Jesus Christ. We already have unique identifiers from birth in the UK in the form of NHS numbers, and a National Insurance (not SSN, because we don't actually live in the states) from 15.5

This reads like it's being written with the full chest of someone who doesn't have kids. I quite like my kids to have a device that holds money, a map, a travelcard for the tube and buses, multiple methods to contact me and others, books, a camera, etc. I don't have a fucking conniption over fucking Insta, and there's more than enough pernicious behaviour that my kids get exposed to whether I want them to or not with or without social media

We already have NI numbers and NHS numbers in the UK, each of which is a unique identifier and a national scheme. This is in no sense an ID card

Well,yes, but also many parts of road haulage are electrifying faster than the consumer market (see also: buses), merchant ships run on heavy fuel oil, not diesel, about 40% of all shipping is to move hydrocarbons, and trains in many places are already electric.

Plus the point was orthogonal to mine. I wasn't making a claim about the comprehensiveness of electrification, I was making a point that purchasers are responding to oil and gas price incentives by seeking to insulate themselves from the shock.

You may want to support development. So that it, you know, does not go away. Obviously, that idea is altruistic and not everybody understands that concept.

She should have said "programmed" rather than anthropomorphizing it, but other than that, she's correct -- that is, in fact, how it is programmed to behave.

It depends on the density of the neighborhood. The preferred use-case for drones is "neighborhoods" where the houses are few and far apart from each other, making ground delivery tedious and making the distance between the drone and the nearest set of ears larger.

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.
=Smidge=

I never had any real problems with floppy disks. But I always bought quality brands, both for disks and for drives. There was a lot of bad quality disks and drives around back then.

One of the characteristics of shoddy / cheap manufacturing is that the products have large variations, sometimes with long rhythms. It is entirely possible that some factory produced "good" zip drives for a day or even several regularly and you got lucky. The thing is, good products have consistent quality. Bad ones do not.

The difference is the Ukrainian version does its job well ...

The whole thing probably needs a few more decades to work well. I guess somebody "important" had to blow up their ego and could not wait. Also reminds me of certain other projects, like some tunnels, for example.

As with my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
        "Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land? ...
        These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
        There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
      So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially ... irony. :-)
      So, how can we transcend militarism?
      Simple persuasive rhetoric was tried, and failed, when Albert Einstein said, with the creation of atomic weapons everything had changed except our way of thinking.
      The economic argument against war was tried, and failed; see "War is a Racket" by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler...
      A basic moral argument against war was tried, and failed; see Freeman Dyson's book "Weapons and Hope" that says nuclear weapons are a moral evil, like slavery.
      A deeper religious argument against war was tried, and failed, see "James P. Carse, Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game, SALT talk"...
      We even tried public education through TV to create an enlightened citizenry (what high hopes back when TV was created) and that even got corrupted into promoting and celebrating violence. See the book by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige "The War Play Dilemma" for ways to deal with that if you have children...
        So, people have tried, and tried again, and failed to turn the tide, both people in the military and people outside the military. Still, each attempt has contributed, but together they have not yet been enough yet to turn the tide and help the USA transcend militarism and empire.
      What else can we try that does not just beget more violence? ...
      Maybe ironic humor is our last, best hope against the war machines?
      As was quoted by Joel Goodman of the Humor Project...: "There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension. So we must do what we can with the third. (John F. Kennedy)"
      The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
      We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ..."

Your battery has way, WAY more miles than you're going to need. You can charge overnight on 110v to keep it topped up, but if you have a night when you can't charge, your battery will still have plenty of miles, and you'll catch up on charging over the course of a few nights or the weekend.

It's just not a big deal.

> 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.
=Smidge=