The increase I'm talking about is just in deployed capacity... it's a manufacturing and installation problem, not a technology problem, and it's manufacturing and installation (as well as demand) that is doubling deployed capacity every year, not technological changes. If you want to claim that the current rate of growth is going to stop it's incumbent on you to explain why it will change.

That said, I think you're wrong that the technology is "done". There is lots of very interesting research going on, in both new chemistries and in new manufacturing techniques.

Sure. So? 10 years is almost certainly not enough to get us to that capacity, but 20 years is. Like most such things, installed battery capacity is likely following a sigmoid curve, and we're in the exponential phase, with an exponent of around 2. Assuming we didn't level off, 20 years would see global installed capacity increase about 1,000,000X.

What was the Powerwall price in 2015?

Define "affordable". There certainly are plenty of Powerwall alternatives that are less expensive than Tesla's.

But that's not really the point of the article. The point is that battery prices have been dropping rapidly for a couple of decades now, and they're showing no sign of slowing. The point is that the cheaper batteries that will be available in the next 1-2 decades will make renewables cost effective as a full replacement for fossil fuels.

If your battery dies after five years, it will be replaced for free under warranty because it's faulty. AFAICT all the manufacturer warranties are around 8 years.

However, it's really unlikely to happen. My 2011 Nissan Leaf's battery is still fine, though it only has about 80% of its original capacity, and the Leaf is about the worst case scenario since Nissan failed to implement thermal management. My four year-old Tesla still has 95% of its capacity.

You wasted money on the Fire stick (granted, not much), since the TV can do everything it can, and more. Okay, it looks like it can maybe do a little bit too *much* more (Gmail access), but it sounds like that was an oversight that is being fixed.

Inflation isn't a deterrent to savings, it just means you have to put your savings somewhere that it also does work, i.e. invested in something. Having a non-zero inflation rate encourages investment, which encourages economic growth. This is good. But it's not the main reason we need constant inflation.

The reason we need constant inflation is because deflation is extremely harmful; it causes debts to grow which can make people and businesses insolvent. The Fed has a 2% inflation target because low inflation rates are manageable and because 2% is high enough that a decrease still won't go negative.

In general, documents are considered hearsay and are inadmissible. There are exceptions to the hearsay rule that allow them to be introduced, for example public records that are made in the normal course of business, but police reports are explicitly and specifically excluded from those exceptions. It might be possible to introduce a police report as evidence if the officer who wrote it is present to testify to its authenticity and accuracy, and to be cross-examined about its contents, but if the officer is there it's easier to avoid the hearsay question entirely by just having the officer testify.

Note that this applies not just to written police reports but also to bodycam footage. You still need someone to testify that the footage is authentic and accurate, and available to be cross-examined about it. With bodycam footage I suppose that could be either the officer or a technician responsible for collecting and archiving the footage.

In the case of an AI-generated summary of the footage, if the officer checked and edited the output I think it would be exactly the same as the officer's self-written report. If the officer didn't check and edit the output, then it would be a mechanical transformation of the bodycam footage and you'd need someone to testify to the accuracy of that transformation, as well as the authenticity of the footage. I don't think anyone could honestly testify that the transformation is guaranteed to be correct and accurate. In any case, though, the defense could always just review the footage to point out any inaccuracies in the summary. Most likely the summary would be ignored completely and the bodycam footage would be used directly, after appropriate testimony about its authenticity.

Yep. Thus helping the blue states to maintain their dominance in technology work.

It might make more sense to use the hydrogen to produce methane, which is considerably easier to store and manage.

While desalination is a great use of excess power, this is not an easy thing to do because the places where the water is needed are inland. Obviously it doesn't make sense to pump desalinated water 180 miles uphill from the Gulf of California to Phoenix, what you really want to do is to use desalinated water at the places nearer the coast so they can stop relying on the river water that comes from the mountain west, so the southwest can use more of it (and so the mountain west can keep more of it for our own use). But while you could get some benefit from getting the coastal cities using desalinated water, their use actually isn't that significant. The bulk of the water goes to California farmlands, and those are in a belt 70-100 miles from the coasts, and there are mountains in between. Not terribly tall ones, but enough to make pumping the water challenging.

None of this means what you say isn't a good idea, but it does mean that a lot of infrastructure has to be built to make it work. Big coastal desalination plants, big pipelines from those plants, fed by big pumps, and either additional reservoirs or perhaps large tanks in the mountains to buffer the water supply -- though only after peak supply rises to the point that it exceeds demand. Heh. That's exactly the same situation as with intermittent, renewable power, just shifted to water. Water is a lot easier to store, of course, but you still have to build the infrastructure to store it.

So, this is a good idea, but it's an idea that will take years, probably a decade, to realize... and we have excess power now. Of course, starting by tackling the easier problem of using desalinated water in the coastal cities while the infrastructure is built out and scaled up makes sense.