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Batteries supplied 3.4% of ALL California electricity consumed past 48 days
A place to store surplus solar power in being build fast in California.
But solar installations have run ahead of forecasts so the California Independent System Operator, aka Cal ISO, is periodically dumping power at a negative price during peak solar periods.
https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx#section-ra-capacity-trend
The supply constraints on Nvidia have been HBM (high bandwidth memory) and "special packaging" which is connecting typically 6 or more GPUs onto one substrate inside a CPU enclosure.
Special packaging also includes stacking HBM 2 or 6 layers high with connectors running through them - and this special packaging includes transmitting heat away from the electronics in the "CPU container". Packaging is a many step process that takes months.
The same goes for other GPU makers like AMD, Qualomm, and in-house development like Open AI and Google and others through Broadcom.
The validation of SK Hynix solved the HBM supply problem for Nvidia. Longer term Samsung is ramping up supply and AMD probably has most of what they want.
Hung says Nvidia has the packaging capacity they need under contract, but I strongly suspect they could sell GPUs faster if they there were more packaging plants. Intel wanted to buy Tower Semi TSEM for their packaging technology putting many processors on a glass substrate, but China objected so they're working with Tower giving over 2/3 of one of their new plants in Arizona.
So "packaging" will be supply constrained for perhaps another 3 to 4 years - then there will be a glut.
First NVIDIA DGX H200 in the world, hand-delivered to OpenAI and dedicated by Jensen "to advance AI, computing, and humanity".
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/h200/ $31k each
The H100s was first priced at $40k, with Nvidia currently selling them for $25k until the production of H200s ramps up fully.
Arizona grand jury indicts Meadows, Giuliani, other Trump allies for 2020 election interference
The former president is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/24/arizona-election-indictments-giuliani-meadows-trump-00154241
Honda making solid state lithium batteries
Assistant professor Katey Walter Anthony ignites methane from under the ice in a pond on the Fairbanks Alaska campus in 2009.
Massive amounts of greenhouse gases trapped below thawing permafrost will likely vent into the air over the next several decades, accelerating and amplifying global warming.
Methane beautifully trapped in ice before it could escape from a remote Canadian lake.
Most of the organic sediment on the bottom of pristine lakes gets turned into methane due to low oxygen levels.
The largest source of Methane emissions has been thought to be decomposing waste in sewers, ponds, marshes along with Rice fields and Livestock.
But live Trees have now been found to possibly be just as large a producer of methane, which is really surprising to me.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/scientists-probe-the-surprising-role-of-trees-in-methane-emissions
Methane surveys of cities have found decomposing plant matter, garbage, and feces either wet or buried is the cause of most measurable methane in urban environments. Humans are champion methane producers when put up against cows. - https://medium.com/climate-conscious/do-humans-fart-more-methane-than-cows-a0f48c590fb0
For their small size, Gardener's compost pits are massive methane producers.
In agriculture, rice farming is the larger methane producer just because so much land is turned into methane swamps to raise rice. In the US those methane producing rice farms are in Northern California with irrigated land, Texas, and Texas - although the swamps in Florida produce massive quantities of methane, even without rice production.
Just four percent of all methane in the world is produced in the oceans, because most methane is eaten as food before it escapes the water - the same bacteria that chow down on oil in the ocean.
I can't imagine having a taxable trading account without margin to avoid "trading violations", among other things.
As might be expected with the dysfunctional systems at Merrill Lynch, when I open their Margin Account Application
It shows my Trading Account which has margin approved, and my Roth account.
"Based on your login, you have no accounts eligible for margin." LOL
Merrill is little changed from when I first did business with them for 3 or 4 months when I was 16 years old. When I noted their defects my grandfather suggested Sutro & Co which was far more modern.
This is a simple explanation from SoFi brokerage of Limited Margin https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/ira-margin-account/
This is an unnecessarily complex explanation from Fidelity of Limited Margin https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/trading/limited-margin-trading-IRA
In addition to having at least $25k in equity in the retirement account, you have to specify your investment objective is "Most Aggressive", and you also cannot use an FDIC insured default sweep account for excess cash.
"Limited Margin" doesn't allow you to invest more money than you have in your Roth account.
Limited Margin allows Fidelity and Schwab to extend you "a courtesy" of avoiding SEC settlement rules. Limited Margin makes your retirement investments safer.
"Limited Margin", which requires a balance of at least $25k in your Roth account, allows you to trade ALL of the money in your Roth account, regardless of whether it is "T+2 Settled Money" or merely your retirement money which is not yet "settled", eliminating "Trading Violations" which is just brilliant.
Fidelity and Schwab can't charge me interest for using my unsettled money because margin, the way you think of it, is not allowed in retirement accounts. How did this manage this last year? I don't care.
Mitch is a two-faced worm, but al least this indicates worms feel it's now safe to tell the truth.
Trump's influence must be on the wane
I just learned Fidelity allows you to add "Limited Margin" to Roth accounts as of sometime last year, which is well worth doing to avoid trading violations on selling securities bought with "unsettled funds".
Add Limited Margin to the account online, then call and have your holdings transferred from Cash to Margin.
Finally other self-driving cars will be able to actually see like Google Waymos. I'm certain any "Tesla Taxi" will have to be retrofitted with a Luminar Halo or other Lidar.
Luminar, an American Lidar company based in Orlando, Florida starts shipping lidar for China-owned Volvo and their EX90 — while readying its next-gen sensor
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/23/24138224/volvo-ex90-production-start-luminar-lidar-halo-sensor
Luminar has worked with Swiss Re to measure how lidar can reduce the severity of accidents and found that its tech resulted in about 27 percent reduction in accidents and about 40 percent reduction in severity compared to the top-performing vehicles with camera and radar-based systems (aka blind Teslas).
Luminar’s new Halo sensor, weighs under one kilogram, and only uses about 10 watts of power. This uses four of the next-generation chips from Luminar Semiconductor Inc., which it says will enable four times performance improvements, three times the reduction in size, and twice the thermal efficiency compared to Iris. Luminar is moving forward with 1550nm lidars, stating it wants to “avoid future performance and power consumption issues associated with 905nm.”
The order of lidar sensors to Volvo, which Luminar notes is worth $4 billion, comes after Volvo announced last year that it had to push production start of the EX90 to early 2024. The placement like a visor on the roof of the car allows the sensor to sort of blend into the roofline/
Luminar’s lidar tech sits on top of the vehicle like a visor and uses lasers to create a 3D environment around it. The placement allows the sensor to sort of blend into the roofline; however, the company’s current “Iris” sensors are still a bit obvious when looking at its partner vehicles like the EX90 and new Mercedes Benz racing vehicles.
In 2022 Innoviz Lidar based in Israel signed a similar $4 billion contract for Lidars with VW and BMW.
You find some interesting companies
CRM is reminding me of Oracle - Larry Ellison met people from the CIA who wanted something called a relational database and Larry used government funding to create on called Oracle, which the Fortune 500 found uses for once it existed.
Most of Larry's input since that early time has been a mistake. ORCL works best when he's otherwise occupied.
I wish I knew better what to do with Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) 272
Investors appear to be back in the mode where no one trusts CEO-founder Marc Benioff again after his recent leaked contemplation of buying Informatica, which fortunately did not like the price he offered. https://qz.com/salesforce-informatica-no-deal-1851425746 It would have taken something like 5 years to integrate the two companies.
CRM is still in an uptrend, but it's not responding to the market upturn today.
I admittedly bought most of our CRM at 133 following another of Benioff's merger brainstorms that took too long to show profit.
Shame on me for buying some more in a Roth a month ago recently for 296 - at least it was the only Roth holding I didn't add to yesterday. All the additions are up smartly.
Even blind squirrels find nuts now and then.
Trying out one lot of AMD @148.50
Maybe they'll figure out a way to make money on graphics chips as well
Bad news and reassuring
There's nothing I sold Friday that I could have sold for more this morning.
The stuff I didn't sell bounced up, but I'll look for lower prices to add.
sold DUK
"I cannot, with all sincerity, not wish the United States to plunge into a new civil war as quickly as possible." - Dmitry Medvedev - https://www.newsweek.com/russia-reacts-us-military-aid-ukraine-dmitry-peskov-medvedev-maria-zakharova-1892547
The former Russian president is not happy with the House vote subverting the Republican "Freedom Caucus'" plans to starve Ukraine of US aid.
Limiting the portion of the day during which you eat has become an increasingly popular way to lose weight.
"We were surprised to find that people who followed an 8-hour, time-restricted eating schedule were more likely to die from cardiovascular disease,” Victor Zhong told the American Heart Association.
“Even though this type of diet has been popular due to its potential short-term benefits, our research clearly shows that, compared with a typical eating time range of 12 to 16 hours per day, a shorter eating duration was not associated with living longer.”
People who followed a pattern of eating all their food during a period of 8 hours or less each day had a 91% higher risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.
Restricting eating to a 10 hour period per day was associated with a 66% higher risk of death from heart disease or stroke.
https://www.salon.com/2024/04/15/a-new-viral-study-linked-intermittent-fasting-to-cardiac--but-dont-worry-just-yet/
https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/
South African anger-management candidate Elon Musk totters on from one tantrum to the next announced a new Tesla megafactory in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico March 2023.
Three months later press reports in June 2023 suggested another megafactory in Valencia, Spain. The Elon was reported to be furious he immediately cancelled negotiations for the plant with Ximo Puig (aka Shimo Pwee, for those not familiar with Catalan), president of Valencia state. Said Ximo, "Viure és prendre partit."
In September 2023 Elon burst into Tesla's engineering offices in a fury after his self-driving Tesla "tried to kill him", after years of ignoring his engineers pleas to incorporate LiDAR sensors into Tesla vehicles so they can accurately place where objects are around them.
In October 2023 the Elon angrily announced there'll be no groundbreaking at the site in Mexico he had announced because he is furious about tepid consumer demand for Teslas, especially in China.
In March 2024 the Elon furiously halted all work at Tesla's Berlin megafactory after German Friends of Brandenburg Forest set fire to the high voltage power lines bringing power to Tesla's clearing in the forest for a future expansion of the megafactory.
We have a capital gain on a joke amount of TSLA, 200 shares @ 120.33, but having already made our allotted sales for this year I can't recognize even the $5k profit remaining, of a prior $35k of profit in Tesla this year. I may need to put in a stop-loss at 120 or 110. If we take a small loss I can sell other gainers. But you never know. In spite of the Elon it's possible TSLA might still be worth something more someday.
Reports this week say Elon is especially livid and now more furious than ever as loose lips in the cosmetic surgery industry issued claims that Elon has spent billions on extensive cosmetic surgeries over the past 24 years, since the age of 28, in an attempt to give him more human-like facial characteristics.
One surgical nurse claims Elon is just one surgery short of a full Michael Jackson when his nose fell off.
Thanks for those insights - I'll see what happens
I see House Republicans were able to vote down Border Security today, on the orders of Generalisimo Trump.
They've really all gone barking mad.
Wall Street - transitions into a Residential neighborhood
Today, a “Wall Street bank” is defined as a financial institution with trading operations that span the globe and investment bankers counseling CEOs. An actual location on the street doesn’t matter.
JPMorgan closed its branch Friday at 45 Wall St., ending more than 150 years of physical ties between the bank and the street that is a catchall term for the global money business.
A condo for sale inside 45 Wall Street - https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/wall-street-has-abandoned-wall-street-4b4696c1
It was down the block at 23 Wall St., facing the New York Stock Exchange, where J. Pierpont Morgan and his son transformed the firm into one of the world’s most powerful banks. 23 Wall St and other historic Wall Street buildings are empty shells with vacant storefronts and “for rent” signs on their facades.
Banks occupy a couple hundred thousand square feet on the street, according to John Santora, chairman of real-estate broker Cushman & Wakefield’s New York operations. As recently as 2000, that had been 5 million square feet.
Sunil Rally, who has run a newsstand on Wall Street since 1991 is thinking about shutting down his stand because tourists visiting "Wall Street" don’t cover the loss from7towered the building at 60 Wall St., 55 stories tall, built in the 1980s and occupied by JPMorgan, then Deutsche Bank. It has been vacant since 2021.
JPMorgan left 23 Wall St. in the 1980s, then moved its headquarters to Midtown Manhattan in 2001. The bank explored buying back 23 Wall St., according to executives, but a deal never came together. JPMorgan is now building a glistening new bronze office tower for its headquarters on Park Avenue, several miles north.
JPMorgan had run the 45 Wall St. branch since 2006, but is moving several blocks away. “It kind of looked like a bowling alley,” said Sarah Roselli, Chase’s market director for New York’s Financial District. “We decided it was time to move.”
Peter Tuchman, a broker on the NYSE floor, has seen firsthand how the street has changed. He started working there in 1985 as a teletypist submitting stock orders for Cowen & Co.
“The minute I walked down here, I knew it was the place for me,” he said. “There was energy, adrenaline, and it was chaotic.”
Now, the floor of the NYSE is much quieter, filled with humming computers and a couple of CNBC anchors. Outside, the presence of young professionals living in luxury apartment buildings is leading to changes at historic financial landmarks.
The high-end gym chain Equinox occupies the former headquarters of Bankers Trust at 14 Wall St., whose top was designed to resemble the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. T.J. Maxx is in the basement.
Tuchman remembers when it was an actual bank.
“It had huge ceilings and there was beautiful handcrafted bronze at each teller window,” he said. “It was really unbelievable.”
A LONG TIME COMING
The US government seized 40 Wall Street in 1986 when it was discovered to be secretly owned by Ferdinand Marcos, the corrupt dictator of the Philippines. The action launched a succession of failed auctions, foreclosures, lawsuits and decay that cast a long, dark shadow over the Financial District for a decade. The building was built in 1929 as the headquarters of The Manhattan Company which merged with Chase Bank in 1955.
Tenants left one after another until the building was 80% empty in the mid-1990s. Donald Trump bought the leasehold for a lowball price — exactly how much is disputed — in 1995. He partially restored it and attracted new tenants until his interests turned to a television show called "The Apprentice"
Duane Reade drugstore, the largest store tenant with over 20,000 square feet, moved out last fall — a devastating blow to the dwindling rent roll — and the tower today is worth perhaps $200 million, brokers say — less than half of its estimated value ten years ago.
Since Trump took over the building in 1995, discovered that "prosecutors have filed criminal charges against at least 29 people connected to 12 alleged scams tied to 40 Wall St.. Nine other firms have faced serious regulatory claims. Authorities prevailed in most but not all of the cases." Additionally, "no U.S. address has been home to more of the https://www.sec.gov/investor/oiepauselist.htm]unregistered brokerages that investors complain about, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission's current public alert list." http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-trump-40-wall-street
So what exactly are we talking about? A faked suicide? Check. A ponzi-schemer? You betcha. A penny-stock scam? Yep, there was one of those too. https://theweek.com/speedreads/631650/donald-trumps-most-valuable-building-home-dozens-criminals
The day of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people, Donald Trump bragged in a TV interview that 40 Wall Street was suddenly the tallest building in the city. Not only was his claim offensive in the way he specializes, it was also a lie. Another nearby skyscraper on Pine Street in Lower Manhattan became the tallest building after the destruction of the Twin Towers.
Trump's 40 Wall building has been placed on "Lender Watch" as vacancies and costs soar.
Another former Chase Bank property is the Seamen's Savings Bank headquarters, founded in 1829 and declared insolvent by the FDIC in 1990 with its assets sold to Chase Bank. After decades of chasing tenants with ever lower rent, the building now lies empty.
I belated did the same today, taking out stocks that aren't in the center of the river where the returning flow will be the strongest.
Woulda shoulds coulda done this a couple of days ago, but down Fridays rarely turn into grand upside Mondays.
But I did buy DUK and PG to good effect today - a day for not-tech. We'll see if they stick around.
TSMC boosts production, but ‘it’s still not enough’ to meet demand — https://www.wsj.com/tech/nvidia-ai-chips-demand-tsmc-strategy-e2b8e7d0
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Chief Executive C.C. Wei said Thursday that he expected a major category of AI-related chips that includes the type made by Nvidia to account for more than a 10th of the company’s revenue this year, with the proportion rising to one-fifth within four years.
“AI-related demand is very, very strong,” he said on an earnings call. “We have done our best” to ramp up capacity, but “it’s still not enough,” Wei said.
Until last year, industry skepticism about the staying power of the AI boom held back TSMC and others from rushing into substantial investments, but recent moves show they are confident now, said Brady Wang of Counterpoint Research. At one point, major customers had to wait nearly a year for deliveries of Nvidia’s flagship H100 chip, according to TrendForce analyst Frank Kung. He said that has fallen to around four months as TSMC and its partners lift capacity.
Chip packaging has shifted from being a backwater in the semiconductor industry to a hot area of investment and global competition. Last year, the U.S. government said it would invest around $3 billion in the field.
In addition to TSMC, other major chip manufacturers including Samsung Electronics and Intel offer their versions of advanced packaging.
So far, the technology is mainly used in chips that go into million-dollar servers or other computers at data centers. The advanced packaging technology is too expensive to use for chips in everyday products such as smartphones, computers or electric vehicles.
TSMC said it was putting about 10% of this year’s capital spending—which it estimates at $28 billion to $32 billion—into the category that includes advanced packaging. It said last year that it would spend some $2.9 billion on an advanced packaging plant in Taiwan that it expects to start mass production in 2027. Last month, top Taiwanese officials announced plans for two additional TSMC chip-packaging and testing plants in southwest Taiwan.
TSMC’s advanced-packaging capacity is all in Taiwan. Although TSMC is making a $65 billion investment in three chip-making facilities in Arizona, with $6.6 billion in support from Washington, Wei said for now his company was happy to work with Arizona-based Amkor Technology, which is building a $2 billion advanced-packaging facility in the region that is partially funded by Washington. https://amkor.com/
Are dividends from DUK qualified dividends?
I assume yes, but you know what they say about assuming.
Photolithography is indeed a Rube-Goldberg sort of machine - just an extremely precise photograph printer using extreme-ultra-violet light - but just the light exposure with the negative and printing paper part of the printing.
Air-tight tubs whisk away the EUV exposed silicon chips to the etching and photo-resist and deposition processing, washing and drying inside other machines. Bring them back for repeated light exposures with different negatives (aka reticules). Then finally the cutting up the wafers and wiring to connectors and cases.
So far these machines have only becomes far more complex and costly with each new smaller chip iteration.
Humans should try to warp their minds around Intel's planned Directed Self Assembly using statistics and physics to create integrated circuit features. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_assembly_of_micro-_and_nano-structures Like an inorganic DNA.
Intel will use the ASML and other integrated circuit machines lay down layers, then apply energy (light, acoustics, magnetic or electrical) to free the layers to assemble themselves into their preferred useful shapes.
Like laying out building materials on a building site and applying sound waves to make the materials dance into a house. Only happens at microscopic levels under special conditions.
Until recently we were not too far removed from our ancestors who make most of their own tools with their own hands, learned from a parent or skilled craftsman. This is light-years of complexity removed from that world.
Intel's High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet lithography tool in a clean room at Intel Corporation's Fab D1X in Hillsboro, Oregon, in April 2024.
This 165-ton High NA EUV tool was built by ASML and is the first commercial lithography system of its kind in the world. The second delivery from ASML has just been received by an unnamed customer, likely Samsung.
TSMC says low-NA double patterning is still less expensive than high-NA single exposure with the new ASML machine.
Intel says use of long-researched 14A Directed Self-Assembly (DSA) will produce far lower costs. - https://www.semianalysis.com/p/intels-14a-magic-bullet-directed
Stock portfolios at large pension funds had a blockbuster run. Now, managers are cashing out and corporate pension funds are shifting money into bonds.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/pension-funds-stocks-bonds-679b8536?mod=hp_lead_pos5
“When it’s a very expensive stock market, bad things can happen,” said Marcus Frampton, APFC’s investment chief. "When we sold tech stocks last year we place that money into gold ETFs to be better prepared for the inevitable global financial collapse. We missed out on some gains this year but gold is already up 30%."
Companies in the S&P 500 trade at around 24 times their past 12 months of earnings, above the five-year average of 22 times, according to FactSet.
State and local government funds are swapping stocks for alternative investments. The nation’s largest public pension, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, is planning to move close to $25 billion out of equities and into private equity and private debt.
Like investors of all kinds, the funds are slowly adapting to a world of yield, where they can get sizable returns on risk-free assets. That is rippling throughout markets, as investors assess how much risk they want to take on. Moving out of stocks could mean surrendering some potential gains. Hold too much, for too long, and prices might fall.
For pension funds, which target specific investment returns to fund future obligations, this is a welcome change: It means they can take less risk and stay on track toward those goals. They can sell stocks, lock in price gains and move the money into bonds without sacrificing too much return. Or they can continue to push for higher returns without taking on much more risk.
While stocks have slumped recently, the S&P 500 remains just 4.4% below its record close. The index’s 10% gain through the end of March marked its best first-quarter performance since 2019. Meanwhile, a persistently strong economy has pushed interest rates to multi-decade highs.
The combination is leading large retirement funds to rotate their positions. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that pensions will unload $325 billion in stocks this year, up from $191 billion in 2023.
“You don’t want to give away all of those hard-earned gains,” said Zorast Wadia, a principal and consulting actuary at Milliman. “You don’t want to give it back if stocks fall.”
Pension funds for workers at companies and state and local governments together held about $9 trillion at the end of 2023, according to Federal Reserve data.
I'm not sure how much value there is in a huge trove of data collected by 2 million sight-impaired automobiles.
I've previously re-posted articles detailing the sort and size of real-world objects Tesla sensors are unable to discern and detect, and they fall well, well, short of what is needed to drive autonomously.
I just know for Tesla to be as good as Waymo is currently at self-driving with the upcoming "Tesla Taxi" they will need to use the a similar array of sensors to what Waymo uses.
Waymo uses $40k to $50k of sensors per self-driving taxi - and all of the extra data that produces requires far more powerful computer processing onboard.
https://www.tangramvision.com/blog/sensing-breakdown-waymo-jaguar-i-pace-robotaxi
It's simply not possible way for Tesla to add $50k of extra sensors to a $75k Model S, let alone a $40k Model 3, but it is possible for Tesla to add these sensors and call it a "$125k Tesla S Taxi"
Tesla has actually removed $80 per auto worth of parking sensors in their current model cars to cut costs with predictable results. Musk is gladly cheap and ruthless, but that doesn't provide a self-driving product.
Waymo began manufacturing its own LIDAR sensors in 2011 to reduce cost. At the time, Waymo said it could lower the unit price from $75,000 for an off-the-shelf LIDAR sensor to just $7,500 with its own custom version.
At the end of 2021 Google halted sales of their laser bear honeycomb Lidars to non-Google customers - just as Amazon halted sales of their warehouse robots to non-Amazon customers. The technology gets good enough to necessarily become proprietary.
In 2020 Google said they had invested more than $3.5 billion on Waymo technology. Tesla is betting on future cheaper off-the-shelf technology, rather than helping create that technology like Google and Toyota. That's a strategy but no existing Teslas will be backward compatible or up-gradable.
What is called AI is data processing for graphics, also treating other things as graphics with varying degrees of success.
The closer AI is to graphics, the more useful it is right now.
AI can scan hundreds of camera monitors and spot the fire when it breaks out with a high degree of accuracy, certainly enough accuracy to warrant a look by a real human.
The very useful AI applications need exactly the same Nvidia equipment as bad AI applications, so in that regard they're little different from an investment perspective.
Nvidia is selling durable dungarees, and mining pans to the gold miners, and they're doing well at that. Nvidia doesn't just sell chips. They sell an entire ecosystem of connected equipment that together makes the AI system / cloud.
A small handful of miners will do well too, but I can't begin to guess which they are.
How long ago were we supposed to have autonomous self-driving cars. It's amazing where we're at. I've been very happy riding Waymo cars around West Hollywood. Waymo uses very large LIDAR scanners coupled with a lot of other sensors that would currently cost far too much to put on private cars. Tesla's can't even be retrofitted with these sensors. I expect "Tesla's taxi" will be a vehicle similar to Waymo with the required sensors.
It look like we're finally getting our March correction
The UAE relies heavily on cloud-seeding to induce rainfall - a technique which sees aircraft fire salt flares into clouds to speed up condensation to provide its groundwater.
Flight-tracking data analysed by the Associated Press showed one aircraft affiliated with the UAE's cloud-seeding efforts flew around the country on Sunday. Ahmed Habib, a meteorologist at the National Centre for Meteorology (NCM), told Bloomberg several cloud-seeding sorties were flown in the days before the unprecedented rainfall hit.
The rains began late on Monday, soaking the sands and roadways of Dubai with some 0.79 inches of rain, then intensified at around 9am local time on Tuesday and continued throughout the day, dumping more rain and hail onto the overwhelmed city. By the end of Tuesday, more than 5.59 inches of rainfall had soaked Dubai over 24 hours. An average year sees 3.73 inches of rain at Dubai International Airport.
My sister and husband were here from Santa Fe, NM for my nephew's 30th birthday.
She had tickets to see a 2 hour American Idol live show. It's been many years since I been to a taping.
The one good thing about a live broadcast show is it can't take any longer than the actual broadcast time, plus the seating and short warm-up.
I always find it curious how the television cameras are able to make a relatively small soundstage look like a huge auditorium and a large audience,
At least on this show all of the "curtains" and props are now all LED screens. On television the images mostly look like real things rather than flat LEDs.
All the cameras were remotely controlled from the back of the soundstage, with the exception of one small handheld they'd sometimes use on stage.
It's interesting how that business has changed since I last saw it up close.