Let's do that: GDP per capita of the UK: $46k. GDP per capita of China: $12k. But maybe China does better at distributing the wealth? Nope. UK Gini coefficient: 35, China, 47 (higher is more inequality). Until recently China had phenomenal growth rates, but that's only because (a) they started from a very depressed level and (b) they mostly abandoned socialism. As Xi is reasserting more socialist policies their growth engine has largely stopped and their growth rate is currently below that of the UK. It's still positive at the moment, but if Xi continues what he's doing, it will likely go negative.

Socialism -- not social democracy, which is a thoroughly capitalist economy that accepts high but strongly progressive taxation to fund a strong safety net -- consistently drives economies into the toilet whenever applied on any scale larger than a kibbutz. Without fail, every time.

I don't think this is true. If you enable emergency mode video recording you have to enter your PIN to end the recording, but biometrics will still unlock the lockscreen. While the recording is going, hit the power button to activate the lockscreen, which will be unlockable with biometrics. You can also swipe up from the bottom (assuming gesture navigation) and switch to other apps. The device is not locked and not in lockdown mode while in emergency mode.

What you can do is press power and volume up to bring up the power menu, and then tap the "Lockdown" icon. That will lock the device and disable biometric authentication.

If you really, really want to lock it down, power the device down, or reboot it and don't log in. Android's disk encryption scheme uses your PIN/pattern/password ("lockscreen knowledge factor", or LSKF) along with keys stored in secure hardware to derive the disk encryption keys. It would make for a long post to go into all of the details, but given the hardware-enforced brute force mitigation,if the attacker gets a device in this state it's extremely difficult to decrypt any of the credential-encrypted data on the device without your LSKF. This is particularly true on devices that implement "StrongBox" (all Pixels, some Samsungs, some others). Android StrongBox moves some crucial functionality, including LSKF authentication and LSKF brute force resistance, into a separate hardened, lab-certified[*] security processor with its own internal storage, a "secure element".

Of course, note that appellate courts in the US have split on whether or not your LSKF can be compelled. Some have ruled that unless the PIN/pattern/password is itself incriminating, it's no different than compelling the combination to a safe, which has long been held to be constitutional.

[*] For anyone interested in the details, the required certification is Common Criteria EAL 4+ (5+ is recommended, and common, many devices meet 6+), using protection profile 0084 for the hardware and equivalent "high attack potential" evaluation for the software, plus AVA_VAN.5 penetration testing, all performed in a nationally-accredited security testing lab. While certification isn't a guarantee of security (nothing is), the required certification applies the highest level of scrutiny you can get for commercially-available devices. Apple also uses a similarly-certified SE in their devices, but it's not clear whether they use it for LSKF authentication, or whether they use their (uncertified) Secure Enclave.

Maybe not hundreds, but at least dozens. For most people their phone is their digital assistant in all sorts of ways... not only for communication for for calendaring, looking up random things, reading the news or books, listening to music, getting directions, checking their bank account/brokerage, doing calculations, fitness tracking, managing shopping and to-do lists... the list goes on and on.

True, and neither does Hamas. For that matter, neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian people get to claim the moral high ground, since both overwhelmingly support the actions of their governments. Both are in the gutter, and digging downward. A pox on both their houses, and I don't think we should support either one. I am okay with humanitarian aid to starving people, though.

I suppose. I prefer to plug in every time I park, then I basically never have to pay any attention to range except on long trips.

Yeah, that's another side of my second reason, though cycles really only begin to bite when you get close to full or close to empty. Oscillating near the middle is fine.

You're missing the point.

The point is that CA has now gotten to the point where storage is a real requirement to continue growing renewables, at least if they don't want to simply be discarding a lot of renewable generation. That is, CA has now gotten past the easy part of renewable growth, where the renewables are cutting into but not fully replacing fossil fuel generation. From here forward, it's going to be harder, and the state is going to have to be breaking new ground.

This is both a major milestone and an inflection point in the difficulty of converting.

Even that is not enough when renewables generate >100% of consumption for significant parts of each day. Then you have to start figuring out how to store that excess production. In the short term they can probably sell some of it to other states, but as other states transition their own production that's going to become less useful, especially for solar. Time to start building out storage!

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.

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