People who don't play office politics lose to people who do. Having "toadies" helps you win the game of Survivor. It works because the CEO doesn't recognize actual skill.

Yes, it took specific legislation to ban them in blue states. However, "right to work" laws, as present in red states, already banned them, just not explicitly, more "your employment contract cannot bind you after you cease working for that employer".

IE, what I've seen a couple times, they have to keep the employee "employed' for the non-compete period, including paying them.

Well, I suppose I could have shoved an "annually" in there. Sometimes I have a problem with missing words, and slashdot is harsh on that - I need a few hours to days to get what I've written out of my head so I don't insert them automatically, thus completely missing it. Lacking the ability to edit my posts...

In this case, because the income tax is reconciled on an annual basis, that the poverty line numbers are on an annual basis, etc... I just had "annual" as just assumed to be obvious.

Spending above the poverty line being the part effectively taxed is part of the core idea though? I mean, do you want a core idea reduced to, as you put it earlier, a footnote?

Well yes. That's describing what would be taxed under the proposal.

Really, at this point it might have been faster to just hit up the site I linked and read the actual proposal. It would have answered all these questions.

I wouldn't call the breakthrough "recent", but batteries now make sense for at least part of the solution. If they manage to cut the cost in half again, it might start pushing things like pumped hydro into being uneconomic.

The real trick, I think, would be to have much more battery than necessary to soak up the negative power cost situations. That way, you use it for load balancing all the time - but you only charge up close to 100% when power starts getting close to negative, justifying the extra wear. Assuming they use a battery chemistry subject to wear - there are cheap batteries out there that are extremely durable that don't have significant wear from full charging, they're just too big and heavy for EVs.

I'd imagine that, at most, you'd idle the plant only when electricity is at the peak.

There's two major forms of desalination - distilling and reverse osmosis. Distilling I think has the lower equipment cost, but higher operating cost. RO is more expensive equipment wise, but cheaper energy wise - but you want electricity to run the pumps. Distillation can be run mostly on any heat, so straight resistive electricity is normally too expensive/wasteful for it.

The problem I see is that idling the RO system is an expensive waste of RO time. With Distillation, the efficient systems do all sorts of tricks to scavange as much heat as they can - such as cooling the outgoing water with the incoming water. Not necessarily kind to power interruptions.

However, depending on how severe the spikes are, it can still be worth it. Maybe you do a RO setup where it does less power intensive maintenance tasks when power is expensive. Or you might just turn the power of the motors down - you produce less water that way, but from what I remember, the loss is not linear. IE 50% power might produce 60% as much water.
With distillation, maybe you install alternate thermal sources, or maybe a thermal storage bank so that when electricity is expensive, you just don't use it - you can run the pumps and heaters and such later.

Permitting: Sounds like a California problem to me. Self imposed. Such a feature, if implemented by the car manufacturer, should be relatively cheap to permit.
Additional appliances and wiring needed: The requirement of additional appliances and wiring should actually be minimal. If you have a dedicated car charger, that should be all the equipment needed to to V2G. It should be mostly software changes. Maybe an inverter in the charger. That said, EVs generally contain a relatively massive 3 phase inverter designed to run the induction motor for the wheels. It's flexible enough that 50/60 hz@240V should be no problem for it.

And you go by laws of average for having vehicles plugged in. If there's money to be had, more people will try to plug in around those times, of course.

Hmm... Peak power is generally right after people get home from work and get to work on dinner and such.

Let's say that we're in a reasonable future world with the following characteristics:
1. Batteries, including BEV batteries, are considerably cheaper.
1a. However, powerwalls are still not entirely common.
2. Vast majority of cars on road are BEV.
3. So much solar has been installed that daytime power is cheaper than night time.
4. Infrastructure has caught up with the changes.
4a. The vast majority of people who drive to work can charge at work, during the day time.
4b. V2G is "standard".

So a standard user situation could be such:
They get up in the morning, do morning stuff, and drive to work in their EV. They then plug in at work, where they have roughly 6-8 hours to charge.
They drive home with a more or less full battery (we might knock off a few percent to preserve the battery more).
They plug in when they get home, because in ~20 minutes, electricity is about to get expensive as everybody else gets home and turns on everything - TV, computer, HVAC, stove, oven, microwave, etc...
Their vehicle automatically does V2G so the house doesn't have to pay those expensive rates. This works because BEV batteries have advanced to the point that they're cheap and durable enough that battery wear is not a significant expense.
Once that power spike is over, the car monitors electricity rates, and charges enough to meet the needs of the next day, with appropriate safety margin, if necessary.
The owner drives to work, the EV might be at half charge or so. Doesn't matter much, they'll top off at work during their shift, when power is cheap because the parking lot is covered in solar panels or such.

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.

SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.

The current /Maine Fisheries/ case should dissolve Chevron deference.

We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.

Weren't the founders and top management of Google citizens of Israel?

It dozen't seem all surprising from that perspective.

These protesters should have gone back to writing code to surveil Americans, I guess?

Sometimes a Good paperback at ThriftBooks is $1 less than a new one at Amazon so I just get the new one.

Weird market!

PS unless the recent printings have been Trust & Safety'ed.

The ghost writers have gone along with it and I think really shot themselves in the foot.

We are still getting new Tom Clancy novels. Sure you can look below the line any see who actually wrote it but that isn't the big bold letters on the cover. This is true for a lot of the popular "air port series", I guess Lee Child is actually still writing his own books.

How are new authors supposed to make a name for themselves when marketing all goes to guys already in the ground. The authors actually writing those books have more or less allowed themselves to be comoditized and just wait for the LLMs to come for them...

My company, my rules. For example almost all people working for me are Ukrainians, my policy is that Ukraine must win in this war against the murderous ruzzian aggression. Anyone not aligned with my values shouldn't be working here. I also completely support Israel, anyone not aligned with my values, shouldn't be working here.

Ah. That would be rather silly, wouldn't it? Is there something I could have said to avoid this impression?

As for rally2xs:
The definition of "luxury" is buying new items for sale at retail or services above the poverty level.

There you go, him clarifying, at the very least.

Or, get this, we don't bother. We just send everybody the mandated precalculated prebate. Done, without lots of forms needing to be filled out. Electronic deposit is very very cheap. Especially at the levels the IRS does it at. In order to keep things simple (not a lot of forms), the tax is charged on everything the tax is supposed to cover, and "everybody" gets the same rebate.

I mean, we're totally adding up everybody's spending and sending it to the IRS on some equivalent of a 1099 why? What difference does knowing the number make to their tax obligation?

I think you're getting me and rally confused. He's the supporter of fairtax. I'm the guy who read up about it years ago during his more libertarian phase and thought it was an interesting idea. That said, I'm also something of a contrarian, so I'll let you know when I think there's a problem with your understanding or logic.

It is when you're talking about getting rid of and replacing a system that hauls in $4.8T/year and replacing it with one that hauls in $6T (before sending $1.2T right back out).

And I wouldn't really call it a footnote, it's a core part of the proposal: "Replace the federal income tax with a federal sales tax. In order to keep it progressive, give everybody a prebate equal to the tax that would be paid on poverty line spending." Heck, in my "quick explanation" to you, it's the second sentence. First sentence: $4.8T of spending transformation, second, $1.2T of transformation. Hardly a footnote, but still lesser than the prior change.

It's like the second sentence in the "extremely short proposal" form. On their site, it's the 3rd paragraph.

That said, remember, I'm libertarian adjacent. The actual Libertarians and Republicans and such? They oppose UBIs pretty much on reflex (and I'm a dude who supports a UBI on libertarian reasoning). So, at least for them, you're selling them on the "get rid of income taxes!" first, and avoiding calling the prebate a UBI in order to not spook them.

I mean, it's funny, the only state in the country with a sort of UBI is Alaska, and it's republican held, and god forbid you try to touch the permanent fund dividend. But having it elsewhere? Oh no!

government has long surpassed that threshold. Government shouldn't be so big, that its failure would take down the country, yet here we are, all of us.

Battery research: Already happening. Have you read about sodium-ion? Supposed to be a lot cheaper than lithium chemistries, last longer. Main downside is that they're bigger and heavier per kWh, but for grid storage, who cares?

They only store about 2/3rds the power by weight and volume. Which means that a 300 mile car becomes 200 miles with sodium. Battery pack is ~30% as much though. Given Tesla's upscale market position (for EVs)...