It could actually be a good way to deal with compulsive smartphone use.

Engineers understand things and want to do a good job.

To be fair, you find greedy and thieving engineers too. It's just that being engineers they will realise that you cannot make a system like MCAS and not have it blow in your face within months the first time a bird strikes the one sensor that was keeping everyone on a plane alive.

The main problem with the McDonnel-Douglas suits was not even their greed or shortsightedness focused only on stock price. It's their outright blindness to the technical reality of the business they were running. This happens in so many sectors (I'm certain people in IT will sympathise), but in aviation you get lots of dead people who paid dear money to use your product, and millions others who will be scared of using your products again, causing the company's demise. In most other businesses, these corporate leeches are simply happy to feast on a rotting body, ready to jump onto a new one when the time is right.

It's a theory that is difficult to prove — but difficult to disprove as well.

By that line of thought, you can accept any absurdity, such as the existence of god. Unless we find some "glitches" in the Matrix (like déja vu was in the movie) that cannot be explained by our current understanding of physical laws, and that somehow can be best explained by the simulation hypothesis, this is just cheap sci-fi. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence.

Besides, as Feynman (IIRC) observed, the most amazing thing about the universe is how few laws actually govern it. We can reduce pretty much our entire lives to gravity and electromagnetism, and together with the nuclear forces this has run the universe for billions of years, with no exception ever registered, and we've been looking. If this is a simulation, it must be really well programmed...

I'm a Norwegian EV owner, I drove two winters ago from Trondheim to Røros, literally the coldest town in Norway, driving about 100 km on a contiguous ice sheet under which the road was, and had absolutely zero problems. Take your bullshit elsewhere.

These problems could be solved with street chargers, but that's a whole can of worms itself.

If your street has streetlights, you have power. Most of these were built in the age of incandescent light bulbs and their wiring is now very oversized in the age of LEDs, freeing up several kW per lamppost. At that point it's just a matter of setting up an authentication system or an app for payment (which can be done at a later point when there are enough EVs to be worth it).

As a Norwegian EV owner myself, I think you would do just fine with 2 kW for overnight charging.

True, but we can still drive in the bus lane. Tolls have been re-introduced, but are typically lower for EVs than ICEs (usually half, which used to be the legally mandated maximum - now it's 70%).

The concept may be tantalising, but the price tag of 50 million euro is way out of proportion for a measly 16 MW plant. I mean, I have worked with air coolers that had that rating in a refinery.

Assuming the plant lasts 50 years and has 8000 operating hours a year, that gives 40000 hours and 640 GWh through the lifetime, for a price of 78 €/MWh (not accounting for interest rate), or 291 €/kWh with a very favourable 4% interest rate, or 630 €/kWh with a commercial 10% interest rate.

Considering that the current power price in Croatia usually are below 100 €/MWh (yes, they were higher in 2022), and that the assumptions I use are VERY generous in regard to lifetime and availability, and that I totally ignored operating costs, this looks like a horrible business case.

How many concrete, proven cases of Chinese espionage via telecom hardware have been detected? Are the Chinese so skilled AND self-confident that they would deploy spyware in thousands of units to be deployed in adversary countries, who have full and unrestricted access to the actual hardware?

Because this looks a lot like a case of protectionism by fear-mongering. Leaving aside the whole PRISM thing.

most professions that receive tips are quite fond of the system

No one complains about receiving money. I'm pretty sure all professions receiving tips would rather prefer the same money as higher wage with no tip.

No tipping means Soviet-style restaurants where the wait "staff" don't give a shit about you and tell you to go f yourself.

Never been to Europe? No tipping means waiters have a modicum of dignity and do not come along every 5 minutes asking "everything OK?!?" with a smile so fake it could be plastic.

And yes, sometimes we do tip, when there is extraordinary service involved, not when they did just what they were supposed to.

Just like for ICE cars you will need to replace the engine and or the transmission at some point.

I find that unlikely, since EVs have neither of those things. EVs have electric motors (far cheaper and more reliable than high-temperature ICEs with thousands of moving parts) and there is neither gearing nor transmission required (the motor is installed directly on the shaft).

I live in Norway, where EVs were phased in much earlier, and EVs are well-known to be cheaper to maintain and way more reliable than ICEs.

[...] assuming we'll never find another type of material to make a future battery out of.

That's because there isn't. Lithium is irreplaceable for high-density battery storage because it has an extreme electrode potential and extremely low weight. I mean literally extreme since there is no material with higher (well, lower since it has a minus sign) electrode potential for a plain ionisation, and there is no lighter solid material.

You can play with all the other metals and components in batteries like nickel, aluminium, molybdenum, iron, phosphates, but lithium is the one carrying the charge and you can't replace it. If you heard of sodium batteries, those are only for stationary storage as sodium is a lot heavier than lithium.

Then you can think outside the box and go for hydrogen for fuel cells, which is lighter and does not need to be mixed with other metals for storage, but that's another technology entirely.

Did you forget to amortize $30b across 80+ years of operation?

Did you forget to account for capital costs? With a reasonable, non-commercial 4% interest rate, the present value of annuity factor converges to 25 years for an infinitely long depreciation horizon. (It's 23.9 years for 80 years of horizon). So it does not really matter that much whether the plant is going to last 40, 60 or 80 years to calculate the LCOE.

This is because you need to pay interest for those loans you took to build the plant to begin with. No one is going to give you 30 billion dollars interest-free, except for the government, but then we are in subsidised territory and taxpayers will be paying for that.

My employer (in Europe) provides company phones for private use (nice perk), but also requires us to use a work profile (at least on Android) for work apps.

It is a bit clunky (e.g. I cannot copy and paste data between apps in separate profiles, but that's the point) but it works fine for us. Is there an inherent weakness to this approach that makes US employers rather give out an extra phone?

The average mileage of a US car is 1123 miles a month, so the GP's data are perfectly credible.

Also, it's pretty easy to set up some smart charging logic to charge the car in the middle of the night when electricity is cheapest. Tesla has it out of the box.