Texas is slowly moving in the right direction. Imagine how much farther it could have moved if conservatives didn't have a jihad against reality.

In the 90s I inherited a make/awk monstrosity where top-level make created a top-level awk script, which ran and created Makefiles in each subdirectory and ran make in each one, which generated awk scripts in each directory, which then ran each awk script, and each result was gathered by the top awk script.. I dealt with it for a year until it was fully in my control, when I quickly replaced it with a single perl script which mere humans could understand. (Generating DNS files for named, if anyone cares, one domain per subdir),

Oh, very nice. I'm surprised (but happily so) that anyone was that structured in the 80s, though if anyone was, the military seems likely. But anyone that structured probably already replaced most/all of their COBOL with something newer, so the remaining COBOL systems are the OTHER sort...

it's not financially viable (and probably logically impossible) to write fantastic software. But coding theory has advanced enough that "well designed code" is not much more expensive than "fuck it, we'll ship it and pray" and it's far cheaper if you assume the company will still exist in five years.

Note that we don't assume we know what we are doing nowadays either. But the intelligent among us know that we are idiots, so we add structure and unit tests such that in 50 years, those new young idiots will have some breadcrumb trails and unit tests to make their life less terrible.

If problems occur, it's hard to follow the logic since modern systems try to encapsulate business logic in different classes than message passing and database validation.

If you want to add functionality, you have too many options (all with unknown side effects), rather than one class with defined sided effects.

If you need to change one specific rule, you don't have the unit tests to (hopefully) prove that you didn't break ten things while fixing two.

So it is perfectly stable as long as the underlying system, inputs, business environment, and logic never changes. So, if we assume a spherical cow...

Fixed that for you.

An important fact about the expansion of EV infrastructure is that most of it is happening separate from EVs. Our electric infrastructure was aging and terrible but is being made more reliable every year. As parts of the country (and world) gain population, it turns out that we need to add better grid infrastructure for the new residences as well as for the EV charging stations. While Texans may think that region-wide outages every year or two are fine, most of us expect more from power to our cities.

So the powerline capital expenses cannot be completely or even mostly charged to EVs. 80% of it was going to happen even if we only had internal combustion engines. We're moving to HVDC connections because we want a reliable grid, home solar panels feeding the grid, and more power for homes, factories, and data centers. And, after all that, some public EV chargers too.

You make an excellent point. If most people can plug in to a private outlet at home each night, we should need a lot fewer public chargers than public nozzles.

These are not really comparable. Fueling via electric is slower, but many people have home chargers so rarely need public chargers. But I'm glad that the idiots who used to complain "we'll never duplicate our gas infrastructure so electric is bad" will now shut up. Yeah, yeah, of course they'll just whine about something else, but I can dream.

"Mature technology" can mean different things. Batteries hold a LOT of energy which can usually be released very quickly if the battery is damaged. We want batteries with more energy and less volume, so pack that energy tighter. And as time goes on, we get companies which... don't follow every single safety precaution (because that's expensive) in design and manufacture of the batteries, especially because the components of the batteries are made by many companies, then assembled by other companies, then sold to other companies for use in products which were ordered by Apple, Samsung, etc for sale to us. A few battery issues are hard to track back, and companies which ignore safety are usually happy to fold and reform with a different name when lawsuits appear.

News sites have been able to do this for decades; a simple robots.txt file will do this. But no news sites wants this. They want Google to send traffic to them (and only them, but not their competition). And they don't want Google to add any value. And, oddly enough, that's not what consumers want. If consumers wanted to read "nothing but Daily Mail" they can do it... but they don't do it.

There are a lot of problems with the profit model for news sites. The sites are part of the problem; consumers are a large part of the problem; Google is part of the problem. But sites like the Daily Mail have helped create the world that they find themselves in by pushing political narratives and avoiding facts, so I'm not feeling bad for them.

To be fair, when I see a verbatim paragraph on multiple news sites (usually meaning that none of them wrote it), I'm not really feeling bad about their copyright on their "borrowed" content. This happens a lot. And the term "victim" is debatable.

As opposed to being deported to a death prison in El Salvador when you're not from El Salvador with no legal recourse?

Look, I'm not interested in a game of "there exist shittier people in the world, so I'm completely justified in being a piece of shit". The point is that many places have decided the visitors (both legal and not) are EVIL and treat them badly. And nowadays, the US is one of those places. Sure, there are even shittier places, but you have not expressed any problems with our current behavior which implies that you support the US being "shitty, but less shitty than the worst places". You and I have different desires for the Land of the Free.

Nobody cares about idiots wearing a billionaire's branded merchandise. The problem is that a number of people traveling to the US either for tourism or business have been stopped by border control for utterly pointless reasons and sometimes deported back home. Why would you visit a country for a vacation when there was a reasonable chance that you and your loved ones will be stuck in a "holding facility", then sent away, your vacation plans ruined?

And while the SCOTUS won't allow it yet, there are plenty of voters which would happily vote for "a death penalty for homosexuality". Remember when we were the "Land of the Free"?