Yeah, your definition of "mega-mansion" definitely is a starter house. My parents' home was two stories plus a basement. I can think of plenty of three-story houses that aren't even remotely mansions (e.g. row houses in San Francisco).

Penalizing people for using space efficiently by building up just leads to more suburban sprawl and lower housing density. It's the opposite of what any sane urban planner would recommend.

I would argue that having newer houses in your neighborhood is a sign that your neighbors probably aren't crackheads, so it should make your house look more attractive by comparison. The only time that might not be true is when the nicer house is also for sale at the same time yours is.

Also, those "mega-mansions" (which, based on having known a bunch of people who use phrases like that, are probably what we used to call a starter home back where I grew up) mean higher property taxes, which means better schools, which also increase the value of your property.

Wow. I looked it up, and today I learned that it actually is available to non-seniors. I'm kind of surprised. Of course, the median wait time is measured in significant fractions of an hour, so even the elderly prefer to get rides from other people when they can. Either way, there's no advantage to a van that drives around and picks up one or two people at a time and takes them to their destination compared with a private car (and actually a huge disadvantage from a fuel economy perspective). It's just a glorified Über service, but with the most fuel-inefficient vehicles on the road.

My actual small town that I lived in until I was 22 currently has almost no houses within a twenty minute walk of any of the grocery stores. Maybe a few of the houses closest to the front of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods are close enough to Walmart. E.W. James (oops, that apparently just became a Save-A-Lot) is on a highway with almost no houses for probably a mile. Ruler Foods is within a mile of maybe a half dozen houses.

The Big Star store that went under in the 1980s (IIRC) was within walking distance of maybe a dozen mostly low-income houses, plus some university married student apartments, and *barely* within walking distance of some of the other university housing, but that has been gone for decades. The old E.W.'s was within walking distance of maybe low-double-digit houses before it moved across town in the late 1990s to where Ruler is now, and then again to its current location. IGA was also kind of near some houses, but again, that closed in the 80s or 90s when all the businesses moved to the west side of town to be near Walmart after it moved.

But even if you distributed them as evenly as you could, with only three real grocery stores, you'd still only have maybe 10% to 15% of residents within a reasonable walking distance of a grocery store. At 850 people per square mile, you just can't sustain a lot of grocery stores. And that's before you factor in all the people out in the country. For that matter, my current city has trouble keeping more than about three grocery stores in business at anything approaching *bikeable* distances even with 7k people per square mile. The economies of scale just lend themselves to a smaller number of larger grocery stores, rather than a larger number of smaller stores.

Except that this isn't true. Yes, above a certain speed, you rapidly lose energy from wind resistance. But at lower speeds, you're not getting the maximum advantage of higher gears. That's why most cars are more efficient at 55 to 60 MPH than at 40 MPH. So lowering the maximum speed will NOT necessarily reduce emissions.

Here's a graph of a few vehicles' efficiency versus speed. Going significantly over 60 MPH usually results in a significant reduction in efficiency. Below that, though, you're just as likely to make emissions worse by slowing people down as you are to make it better. It depends entirely on what speeds just happen to be at the sweet spot in the torque curve of a particular engine with a particular gear ratio. You really can't fix the environment with that approach. All you'll do is make people late all the time.

Nit: To the best of my knowledge, there are no rare earth minerals in EV batteries. They are, however, used in a lot of EV *motors*. Lithium, cobalt, manganese, iron, etc. are anything but rare.

The full extent of the damage will take years to fully appreciate. That's half the reason people like him get elected. By the time the full extent of the damage is know, you're two presidential cycles later or even three.

It's really not *that* bad. They just have to sell them for more money. The tax credit doesn't magically make them unprofitable unless they haven't paid off the R&D costs. Otherwise, it just reduces their sales volume or forces them to take a lower profit per unit to keep the volume up.

It's stock. It's funny money.

Not at all true. The numbers are kind of nuts, but they are also tied to growth targets, so if Tesla doesn't grow, he doesn't get anything. It doesn't really devalue the shares, and this style of compensation scheme is pretty typical, though again, I won't argue that the numbers seem questionably high.

It already did, at least in the U.S. As soon as the tax credit expired, buying cratered. The company most likely to weather this is Tesla. Tesla already lost their tax credits, and their sales didn't crater before, so they probably won't crater this time, either.

But the rest of the industry? Dealers at the major car companies want to *avoid* selling EVs, because they don't get all that lucrative service business — oil changes and brake jobs and oxygen sensor replacements and so on. They have no incentive to sell EVs, and without tax credits to push people to choose EVs, sales dry up.

In other words, Ford ditching their electric trucks is *entirely* plausible. (I could maybe even see Tesla ditching the Cybertruck, because its sales suck for... let's just say design and implementation reasons.)

A *school* bus? Or a city bus? Because nowhere I've ever lived had school buses that took people home except at the end of the regular school day.

Where I grew up, a town of about 10,000 people, the total extent of "public transit" was a van service that served the elderly and disabled. Zero buses, zero *taxis*. You drove or you didn't get there. So I'm not sure what your definition of "rural" is, but it sure as h*** doesn't match up with the decades that I lived in a rural area.

WTF are you talking about? You're talking about huge cities here. I'm talking about small town USA. So unless your idea of "different choices" means not living in a rural area (and good luck finding food on your table if everyone did that), you really don't know what you're talking about.

Sure. But my point was that trying to eliminate cars can't work in rural areas, and doesn't work well even in suburbs. That first part is not solvable by moving everyone to cities, because we still require food, and you can't grow that in a dense urban areas, because there's not enough arable land. And people live in suburbs precisely because they don't like living in cities, so eliminating cars in suburbs isn't going to fly, either.

School buses only work if you don't have after school activities. Band, sports, theater, etc. are all fundamentally incompatible with a carless society unless you have high enough density to warrant a proper city bus system. Same with AP classes before school.

Potato, potahto. There are places that you have to go, e.g. work, school. If the amount of time it takes is too long, it completely breaks your ability to function. Whether the reason for it taking too long is because of distance or because somebody thought it would be fun to make cars go horribly slowly to convince you to bike for an hour is mostly an implementation detail.

I bike two to three hours every Saturday and Sunday. But there's no way I'd be willing to accept an hour of biking each way as a minimum requirement to get to work or school. Life's too short, and I'd be too exhausted when I got there to do anything.

True, but you're still kind of missing the point, which is that not everybody lives in cities. Public transit is provably not cost effective at rural densities.

Actually, what will happen is that people will move away from places that do this, or they will continue to drive, but more slowly, or they will ignore the speed limits and pay the tickets.

The only way to shorten trips is to increase density, and that can't just magically happen.

Walking and biking are fine if you are only a couple of blocks away from where you are going. They don't work for long distances. So they don't solve the problem, either.

You either have urban density or you don't. If you do, then cars don't work very well. If you don't, then alternatives don't work very well. There's a grey area in between where neither one works very well.

I'm thinking about my rural hometown in west Tennessee, and imagining middle school kids biking to school for up to an hour each way while carrying books, musical instruments, gym clothes, etc., and I'm laughing at how well your "magic cure" would work. It's the sort of thinking I'd expect from someone who has never lived somewhere with fewer than half a million people.

+1. As soon as you get out of the core of Paris and its inner suburbs (Hauts-de-Seine), a lot of metro Paris is suburbia with zero-lot-line single-family houses.

Mind you, it's not "a hundred houses all alike" suburbia, because it was built up before folks started doing that sort of mass development, but it's still suburbs.

I think you missed the joke, which was that you can delete two words from the quote and get "I believe you are a racist."

Bets about whether they stop working with HomeKit in February of 2026?

In practice, storing energy for a longer period of time is basically never done, with the only real exception I can think of being space travel. And it's not how long the storage period is that matters. It's how quickly you need to get the energy when you're done. Sure, if you store a year worth of energy in a day and dribble it out over a year, a tiny fuel cell and a huge tank is great for cost. But literally space travel is the only practical application of that. For every real-world application other than space travel, you need to be able to dump the entire contents of the fuel cell in at most maybe five to ten times the period of time over which it was built up, if not less. That means either big fuel cells or a lot of fuel cells.

See above. And to that, I would add that converting electricity to hydrogen with electrolysis of water and back is likely to result in a loss of somewhere around 60% to 70% of the energy that you put in. So even if you somehow manage to find some rare edge case (e.g. trying to do solar in Alaska or something similarly nuts) where you really do want to store power long-term and spread it out over a long period of time, the loss of energy is still going to be around 5x as high from fuel cells as lithium ion batteries even factoring in the self-discharge rate over several months.

And that's before you factor in the additional losses from having to pressurize the hydrogen, which adds further the losses. In fact, you'd actually be better off building air tanks and pressurizing them and using the air pressure to turn turbines than doing electrolysis, pressurizing hydrogen, and dumping it into a fuel cell. That will give you a loss of only 25% to 50% of the energy that goes in. Sure, it will take up more space, but you won't have hydrogen making the metal brittle after a few years, requiring you to replace the whole system over and over again, so it makes *way* more sense.

When I say that IMO, there is literally no case where hydrogen fuel cells make sense other than space travel, I mean that. It is utterly terrible efficiency-wise, so much so that almost anything is better, including things that are way simpler and cheaper than hydrogen, like a giant air tank and an air turbine.

I would still expect it to be less efficient than electric arc furnaces, but maybe not, so I'll grant you that this might be a very narrow use case, solely because burning the fuel source is actually important for that. :-)

Fuel cell efficiency is at best about 60%. So no, you do NOT have 80% round-trip efficiency, unless you've found a way to violate the first law of thermodynamics.

60% efficiency times 68% is 40.8% efficiency. Yeah, that's slightly better than 34%, but in much the same way that a s**t sandwich is slightly better than s**t. :-)

And this will still be capable of running on natural gas, which probably means it won't be optimal efficiency-wise for either fuel.

The losses from electrolysis alone make it a bad idea, even if the next step were 100% efficient. It just gets worse from there.

You forgot that this is about gas turbines. They're going to BURN the hydrogen. Divide that 68% number by two, and that's still probably wildly optimistic. More realistic numbers are probably more like 20%.