Category: Technology (Page 5 of 8)

Disney’s Star Wars hotel was never going to work.

May 31, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Disney spent a quarter billion dollars to build, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel, and it only remained open for a year and a half. This girl spent $6000 to be immersed in the experience. Fortunately, she’s cute and made an engaging 4-hour video about her Star Wars adventure that’s been viewed by 7 million people. She should recoup her expenses.

Disney is a big company, with a net profit of 1.7 billion dollars last year. They can’t keep making big mistakes like this. How did they screw this up so bad?

City Journal: Green Tech is a Fantasy.

April 19, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

City Journal: Politics and Physics Collide

The legislature and unelected regulators enjoy magical thinking because the time frames are long, they will never be held responsible and perhaps engineers can meet the goals. Automakers have long been burdened with fleet economy standards that must be met. The Laws of Thermodynamics are problems for engineers, not legislators. Cars became lighter and less safe while also becoming more complex and expensive.

The idea that the United States can quickly “transition” away from hydrocarbons—the energy sources primarily used today—to a future dominated by so-called green technologies has become one of the central political divides of our time.

Wisely, Toyota didn’t commit to battery-powered cars.

March 10, 2024 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

NYT: Toyota’s hybrid strategy pays off

WSJ: Why Does Elon Musk Keep Talking About Merit?

December 23, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

WSJ: Elon Musk on Woke Mind Virus

For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus”—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization” and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.

Biden Spends $10 Billion on Another Waste of Time

December 9, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Biden putting $10 billion into high speed passenger trains.

This is another bad idea that we will have to spend a trillion dollars on before we give up.

Who Should be Worried About ChatGPT and A.I.?

December 3, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

It isn’t clear what ChatGPT is good for, but that doesn’t stop people from predicting it’s going to take all the jobs. Try hiring a handyman or someone to cut your grass. They are busy and expensive.

Power Grid Reliability by State

December 2, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

Electric Grid Reliability by State

I was recently talking to a nephew about the frequency of power outages. The general topic was about having a supplemental heat source in case the power went out in the Winter. I estimated that my power goes out about 6 times per year, but usually it happens in clusters. If the power goes out once in a day, it may go out once or twice before the issue is resolved. Also, I am shit at remembering random things like that, so have no confidence in my estimate.

WaPo: What Scientists Know About Aliens.

November 26, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

WaPo: What We Know About Aliens

It came from space, hurtling at tremendous speed: a mystery object, reddish, rocky, shaped like a cigar. Its velocity was so extreme it had to have come from somewhere far away, in the interstellar realm. The astronomers in Hawaii who spotted it in 2017 named it ‘Oumuamua, Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first.”

Don’t forget the unexplainable Wow! signal detected by Ohio State in 1977.

Car makers will eventually limit the performance of all cars.

November 18, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 0 Comments

AutoBlog: NTSB calls for Speed Limiters on Cars

After investigating a three-vehicle accident that happened in Las Vegas in January 2022, the NTSB is again recommending a few measures to curb speeding, one of them being the “need for intelligent speed assistance (ISA) technology and countermeasures including interlock program for repeat speeding offenders.”

We already have plenty of laws, but DA’s and the DOJ choose to enforce them selectively. It is irresponsible of the NTSB to make a major policy recommendation that will effect every car buyer in America based on one horrendous car accident.

WSJ: Old Coal Mine could hold Billions in Rare Earths

November 9, 2023 / Richard Nestoff / 2 Comments

WSJ: Old Coal Mine has Billions in Rare Earths

Twelve years ago, former Wall Street banker Randall Atkins bought an old coal mine outside Sheridan, Wyo., sight unseen, for about $2 million.

Several years after Atkins bought the Brook Mine, government researchers came around asking if they could run some tests to see if the ground contained something called “rare-earth elements.”

That government researchers are looking out for America is good news. Yeah, that’s pretty cynical, but recall President Reagan’s joke.