Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.

We decided to cut device usage way down - they get 1 hour in the morning to play whatever games they want on computer, tablet, console. Then they get 1 hour before bed to watch TV. The rest of the day, no devices. We are homeschooled so this is a LOT of free time.

After a few weeks, they're now: blasting through books daily (to the point where they forgot their own TV time, which used to be sacred), playing board games with us more frequently, asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes (which they've previously shied away from), writing their own comic books and board games on paper, and overall just being creative through the day and entertaining themselves.

It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.

Plenty of ways to get exposure to that stock without it going into the indices it is not qualified for.

He's ahead in some areas, having some skills from as far as 7th grade, but mostly he's more in the 5th grade band by now. His MAP test score is 50th percentile for 12th grade. This means, basically, he knows more math than 50% of 12th graders who take the MAP test.

This really blew my mind at first, but these kinds of single-scale tests are really valuable for this purpose. We should be reaching for a solid absolute standard, not grading everything on a curve and passing people who haven't demonstrated real mastery.

It's like saying you can't use windows to develop an OS, or drive a Ford on the way to your job at Hyundai.

I lived in Idaho Falls (well within the majority Mormon area that extends farther North at least to Rexburg) and never had an issue, but I definitely knew I was not part of the club.

At some point national and state level goals must supercede local control if progress is to ever be made.

In compensation I noticed they nap frequently in the day time, often in the hottest part of the day when it's unpleasant to work.

It put my own sleep issues in perspective, I realized I had been a little too precious about it and I can indeed do fine on more fractured sleep. Often I form a judgment in the morning about my sleep and if I feel bad about it, I carry that through the day. I'm more convinced now it's a psychosomatic thing, I'm convincing myself I should be tired! So I try not to do that now and think of the people out here who live every day like this.

Even without a battery people usually choose hybrid, which can function on and off grid.

Also to be honest I'm mostly looking at larger inverters so maybe that colors it. Not many users here need 24,000 watts continuous outside a commercial context, for instance, so an inverter with that as an input but 12,000 watts continuous AC output doesn't seem weird since part of the 24,000 watts DC can be sent to the battery.

You can definitely get equipment that can do symmetrical input/output, but if you actually model out the supply and demand curves on the system it's not usually going to be worth the extra up front expense since peak input is a small portion of the day and that extra hardware will mostly sit idle.

For that matter people often design systems where peak input can't even be accepted by the inverter and the extra power is just wasted, because it's more valuable to have a steady input over a long period than to maximize the daily peak.

Execution of unrelated ideas seems like a natural follow on, and having managed several such "labs" efforts, it's actually a good idea but it inevitably grinds up against the lack of will to continue investing in the face of headwinds, especially since the main business line is several orders of magnitude larger than anything labs can deliver in a foreseeable timeframe.

Went on a bit of a rabbit hole and it appears that there is a lot of methane in the atmosphere and that gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow, and the methane likely is there from the formation of the moon originally via methane ice.

When we've got actually braindead policy like ethanol fuel mandates, the ROI of switching a corn farm to solar is so incredibly high that solutions like this just aren't competitive.

I wish some of our billionaire class would turn their attention to these things rather than building yet another rocket company. Maybe that's why Gates is buying up farmland, who knows.

Payback time is 2-4 years.

It reminds of healthcare and infrastructure in the US. When you really dig into why both are so expensive, it's literally every step. Every link in the chain between supplier and consumer is some kind of inefficient market, or burdened by regulations, etc.

Americans are just so rich they don't care enough to see these huge margins and undercut the competition, which is what happens here and keeps markets much more efficient.