Also note that ICE cars also frequently fail to start when parked outside in cold temperatures. This isn't specific to EVs. If anything, EVs should be a lot less likely to fail to start, because they have a giant lithium ion battery pack with battery heaters to maintain its temperature, and that main pack periodically tops up the 12V battery when it gets low. Also, EVs tend to have active monitoring to warn you when the 12V battery is getting near the end of its life.

What's really sad is that it wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, we went to Canada and Mexico all the time, and we never had passports. The passport requirement wasn't introduced for travel by land until 2009 for Canada and 2008 for Mexico (and previously, in 2007 for travel by air to Canada or Mexico). You still had to go through customs at the border, but it was nothing like what people have to deal with today.

When there's a law about this, the law usually has a more solid definition than mass media has. In this particular instance, hate speech is not what the accused is being charged with, but what the accused tried to frame his boss for (framing him in the social circles). Which means that for this story, the definition of hate speech is utterly irrelevant, the accused may as well have used AI to generate a fake phone sex recording of his boss.

I agree that for a family a car is a really good choice. Families of three or four people get an economy of scale with cars. I saw no families on the train. It was almost all single riders (not as in marital status, as in by themselves) or couples. And I'm guessing 80% of riders were by themselves. The train drops you off in the middle of urban areas and includes a free shuttle to many nearby places. So you don't have to do Uber or Lyft or deal with rental cars. The train is not perfect for everyone but as you said 4,600 people a day are taking the train and love it. If word doesn't spread, yeah, Brightline will fail. And I don't own their bonds. But I do hope that more people get interested because it's really a wonderful service. I wouldn't have taken it if I had my family with me for many reasons. But for trips made by myself it's much better.

Past discussion has stated that basically every large PRC Chinese company operates under a charter that allows the government to basically influence or take over the company at will.

Stop thinking of China as a Communist state. Start thinking of it as one giant company where the Politburo is the board of directors and the Inner Party are shareholders, and all of the people in China vary somewhere between employee and liability.

Yes, I have (by way of Cocoa Beach). And I've gone about 3/4 of the way several times. I'm familiar with Florida roads and their constant state of construction....

*shrugs* I usually got reasonably close on I-95. Maybe it's a time-of-year thing.

Either way, though, when you get to the other end, unless you live in Miami or you're going to rely on public transit, you'll still need to find a way to get a rental car, but you're no longer at an airport with car rental places, so you'll end up waiting for an Uber or Lyft or cab and going a mile or so to one of the car rental places, by which time you've almost certainly lost most or all of your time savings.

And even if it takes an entire hour longer by car and you're able to avoid extra delays that wipe out those savings, the cost is still exorbitant. Driving will cost you $20 in fuel for everyone in your party, versus $75 per person for the train. For a family of 3, that means the train costs 1100% as much as driving. That's a *huge* cost difference for such a small time savings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed that 4,600 people are riding it every day (which likely means about 150 people per train), but that's probably not even close to being commercially viable. They've already had to massively scale back their ridership projections because people aren't taking it nearly as often as they expected, which is likely because the cost is way too high for the amount of time saved.

And in spite of those high prices, the company is still losing money — on the order of $250 million per year, which makes the shortfall somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per ticket by my back-of-the-envelope math. And they are already $4B in debt.

I fully expect them to go bankrupt. I hope I'm wrong, but I definitely wouldn't buy their bonds. :-)

Nobody. Of course I also can't imagine driving further in a day than I can get on one charge. So it is somewhat of a hypothetical fear. For any trip over a few hours, a train or a plane starts to look very appealing whether you have an ICE or a BEV because sitting in any car for ten hours at a time kind of sucks.

No they're not. Which is why, if you can't self-service via the web site, you might as well give up. However, I should point out that not all call centers are terrible. I called Amazon Music once about a playback on device issue and got quickly to a higher-level support person who was very capable and actually opened a bug report that got fixed.

Right now it seems that 50% of the world is involved in posting pictures of themselves online and making more money than high skilled jobs. It's probably not actually 50% but it does seem that various forms of influencing and/or amateur adult content are an incredibly large part of the US economy. And since most of the call center jobs are already outsourced to other countries, the effect on the US economy of this might be negligible. However, I do agree with your point in general and would have modded you up instead of posting if I had points.

The true information gleaned from this article is that Ford actually makes some EVs...

The documented process is to never answer the phone.

Probably because Netflix is getting more expensive.

Seconds?? Wow, and they were complaining about my two minute average...

I think you mean that more women don't want to put up with abusive men anymore.

Oh, that's a relief, thank goodness. Remember, we don't have to act responsibly as long as anyone else is acting more irresponsibly. Say what you want about my BA in Basket Weaving, but my eggs are MAD well distributed.