That's unusually bad, even for a year ago, but FSD has improved enormously since then. There were some huge updates around ~August that made it go from "Workable, but you have to watch it like a hawk" to "Really quite good, though still needs light supervision". I use FSD all the time and almost never have to intervene. It even passes the wife test now, meaning she uses it nearly all of the time, too, and I'd have said that would never happen.

OTOH, I used Waymo all last week for commuting around the bay area, and it was nearly flawless. There was one time it seemed to get confused because there was an emergency and there were sirens coming from multiple directions but none of the emergency vehicles could be seen. Apparently Waymo uses external microphones to listen for sirens. Anyway, it kind of stopped partway through a left turn through an intersection. It wasn't dangerous; all the human drivers were also slowing/stopping while trying to figure out where the emergency vehicles were, but it would have been better to continue through the intersection, then pull over. After about five seconds of hesitation, the Waymo did exactly that, but I'd have done it without the hesitation.

Neither does an EV. After 8 years an EV's battery pack will have degraded a little; perhaps it'll only have 85-90% of the range that it had when new (the 8-year warranty generally guarantees 80%). But the degradation curve is actually front-loaded; you lose the largest amount of range in the first year, less in the second, and so on. By the time it's 20 years old it will probably only have 75% of the range it had new. At 30 years, 70%, and so on.

Barring some manufacturing problem or catastrophic event, an EV battery should continue functioning long after an ICEV will need an engine replacement. The ICEV will maintain roughly its original range until it fails while the EV will lose a little range, but the EV will last longer.

As a driver of an EV, I disagree. I'd appreciate it if the PHEV (and EV!) drivers moved their vehicles when they are full, but as long as they're actively charging I don't see a problem with it. I suppose if the chargers are oversubscribed I'd appreciate PHEV drivers leaving them for the EVs, but that just means more chargers should be installed.

Hotels should just make them free, but room key-activated, so only guests can use them. And, of course, they need to install enough that they aren't oversubscribed.

If you're doing a road trip in an EV, being able to charge overnight while you're sleeping (just like at home) is marvelous. When I'm road-tripping I try to stay only at hotels with free chargers. There are actually plenty of them, at least in the US, so I succeed in staying at a place with a charger about 90% of the time.

Being able to charge overnight and start the day with a 100% charge means that I generally don't have to charge except during lunch and dinner, which means I can drive several hundred miles per day but spend zero time waiting for charging. I just have to make sure I stay at a hotel with a level 2 charger and eat lunch and dinner at places near superchargers. Not starting the day at 100% changes the dynamics significantly, requiring two quick supercharger stops for partial charges in the morning (if you're trying to minimize time spent charging, you only charge to about 60%, which takes about 20 minutes, vs an hour to get to 100%).

PBS is primarily (85%) privately funded. It will continue to produce shows like Masterpiece, Nova, Frontline, and Sesame Street and people in places like Boston or Philadelphia will continue to benefit from them.

What public funding does is give viewers in poorer, more rural areas access to the same information that wealthy cities enjoy. It pays for access for people who don't have it.

By opting out, Arkansas public broadcasting saves 2.5 million dollars in dues, sure. But it loses access to about $300 million dollars in privately funded programming annually.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

Or, more concisely: Countries should aim to be poor.

To be fair to the nutballs, their proposal will actually slow it down as compared to not limiting immigration. That is, from their nutball perspective the proposal is an improvement, just not a total solution. For a total solution, they need to go full right-wing nutball and also ban women from working so they'll stay home and have proper Swiss babies.

Except that they aren't blocking sideloading. With the planned changes you can still install apps via:

1. Other app stores. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
2. By one-click installation from a web site. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
3. By ADB. No registered developer account required.

And for the cases that require a registered developer account, that account can be anonymous and free as long as the number of installs is small.

That would be fun, actually. I'd have to give them slashdot and substack. They'd have no idea what either of them are.

Well, it would be fun until they denied me entry.

FTFY

This is a gaslighting that he'll probably largely get away with, since most Americans -- especially his voter base -- have little contact with tourism or people from other countries.

His ongoing attempts to gaslight them over grocery prices, though, that one's going to be tougher. I'm surprised he's trying that. I mean, he's dumb, sure, and insulated from truth, but surely someone around him is smart enough and clueful enough to tell him that it would be better to sell it as a period of unfortunate but necessary pain on the way to long-lasting economic revival and stability. His base would eat that up, but even his diehard supporters are having a hard time reconciling "grocery prices are down!" with their own grocery bills, and he just keeps repeating it. He can cherry-pick specific item prices or gush about the lower-price of a (conveniently scaled-back) Thanksgiving dinner basket all he wants but people who actually buy groceries (such an old-timey word! <eyeroll/>) can see the truth during every weekly trip to the store.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

I care about the kids, and I don't think this is treading on them, I think it's pushing them to have IRL relationships, and that's a good thing. I say that as a nerd who had few friends when I was a teen (in the 80s), but even normal, social kids today have far fewer real friendships and many of the geeky kids like I was now have none at all.

We're a social species, we need and crave socialization, but social media is to real relationships like drugs are to the normal joys of life; a false but massively-amped substitute for the real thing, addictive and harmful. It's perfectly possible to get high or drunk from time to time and still enjoy real life, but you have to use the artificial happiness in moderation and control. There are really good reasons why we try to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol, and keep adults away from the really powerful and addictive stuff, and get them into treatment when they get hooked (well, in the US we mostly just put them in prison, but some parts of the world are getting smarter and focusing on treatment).

The same logic applies to social media. We need to figure out how to tame its effects on adults, especially those who are for some reason especially vulnerable and get very warped by it. IMO, it makes perfect sense to just try to keep kids off of it entirely, especially since we don't really understand it yet.