No amount of complaining/bellyaching will help. This is the much praised "efficiency of private sector" that some politicians talk about when they talk about social security or health care. Remember that, next time they denounce government as inefficient. Efficiency for private sector is defined as the ability to squeeze the last drop out of the hapless customer

Adam Smith's invisible hand providing the maximum goods and services at the minimum cost does not happen when there are monopolies, cartels and collusion. May be with the rise of ride hailing apps, someone will cherry-pick 200 to 300 mile sector away from the airlines and buses.

If you say "If xxx lives up to its promise ..." and you make the promise on behalf of xxx, you can finish that sentence any way you like.

If the new kind of zero coupon inflation protection bonds live up to its promise, all retirees will be rolling in money and be donating millions of dollars to get rid of mosquitoes in equatorial New Guinea....

See? Anything is possible if you add an if at the beginning ...

I have some 27 years worth of transactions and investments tracked by Quicken.

Locked in, would be very difficult to move out. They tried hard to push all quicken users to on line account and mint.

Recently they said they are splitting on line version from desktop app. So I was sort of expecting them to dump one or the other. Looks like they are dumping the on line version.

Good thing they are ditching the on line version. The performance was horrible, when they tried to do all the work on their servers and tried to use the desk top app as a dumb terminal, (thin client is the term? ). Of late the performance is not bad, may be they have cut down the use of net work procedure calls. Or may be I am using a SSD now. One version of Quicken made so many disk r/w it was slow as a turtle stuck in a tar pit.

There are lots of sections of India that are openly hostile to India.

There is this party Communist Party of India (Maoist). [ The parenthesis is part of its name, assigned by the election commission. To see the entire cladogram of all the kingdom, class, genera and species of CPIs look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ]

They openly pledge allegiance to China and sabotage everything to favor China. They create labor strife, it takes very few miscreants to savor the investment and sow Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about investments. The Foxconn factory near Chennai, India constantly gets in the news about labor stoppage, strikes, managers being gheraoed (ghero is a hindi origin word, meaning encriclement) in the factory.

So, dont count China out. They have been sabotaging foreign direct investment going to India for several decades, and they are not going to stop now.

What with people buying bankrupt companies and what not...

Funding only dropped 63% and 37% of funding still remains!! Shocking!!!

You think they are going to wait for you to ask?

The first item on the agenda of the 3.12 committee: What we need to break in 3.11

Mitt Romney said that. But he did not get into when they are people and when they are not.

Hobby Lobby corporation wants to avoid paying for healthcare coverage that includes contraception coverage even if there is no additional charge. Oh yes, here corporations are people, entitled to full freedom of expression and religious belief. Really. yup. true.

A non existent fake corporation wants a precedent allowing businesses to discriminate against gays. Yup, they are people, and their religious belief trumps your right for equal treatment and discrimination prevention.

Corporations are people. People acting like jerks can be shamed. People behaving like class 1 a-holes can by shunned. Oh! no!! that is Woke, man! not allowed. You can not ask a corporation to behave decently. You can sermonize from the pulpit shaming and damning people, but not corporations. They are... they are job creators and profit motive is the only thing that can drive them. Not your morals, ethics blah blah blah. OK get that.

Corporations are people. They can decide what can be said in their platform. If a private platform wants to prohibit whatever it deems as misinformation, whatever reduces the value of the platform, whatever messages that leads less user engagement, more user frustration, whatever loses them uses and eyeball time, they can ban it. Right? No way. The right of MAGA to shout into the megaphones pointing at your home window shall not be abridged.

Move the taskbar to the left or right. Use small icons. You will pack more windows in the taskbar. Expand the task bar size to 20% of screen width and turn on auto hide.

Cant tell where one inactive window ends and another begins, to raise it for focus. Five inch phone screens with all apps running maximised does not care. I have a 48 in double wide curved monitor... Same behavior? horrible.

I had follow mouse focus back in the 1990s in my motif window manager. Why can windows support that?

In a five inch scrren you have no screen real estate and cram stuff on title bar. In a 28 in desktop? Window title is full of controls responding to click. And the only way to reposition the window is to click on title... Need to hunt for a place to click. Only way to resize a window is to grab a corner of the one pixel wide window border.

They said task bar cant be moved. I was worried. But atleast in my professional edition I am able to keep taskbar on the left for one machine and on the right for the RDP session.

Nope, it wont work. Heat engines are inefficient. It extracts 25% of the energy in the fuel and wastes the rest. It wont be economical.

There are already millions of chargers in USA for overnight charging use. That is good enough for 90% of the driving.

You need far fewer super charging stations. Even they are not as expensive as gasoline delivery infrastructure.

One issue is not everyone has a garage to park their car, or even a set spot near enough to their domicile to run a 120 volt cord

They will be served eventually one way or the other. They have a need. Market will find a way to serve them. Sooner or later.

The LED light revolution has created a huge surplus capacity on street light wiring infrastructure. All those sodium vapor lamps, halogen bulbs, and mercury vapor lamps were on 220V - 20 Amp circuits. With LED each lamp post has excess capacity to dish out 2 or 4 kW. Internet enabled outlets can convert every parking spot close to a lamp post into an overnight charging L2 facility. Every lamp post can dish serve 14 cars per week full charge.

Initially companies will try to corner the market by coming up with mutually incompatible implementations and apps and accounts. There will be shakedown then a common standard will emerge. Look at superchargers and Tesla. All auto companies decided to adopt Tesla NACS.

There are 250,000 gas stations in America and several million lamp posts.

I set my car to be at 90% battery capacity every morning. How many gas cars owners wake up with 90% full gas tanks?

Oh, yeah, you can fill it in any 250,000 gas stations in the USA. Early in the morning you need to smell the gasoline stink ... But people who have not seen a better way of life would never imagine it ...

The change will come rapidly.

Most people are skeptical about EV adoption.

In 1960 if you told an average American, the thundering behemoth steam locomotives, impressive Big Boys and Pacifics , will be dead and gone, they would be skeptical. If you told them they will be gone in less than 10 years, they would be incredulous. But in fact steam locos peaked in 1957. The last batch of steam locos ordered by Pennsylvanian Railroad went straight from plant to scrap yard. The Railroad was so confident of the value of the steam locos they signed contracts with onerous cancellation clauses. The scrap value was more than what they could get back by cancelling the order. So that batch made exactly one run, from the pant to scrap yard.

It is the cost per mile that did it in. Total cost of steam locos, thermal efficiency of 6%, cost of handling coal, maintenance on these machines, ash removal, water replenishment... just too much. EVs are four times cheaper than ICEV, per mile. Sticker price is coming down. People will switch very quickly.

Gas will get very expensive, it needs very expensive infrastructure and the fixed costs spread over fewer gallons of gasoline will increase the price. Even if the crude oil is free, gasoline will sell for 2 $/gallon. That is twice the cost of EV.

The point is, gas cars and the gasoline infrastructure can disappear as quickly.

Level 1 is home outlet that you use for your toaster, 120 V - 15 amp. If you drive less than 210 miles a week and park close to home outlet for 70 hours a week this is enough for city driving.

Level 2 is 220 V -20Amp to 40 Amp. You get this in RV parks, homes with such dryer plug in the garage, hotels and motels etc.

Level 3 is HSDC chargers with 400 V, 50 Amp minimum. Tesla urban chargers are 64 kW. Tesla v2 are 128 kW. Tesla v3 is 256 kW.

You are right Tesla v3 usually has the car ready to go in 15 to 20 minutes. But taking some 10 min more in one charger gives you flexibility in choosing the next stop or avoiding a charge stop altogether. Sometimes, not always.