What makes the researchers think there are any humans on these channels anymore?

But your home's set up isn't mainstream at all: the vast majority of houses that can have home charging do not need to spend more than 1k to get it. They don't have to contend with 250 foot cable runs. Although as I pointed out, in all likelihood, you don't have to contend with that either. Your problem is niche, not mainstream!

And we all know that won't happen.

The thing with fines is that all the people ACTIVELY involved have interests that don't align with the public and taxpayers.

The shops are ok with fines if they happen rarely and in manageable amounts. Then they can just factor them in as costs of doing business.

The inspectors need occasional fines to justify their existance. So, counter-intuitively, they have absolutely no interest in the businesses they inspect to actually be compliant. Just compliant enough that the non-compliance doesn't make more headlines than their fines. So they'll come now and then, but not so often that the business actually feels pressured into changing things.

You misunderstand wealth.

Most wealth of the filthy rich is in assets. Musk OWNS stuff that is worth X billions. That doesn't mean he as 140 mio. in cash sitting in his bottom drawer.

Moreoever, much of the spending the filthy rich do is done on debt. They put up their wealth as a collateral and buy stuff with other people's (the banks) money. There's some tax trickery with this the exact details I forgot about.

So yes, coughing up $140 mio. is at least a nuissance, even if on paper it's a rounding error.

The actual story that got buried is that the filthy rich are now in full-blown "I rule the world" mode when their reaction to a fee is not "sorry, we fucked up, won't happen again", but "let's get rid of those rules, they bother me".

These automated tags are about $15-$20 each. If you buy a million you can probably get them for $10, but still. Oh yes, and their stated lifetime is 5 years. And you STILL need an employee to walk around updating because it's done via NFC.

In many cases, there are modern tech solutions, but pen-and-paper is still cheaper, easier and more reliable.

It's not necessarily malice. What I mean is: They are certainly malicious, but maybe not in this.

Now THAT is a rare example of an actually smart law.

No government funds needed to enforce the policy, while the stores have an incentive to post the right prices. Why the max $5 though?

My grandparents and parents sometimes talked about how mail used to work.

Delivery within the same city within a few hours. The mailman would come to your house several times during the same day. Every day.

Telephones changed that. With phones, if something is urgent but not so urgent you go yourself, you can make a call. So the demand for same-day-delivery disappeared. Visiting each house only once means a mailman can cover more houses in the same amount of hours.

Privatizing mail delivery is an astonishingly stupid idea, given that what is left in physical mail delivery is often important, official documents.

250 is completely fine in an EV. I drive from London to Durham, which is 260 -- ie longer than your there-and-back journey -- it take five hours if all goes well. The car doesn't need to charge, but I do need a break on a journey of that length. I would not blink about jumping in my car and driving 125 miles, going for a hike, and driving home again, without ever thinking about the need to plug in either en route or at my destination. Just plug in the night before and plug in when I get home. Totally straightforward.

Obviously, some EVs have a range of way less than 250 and some have a range of way more. But there's plenty of perfectly ordinary cars that will take you 250 miles without blinking: Citroen C5 Aircross LR, Renault Scenic LR, Kia EV4, Tesla M3 LR, Xpeng G6 LR, MG IM5 LR, etc etc.

I don't really see why you need me to do this, when Google is readily available to you. It would be nice to think that as I'm going to this effort, you're going to concede that it is in fact the case that China has been innovating in basic battery chemistries, but we shall see.

Anyway, I am amazed you really need me to spell this out for LFP: it's quite a well-known chemistry, surely you've read about it? You know, cheaper, more durable, many more charge cycles, greater fire resistance, no M or Co thus no risk of conflict minerals, lower power density than NMC but not too bad, etc etc. Used in the R1T, the Mach E, the M3 & Y, loads of BYDs, etc

For sodium: there's been models in mass production since late 2023, including the Yiewei 3 and the JMEV EV3. Sodium's obvious massive advantage is that it's much cheaper due to sodium's enormous abundance cf Li. But there's also a lower fire risk, lower impact of extraction cf Li, no conflict minerals, many more charge cycles even than LFP, etc. But lower power density than Li chemistries
Example: https://www.electrive.com/2024...

For semi-solid state: the first mass produced car is the MG4 Anxin Edition. It's an LiM chemistry similar to the LMR chemistry you touted, but it's coming in mid 2026 in global markets, a full two years before the chemistry you described, and the production car is already finalised. You can read about it here: https://carnewschina.com/2025/...
Semi-solid is more power-dense than liquid chemistry and more stable.

I don't think anyone's ever tried to hide the fact that putting in a home charger has always had two costs associated with it: the kit and the installation. The all-in costs have always been 500 to 1k in the UK, which is not nothing, but also only a small fraction of the costs of buying a car (unless it's a really, really shit car). What we were discussing was whether your costs in your circs would be the typical 500 to 1k or would be that plus another 2500 for a long shielded cable run, and I think the answer is, there would be extra costs, but almost certainly far less than the 2500 you were talking about, because there's easier solutions than running that long cable.

But as I said before, it's going to be a very long time before you buy an EV anyway, if you ever do, long enough that battery prices will have fallen another 50 or 75%, so the car itself will be a lot cheaper than today.

It's quaint that you think the United States is still a republic. It's a monarchy, and Trump's handlers are likely moving currently to make sure that when Vance succeeds him, that the Executive branch and a Congress that will be, through the use of naked force if necessary, remain filled with Republican paper tigers to complement the paper tigers in the Supreme Court, settles into the oligarchy the Framers always really intended it to be. The military will largely be used to recreate the American hemispheric hegemony. The National Guard and ICE will be used as foot soldiers within the US to "secure" elections.

The morons that elected that diseased wicked and demented man have destroyed whatever the hell America was. As a Canadian, I can only hope we can withstand this hemispheric dominance and the raiding of our natural resources to feed the perverse desires of the child molesters, rapists, racists and psychopaths that have already taken control of the US.

Doubtless, I will be downvoted by the remaining MAGA crowd here. You know, the guys that pretended they refused to vote Democrat because Bernie wasn't made leader, but are to a man a pack of Brown Shirts eagerly awaiting the time when they imagine they can take part in the defenestration of American society.

> The far more sensible way to view things when living in an infinite thermal bath of energy separated from absolute zero by a high value resistance is exergy defined as the available energy to do useful work.

We do not live in an infinite thermal bath of energy. It is, in fact, very very finite.

Exergy is based on the environment; Specifically, if you take some environment and bring the energy to equilibrium. This will be important in a bit, because you say a very dumb thing...

> Say the Carnot efficiency was maximized at 100C over room temperature of 300k, that would be 25% or 1-(300/400) because it penalizes you for the heat you got for free, the 300C

And there is the dumb thing.

You definitionally can not use any of the energy at 300C because that's your rejection temperature. You're not "using 100% of the heat energy you paid for" not only because you did not pay for the ambient heat, you have no mechanism in this scenario to move it to a lower temperature reservoir (and extract work from it) because it's already the lowest temperature in your system - by definition.

So yeah I guess "If you change the reality of the situation you can get different results" is technically true, but means nothing. You threw out the word 'exergy' (as if it was wholly unrelated to Carnot efficiency?!) and then quietly completely changed the parameters of the problem to do some bogus math. Exergy is about bringing a system's environment to equilibrium, and you tried to redefine the environment from a realistic and practical "Earth's surface" to a hypothetical "The entire universe."

> The earth has about 400k volts stored between its upper atmosphere and the ground where we live, with a net charge against true neutral of only a few volts making the surface voltage 200,000 or so. Your absolute electric car efficiency therefore goes from 200,800 volts to 200,000 volts never using the remaining potential to true neutrality.

For someone who claims to have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, I'd hope you'd have a better understanding that the Carnot Theorem only applies to heat engines and thermal gradients, not electromagnetic gradients.

Understanding that all voltages are relative, and that it makes no sense to use the average voltage between the ionosphere and the Earth's surface when evaluating anything other than discussing the voltage between the ionosphere and the Earths surface, is also something one should expect from someone with an advanced engineering degree.

> But thatâ(TM)s stupid because the current never flows to true neutral and canâ(TM)t flow to true neutral because of the giant resistor in the sky

It's stupid because even if it could flow from whatever the fuck "True neutral" is supposed to mean (midway point that is arbitrarily significant?), you're still dealing with a gradient that's tens of miles long but your car is only several feet high. Even if you created a conductive path to discharge the ionophere through your car, you'd still only get a fraction of a volt.

None of that is relevant here though, because you' don't use Carnot efficiency to describe something not operating with the flow of heat energy.

> So saying a thermodynamic process is effectively described in absolute terms by Carnot is just as silly as saying electric cars are less than 1% efficient.

Well no, because Carnot efficiency is a well established principle of thermodynamics - a direct consequence of the second law - that actually works in both theory and practice, and the electric car thing is some delusional bullshit you came up with. Big difference.
=Smidge=

They're dragging buzzwords through the water, so see whether they get any nibbles.

Your MBA/PHB eats this shit right up.

Well, I am still on fvwm and I have been for the last 30 years. I see not need to go to any other desktop as it works perfectly well and is customized to exactly hat I want. There are tons of other good and sane window-managers out there.

KDE? Gnome? I could not care less. This is not Windows, where you can be forced to use a specific broken desktop.

That thing is a partially built wreck that cannot compete with X11 on possibilities.