That explains the human sacrifice to appease the Volcano Gods - so they can release all that pent-up frustration in virgin territory

802.11ac is pretty darn awesome if you design it well.
I was at Cisco Live in SanFran last year where the only connectivity anywhere was through wireless and during a breakout session attended by over 300 people, i updated 2 Android devices to Ice Cream in under 20 min while using my Windows laptop to VPN back to my company's network to troubleshoot some an outage.

Indeed. How soon we forget.

Right back where we started?
  That's called a round-trip - and I'd be happy to take on a fast train.
On a plane, not so much.

I have no idea why conservatives love cars & trucks so much, they are just another mode of transportation.

Fixed that for you.

Elon Musk's Hyperloop is starting to look like a bargain, if it's technically feasible.

I can't speak for every situation but I can tell you that in the last 2 places I lived, the major utilities weren't telling the truth about how they were spending the money or what they were doing for upgrades / maintenance. They did do a pretty good job of rewarding upper management, not entirely sure for what.

Things only started to improve when they were essentially taken over by the gov't, split up and subject to greater oversight. Grid reliability is much better although there's room for improvement.

I'm not fooled. I know the grid could be better but it functions quite well despite its age and increasing demand.
And the fact that it's NOT better, is the fault of the utilities. What they should have their feet held to the fire on is WHY isn't the grid in better shape.

But I expect we'll hear nothing but more lame, timeworn excuses.

"This is despite the fact that residential power prices have risen 70 per cent since the Barnett government came to power in 2008"

If prices rose this much in any of the Freedom-lovin' states in America, there would be a vast exercise of 2nd amendment rights. This hurts the poor FAR more than any perceived subsidising of the "rich", really the middle class.
I have quite a few friends in Australia who have solar PV. NONE of them - ZERO - are wealthy, mostly all working couples in modest homes with 1-3 kids, usually only one car.

Just more lame excuses.
Australia, a giant country that's almost as large as America but with only 1/15th the population went from nearly ZERO rooftop PV in 2009 to over 4GW by the end of 2015. It's true that the utilities there have been whining about voltage surges since 2011 but the amount of rooftop installations have increased 10x since that time and the grid hasn't melted down.

In other words, if the utilities in the USA are only as marginally as competent as the ones down under, they should be able to deal with a 5-10x increase in solar across the same population / geographic area.

Absolutely. Given the history of the Southwest, it's astonishing to me that water recycling & conservation isn't mandatory & widespread.

Likely because of agricultural demands. A lot of CA's water, in the hundreds of billions of gallons, leaves the state in the form of produce.

They're building a new $billion desalinisation plant near San Diego that should be operational by this fall. If the warming trend continues, this may be the 1st of many for CA & TX.

*That* Republican party is NOT *this* Republican party, they merely claim lineage but were hijacked by the Southern Democrats thanks to Nixon.

Only because of a passerby with a cellphone camera.
If he'd only *seen* the altercation but not recorded it, Officer Scott would still be walking around free.