Isn’t Cuba walkable for the most part?

I haven’t been there, but the videos I’ve seen show that they have a very car-centric culture.

The relatives I’ve had visit have confirmed the classic cars. It isn’t propaganda. It’s that they have a lot of cars from the time just before the US sanctions went into effect. A lot of those cars now have weird engines out of trucks, but because they can’t get new car frames in easily, they’re keeping them for as long as they can.

I don’t think there’s anything stopping them from importing electric vehicles from China

Nothing, except for the money to pay for them.

It seems like you’re living in a dream world where Cuba has a strong economy and great relations with China.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re for emergencies or they’re the main power source. Since the Cuban grid is down, the US embassy could only get power using those generators. So, now they’re as in the dark as the rest of Cuba.

While the Cuban government could still communicate with messengers on motorbikes, the US can hardly do that to communicate with the US mainland, so they’re going to be really cut off.

I assume they have some kind of satellite phone and some spare batteries, but unless they have solar panels or something, once those batteries are gone they’re really cut off.

Cuba is still using cars from the 1950s because of the American trade embargo. Under ideal conditions a transition to pure electric / solar energy would take a decade. With an American embargo in place it would take decades and probably never finish.

Apparently an average fuel tank can hold somewhere between 40 and 80 litres. So, that’s up to (0.75 * 80 = 60) 60 kg of fuel, which can supply 2.74 GJ of energy. If you wanted 2.74 GJ of batteries in your car, it would weigh about 4000 kg. That’s double the weight of an F150, or basically the weight of a F350, engine, fuel tank, wheels, etc. included.

Now, of course, nobody puts that much battery capacity into a car or truck.

The point is, it’s not an apples to oranges comparison when you talk about the energy efficiency of an EV vs. a ICE car. ICE cars are inefficient, but carry around a very energy dense fuel source and can go hundreds, sometimes thousands of km without needing to stop. EVs have much more efficient engines, but have to drag around really heavy batteries that aren’t very energy dense. Their range is very constrained because if you wanted to match the range of an ICE car you’d have to almost double the weight of the car in batteries alone.

Personally, I like mass transit and bikes. But, if I had to own a car I’d get an electric one. Still, I know that the major drawback to electric cars is that battery energy density sucks compared to gasoline.

What’s interesting is how everything merged into the same thing online. For example, ABC News is the news division of the TV network ABC. USA Today is a newspaper. KTLA is a radio station. All those websites look pretty similar today. They all have text-only stories like a newspaper. They all have video stories.

You’d think maybe TV stations would say “we’re not going to do text-only stories” or newspapers would say “we’re not going to do video”. I wonder if we’re ever going to get to a time when there is a distinction between them again.

I was about to cry fowl

What are you, chicken?

The main difference is that a modern battery has an energy density of about 0.7 MJ/kg or 700 kJ/kg, whereas gasoline has an energy density of about 45.7 MJ/kg. So, you need to pack in a lot more batteries to allow an electric car to go a meaningful distance. And, you’re hauling around all that extra weight all the time, even when the batteries are nearly empty.

Oil / Gas is a global commodity, shipped around the world on tankers. If prices are higher in France, someone will take cheaper oil/gas from the US and ship it to France where they can make more money.

In the short term, maybe the US suffers less. But, in the longer term prices well even out as people will sell wherever they can get the highest profits.

There are very few US ships.

Almost every ship from a western country flies a “flag of convenience” from a country like Liberia, Panama, the Marshall Islands, etc. If they flew the US flag they’d be subject to US laws, and have to meet US safety standards, pay taxes to the US government, etc.

The few US ships that exist are there to meet the requirements of the Jones Act which requires that shipments from a US port to another US port be done by ships owned by a US citizen, crewed by US citizens / permanent residents, built in the US, and so-on. These ships only serve US-to-US trips, so they don’t go through the Strait of Hormuz. Incidentally, this is a big reason why prices in Hawaii are so high. Only US-flagged carriers can bring supplies from the US to Hawaii. And, with a population of only 1.5 million, it’s not really efficient to send huge ships from other countries to Hawaii.

The dark spot is only an issue if you’re using a laptop or something. Pen and a pad of paper is fine outside. Loose stacks of paper is obviously not ideal.

Unfortunately, most of us need to work using screens these days. I have hope for the future with these smart AR glasses. With the screen on the glasses, it shouldn’t be a problem to use them in bright light. And, feeling the sun on your skin is one of the best parts about being outside when the weather is good.

I don’t even like Hawaiian shirts. What’s the point of that collar? Why is western wear so obsessed with putting that style of collar on absolutely everything.

The same thing would work with e-ink. It works fine in super bright sunlight. Unfortunately since it physically spins little balls with electromagnets the refresh rate is very slow compared to conventional screens.

We don’t really know. Maybe they stopped completely and honoured the deal. Maybe they didn’t even slow down and just hid what they were doing.

We know that they allowed international inspectors in while the deal was active though, so at the very least they had to work harder to hide things if they were continuing to work.

That would be nice. But, one common theme with religious people is that they always believe that they are going to heaven, but everyone else isn’t.

Interesting, I didn’t realize that. I thought all of the groups Iran supported were Shia.

It would be funny if they weren’t actually trying to bring about the biblical end-times. Also, they don’t care at all about the future because they don’t believe that the future will exist, since we’re in endtimes.

I have an old YouTube app on my iPad, and it still works fine. One of the more responsive apps on the device. I get nagged nearly every time I use it to update to the newest YouTube release, but that’s impossible. I’d first have to upgrade my OS, and Apple no longer releases new OSes for this generation of iPads. So, I’m stuck with an old YouTube, which mostly works fine, and an occasional nag message.

I’m sure within a year or two mine will be like yours and YouTube will simply no longer work. But, for now it’s in a relatively good spot where I can use a version of YouTube designed for this particular hardware that doesn’t feel sluggish.

What’s going on:

Israel and Iran:

• Israel has terrible relations with virtually every country in the world, and even worse relations with the countries nearby, one of those countries is Iran
• Iran is the only Shia Muslim country in the world (one where the majority of the population is Shia and the people in power are Shia)
• There are Shia minorities in many countries, and in some countries the Shia are a majority of the population, but don’t have power (Iraq used to be like this, not sure how it is now)
• Iran supports armed Shia groups outside Iran (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen, etc.)
• Sometimes these Iran-backed Shia groups act a bit like governments, sometimes like terrorist groups, often a combination of both.
• Israel shares borders with many countries with Iran-backed militias, so is constantly dealing with low-level conflict with groups linked to (financed by) Iran
• Iran (quite reasonably) thinks that the only way it will be safe from attack is if it has nuclear weapons, so it has been trying to develop them for years
• Israel (quite reasonably) doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, so has been trying to stop them for years, using spying, sabotage, and more recently, direct airstrikes
• Under Obama, a deal was reached where Iran agreed to stop work on nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief
• Trump violated the terms of this treaty (as he has violated many other treaties) mainly because Obama signed it, and Trump has personal hatred for anything having to do with Obama
• With no deal in place, Iran went back to working (at least more openly) on nuclear weapons

Trump, Racists, and Evangelicals:

• The war against so-called “DEI” has meant any non-white person in an elevated position in the US government and military has been demoted or fired, and an incompetent but politically loyal white person has replaced them
• DOGE meant eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse”, but mostly they eliminated anything they didn’t understand, which included soft power (like Voice of America broadcasts in Persian which were received by people in Iran), Iran analysts at the Pentagon, etc.
• Successfully kidnapping Maduro from Venezuela gave the Trump admin a false sense of confidence
• Israel has a powerful lobby in the US,
• Many evangelicals believe that we’re in the biblical endtimes, and that the rapture will happen soon. They want the jews to go back to Israel so Jesus can come back and kill them, then they get to go to heaven. Jews being in control of biblical places is a key element of their theory, so they support Israel because they want the world to end.

Israel’s latest attacks:

• Israel attacked Iran last year, and the US joined in, and they claimed this “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program
• Despite this, the message is always that Iran is days or weeks away from a nuclear weapon, so both things are true: the Israeli/US strikes against Iran were a massive success and Iran’s program was obliterated, but Iran is still days or weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon
• The Trump admin was trying to negotiate a new treaty with Iran, but wasn’t making much progress because the negotiators were unqualified idiots: a real estate developer (Steve Witkoff) and Trump’s son in law (Jared Kushner)
• Israel saw another opportunity to take out targets in Iran recently, so they attacked, and the US felt the need to join in, despite being in the middle of negotiations

Hormuz

• Many countries in the middle east only have major ports inside the Persian Gulf, and no way to get goods in or out without passing by the Strait of Hormuz
• Getting into the gulf means getting past the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran can easily control, it’s only 50km coast-to-coast in some places
• Iran, at best, has non-hostile relationships with the rest of the Persian Gulf countries, so it doesn’t risk much by sinking any ship passing by in the Gulf

What’s Next:

• Who knows
• The US went into the conflict without a goal
• Israel went into it with goals (destroy the ability for Iran to finance militias on Israel’s border, force them to focus on issues back home), but achieving its goals might make things even worse for the US
• Iran is facing an existential threat, so it’s unlikely to back down, and it’s not really like the US can escalate without actually invading
• In any invasion, the US would be badly hurt, Iran has a population of almost 100 million, 660 thousand active military, and 350 thousand reserves
• Any invasion would also serve to have Iranians rally around their country
• Many Iranians (especially urban ones) hate the theocratic regime, but they’ve seen how after US “interventions” nearby countries have collapsed into chaos. Stability under a hated theocratic leader is much preferable to chaos, so they’re unlikely to rise up
• There are groups inside Iran who might fight (the Kurds for example), but they’ve been repeatedly burned by the US, over and over, going back decades, so they’re not going to take promises from the US seriously

You do really feel this when you’re using old hardware.

I have an iPad that’s maybe a decade old at this point. I’m using it for the exact same things I was a decade ago, except that I can barely use the web browser. I don’t know if it’s the browser or the pages or both, but most web sites are unbearably slow, and some simply don’t work, javascript hangs and some elements simply never load. The device is too old to get OS updates, which means I can’t update some of the apps. But, that’s a good thing because those old apps are still very responsive. The apps I can update are getting slower and slower all the time.

Yeah. I read Heart of Darkness long before I saw that, plus I’d watched Apocalypse Now, which is a movie adaptation of Heart of Darkness. I saw a list of their influences in making the game, and I’d already seen all of the other ones too. So… it was definitely taking FPS military games in a new direction, but it wasn’t anything really new overall.