Start by passing a law that makes it unlawful to make anything non-transferrable, whether it is a concert ticket or a software license. That one law would do more to fix this problem than anything else.

One of my friends once pointed out to me that 10 Things I Hate About You is basically Taming of the Shrew in a different setting, and my perspective on movies has never been the same since. So how many of those 7% were still retellings of existing stories, but with enough changes to make them not be flagrantly "based on existing IP"?

If the people using public chargers during the day don't have a charger at home, then by definition, they're not part of that 6 P.M. surge, and are thus effectively reducing its magnitude compared with what it otherwise would be.

Remember that the 10x number that I was arguing against is a hypothetical future state in which everyone has an EV and charges at home, not a power deficit that currently exists and that we need to fix, so if a third of apartment dwellers are never able to move to home charging, it does reduce that number considerably.

And even if the apartment complex owners eventually tear down and rebuild the apartments and thus have to comply with the new building code requirements forcing them to put in charging infrastructure, it still potentially kicks the can down the road for several decades, thus reducing the urgency of dealing with that hypothetical load.

While technically true, that definition of "abuse" has to include things like fast charging, bringing the cell close to 100% state of charge, charging when it's too cold outside, allowing the battery to get too warm, and starting to drain the battery immediately after charging. With the exception of charging to 100%, all of those are things that many car owners can't really avoid. So you can't really just wave your hands and say "That's abuse," because such abuse is common enough for entire lines of products to have been recalled over it.

True, but not everybody has home charging available, either because they don't have a dedicated parking spot (apartments) or because they don't have adequate service amperage to their home (many mobile homes, many homes built before 1970 or so, etc.). In the short term, that's likely to be a pretty large percentage of EV buyers in major cities.

At which point NASA could presumably remotely trigger a reentry burn and plunge the thing down into the middle of the ocean as a giant fireball, cosmonauts included. Besides, the shuttle was designed way back in the 1970s. If you think there was any technology on there that the Russians didn't have two decades later, you're kidding yourself. :-)

The APU is a red herring. They start up the APUs a few minutes before the shuttle begins its reentry burn, not during the landing. Nothing prevents them from manually starting them up a few minutes earlier to allow the astronauts enough time to reach a rescue craft.

Remember that what you're quoting was written at the time of the initial investigation. After the crash, NASA immediately began work on an emergency plan to autoland the orbiter without personnel aboard in the event of just such a disaster, and by the time shuttle launches resumed in 2006, they had that solution, in the form of a long cable that runs across the floor and connects from the avionics computer to the manual flight controls (for landing gear and pitot tube deployment).

So we know that it would have been possible, because NASA already provided that patch hardware on all subsequent shuttle missions. Now it's certainly possible that the Columbia's computer, being part of the oldest of the remaining shuttles, might have required slightly more extensive modifications for some reason, but at least in principle, it should have been possible.

The average California commute is about 29 minutes. If we assume an average commute speed of... say 45 MPH, that's probably in the neighborhood of 22 miles, or 5.5 kWh. If we assume that everyone installs a L2 charger capable of 30A output (7.2 kW), this means the average car will charge for less than one hour per day. So yes, if you incredibly stupidly charge them all for exactly the same 46 minutes, then 10x could be about right.

However, that's just not realistic. These vehicles are already generally continuously connected to the Internet (cellular), and these cars already are usually capable of timing their charging to coincide with off-peak power, and most of these cars are going to be plugged in for well over 12 hours before you leave home the next day, and if for some reason they mis-guessed when you're going to leave and failed to charge up by that tiny amount one day, it isn't going to matter. So there's really no possibility that they'll end up charging during the same 45-minute period.

Also, a lot of folks will have workplace charging that they can use during the day, or charge at chargers while they're out shopping, or charge at other times. So charging during the same 46 minutes is not even a realistic description of how people charge their cars right now, much less a realistic prediction of how they will charge their cars in the future. Realistically, most people usually work either from 9 to 5, from 10 to 6, or from 11 to 7, so they're going to charge between roughly 5:30 P.M. and 10:30 A.M., and their cars *should* easily be able to randomly pick a time during that window, thus spreading out the usage over potentially a 17-hour period.

Besides, even if I'm wrong and the car companies don't do anything to spread out the load, you could always take care of that at the local level or even the neighborhood level by using grid-scale battery setups to spread that one hour of extra household load over the entire day. That's just not a a realistic concern, much less a serious concern.

That number seems way too high to me. As of the end of 2022, California had just 28.2 million cars and light trucks burning gasoline (and 1.1 million BEV/PHEV/FCVs, with about 764k of those being full BEVs).

To move everyone to electric, then, means moving 28.2 million cars into that BEV column, plus 300k PHEVs. All told, that's about 28.5 million. On average, Californians drive 12,524 miles per year. So that's 356,934,000,000 electric miles. At an average of 3 miles per kWh, that's 118,978,000,000 kWh per year, or 118,978 GWh per year.

California currently uses about 287,220 GWh annually. That means if you ignore time of day concerns, if California moves every car and light truck to be fully electric, it would increase California's power consumption by only about 42%, not 900% as you're implying. Your numbers are off by more than a factor of 20.

California increases its energy output by a couple of percent every year, so even if they do nothing more than they're already doing (and assuming all other consumption miraculously remains flat), California could theoretically meet those capacity needs within two decades, which is long before the last gasoline-powered car goes away.

But given that California's daytime energy usage already peaks at almost half again more than its nighttime use, that means you could probably electrify close to half of those cars right now, without adding any more capacity, assuming you can get people to charge during the troughs or otherwise smooth out the power consumption over the course of the day.

On this, we agree.

Depends on how you define reachable. As Columbia was equipped, no. With a rescue shuttle whose cargo bay was loaded up with extra fuel tanks containing extra hydrazine and MON-3, maybe, though my crude mental math is saying that the 29,000 kg limit for the payload bay might not leave enough extra fuel to do a reentry burn, so they would then be stuck at ISS until a third shuttle mission brought them down, so that's probably a really silly idea, unless your plan was to mothball Columbia at ISS, in which case... maybe.

The process of successfully moving 29,000 kg of fuel tanks from one shuttle to another without it blowing up, along with the process of using those tanks to recharge the OMS/RCS engine system on Columbia without blowing up, are left as an exercise for the reader. :-D

Or they could have just kept it in orbit long enough for them to manufacture the thirty-foot cable needed to connect the landing gear control system to the main computer and ship it up there on a subsequent mission along with whatever new computer firmware was necessary to make it capable of turning on the correct outputs.

For that matter, they wouldn't have really been under any sort of deadline to get the empty shuttle back down on the ground if there were no longer any people in it. So ostensibly, they could have inspected it, figured out what needed to be replaced, and sent up the necessary set of replacement tiles in a separate mission six months later.

To the best of my knowledge, dendrites can occur with quite literally every wet-cell battery chemistry ever invented to date — lead-acid, NiCd, NiMH, zinc-ion, and Lithium ion. Heck, even a potato battery at least ostensibly can exhibit dendritic growth to some degree.

Dendrites are the one of the leading causes of catastrophic lithium ion battery failures. When those whiskers of metallic lithium grow large enough, they can puncture the separator and reach the cathode, at which point they cause a short circuit that creates very rapid localized heating, which can cause a thermal runaway that tends to destroy the cell along with the device containing it.

Yeah, but electronics manufacturers and companies like Tesla *do* have an interest in doing that, and research papers have been showing benefits from this approach for a really long time. That paper I linked was published in 2014, literally a decade ago. It's weird that nobody is doing that, unless there's some downside besides longer charging time.

When I started reading the description, I felt sure that they were going to say that pulsed charging burned up the tips of the dendrites that form inside the batteries, thus inhibiting their growth, but we've known that for a decade. So my initial reaction was "Yeah, no kidding, of course it will." But unless I'm misunderstanding, this is yet a second, unrelated reason to do so.

The only real question is why we haven't been doing it for a decade. Unless some a**hole took out a patent on it or something. :-)

A tax on electricity is not a luxury tax. A tax on food is not a luxury tax. Buying new goods isn't a luxury for most people. Nobody wants to buy somebody else's problems, and the number of used copies of most goods is tiny compared with the number of new copies out there, and once that supply is exhausted, buying new goods isn't even optional unless you can completely do without the product. Sorry, but that's just not how real luxury taxes work. They've fooled you.

Economists by the boatload have said that this tax is regressive. There's only one of us whose ideas are outside the Overton window, and it isn't me.