are actually designed properly, then speed limit laws are unnecessary because drivers will naturally slow down to avoid damaging their vehicle or themselves.
To some extent I agree with you but I think intentionally wild, reckless driving would still exist and need to be controlled even with smarter road design.
The problem is my procrastination brain knows this hack. It knows that once I do the 5 minutes I won't be able to stop and it doesn't want that. So it still doesn't let me start.
Careful with the Saliva tests. They are much less accurate. I had one done and it said I was way above the normal range. I went to the doctor and had a blood test and it was normal.
Same thing for airlines. I hate the argument "consumers decided they wanted smaller seats, no free food or drinks, etc by buying the cheapest tickets." People just tried to get the best deal possible in the market, they aren't analyzing which airline has the best seats and amenities and making their decision from there.
Also 9 times out of 10 its a bait and switch for a different company. Whenever I've worked with these recruiters they always "see whats a good fit" with my resume and its never the company that was in the job description.
I've checked multiple sources and I can't find a single definition of genius that requires the person be notable or "who greatly improved human society through their intellect." Only that they be exceptionally intelligent or gifted in a certain field.
Yes, specifically the law of physics that says that whenever you want to exercise, the energy stored in your fat cells will magically teleport itself into your muscles.
Without this law of physics, CICO becomes quite useless as a weight loss advice. Yes, you want to burn the calories, but the calories are not moving to the muscles where they could be burned by exercising. What is your next step?
