ChickenLadyLovesLife

This seemed intuitively wrong to me (like, way too low a cost), but: 25,000 pounds moving 100 mph is equal to 11,331,007 J of kinetic energy. Since 3.6 million J equals 1 kWh and 1 kWh on average costs $0.17, that means you could accelerate 25,000 pounds to reasonable bare minimum flying speed for about fifty cents (not considering efficiency of the machinery). My mind still can’t process this, but math is math.

On the other hand, looking at it from a potential energy perspective it’s a bit more expensive. 25,000 pounds at a cruising altitude of 10,000 ft. (still quite low from an airliner perspective) is about 339 million J, 94 kWh or about $16 – the cost of lunch at MacDonald’s.

Since a plane requires the most thrust at takeoff, you could use ground-based catapults to get the plane to takeoff speed (or faster even) and then you could carry smaller batteries and propelling machinery. For extra fun, you could have landing planes snag a wire and use their momentum to accelerate a plane taking off.

To save even more weight, since you’re going airport-to-airport you could leave off the landing gear and just have the planes come down on a bouncy trampoline-like surface. If you think that’s batshit crazy, the British actually experimented with this idea for their aircraft carriers in the 1950s.

Edit: to make these numbers more realistic I’m going to assume something like a 737, which can weigh something like 150,000 pounds fully loaded (this includes fuel but you’d need batteries instead for an electric plane). Getting this to a 150 mph takeoff speed would take about 100 million J. Climbing this plane to 30,000 ft would take 6.1 billion J. Resisting a drag force of 5000 pounds (about what a 737 experiences at cruising speed at 30,000 ft) for 500 miles (the distance from Cleveland to New York City) would need 17.6 billion J. Assuming landing is free (fuck TANSTAAFL) that means a typical trip needs 23.8 billion J or 6618 kWh or $1125. Assuming a real-world efficiency of 25% means the actual cost would be $4500 (which is in the ballpark of what jet fuel costs). Assuming 200 passengers, that’s $22.50 per person. Not exactly “$5 in electricity” but surprisingly small.

Feel free to check my math, my brain hurts.

in the first couple years iPhone was the smartphone

Blackberry was the smartphone in the first half of the '00s. And circa 2005 even Windows Mobile smartphones were gaining some traction (by “smartphone” I mean devices that are essentially handheld computers that can run apps and do a lot more than just calls and texting). They both got swamped by the iPhone because RIM and Microsoft were short-sighted idiots who failed to see the potential market and saw no need to improve their devices much, until it was too late. The iPhone wasn’t the first, it was the best (at the time at least).

I think one of the main reasons Blackberry was swiftly killed off by the iPhone was that their devices had tiny non-touch screens that used 16-bit color, and RIM were unwilling to move on from that until it was far too late. The other reason is that the Blackberry app development environment was orders of magnitude more atrocious than anything else I worked with in my 25-year career. The development environment for iPhones was the second-worst but still massively better than Blackberry; even if RIM had moved to upgrade their devices, they never could have gotten anyone to develop apps for them.

actually quite well built

Windows 11-like Acrylic design

Lol, that’s the lede defense.

I do believe there is some end game these tech billionaires believe is on the horizon

I think it’s just a variant of the standard republican “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter”. They think financial wealth is something they can just create out of thin air using AI (the way that government creates wealth out of thin air by printing money, allegedly), so as long as they acquire the data centers to fuel it, by whatever means necessary, they’ll be all right in the end.

I get blocked now in a regular browser, but not in an anonymous browser.

I just browsed /r/nba for basketball news. A couple of days ago they started throwing up unavoidable popup overlays after a few seconds. This was helpful because it made me realize that I don’t really give a fuck about basketball news. Buhbye /r/felicia.

This is the correct one. People make such a big stink out of his nazi salute while completely ignoring the Mussolini stank face he was making at the same time.

I prefer Melon Husk.

“The board” is mostly just CEOs of other companies. All they have to do is vote for each others’ absurd compensation packages, no smartness required. It’s a true circlejerk.