How else is he supposed to keep enjoying his hot tub while doing laundry and cooking a Thanksgiving feast during a blackout, you insensitive clod?!

So enter into a power purchase agreement, or a lease. Or, take advantage of one of the solar companies offering low interest loan programs.

The days of having to whack out a 5-figure payment in order to go solar were over like 6 years ago.

Your overall use may be higher, but your peak is likely lower. AC is mostly concentrated in mid-to-late afternoon. Heat pump use is spread out more through the day and night. The problem for the grid is not total consumption but peak consumption.

Yeah - I'd love to have the geothermal heat pump, but I just have a regular one that exchanges heat with outside air.

There's not a lot of heat to be pulled from the air when it's 5F outside. My electric bills were atrocious this winter from using what is effectively a giant toaster inside my air handler to heat the house. I'll be having someone coming by to "weatherproof" the house this summer in order to try to increase efficiency, but I'd love to put a nice whack of PV panels on the roof, and one of these batteries on the wall next to the electrical panel and water heater in my utility area.

And here's the companion press release from SolarCity, where they are reselling the Tesla product with their panel installs.

You get less power on cloudy days, but you also need less, since AC is the biggest consumer of residential power.

Which is not that much of a problem. Winter power consumption is spread out more than summer consumption, so the grid can deal with it more easily.

The biggest challenge is the 5-7pm peak in demand. Just as solar is dropping off, people come home from work, kick on the AC to cool the house down, and turn on the appliances to start dinner. If these batteries can help shave off that peak, that will be a big help.

I think you are mistaking "stupid" for "desperate" or "hopeless" or "disillusioned".

You can get a decent computer for $20 from Goodwill. You can buy a used Kindle on eBay for about the same. Computers are common, even in poor households. They aren't luxuries anymore.

My local library also has e-books, in San Jose, California. I thought all libraries had them. They even have e-readers that you can check out and use.

Would you care to explain what you think the "real problems" are, and what specific policies you would recommend to address them?

If so.. yes.

Look- I donate to the police survivors fund each year, but the drug war, militarization of police, and grossly racially imbalanced police forces lead to these events.

Freddie Gray's record was minor drug infractions which wouldn't even be a problem in three states any more.

Once he was arrested the first time, he had no hope of ever getting a good job with an arrest record. Once he had a conviction, it was over.

Except they are NOT getting away with it ... because of the people. We are not going to accept it, and our elected representatives know that. They already tried this crap with the Clipper Chip, which died in a firestorm of protest. The same is happening now. There is no way that the TLAs are going to LEGALLY get a backdoor. It is not going to happen.

... and potential new customers read your Yelp reviews, and stay away.

And as noted by others in reply to your note from others, your own fucking wayback machine link states:

"Even under ideal conditions, Apple Watch may not be able to get a reliable heart rate reading every time for everybody. And for a small percentage of users, various factors may make it impossible to get any heart rate reading at all."

Clearly, having a tattoo counts as one of the "various factors"

Basically, yes. Greeks retire at 60, or even earlier, with generous pensions, and then expect the Germans, who work till 67, to bail them out.

Nope. The loans from Goldman Sachs were mostly squandered on the same unaffordable social programs, and generous pensions. What happened in Greece should have been obvious to anyone decades before it finally imploded. Do you also believe that "corrupted elite" elected Syriza?