You're thinking of electronic typewriters, perhaps. Electromechanical typewriters include the Selectric and that Smith-Corona - the keys mechanically engage certain clutches and drive systems, which allows the motor to drive the hammer(s) for the appropriate key. The motor was always running.

Yeah, but Grafitti was pretty good and you could get away with using less screen real estate than modern on-screen keyboards if you implemented it. You'd need HP's permission, though.

I doubt many people here under the age of, oh, thirty or so have ever used a typewriter, let alone one that was capable of jamming. Selectrics didn't, daisy wheels didn't. The last one I used that could jam was my dad's mid-70s Smith-Corona portable.

You live in northern Europe, though, right? Where it basically never gets very hot or very cold, and the yearly mean temperature is such that the heat generated by a few humans going about their day is enough to keep it comfortable inside? Our summers are upper 30s Celsius nearly every day. It is not at all uncommon to go two or three months without the ambient temperature ever dropping below 20 C. In winter, typical daytime highs are low teens C with lows in low single digits, but with occasional drops to around -10 C. Typical power usage then is around 1/5 of peak summer load, although the gas usage for heating means that total utility bills are not much changed.

So you keep electric load low by using non-electric heating and living somewhere with a very mild, dry climate. That's a great solution, if you live somewhere with a mild, dry climate. I don't.

It's spring here, which means it's pollen season, so even if I wanted to take advantage of days with cool air outside I couldn't do so without turning every surface in the house yellow. My house is well-insulated, and it's painted white, and I use LED's as much as I can, but there's little I can do given that the climate here is basically "subtropical swamp".

Should have put this in other comment, but: let's round 10 kWh/d up to 12 kWh/d to make the math easy. That is equivalent to 500W continuous load, or a mere 4 Ampere at 120 V. How the hell do you keep load that low?

It's a ballpark, but $300/mo power bill at roughly $0.10/kWh (actually slightly cheaper, but not enough to worry about) means 3000 kWh/mo, or 100/day. Southeastern US, air conditioning is most of the bill. And here, air conditioning really is air conditioning, as neither dehumidification nor cooling would be adequate alone,

Sounds like bullshit, or you live in Santa Monica and don't actually need that central air for cooling. I use around 100 kWh per day in peak of summer; you can pull that much out of 30 batteries for three days straight?

You can buy liquor 24/7 in Louisiana, at any kind of store - convenience store, Walgreens, grocery store, etc. Check out the first exit in LA on any interstate highway, you're going to find a gas station/liquor store. Back in the early nineties, their legal alcohol age was still 18; I smuggled $400 of booze back from Christmas break my freshman year.

Maybe in the Northeast, but not generally true across the country, and especially not so out West, where 75 is normal on freeways. In Texas, the speed limit tends to be 70 even on two-lane roads.

Christ, some people have no sense of humor.

That's not how it works. Not at all. I'm an anesthesiologist, and my job basically consists of being cool when the world goes crazy. Just like a pilot. Unlike him, I haven't decided that the world needs to go down with me.

Absence seizures don't really work like that, and they don't really show up as a new diagnosis in someone that age. A prior diagnosis would have disqualified him from getting a commercial (and probably a private) pilot's license. And automatisms won't don't that. My wife is an epileptologist, I know far more than I want to about these things.

Murder-suicide is when you decide to kill that lying bitch you've been living with all these years, and then realize you'd rather be dead than spend the rest of your life in prison. If you just feel the need to end it between the two of you, there's no reason over a hundred other people need to go too.

Speed governors are not going to ruin a generation. When I learned to drive, my speed governor was called a "crappy engine". My first car did 0-60 mph (~0-100 km/h) in a blistering 16 seconds if the air conditioning was off - much longer if it was on. It wouldn't do 75 mph unless it was headed down a mountain. But it had four wheels, it ran, and it was mine, and that was enough.