Absolutely not. The charge/discharge round trip losses will be a few percent, maybe 10% if the batteries are in bad shape. The price difference between peak and off-peak is often 5-10X. Commercial users also get hit with demand surcharges based on the peak draw during the month and those can really make a huge difference. Using batteries to smooth out those peaks can be a bigger savings even than avoiding draw during peak times.

Even for residential use, the savings can be significant. I have batteries and I'm on a time-of-use plan that charges me 5X as much during peak hours (6-10PM) as the rest of the day. I make sure the system is set up so that I never draw any power during peak.

Incredibly unlikely. If the claimed violations are legitimate, and webXray reported them to the state plus the attempt to lean on them, Google would get slammed, hard, both legally and in the press. No way in hell Google would risk that.

No one can make session tracking with form variables or URL arguments as reliable as it is with cookies.

I have a lot of success with obscure, mostly-undocumented systems. Which models are you using? There's an enormous difference in capability level between the top-tier models and the next step down. Also a pretty big cost difference.

It can be, sure, but it's less reliable and more painful to work with.

If the law is about sale or sharing, not collection, then Google doesn't have to change anything, because Google doesn't sell or share data. That would be wasteful; Google's ad business is all about monetizing the data at Google, not giving someone else a chance to monetize it.

Sure, but isn't it interesting that the number of photos -- fuzzy or otherwise -- didn't massively increase when everyone started carrying cameras all the time? In fact it declined significantly.

The only logical conclusion is that the little gray men realized there were a lot more cameras about and became much more careful.

It's possible the companies are flagrantly ignoring the opt out indication.

It's also possible that webXray is confusing ad/tracking cookies with cookies required for normal site operation, viewing any set-cookie command as a violation.

Based on my experience working at Google, I'm betting on the second possibility. But, we'll see. Either we'll hear some stories about the companies being fined, or sued, or prosecuted (depending how the law works), or this will just quietly disappear when someone educates webXray.

You are absolutely feel free to argue what you think the law *should* say. But the Bill of Rights, including the fourth amendment (which is what you meant, not the fifth), definitely does not restrict what private citizens and corporations can do. It only restricts the government. And, as TomWinTejas said, it didn't even restrict the states or local governments, only the federal government, until the 14th amendment modified the meaning.

When it comes to search and seizure there is a different concept that protects you from private individuals and corporations: property rights. But the way property rights apply to your face is... complicated at best, and under present law doesn't give you the protection you think you should have. The law gives you protection against someone producing images of your face for commercial use, but that's not what's happening here.

And as for privacy rights, the Constitution really doesn't address that except in the narrow case of government searches. SCOTUS did actual find a right to privacy in the "penumbra" of the Constitution in Roe v Wade, but only ever applied it in the context of one very particular medical procedure, and anyway that court opinion is widely considered to be one of the worst examples of motivated legal reasoning in history. It's pretty clear that the court didn't apply that privacy right in any other cases because shining more light on the incredibly shoddy reasoning could only result in Roe getting overturned. As it did.

Anyway, the point is that you can and should advocate for laws that enact the privacy protections you want, but don't fool yourself in to believing that they already exist in the law, because they don't.

The left wing does its own share of screwing stuff up. The center-left is pretty good at governance, though.

We're talking about manufacturers, whose customers aren't consumers, or even retailers, but distributors who want to keep their pipelines full and their business operating. The worst thing a manufacturer can to do their customers, the thing that is most "disloyal", if you want to put it in those terms, is to be unable to fill orders. Distributors mostly don't really care what the unit price is anyway, they operate on a percentage markup basis. They care about dollar volume, so as long as that stays constant (or rises!) they're good.

So the smart thing for a manufacturer to do, and the thing that their customers (who are businesspeople who understand supply and demand, not end consumers who are confused about how economics work and throw around ridiculous concepts like "price gouging") understand and appreciate is a supplier who responds to increased demand by investing in manufacturing capacity... and it's higher prices that facilitate that.

I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced. I see a lot of people on the right are getting tired of Trump's craziness, but I'm not sure they wouldn't be fine if it were just dialed back a bit, say to Trump 1.0 levels. In a way it may actually be a good thing that we're only a year and a quarter into a four year term. Assuming Trump doesn't keel over he's got a lot of time to convince Americans that it's a really, really bad idea to elect someone like him. Of course, he'll do a lot of actual damage along the way.

And you're absolutely right that we need the Democrats to avoid the temptation to go hard left just because they have a particularly-hated opposition... but I don't think it's at all certain that they will avoid it.

You absolutely can, if you really look at what happened and when. What happened, basically, was that Nixon and Ford left Carter with an incredibly-damaged economy, and Carter fixed it, but the fixes took a while to take effect. If Carter had had a second term, those changes would have taken effect while he was in the White House, but he lost. Reagan is to be applauded mostly for not undoing what Carter did.

What did Carter do? The biggest thing he did was to appoint Paul Volcker as Fed chair. Carter knew exactly what Volcker would do, and knew that it would be painful, but believed the economists who told him that it was necessary. They were right, Carter was right to believe them, and Volcker's medicine of high interest rates got inflation under control and the economy moving in the right direction, even though it caused two recessions. Reagan was smart enough to believe the economists, too, so he reappointed Volcker and made some famous speeches, especially the 1982 one in which he told Americans we needed to "Stay the Course". He didn't, of course, mention that it was Jimmy Carter's course that we were staying, but it was.

The other big thing Carter did was massive deregulation. Reagan is also often credited for deregulation, but he did very little of it while Carter did a lot -- energy, telecoms, trucking, airlines... and more. Carter really was "The Great Deregulator", not Reagan.

None of this is because Carter was some sort of economic genius (though he was an extremely smart man). It's because he got good advisors and took good advice. This is a pretty consistent story, actually. I think there are two main reasons why the economy tends to improve during democratic administrations and decline during republican ones: (1) Democratic administrations make better use of experts and (2) Democrats are less likely to go to war (though they do tend to engage in more small-scale, humanitarian interventions). Those are just my opinions, of course, and this is an incredibly complex space.

I'm a member of the Republican party. I have been on paper for decades, and until 2016 regularly (but not exclusively) voted Republican. In 2024 when the state GOP organization decided to switch from primaries to closed caucus meetings, I decided to get active so I could vote against Trump. I've since decided my participation as a never-Trumper is a good idea, we need more people who are fundamentally conservative (or at least small-L libertarian) to get involved to rescue the party and return it to something approaching rationality.

Anyway, that's background to explain why I just got home from the GOP county convention, which was very interesting in that during the whole three-hour meeting I never heard Trump's name mentioned even once, and there were some rather pointed allusions to how important it is that our elected leaders act with careful consideration and to promote peace. I think a lot of the GOP rank and file are getting pretty pissed off. The first break was the refusal to release the Epstein files. Minneapolis made a lot of them uncomfortable, and they found a lot of things that happened hard to defend. (CECOT should have, too, but early on they all believed Trump when he said they were gangsters.). By the time Venezuela came around, most of them had stopped trying to defend, and Iran actually generated some pretty vocal MAGA-world argument against Trump, while the soaring fuel prices just pissed off a lot of his supporters.

Are they? I don't see that in the summary or the articles at all. All of the counter-filings are coming from the individual's attorneys, not from Reddit. Reddit is certainly to be applauded for not just voluntarily complying, for actually going to court, but it seems like *main* thing they have done is to notify the user in question, so the user could get lawyers from a non-profit, and it's those lawyers who are doing most of the work.