As I said in another comment, this is a step towards making a more efficient hybrid plane for trips under 500 miles, of which about 4 million are made per year in the U.S. alone. Having enough battery power to take off efficiently makes those trips a lot more economical. On longer flights, fuel for takeoff is a lot smaller portion of the overall costs and doesn’t matter as much. Except for all the fossil fuel burned, of course.
According to this NPR article there are 4 million flights under 500 miles in the U.S. alone. Based on my quick estimate of the chart in the article, that’s about half of the flights made. Other parts of the world may be better or worse depending on terrain, etc. The number of short flights is going down due to efficiency. They mention pilots, but everything else indicates fuel costs. If these hybrid planes took over those flights, and are as effective as projected, they could maintain equivalent or better fuel efficiency on short hop flights, making them more viable.
Now, the point about trains is quite relevant, but the infrastructure for planes is already there and I don’t see regional train routes filling that gap any time soon. This would also make synthetic avgas more viable since you would already be using less overall.
The terminal velocity of a penny is at least 40 km/h. A Porsche would be much higher. Assuming the Porsche fell that slowly and reached terminal velocity instantly, the cliff would have to be 20 km high for the Porsche to fall for 30 minutes. Given Mt. Everest is just under 9 km high, you would need more than 2 Mt. Everests of height for your cliff to make this happen.
Based on all that, the terminal velocity of a Porsche is irrelevant.
Bullets cost money, so bullets are just a way of projecting speech. Finally, a way for the average person to “talk” to a politician where they’ll actually listen.
Does this qualify me to be a Supreme Court judge?
I’m not really sure Azure or AWS is much better. Not a defense of Oracle or Larry, just a dearth of free VPS servers out there, and I’m not sure I want to spin up a paid one with the other guys.
I’d say this is a significant factor. Some youtuber did a video where he basically showed that most Musk stocks were overinflated by a factor of 10 based on their traditional metrics. The difference was basically built on investors’ confidence that Musk could keep the companies growing. Between driving away customers, not focusing on building his businesses, and still not achieving the goals he promised, investors are rightly worried that desired growth is no longer something to bank on. He may have to stop relying on the wunderkind factor and actually start running his companies responsibly, and I don’t think he can do that anymore, if he ever could.