mchannon

North America doesn't make chips or components?

That's never been true (at least since the first chips or components). A lot of my Shenzhen orders have to wait on international airfreight on US-made chips because the ones I spec'd (basically the only ones that would do the job) are US-manufactured and warehoused.

Recommend you look at a world map of Intel fabs. Or Micron Fabs.

I’m literally arguing they should get rid of a big chunk of that bureaucracy, so why would I mourn missing out on it?

"Maybe Apple just doesn't want you" assumes, incorrectly, that Apple has enough information to know that. I'm not in their funnel for them to decide they don't want me. Apple has no clue.

If you're ever going to record an interaction with people who do not want it seen by the masses that they are breaking the law, you need to ensure that you livestream it.

Then you can tell them, "Go ahead, confiscate my phone. Proof of your illegal acts have already left the building, and the country."

During 1998-2000, AOL was ordering so many free trial CDs that it locked up world production, and music CDs faced 8-12 week delays. It was rumored that certain weeks there were no albums getting fabricated at all, worldwide.

I wonder if history isn’t repeating itself. AOL CDs had pretty much jumped the shark by 2000.

In 1987, Paul Verhoeven predicted exactly this in the original Robocop.

ED-209 mistakenly viewed a young man as armed, blows him away in the corporate boardroom.

The article even included an homage to:

“Dick, I’m very disappointed in you.”

“It’s just a small glitch.”

Am thinking propane tanks.

Working with those temps probably not appropriate for an office environment, but on a porch or well-ventilated garage, should economically outperform 110V pretty well.

But now we have the “deathbed pardon” or the lame-duck preemptive blanket pardon, popularized by 46.

Break the law all you want, long as the old boss or his successor is happy with you, you can’t be held accountable by the new boss.

The ZT (figure of merit) is an apples-to-apples number for comparing one thermoelectric material set to another. Higher is better.

Bismuth Telluride is the standard and has been for decades. It has a ZT of about 1.3. There have been some breakthroughs to exceed that in a few spots, but with limitations. Most of its competitors still exceed a ZT of 1.

This publication’s material is less than 0.01. Not all that newsworthy, unless I’m missing something.

Having read the same book (while on the fourth floor of MDC Brooklyn of all places) I believe the conclusion I read was that they were trying to make it all work with one drop, which was impossible, because of the number of tests they were promising and the low solute concentrations some of those tests had to work with.

But there's a wide gulf between a drop and a 20mL vial. Requiring three drops and claiming half the battery of tests would still be a substantial improvement. That's what they should've done. And I think this new startup can do that.

I interviewed with Theranos toward the very end. I have never been in a place with a bigger show of security, and I've previously worked for years in nuclear weapons laboratories. If this new startup ditches the demonic-possession voice and the arch-military security schtick, and the Wizard of Oz curtain, I might not consider an investment in them as foolhardy as one in Theranos.

Just wow.

I think it's an uncomfortable truth that there was some good in Theranos in terms of the unfulfilled needs of society and the potential of diligent work toward realizing those needs with technology.

I don't know how often it's been said by others, but I often think that Theranos would have had an easier time if they hadn't falsified anything. Faking things takes effort too, and aiming a little lower and being less secretive would have been a better outcome. Maybe a different tack is possible through this reboot.

Mr. Evans' silver spoon is worth $10M, so raising $20M against that in such a fraught area is eye-opening. Whether he sees this as part of Elizabeth's redemption arc or just can't quit the hair of the dog that bit him, I guess we'll see.

Elizabeth Holmes' crime wasn't defrauding people, it was defrauding people richer than her. Change my mind.

Most VC's are taking it in the shorts right now anyway, because they're addicted to free money and there's no more free money, and most of them quite frankly suck at spotting good deals. So for the intrepid souls who cast their lot in with Mr. Evans, maybe only Nixon could go to China, and maybe they'll fare better than the stodgy fat-dumb-and-happy B-tier VC's who are not long for this brave new world anyway.

The devil's always in the details.

I notice they use potassium hydroxide to treat this, and I seriously doubt merely in a catalytic capacity. That means that a lot of electrical input needs to be run into a chlor-alkali plant to make the KOH. If it's just a sprinkling, great. But is it?

Now if you're making moderately valued commodities like sugars or bioreagents, or perhaps even bioplastics, it might be cost-effective in spite of an electrical chlor-alkali input stream.

If you're making biofuels, however, this looks like corn-based ethanol or certain kinds of biodiesel, where there's lots of electrical and petrochemical energy inputs that conveniently get omitted when they tout how great for the environment and home-grown that biofuel energy is. Really hope they're not planning on going the same way with this set of discoveries.