Banning the trading of certain goods which aren't inherently harmful by themselves seems like a dangerous precedent to set.

The precedent was set by the outlawing of gold bullion ownership. I'm glad that's over, but governments have not promised to never try such a thing again. The control of the money supply is important to them.

What clouds?

Maybe robots could build desalination plants?
It's pretty damn sure that humans never will ...

We're well on our way to getting one built in Carlsbad, near San Diego. I hope there are more to follow.

... in 2000yrs ...

In 2000 years the drums might get sucked down 100 meters or so. It would be better to drop them into the mud in the middle of the abyssal plain. Personally, I think we should keep them more available; they might be useful someday.

The difference between the 60kWh and 85kWh Tesla Model S cash price is $10,000 or $400/kWh so I'm not sure about the article's conclusion that the battery costs $300/kWh.

In addition to the other points mentioned elsewhere, the 85 kWh Tesla includes access to their charging stations, which is valued at $2,000.

747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC.

Off by a factor of two. The cruising speed is almost 500 knots.

I'm very suspicious of the idea of used battery packs being used for grid storage.

However, lithium is cheap and is well understood. I think Tesla could devote some of their production into non-cobalt based cells, and possibly non-nickel too, and use them for stationary storage.

The End? Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!

Unfortunately, we're near the end of the rainy season now. There's not much hope of an El Niño fixing the drought this year.

Isn't that plagiarism?

According to Wikipedia, Berserker was first by a year. I am more reminded of Laumer's Bolo series, anyhow.

If I had to pick an anime series I would have picked Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

That was a long series. I liked the first two-thirds of it or so, but in the end almost everyone dies to no real purpose. Kind of a downer.

FYI, a kilowatt is a unit of power, i.e. a rate of energy transfer per time. 21 kilowatts means you can move around 21,000 joules of energy per second.

A 'full charge' depends on the amount of total energy the battery can store, i.e. units of simply joules. Joules are pretty small and energy for batteries is often expressed as kilowatt-hours; 1000 watts * 3600 seconds = 1 kilowatt-hour = 3,600,000 joules.

So, 86 kilowatt-hours is about 310 million joules. If you charged a 86 kilowatt-hour battery with a 21 kilowatt power supply, it would take 86 / 21 = 4 hours to charge.

I was going to point this out, but Mister AC beat me to it. You rarely run a Tesla down to empty in a day of local driving. Also, most places in the US get between 5 and 6 hours of sunlight per day, although it can be much less in winter if you're anywhere near Canada.

More prosaically, and more accurately, I can predict the Sun will rise in the morning, or that it will be colder here in a month.

However the U.S. has the distinction as being the third most populous country, as well as the third largest in geographical size...

The USA is only the fourth largest country by area (Russia, Canada, China).

Aren't cows a leading cause of CO2?

No, that's methane. Any carbon dioxide cows produce will be transient. Methane will eventually decay to carbon dioxide, but it will take decades. Still, that's short enough that I don't particularly care about cows.