I used my Leaf quite happily for years. My daily commute was only about 25 miles, so the car could make the round trip easily. In the winter making the round trip without charging got me closer to empty than I liked, but that just meant that I shifted from charging only on the L2 at work to also plugging in the L1 at home. The only real problem was that I often got home with low enough miles remaining that we couldn't take the car very far in the evening if we were going out to eat or something. So then we'd have to take the Durango. This was in Cololrado.

Then I moved to Utah (where I'm from)... but here I work from home. The Leaf was fine for running errands as long as you didn't have too many stops, too widely separated. In a pinch, there is a Nissan dealership with a Chademo charger not too far away, just at the bottom of the big hill I have to climb to get home, so sometimes I had to stop there for 5 minutes to make sure that I had enough juice to get home -- where I had installed a 10 kW L2 charger. Two of them, actually, because then I bought a used Model S and sold the Leaf to my son. By then my lease had ended (after being extended twice) and I bought the car for a steal. In total I only paid $14k for the car.

My son still uses it to get to school and work. He doesn't live far from me and has to climb the same hill, and the car has lost some range, so in the winter he always has to stop and charge on the way home. He seems fine with that, though, and even prefers to charge more than he needs to because the Nissan dealership's electricity is free.

Unless the battery was too small to begin with, you won't even think about it. I normally only charge mine to 70% anyway, so the difference between 100% of capacity or 90% is completely irrelevant on a daily basis. For long road trips it's also irrelevant, since it's most time-efficient to charge to only 70-80% -- charging slows way down as you get close to full.

So, why not get a smaller battery if you rarely use the whole thing? Two reasons: First, so that losing a little capacity or charging to 70-80% is still sufficient range. My first Tesla, a 2014 Model S, only had 200 miles of range when charged to full, and that meant that time-efficient road-trip charging required stopping every 100 miles, which is too often. Second, because using the full range of the battery causes it to lose capacity faster. So, you buy an EV with a battery that's 30% larger than "needed" in some sense. Losing some of that doesn't matter.

So, you wouldn't think about how to pay for a replacement every time you get in the car, because you wouldn't plan to get a replacement, ever.

Yeah, specific battery packs can be faulty. It also depends a lot on whether the car properly manages battery temperatures. My first EV was a 2011 Nissan Leaf, and the Leaf has no battery cooling so in hot climates the batteries often die quickly. That said, it's 2024 and that 2011 Leaf still has about 60% of its original range (my son bought it from me). We live in a temperate climate, but it does get pretty hot in the summer.

I live in rural America, and EVs are great here. Oh, public charging infrastructure mostly doesn't exist, but that's fine because I have electricity -- get this -- at my house!. I even have flush toilets, 'cause we're high class. The nearest Supercharger is ~100 miles away, but I have a garage, and a barn, and I put EV chargers in both. For normal daily driving, it works fine to just charge at home -- car is fully charged every morning -- and when I go on a long trip, well, the Supercharger network has me covered.

Works perfectly.

It's not clear that will ever be needed. EV batteries don't just stop working (barring some unusual fault); they just gradually decline in capacity, and the decline is very slow after the first 1-2 years. So expect to have 95% of capacity after two years, 80% after a decade, 60% after two decades, 50% after three, etc.

So it's just a question of when the capacity drops so low that the vehicle no longer has enough range -- but over time charging infrastructure is going to get better and better, so long range will become less and less important. Also, batteries are going to get cheaper.

So, yeah, it seems entirely reasonable to me to replace the battery in 20 years (if you haven't replaced the vehicle by then). Especially since the fuel savings over that time will far more than cover the replacement cost, even if the replacement cost hasn't come down, which it will!

The exponential growth achievable by Von Neumann probes that don't mind traveling for millions of years to get to the next galaxy make space small.

What are these scientifically-sound indicators?

I suppose some of that may be down to the difference in the value of the change. It was worth about 2.5X what it is today back when I was working convenience store night shifts, so people might have cared more about getting it correct.

Even more, people at Starbucks are paying $7 for a cup of coffee, so they're clearly not very price-sensitive. If the customer doesn't bother to look to see whether they got the correct change, should the cashier waste everyone's time getting it right? I think yes, but I could see where people might disagree.

I know people at the convenience store got pissed when they got shortchanged, which is why cashiers who couldn't count change out got fired pretty quickly. They might last longer at Starbucks today. Especially since most customers don't pay with cash.

Remembering that in the business world, "unsupported" can translate to "legally liable" in the event something goes seriously wrong.

I have a houseful of PCs, but only one will officially run Win11 -- a low-powered netbook that ironically is the least competent hardware I own (its horsepower is on par with my laptop from 2003). I'll give it this -- Win11 does a good job of downshifting to match the environment it finds itself in; Win10 would struggle on that netbook.

Which desktops did you try, and what issues blew it for you?

I had a hard time finding a linux I could live with, and I first started looking over 25 years ago. It's only been about six years now since it's become sufficiently stable and complete. And implementations vary wildly. I prefer the KDE desktop as being the most functional (and least annoying), but KDE on Kubuntu is not nearly as slick as KDE on PCLinuxOS.

But at the far end, IMO current Gnome makes Win10 look stellar.... good gods, who thought a cellphone makes a good desktop??

That's not new. I saw the same problem when I was working at a convenience store in the late 80s.

The fact that they can get a job in another country easily doesn't mean they don't fear being required to leave this one. Most immigrants like the US and don't want to leave it, and even if they didn't care about the US in particular they've often built lives here that they don't want to uproot. I've seen several really smart, talented people get booted out of the country over bizarre rules or immigration snafus, even with help from expensive immigration attorneys. It's stupid.

And, of course, many more are willing to be abused by their employers in order to stay. I don't see that problem so much, because although I work with a lot of people on H1Bs, my employer (Google) treats them well, pays them the same as citizens, etc. But it make sense that there is a lot of abuse in the broader industry.

That doesn't happen much, not unless the worker is forced to go back because of crappy H1B policies. The fact is that nearly all foreign workers would love to stay permanently.

Well, there is a non-zero probability that the Earth could enter a runaway warming cycle and become another Venus, with surface temperatures exceeding 400C. The planet wouldn't be destroyed, but life would probably be wiped out. AFAIK we haven't found any life form that can survive above about 120C.

That seems unlikely, though, given that Earth's hottest phases so far (after the crust cooled, anyway) have been considerably cooler than that.