Friday, 29 May
01:00 EDT
Shrey Parikh, 14, wins the Scripps Spelling Bee after a nail-biting 'spell-off' [NPR Topics: News]
This is the 101st year of the national spelling competition, and the third time it's been decided by a rapid-fire "spell-off" since the practice was introduced in 2021.
(Image credit: Allison Robbert)
00:00 EDT
MIT Researchers Develop a Low-Cost Technique To Get Lithium Out of Rocks [Slashdot]
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded. Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. The process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts: not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica. After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so waste levels approach zero. The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water. "We believe this approach is the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium not only out of hard rock, but period," says Yet-Ming Chiang, MIT's Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. "That's what's motivating us to scale this. It will enable the energy transition through batteries that use lithium. This was one of the goals of The Climate Project at MIT -- to work on projects that, within a short number of years, could transition from the lab to commercialization and impact." A paper describing the process has been published in the journal Science.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thursday, 28 May
23:00 EDT
Ron DeSantis wants to set up Florida property taxes to be like federal income taxes (paid by a minority and benefiting the majority) [Philip Greenspun’s Weblog]
Here’s a disturbing proposal from a politician whose policies I generally agree with:
While I don’t enjoy paying property tax, the idea that the majority of Floridians eligible to vote will soon pay nothing seems like a recipe for much faster growth in county/local government spending. (Many Florida voters already pay next to nothing because they’re taxed on the original purchase price and perhaps that is what accounts for the rapid rise in county spending that Gov. DeSantis decries.)
If the majority of Floridians aren’t paying property tax, won’t they vote for every blue sky spending dream that counties and cities put forward? That’s how it works at the federal level. The majority pay either nothing or next to nothing and have voted the U.S. into the world’s largest or second largest welfare state, as a percentage of GDP (we vie with France for the title). Even if a homeowner who isn’t taxed receives only 1 penny of benefit for every additional $1 million spent it would still be rational for him or her to vote for increased spending.
Is there a method to Ron DeSantis’s apparent madness? I’m sure that he understands politics much better than I do, but I am struggling to find merit in narrowing the tax base and feel that the experiment has already been run on the American people. If the goal is limiting county spending, why not a state-imposed limit on county/local government spending? Take the 75th percentile of per-capita spending in 2025 and impose that as a limit, adjusted annually for inflation, on all Florida counties. A county that is already over the limit would have five years to come down into alignment with the law. This might force counties to eliminate affordable housing subsidies, for example, which have the potential to be infinitely expensive as well as certainly unequal (some people get below-market-rate housing; others, equally virtuous and equally situated, are forced to pay market rates).
Maybe the method in the apparent madness is that homesteaded property isn’t that important to county budgets, e.g., for Miami-Dade just 7 percent of the total budget. ChatGPT says it is 9 percent of the total Palm Beach County budget. Both of these counties have a lot of commercial real estate, but property tax as a whole isn’t the lion’s share of the budget as I would have expected.
Republicans in general seem to be competing with Democrats in the “make the rich pay for everything” department. As noted above, I don’t see how this can work in a democracy where the people paying nothing have the right to vote for unlimited enhancements to whatever they’re receiving from a government funded by a minority that can be trivially out-voted. Maybe it can work in California and New York City where AI and Wall Street actually do generate infinite wealth on a recurring basis, but Florida isn’t home to NVIDIA and the AI companies that use NVIDIA chips.
The post Ron DeSantis wants to set up Florida property taxes to be like federal income taxes (paid by a minority and benefiting the majority) appeared first on Philip Greenspun’s Weblog.
21:00 EDT
20:00 EDT
2027 Audi RS5 first drive: A performance PHEV with split personalities [Ars Technica - All content]
SAALFELDEN, Austria—Audi may have built a reputation for technology over the years, either pioneering or early-adopting things like all-wheel drive, direct-injection engines, and so on. But it's also true that along the way it has earned a bit of a reputation for cars that look good inside and out but maybe aren't the most exciting things on four wheels. Not so for the models reworked by Audi Sport, the company's motorsports division, which now also spends its time building the company's new Formula 1 power units.
And like those latest F1 cars, its newest RS5 road car also marries together a turbocharged V6 and an electric motor. How convenient.
The underlying chassis of the new RS5 is shared with the A5 that we first drove last summer, but the only common body panels between the lesser A5 and this car is the hood; everything else is RS5-specific. Aggressive wheel arch blisters add more than 3.5 inches (90 mm) of width compared to the A5, and massive air intakes dominate the front fascia. At the rear, a pair of large oval exhaust pipes are set into a diffuser. Oh, and you don't get those kinds of carbon-fiber accents on a regular A5. Perhaps my favorite styling detail? The rear OLED tail lights have a checkered flag pattern (as do the daylight running lights up front).