Lidar has very short range. That, and the cost are most likely the reason Tesla is avoiding it. By itself, lidar can’t see far enough to allow the vehicle to drive at full speed.

If these are street bikes of some sort, you're not hauling three of them without a trailer no matter what truck you get. I'd you're going to need a trailer anyway, might as well get whatever truck you want.

How often do you haul bikes, and how many bikes would you haul when you do? Also, what kind of bikes? If it’s just an occasional rescue/support then a trailer is fine, or I would think 1 sportbike can be made to fit with some kind of weird tailgate replacement

Once people can get a personal benefit and passing the cost on to someone else because it's supposed to be done anyway, there is a tendency for the thing them to think of new reasons why that thing is supposed to happen anyway. It is basically how corruption always starts.

Lots, and very short.

Yes. In some situations, battery farms might actually be more cost effective than elevated lakes.

There is a story that during its bankruptcy, someone asked why GM couldn’t just build a corolla. The answer was because they weren’t Toyota. Each company has a rather specific set of capabilities and advantages, and if they can’t easily be transferred over to making a conventional mass market car, they are going to be…

One of the advantages of a floating landing pad is that you can position it where you need it. It’s been used multiple times, but at different locations. Where the far away landing spot need to be depends on many variables, like desired orbit, payload, etc.

In order to land, they have to carry additional fuel, which means less weight they can lift to orbit. For the highest payloads or farthest orbits, they have to forgo the landing and only use the boosters once. Obviously, they figure that’s a trade off worth making.

The point of an update is to generate demand. It lets some people advertise that they have the latest and greatest, and for other people to spend money so they can be more like those people.

Its cheaper if you have the geography to provide you with the elevation difference. If you have to build a bunch of towers, it starts getting expensive pretty quickly.

Have we? I'm not familiar with any non nuclear accidents on the scale of Chernobyl and Fukushima.

That is absolutely true. The trouble is that we've occasionally had to relocate whole cities .

The problem is that it looks like a baby hippo.

Power plants are going to be situated near where the users are, and an awful lot of those tend to be near coasts. In addition, being near a body of water gives the plant access to chilling water.

It’s advisable to use caution when describing inherently safe nuclear plant designs, as they could have failure modes that are not anticipated. We really need decades of data to know for sure. The one common flaw to nuclear power, is that if something does go wrong, it tends to be at the very least incredibly…

That might apply to the developed world, but that’s only part of the problem. Suppose the next iphone is build to last 100 years (and we all agree to keep them that long) that still leaves the billions of people who are currently too poor to own a phone, but are climbing out of that poverty, and then there is still…

Compressing gasses is horrifically inefficient, since you’re creating heat when compressing that is then lost. Moving water up and down is better, but you still have to deal with the efficiencies of both the pump and the turbine, so you’re wasting 20%-30% of the power you’re storing. I think the real bottle neck for…

I like it, but the interior makes me think I got lost in a beehive. The bees are coming!

Who said anything about causation? I said approximate the performance of, which you absolutely can.