Is there on vs off-peak pricing? For example if you don't have an EV and got one thus quadrupling your electricity, would your bill quadruple or not so much if you charged it at night?

They are working on it

"California Tops US EV Adoption: 25% EV Share Of Total Sales In H1 2023"

https://insideevs.com/news/688...

This story from a couple months ago says "Texas is the only state in the U.S. that generates more than a third of its electricity from wind and solar energy."

https://www.newsweek.com/texas...

And yet, electricity in Texas cost 11.36 cents / kWh vs 19.90 cents / kWh in California in Jan 2024.

https://www.electricchoice.com...

So where does that leave the idea that renewable energy must be very expensive?

Also I'm curious where 40 cents above came from.

I won't defend the wording of the headline, but it is an important threshold, because it's the point at which the conversion to renewable energy gets harder and more expensive.

As long as renewables are just cutting into demand for fossil fuels, you don't have to worry about storage / demand shaping / discarding energy. But now California has reached that point.

I think that occurred to the prosecution also:

Apart from three years in prison, Ahmed was also sentenced to three years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $12.4 million "and a significant quantity of cryptocurrency and pay restitution to the Crypto Exchange and Nirvana in the amount of over $5 million," according to the prosecutors' press release.

Not sure whether he actually has all he stole +$5M, or if this constitutes a financial death sentence.

Where it exists, competition is the solution, as your experience indicates.

I hope some of this federal incentive is being used to grow competition.

Maybe we need to have a fiber network as a regulated infrastructure monopoly, and have competition for internet service over that infrastructure.

If you're happy about it, why? If Apple is pushed out of China, either by protectionism or simply cost, what do we gain by that?

Changing population and miles driven per person don't matter to their calculations because they are based on vehicle miles traveled:

Traffic flow data were obtained from the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS). (44) Data for 693 PeMS observation sites within the BEACO2N region of influence as of 2018 were included in our assessments. We calculated vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as the product of the vehicle count at each PeMS site and the segment length to the next PeMS site...

For fVMT, the PEMS data set was used as a proxy for vehicle miles traveled in the region. (44) Preprocessing of the two data sets is described in Section 2.7. We conduct a simple multiple linear regression (MLR) to derive the coefficients m1, m2, m3, and c, using the posterior derived hourly anthropogenic emissions as emsanthro. The value of m1 was 2.3, which means about half of the observed seasonal trend is explained by the PG&E reported natural gas consumption. The constant emissions (c = econstant) were 156 tC/h. The term m2t + m3 can be factored out, and the rate at which this value changes over the 5-year study period is a reasonable proxy for the rate of change of overall vehicle fleet efficiency (average CO2 emissions per vehicle mile traveled).

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.10...

I'm not so sure a lower-tech strategy would have saved Germany. They simply didn't have enough men to keep sending wave after wave to die in battle, so they had to make the most of each soldier. Too bad for them they chose the strategy of invading in every direction and trying to occupy and hold millions of square miles - not something a small number of elite forces can do. The US doesn't have this goal.

Secondly, the WWII wunderwaffe was invented, but at Los Alamos. Beating us to the Atom Bomb and making even a few dozen really would have been a game changer. I hate to think of the British Isles. Could it have happened? The first paragraph of this reference has a nice long-list of people who probably would have been helping them instead of us, had Naziism not chosen to drive them away.

https://digitalrepository.unm....

True, that was the greatest wunderwaffe in all of history. No doubt it influenced, maybe distorted, our views.

It has been eye-opening as multiple waves of initially game-changing weapons seem to yield only a short-term advantage in Ukraine, as the other side adapts tactics and develops countermeasures.

If we have a major conflict anytime soon and our lead in stealth turns out to be not as big as thought or not very durable, and the F35 is quickly rendered vulnerable, we're going to be in a world of hurt.

In the case of Ukraine, the success rate is very high because anybody in range is likely an enemy soldier.

Israel's success rate may be as low as 0.1%. That tells us that robots can't tell civilians from military. A large enough stockpile of human shields would be a serious problem.

And we know drones et al are vulnerable to GPS spoof attacks, making such an attack risky against a technologically advanced enemy with intellectuals and engineers forming a scientific take on special forces.

Why bother with a missile? You're here, so a geek. You know GPS jamming is effective, as is GPS spoofing. All you need is a parabolic dish and a high power transmitter. There's simply no possibility of a wide-angle transmitter on a satellite matching a narrow beam that's broadcast from a hundredth of the distance. Sure, there'll be authentication keys. And social engineers have compromised most of the world's governments, which means the keys will be for sale somewhere.

The only way I can the robot army being effective is if they flatten everything at long range, indiscriminately. And that is going to cause its own problems. Especially if the software gets hacked prior to install. Which will happen, because hiring and training an army of hackers in Mitnick-style social engineering tactics costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the expense of maintaining a wall of tactical nukes that can EMP the robot forces.

The robots work OK, but the AI doesn't. Israel is using AI extensively to target Hamas at the moment, with the very best AI that exists and the very best military minds the world can produce. The success rate is somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

Face scanning tech also depends on the data set being valid. The DOD has been compromised many times by airwall violations, security violations, improper screening, and extremely buggy software from Cisco and Microsoft.

All the enemy needs to do is write a rootkit that flips a couple of bits. The robot army now faces the other way and friends are identified as foe. I wouldn't put it past a group like the Lazarus hackers to be capable of such a stunt. We already know the enemy is capable of GPS jamming and GPS spoofing, because they've done so to hijack US drones, and that's another potential vulnerability.

US military robots are also known to have severe problems identifying that a person dressed as a tree is a person, not a tree. A skillful enemy could walk through US robot army lines without impediment, unless the US robots shoot indiscriminately. But if the US robots are genocidal, mutually assured destruction becomes a viable tactic. You can't be more than dead, after all.

And if the US includes a death switch, given that US defence contractors don't always wipe hard drives and the military don't psychologically screen very well (Manning was known to be seriously mentally unstable prior to deployment, for example), there's absolutely no guarantee the enemy won't simply learn it and spoof it.

I just don't see how the US think this could possibly work.

Its success rate in Israel stands at somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

One gun can shoot at one target at any one time. If your AI-guided robot army is shooting up chicken farmers and goat herders, it's ergo not shooting at the army that's flanked it which threatens to overrun the opposing side's now largely undefended turf.

A robot army can also be taken out by EMP weapons - basically tax nukes. Since robots can't distinguish between soldiers, civilians, and cake stands (AI is pretty dumb), the defending side already faces complete genocide. You can't get any deader than that, so there's no incentive to not flatten the enemy with nukes and a very slim chance they won't fire back, because it's hard to maintain an expensive nuclear defence and an extremely expensive robot army at the same time.

(Basically, same reason the US is now outgunned on fighters, the new ones are so expensive they can't afford that many. The US relies utterly on them being more destructive faster, but again, what's the point in NOT invoking MAD when your enemy has demonstrated they're genocidal and no respectors of the norms and laws of war?)