Saw this in a recent substack posting by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  Advice from Clint Eastwood to Toby Keith.  Lots of irony there but I’ll take my wisdom wherever I happen to find it.  From Kill Zone.

Don’t Let The Old Man In

The first computer I owned was a Heathkit H-89 that I assembled from a kit.  I still have it gathering dust in my garage.  It stopped working a long time ago.  But it had not one, but two Zilog Z80 microprocessors.  I pretty much taught myself assembly language on that machine as a teenager.

After all these years the venerable Z80 is gone.  Quite a run though.  From The Register.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

Happy Birthday to Immanuel Kant.  I took some undergraduate philosophy courses, back when Kant was only a little over 250 years old.  I admit Kant is where I hit the wall.  These help a bit, all these years later.

An Immeasurable Field

Wow.  Been hearing it is a bad housing market.  Didn’t realize how bad.  From the AP.

2023 was slowest year for US home sales in nearly 30 years as high mortgage rates frustrated buyers

A good read in the form of a book review by Adam Gopnik.  I’ve always been fascinated by America’s fascination with Hitler and Nazis.  This covers an alternate and perhaps more realistic story of the Nazi rise to power in Germany in the 1930s.  The failures were essentially on the inside, with various established actors thinking they could use the Nazi movement for their own purposes.  Perhaps not a spoiler, but they were wrong nearly every time.  From the New Yorker.  May require login.

The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers

Been going on in South Louisiana for decades.  This time it’s a Man From Nantucket.

Billionaire’s million-dollar Nantucket beach house has officially been swept away

I guess it’s official, Elon has wrecked his company’s market.  From Jalopnik.

Tesla Learns Hard Lesson: Go Anti-Woke, Go Broke

Boston Review collects some articles on Fascism in America.

Reading List: The Fascism Question

A good read on Chinese EVs from Al Jazeera.

Are Chinese electric vehicles taking over the world?

There is lots of talk recently about EV pricing and adoption.  I will mostly talk from a technology point of view.  The expensive part of an EV has always been the battery.  I recall (without citation) that the cost of the battery was 40% of the price of a Tesla Model 3 when we bought one several years ago.

I also recall that EVs such as the Tesla achieved cost parity with gas powered cars roughly a year ago. When things like maintenance are factored in, EV probably have a slight price edge.  So basically the battery + electric motor combination is about the same price as a traditional gasoline car power plant (engine, transmission, gas tank, etc).

But the big cost of the EV, the battery, is still in rapid decline.  So we can expect cheaper and cheaper EVs, relative to gas powered cars.  This is happening in China, with BYD offering a $10,000 car.

Again, this isn’t labor costs, or subsidies, which haven’t changed noticably.  It’s just EVs riding the technology curve the same way computers, cell phones and other technologies have.  So why have American EV prices (cough, cough, Tesla) stalled? And why at this critical point where EVs should be beating up on gas cars?  I will leave that to others in what is surely going to be non-technical discussions.

The Rise of Batteries in Six Charts and Not Too Many Numbers