As someone with a self proclaimed fetish I have to ask if you have ever tried working with the material? I find even the most basic manipulation to be wild compared to other common metals.

I was sanding and polishing a long handled titanium spoon to make it more smooth (slowly) by hand and the friction from that quickly made it too hot to hold. It's thermal conductivity is 1/10th of aluminum and roughly 1/2 of stainless steel.

Another fun thing is to anodize it to different colors. Compared to aluminum it can be achieved without the use of caustic chemicals.

One downside is it would motivate companies to get intellectual property registered under a trademark with indefinite protection rather than copyright. Even with our current lifetime + 70 year protection we have companies like Disney getting characters registered as a trademark.

I didn't want to believe you so I went to the source: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

wtf.

That’s not all that was added in there

No, although my old one (HP42S) used 3 of the smaller stubbier batteries.

I had a 48C that fed on those batteries. They lasted forever. I had to retire mine when the battery door broke and the batteries wouldn’t stay in. It was a great calculator from HP’s heyday.

How come? I admit I've never given it any thought. What do you dislike about them?

Calculators are large enough that it should be possible to fit AAA or AA sized batteries, even possibly a 18650. They're lower power enough that a CR3202 lasts a long enough time but it always ends up dying at the most inconvenient time and they're really the only device I have that needs CR3202.

You'd need two AAs or AAAs for a CR2032's voltage. While it would last a lot longer, it's also a lot more volume. Also, the diameter is going to be a problem for many calculators; e.g., the R47 being discussed here is 12mm thick, a AA has a 14.5mm diameter and a AA has a 10.5mm diameter.

Huh, interesting points. I wouldn’t have thought of that because I ended up with a passel of widgets using those cells, including car key fobs, Apple AirTags, and a number of IoT sensors around the house. I own exactly a single flashlight that uses an 18650. Go figure!

Places in California has this problem too. Installing solar panels today could result in a larger electricity bill than not having them.

Getting solar panels forces you onto a plan in which they charge more per kwh pulled from the grid. The surplus electricity is only credited at the generation cost which is only 1/4 the total cost per kwh. (Delivery costs is 3x the price of electricity).

So if you want to go solar to save money you need both batteries and solar panels which is not an insignificant amount of money.

Not to be confused with Apple HomePod.

I prefer to cook pasta like rice and starting it in cold water brought to a boil and then a simmer: https://altonbrown.com/recipes/cold-water-pasta-method/

As someone also served by PG&E I don't think cheaper electricity will help. At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

> At peak hours electricity is $0.13/kwh but the delivery charge is $0.50/kwh.

Unfortunately, transmission has a natural monopoly risk, unless the government owns without profit requirements. The price peak is when it is just cheaper to make second set of lines next to old one and you can still pay the investment with fewer customers and lower price.

If we had renewables everywhere, wouldn't a lot of that potentially disappear?

It depends how much competition there would be if for-profit company owns them.

If there is just one source nearby, isn’t that another monopoly risk? The price starts to balance with high distance tranmission cost monopoly vs monopoly of nearby energy source.

If we find many small renewable sources that are cheap to build, maybe that balances it out.

At some point the electricity will be near-free, and we'll just pay transmission fees

Companies certainly won't pay for the maintenance. They'll let them degrade and then the government will have to take over. So we get charged twice, that is the real price.

Or, customer site storage will become so good they just drop off the grid.

The goal of making nuclear cheaper isn’t to lower consumer costs. It’s to displace CO2 emitting baseload sources like coal and gas.

Why not not both?

Sure, but one comes first.

And it's going to end up being price.

I don’t follow. If nuclear initially costs more than coal, then the first effect as it decreases is displacement when the prices cross over. Then if it falls further you will notice consumer price drops.

Or you know, build renewables and storage which has in recent years reduced Californias fossil gas dependency by 40%.

“All of the above” seems a good approach. If this is an existential crisis, why would we not hedge our bets?

(Not everywhere has good sun for solar.)

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinkley Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

The places with worse sun conditions tend to have amazing wind resources. Or be such a tiny niche that caring about them is irrelevant, like the few people living in the wind kill of the arctic high north of the polar circle.

Solar is not the only alternative. Tidal, river flow, reservoir, wind, thermal come to mind in terms of renewables.

Depending where you are in the world some banking apps only work with phones that have physical sim cards.

16GB has been the new minimum for under a year. Give it some more time /s