Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

Wasn't Huawei on the US administration's radar for being a PRC spyware distributor?

If that doesn't convince you the US spews out just as much propaganda as China does, I don't know what does.

I'm gen-X and I don't do phone payments either. Not that I don't want to, it's just not part of my groove.

I have many implants to do many things. Paying for stuff is just one of them. But I also open doors, share my contact information, log into my computers, do 2FA...

It's hard to explain to those who don't wear implants, but once you get used to never needing keys, access cards or payment cards, it's hard to get back. I seriously couldn't live without them. Like popping into any store to do the groceries and simply waving my hand to pay instead of fumbling in my pocket, only to realize I left my wallet at home or something. It really does grow on you.

As for nudity, you jest, but my local swimming pool has NFC lockers and I can enroll one of my implants when I close my locker, so I don't have to wear a bracelet while I swim. It's little things like that...

It's not "the Western world" so much as the US. I'm pretty sure Spain or Germany have no problem with hentai.

Case in point: I have a payment implant in my hand. What that is essentially is a contactless Mastercard payment chip from a keychain wearable that's been extracted from the wearable and embedded in bio-compatible goop.

Well, if the payment processor or Mastercard ever learn that my wearable is in fact under your skin, Mastercard will strike it off their network. It's happened to others who didn't keep their mouth shut and got checked out by the payment processor: they were asked to produce a selfie of them holding the wearable, and of course they couldn't.

Why you ask? Because after all, what does Mastercard care where people put their wearables provided they're valid, right?

Because of the religious right in the US spewing off nonsense about the "mark of the beast". Mastercard wants nothing to do with implants to appease the religious nutters and avoid bad publicity. It's the ONLY F*ING REASON. And that forces implantees in all the other reasonable countries in the world that don't have ridiculous religious groups to play hide-and-seek with Mastercard.

...will be translated into "The suspect was resisting arrest and the officer had no choice".

Each. And. Every. Time.

This is just going to be automated whitewashing. Because why would Axon antagonize their customers by making an impartial AI bot that transcribes the truth eh? They clearly have a conflict of interest here.

The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..

You sure you're responding to the right person?

They have to phrase it that way. By naming an individual or company, it becomes a bill of attainder, at which point it becomes unconstitutional on its face (see Article I, Section 9). Of course, Congress, the Presidency (both parties), and SCOTUS seem to think that the Constitution is a piece of toilet paper these days...

Funny that to you, "Israel" and "Jews" are synonymous. As if all Jewish people unconditionally support all actions of the state of Israel, even those which are highly controversial within Israel itself.

This false synonymy creates an extremely harmful backlash. Stop doing it.

Amazon Linux 1 and 2 were based on RHEL (6 and 7, respectively). After the RHEL shenanigans, Amazon Linux 2023... isn't. AL2023 is a half-baked, poorly-done derivative of Fedora. Seriously... just try it and compare and contrast versus AL2. I did. I was neither happy nor impressed, and am not looking forward to AL2 going EoL.

Georgia.

Ukraine is not free

Give me a list of Ukrainian prime ministers since 2000, and compare it to a list of Russian presidents since 2000 . Thanks in advance.

Even before the conflict it was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe

This is not even remotely true. Ukraine's Rule of Law Index in 2022 was 0,50; contrast with NATO members Turkey at 0,42 and Hungary at 0,52. And its scores were dragged down by the consequences of the war in Donbas.

with a military second in size in Europe only to Russia (hence the poverty)

Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent before the current invasion was 3,2%, and that was *with* the ongoing Donbas conflict . By contrast, the US, at peace, spends 3,45% of its GDP on the military. For some European contrasts:

Azerbaijan: 4,5%
Armenia: 4,3%
Russia: 4%
Greece: 3,7%

Before the 2014 Russian invasion, Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent on the military was 1,6%.

ED: Just saw your second paragraph. But the things you speculate on are not exactly common on Titan, if they even exist on the surface at all (it's an icy crust ,not a rocky one). And either way, it'd be much easier with compounds other than methane.

And no, there doesn't seem to be meaningful amounts of nitrates in the atmosphere at least. You can see a list here. Nitrogen compounds are cyanide and nitrile compounds.

Metabolized with what oxidizer?

It's just the opposite - methane on Titan is like nitrogen on Earth; it's things like acetylene and free hydrogen that are the potential energy sources, and to a lesser extent the more common (but less reactive) higher mass alkanes, etc.

The main problem is that LAWKI isn't even remotely compatible with existing in the cryogenic environment of Titan. There are a lot of interesting alternative chemistries, but they require basically redesigning life from scratch. We're simply not up to this task with our current technology.

Sadly it's being launched to near the equator, not the poles :( The geophysicists won out over the geochemists...