It's much easier to run fiber than to build an aqueduct.

You make a good general point. On the other hand: antibiotics aren't useful against fungal infections.

Terrible neighbors unwelcome in neighborhood! Film at 11.

I am typing from the warmth of my living room, situated in a climate that regularly hits -10C in winter, occasionally touching -25C. The heat pump that keeps my interior spaces comfortable is rated to operate to about -20C just on ambient air temperature, and then gradually supplement that with resistance heating. No, it's not Arctic conditions, but neither is 90% of the places where humans live. Like with EV passenger vehicles, they don't have to be a 100% solution in order to be useful in a variety of use cases.

Increasingly, truck stops have 240-V hookups to provide "shore power" to semis, so that they don't need to idle their diesels when stopped overnight. Much better for local air quality (particularly for the truckers sleeping inside), better for the engines (start/stop is not good for diesels, but neither is idling for 6-10 hours needlessly), and much lower cost of operation on a per-hour basis. If it works for existing diesels, it'll work fine for keeping a Semi EV cab comfortable.

I am not a grid engineer. However, ...

Unless you are genuinely designing for it, a 1-MW load can't easily get turned on and off instantaneously. If nothing else, the inductance of the wires will limit how quickly you can ramp the current up/down. EV charge equipment doesn't instantly start charging at its maximum rate - a modest ramp is employed. There are relatively small facilities, called "frequency stabilization services", whose job is to rapidly (almost instantly) respond to modest changes in supply and demand. They can hold the line temporarily while the rest of the grid adjusts. There has always been some "inertia" built into the grid that can absorb moment-to-moment mismatches. Some of it is the spinning inertia of all the turbines at generating stations. There is distributed inductance and capacitance in the grid itself: that giant mass of cables and connected equipment . Increasingly, it's batteries - including batteries co-located at EV charging stations to smooth out grid demand.

But in the end, even a 1-MW change in supply or demand is tiny compared to a local grid, which could be sloshing 1,000 to 50,000 MW. For context, the grid has to respond to an entire power plant, or a critical substation, going offline more-or-less instantly with no warning. That could be a change of 100 to 1,000 MW. These things happen more often than you might think - and yet you never notice.

Can you explain the mechanisms by which this would happen? Just having 1000 V in the vicinity of a person doesn't mean a thing - you need to somehow have a circuit through a person to kill them. Something like: someone touches a bare conductor with one hand while touching exposed metal on the chassis with the other. (I wouldn't trust my life to it, but automotive paint is generally not conductive.) So: how would you access an energized conductor? All the conductors are heavily insulated. Given the large amount of power, and the integrated liquid cooling, the construction of the cable is non-trivial, and surely would include armoring like a (grounded) metal jacket one or two layers down. The contacts on the vehicle and the cable are not "live" when out in the open air, and are inaccessible once the connection is made. You can safely operate an EV charger in a downpour. The charge circuit contains an earth ground in addition to the high voltage contacts. The earth ground contact is make-first-break-last. The charging contacts aren't live until after the connection is made, communications are established, and the earth ground continuity is verified.

So while not impossible, you'd practically have to be trying to kill yourself to get make it happen.

Other than accidents while installing/servicing EV charging equipment, or tweakers trying to steal copper, how many reports of electrocutions from EV chargers can you find? And, if you want to tally up those potential risks and probabilities, please also compare to the risks from random people operating a fuel pump - something that happens 10^7 times every day in the US. How many injuries occur from that?

I do not understand your sarcastic skepticism. Most heat pumps (including the cabin heating systems for most EVs these days) source heat primarily from the ambient air - same as the heat pump for a home. It's really no different than the car's AC system, just that the hot and cold sides have been swapped around. And, yes, such systems for an automobile opportunistically pull heat from the battery, inverter, and motor coolant loops, which have the typical antifreeze blend in them.

Is an acknowledgement and apology in the same was as "mistakes were made" - use of the passive voice simply does not count.

I understand why the article focuses on the heat shield: there were somewhat anomalous results in Artemis I, and investigating those created program-wide delays. Also, yeah, having the crew burn up during reentry would be bad.

But, really, this is the first crewed flight of the Orion capsule, so it's fair to say that a lot is being tested. Prior test flights have put most of the subsystems through their paces (for instance: propulsion, guidance, power). And everything has been tested like hell on the ground. But the life support systems have yet to flight-tested with living, breathing, peeing, pooping humans.

No.

Saying that other countries are doing worse is no excuse for the US not doing better. That's like doing poorly in the SATs because you were out partying the night before, then crowing how awesome it is that you're still above the median. [slow clap]

Or, to up the stakes to life and death (because, for vaccines, it is): that's like doing the Hunger Games and saying "Well, I got killed off, but there were 7 others that got killed before me - suckers!"

Yup, but small price to pay compared to experiencing any one of the diseases you are now immunized against. And also a small price to pay for the consolation that you won't be the link in a chain of infection that leads to some else's death. So, all in all, worth it for both purely selfish and for social-contract reasons. If only everyone could be so enlightened.

Remember when Trump said that we're going to win so much, we'll get tired of it? If this is winning, I'm well past tired of it.

Or when he pulled RFK Jr. from the nutso bush league, made him the face of federal health policy, and told him to "go wild on health"? Wild indeed.

Some of that is probably genuine. But there's also a high likelihood that you are not getting the genuine article, and are instead getting 1) rejects from genuine production, 2) lower-tier memory that's being passed off as higher tier, or 3) outright counterfeits.

I doubt that anyone would give them $70M just for saying "Uh, yup, we sure did find it. You betcha." A payout would require independent confirmation: Ocean Infinity says "go to such-and-such coordinates and you'll find airplane bits", along with their substantiation, and then someone does just that. Confirmation via video feed ought to be sufficient, and perhaps backed up by bringing some bit of identifiable wreckage to the surface. Confirmation would presumably be Indonesia's or Malaysia's job.

Yeah, maybe Ocean Infinity could fake it by planting some forged bits of wreckage, but probably not an entire plane's worth. Such a faked claim would probably fall apart pretty quickly, and would result in a massive legal action and tremendous reputational damage.