If you have your own garage, or even driveway with a charger, a Tesla is amazing. And their super charger network on highways is amazing, no logins, apps, credit cards, not even a screen on the device. Just pop it into the car, wait 10 or 15 minutes for 150 miles range then drive to the next one.
It's a shame the rental cars are giving EVs a bad name.
Back in the olden days, I had a junior dev ask me if he could learn ops, I said sure, I was just a hacker myself. He wrote a script to make sure the hard drives in all the servers were good. A month or so later we rebooted a server and it wouldn't come back up. We finally rebooted another to see if we could learn something about the dead server. But it also wouldn't boot. Then to our horror we learned that the disk check script was writing and reading to the boot sector to make sure it was good. All of our servers were affected. Good times.
Oh you are in for a treat. They don't fully finish in that book, for the conclusion you need high-octane Judas Unchained with the best inter- and then planetary chase scene. A great book with lovely twist in the end.
Arizona is not running out of water. There's a lot of fearmongering surrounding water levels at Lake Mead or with the Colorado river, but Arizona doesn't get the majority of its water from those sources. It also uses 10x less water with a population of 7m as it did in 1950 with a population of 0.7m.
Arizona has a state-of-the-art water portfolio that uses lots of reclaimed water and is not reliant on micro or even macro-climate trends. A megadrought has impacted the area for the last few decades and only now are Arizona cities talking about the needs for conservation and possibly cuts in the next decade or so, but if climate models hold up the drought will be over in that time frame anyway.
What is the longest and (large enough) volume water piping system in the world? From my recollection its not long enough to significantly make inroads to another state.
edit: I think I might be wrong, looks like China has done significant waterworks across their country.
Oil is significantly more valuable than water - the added cost per gallon of water would be astronomical.
1 oil barrel is 42 gallons and costs around $75 today. I pay about $6 per CCF of water which is 748 gallons. It might be worth doing this with oil, but even if you scaled it up, it would be hard not to have the transport cost more than the actual water.
Of course Arizona doesn't really have that option. But California does, and Arizona already sources water from the Colorado River, which California does too.
Anyways. I think moving California off the Colorado River would do a lot to ease the water problems in the southwest.
California has had trouble kick starting desalination. It is an energy intensive process, and the California electricity grid (especially in water poor SoCal) is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels (even some coal plants in other states feed into the LA metro). Furthermore, desalination intakes can negatively impact marine life, unless subsurface wells are used. Those are more expensive and companies pursuing desalination are not eager to foot the bill for them. Perhaps most importantly, desalination (even without subsurface wells) is more expensive than current sources of water in Southern California. I've not even mentioned the challenges in achieving safe exhaust of brine.
If I'm understanding this correctly, it's still a problem: if the product's price element or the order's line item list is null, for example, that shouldn't just be silently ignored. The transaction should fail, loudly and visibly (like with an exception) so that the root cause of the invalid data can be examined. The way most programmers code it is to just ignore the bad data and potentially ship an item for free, or without charging tax, or charge the customer but not ship the item, etc. etc. This is why so many software development organizations have huge QA departments.
I still write null checks if needed but for deeply nested objects, it comes down to only checking for null at the end of the chain instead of in Java where you have null checks each step of the way.
But note that this is not all or most of the soil in the Amazon, by a long shot... the "terra preta da Amazonia" exists in isolated patches where humans had been conducting slash-and-burn agriculture for hundreds of years. Most of the soil of the Amazon region is just like any other topical soil, nutrient and carbon poor.
But biochar establishes the fact that carbon can be (semi-?)sequestered by a sustainable human agricultural process, this scheme has been implemented on a large scale in the past, and similar schemes could be implemented in future ag systems. That’s not a trifecta you hit very often in complex systems of any sort.
Upshot: if you are a young scientist/engineer/agronomist/ag economist and want to do real hands-on exploratory science where everybody is in the dumb club, and still make a significant direct middle/long-term difference in the world and its population, soil science could be your ticket.
PS: The content of the article is great. The click-bait title is absurd.
It's a shame the rental cars are giving EVs a bad name.