Fortunately, and overwhelmingly provably, the physical and legal world doesn't work in the way you wish it did.

Protip: as soon as you're talking about "never" or "always" or "happened before" or "still happens" .. basically anything in terms of any absolutes, you're not operating in the real world.

People survived car crashes before seatbelts were mandated. People still die in car crashes even when using seatbelts. You'd be a moron to argue seatbelts are useless or car manufactures should not be legally required to put them in cars.

The things that influence law and society is the actual data (how it changes over time) and nuance, and that's what the law deals in. Things you seem quite resistant to engage in.

Multiple people can share responsibility, as their actions combine together. A person who drives somebody to a bank for the known purpose of robbing the bank is determined to share *some* responsibility for the robbery of the bank. Just because they're not the person who took the money out of the bank vault does not mean the law does not consider them partly responsible.

I know I know, life is so much easier if you just try and make everything stupidly simple.

Not always. Grown-ups had been able to purchase games with a debit card, which does not prove age, or with a PlayStation Store gift card purchased with cash.

Yeah, because when SpaceX loses equipment as they do a lot they just spin it as a valuable scientific learning experience and not a disaster at all, and the credulous press and even more credulous Elon fanboys on sites like Slashdot swallow it hole.

Whether or not they could afford a different vehicle is irrelevant.

The point is the vehicle they chose, regardless of the reason, is way below average performance in this use case and is not representative of the average experience.
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Last I heard, the trade policy was set to deter importing cars made in China into the United States. BYD having been blocked from setting up a factory on United States soil and hiring United States residents to produce cars for the United States market is news to me. The interview that Wikipedia cites states only that BYD isn't planning to build in the US or Mexico for the US market, not why that's the case. Searching DuckDuckGo for "is byd blocked from setting up factory in usa" didn't turn up relevant results either.

> EV's for long trips aren't great. I have a Chevy Bolt 2023 EUV. Cross-state trips take 50% longer than a gas car.

I know it's a cop-out to blame your choice of vehicle for your experience, but please understand that the 2023 Bolt EUV has a max DCFC power of 55kw. That's about a third what the majority of vehicles are capable of (150kw peak) and about 30% less than what my 2020 Kona EV can pull (75kw) - another vehicle that was comparatively under powered when it was new.

Your 2023 Bolt EUV is literally the second worst charge-performing EV you can find in the US, with the #1 spot being the 2024 Fiat 500e.

I hope you're not too disillusioned with EVs because of it; the EUV is a perfectly fine vehicle for daily use especially for the price. Just know that your experience is not typical.
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So to buy a car, you have to first buy a house, or at least buy out the rest of your lease in favor of somewhere to live whose parking could support a charger.

Consider the case of buying a car and then changing jobs. How practical is it to choose where to work based on whether the office has a charger?

Not to mention that a lot of ICE car drivers aren't rich enough to afford a new car, only a used car. And a lot of ICE car drivers live in the United States, where BYD has chosen not to build a factory, and have an ethical disagreement with the leadership of Tesla.

There is zero chance I'd go back to an ICE car. The maintenance, reliability, and fuel costs are not even comparable. The math behind driving an ICE car today only makes sense if you need to tow large loads for significant distances. The caveat is that you need a place to charge them for it to be stress-free. We calculated not long ago that it would take $0.25/gallon gas to make an ICE car break even with what we're spending on EVs.

On balance, it would appear to be the case.

I respect many of those comedians for their satire, but not getting news from newspapers is a recipie for idiocracy.

You are correct with respect to their internal storage.

However, say you want to interchange files among several computers using removable media, such as an SD card, USB flash drive, or USB hard drive. One is a Windows PC that prefers NTFS, another a Mac that prefers Apple's FS, and another a Linux PC that prefers ext4. What file system would you use on the drive?

"but labor is so insane"

I gather this is your fault

If I had that kind of money I'd have stepped down long ago to live on a private South Pacific island with rum, hot tubs, and supermodels.

> I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance.

And I'm saying you cannot effectively do load shifting without storage. Renewables tend to peak mid-day, especially solar, and the ability to soak up that surplus energy is dependent on actually having loads that can be dispatched at that time. We're talking about domestic energy use which is not very flexible; Okay great you can do your laundry with cheap solar electricity at 10AM but that's not helpful if you're not home at 10AM. There's very little a typical homeowner can do here unless they've invested in additional equipment. Storage batteries and water heaters are the most obvious choices and are easily scheduled to take advantage of electricity rates. Taking a half day off work to do all your household chores is a bit less practical.

> If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm.

That's exactly not how coal power works, and that's actually the core problem. You can't turn a coal plant on and off on a whim; it can take north of a full day to get one of those things started. This means you can't afford to turn off a coal plant from 10AM to 3PM when renewables are peaking because you won't be able to turn it back on in time for the 4PM peak demand. The coal plant stays on, and now you have to soak up the surplus energy to avoid blowing up the grid. In case you missed it, this is *exactly* the reasoning discussed in the article.

This is not about saving you, the consumer, money. If electricity is expensive to buy then that cost gets passed on to you. The only economic factor at play is the cost of curtailing renewables - curtailment also costs money and those costs CANNOT be passed on to the consumer. Utilities want to avoid curtailment and would rather give electricity away for free than absorb those costs. This point is, again, in the article.
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