Not exactly nickels and dimes

President Joe Biden said in a release that "building a clean energy economy can and should provide a win-win opportunity for auto companies and unionized workers who have anchored the American economy for decades." –Reuters

Batteries take fewer workers to build than engines and transmissions; industry analysts project that the EV transition could shave 30 percent off the auto sector’s labor force. –Washington Post

Hard on the heels of President Joe Biden’s goal to spur the sale of EVs in the United States, the Energy Department will provide $2 billion in grants and $10 billion in loans to support the conversion of US automaker and supplier facilities into manufacturing centers for hybrid and electric vehicles. –CNN Business

The UAW should propose that each CEO be paid $152,771, the highest base pay for GS-15 federal civil servants. This is what the CEOs should be considered, because their companies have become appendages of government, implementing its policies. –George Will

Want to save the planet? Hold your breath.

 Seriously. When a human exhales, four percent of the breath expelled is carbon dioxide. There are 7.8 billion people on Earth. So if we all just held our breath…

OK, maybe that's a little drastic. But I'm tired of being told global warming or climate change or whatever we're calling it now is my personal fault. I will turn off the one little lamp I still have lit when somebody turns off Times Square.

In the end, George Carlin had it right: We don't need to save the planet. The planet will do just fine by itself. Without us.

Here he is, explaing the whole thing on YouTube.

Since "X" is not using "tweet" any more, we might get back to birds

Who’s that singing? As fall migration arrives, apps that ID birds by sound have taken off

As the annual fall migration begins across the Northern Hemisphere, apps like Merlin, which is put out by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, have caught on among birders and non-birders alike by revealing just how crowded with species our surroundings are.…

Other bird-identifying apps include the Audubon Bird Guide, ChirpOMatic, Picture Bird and Smart Bird.

Destroying everything will not come cheap

Inside the delicate art of maintaining America’s aging nuclear weapons

The U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country’s most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project.

As Dwight Eisenhower, a guy who knew, once pointed out…

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.…

When a bunch of billionaires and giant corporations…

CEOs tell senators: Time to regulate AI

…ask the government to regulate what they're doing, it means one of two things:

1) Stop us before we blow up the world (again)

or

2) We've got this; make it hard for anybody else to get some too.

In the case of AI, my money's on 2).

I'm not the only one who thinks that, I guess. In a recent Axios survey of 213 computer science experts from 65 universities, only 16 would trust Congress to regulate AI and only three would trust the private sector. Guess who wants to do it.

A lot of Americans, at least, seem to want it done.

A long line of technical innovations, from automobiles to airplanes, from telegraphy to telephony, radio to TV, and the internet itself started out as the province of dreamers and hobbyists and wound up commercialized, corporatized, and homogenized. And relatively safe. One imagines AI will wind up that way too.

So if you have a nice landing pad on your roof

Hundreds of flying taxis to be made in Ohio, home of the Wright brothers and astronaut legends

Developers say the planes are nearing the day when they will provide a wide-scale alternative to shuttle individual people or small groups from rooftops and parking garages to their destinations, while avoiding the congested thoroughfares below.

Excitement about flying cars goes back at least to the 1940's so finally, only two more years. But a cloud of flying Ubers over Manhattan somehow does not seem like an unalloyed good thing.

New to our Work Avoidance Hall of Fame

Welcome to the Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum!

Digging around through some old stuff

 

The club, now international, maintains a newfangled [Est. 1997] web site here.

Stealthy is as stealthy does

A stealth F-35 fighter jet went down in S.C. It’s proving hard to find.

“The aircraft is stealth, so it has different coatings and different designs that make it more difficult than a normal aircraft to detect,” Huggins said. He added in a text message late Sunday that teams were still searching for the plane.

F-35's, according to a 2020 estimate, cost $77.9 million in 2022. Each. 

How much one might be worth on the scrap metal market is unclear.

All the King's horses and all the King's men

 LONDON (AP) — London police arrested a 25-year-old man early Saturday morning after he allegedly climbed over a wall…

This morning's under-appreciated web site

Pixel Dust

(From our Work Avoidance Hall of Fame.)