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!

Turbotax offers free service to low-to-moderate income people as part of an agreement it has made with the IRS. In return for this, the IRS doesn't provide free electronic tax preparation services like most other advanced countries do. For most consumers, the IRS could in fact automatically fill out their returns and the consumer could simply check it by answering a few simple questions rather than puzzling over instructions written for professional accountants.

If you've always wondered why filing your taxes couldn't be simpler, a bit part of this is marketing from companies like Intuit that make a lot of money out of simplifying the process for taxpayers.

The free tier service is something Intuit is contractually obligated to provide. Upselling low-income people to a paid service that wouldn't benefit them in any way is morally dubious at best.

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.

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.

You want a pre-WW2 suburb.

I was visiting Oxford UK on business and I stayed at a colleague's house which dated from the1800s. I was shocked that the front door of her house was right at the sidewalk, you could look right into her front room. But it turned out that by giving up privacy in that front room, she got an enormous and very private back yard. The arrangement was something like this. That's just a street in the area I randomly picked off of Google Maps satellite view, but I checked it for walkability: it's less than one minute's walk from the local boozer, and on the way back you can get a takeaway curry.

I'll quote from the Wikipedia Article: "In urban planning, walkability is the accessibility of amenities by foot." It is important to contrast this with the practices it was intended to counter (again from the same article): "... urban spaces should be more than just transport corridors designed for maximum vehicle throughput."

Transit is an integral part of walkable planning simply because it gets people *into* neighborhoods so they can do things on foot. But cars are a way to get people into an area too, so cars can and should be part of *walkability* planning. For example there's a main street area near me with maybe 50-70 stores. When I visit I contribute to congestion by driving around looking for a parking spot. A carefully placed parking lot could reduce car congestion on the street while increasing foot traffic and boosting both business and town tax revenues.

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.

I don't see any indication that Google thinks Vids are better than Docs.

So... remain in Mexico is the only one? Mexico has said they won't agree to reinstate it, and without their cooperation it would put the US in violation of our treaties. The president can't legally break treaties; Congress needs to act for that.