I need a 300 mile range

This exists.

range and a 4 hour turn around

You can just about do that at home on AC if you have a good connection. It's only a 32A 3 phase connection.

I want to take the wife out to a movie in the evening after a long commute.

You want a 300 mile range, right? If you're commuting 250 miles round trip and then another, say, 50 to the cinema, frankly you need to evaluate your life choices. You're wasting your life on the road.

I don't think you read the article at all as none of this is due to loans from China. It's people acting in their own economic interest because these products replace more expensive alternatives. Part of it is funding through carbon credits which is a separate sort of idiocy, but the companies involved have built a viable business model around supplying something people want in a way that they can afford. The only involvement China has is that they manufacture much of the hardware and it's not some government directed effort on their part. To them Africa is just a customer buying what they're selling and both sides are engaging in commerce out of their own benefit from it.

Unless you have some direct evidence to refute the claims in the article, you're just talking out of your ass.

What's a metaphor? And before you respond I'm not inquiring about the usefulness of Facebook or any of the other products Zuck is pushing.

While a similar setup makes sense in many places in the U.S. there are too many parties (private and public) invested in maintaining the status quo who will never allow it to happen.

It's good to see Africa figuring out solutions to their own problems. No one else was going to solve them for them without getting more in return.

I own several Apple products and wouldn’t take one of these if it were free. This is for the sort of people who would buy a Gucci bag or something like that instead of this. The people who bought this are the people who only bought an iPhone for the same reason: it's a status symbol.

People not spending money is bad... how? This doesn't slow the economy any,

The economic activity is the movement of money, broadly speaking. Without spending of money there cannot be economic activity, so not spending is literally slowing the economy.

No one would play in the sandbox if they didn't think it was valuable. You may as well ask why there aren't more people trying to scam others out of Koolaid points. No one bothers to try to steal anyone's NFTs anymore for similar reasons.

A basic income isn't a magical fix to economic woes either. If poorly implemented it may do more harm than good. The best arguments for implementing one now is that it would be less expensive to administer than the current welfare state / social safety net.

Speaking of UKCA...

in my line if work is don't think I've had a single UK customer ask about it. CE is still valid here mostly and everyone still asks for CE marking. It's all B2B by the way.

But also since we can get away with just CE, why would we go for just the local one and have to recertify anyway for a bigger market.

companies started planning their exit strategies.

The strategy was so crystal clear, "brexit means brexit" after all, that companies had no idea even what to plan for. The bad ones buried their heads in the sand, the good ones wasted avst amounts of time and money having to cover all reasonable contingencies.

Naturally, in keeping with the entire theme, it wasn't just planning for exit, it was an utter shitshow of trying to plan.

you get a very disorienting "why won't it slow down" feeling, and it's easy to panic.

You don't always even panic. It's weird: if you do something in muscle memory enough, you don't consciously think about doing it. This is why driving etc is smooth because you aren't thinking about every action. When something breaks [see what i did there!] you at best get a creeping feeling of wrongness that takes a while to percolate up to your conscious brain.

I can relate a few anecdotes.

One typically dismounts a bike by first lifting your foot up off the pedal before putting your foot down. After an accident where I slipped off a pedal climbing a hill, I switched to toe clips, which require you to tilt your foot down then slide it up and out. Lifting doesn't work. First time I came to a stop, I toppled over into a puddle while hauling my foot upwards, but not even thinking about it. I wasn't panicking because I hadn't even noticed until I was at about 45 degees at which point I had a brief flash of "oh shi..." before landing in the puddle. But it's funny: lower level part of my brain wanted to lift my foot and just kept applying increasing force to match the requirement, but didn't inform me.

Next (harmless) was on moving to the US. I was driving along and then my partner asked me what was wrong, which confused me. She then asked why I was batting at the door. I had *NO* idea I was doing that. I'd only ever driven a manual on the other side of the road. Based presumably on engine noise etc, my hand was searching continuously for the nonexistent gear stick on the wrong side of the car. The weird thing was it was going all of its own accord. And because nothing had gone really wrong, nothing jogged my low level brain out of that loop, so it was happily searching forever, and my conscious mind was completely unaware.

Third was in winter, wearing heavy boots driving an unfamiliar rental canyonero, and clipped the gas with the side of my boot while braking. The car wasn't slowing properly, and the low level feedback control part of my brain just kept commanding more force, so I kept kitting both pedals ever harder. I got a creeping feeling of wrongness as the car wasn't stopping, but it's basically of the form "why is my limb not working properly".

I then rear ended someone, and I can't remember how I realised what the fuck I was doing. Anyway the guy was really nice.

Even if it is, and it certainly isn't, the growth is predicated on more electricity generation infrastructure being installed than the world can build right now. And that's all heavy industry, you can't spin up new capacity overnight. It's nonsensical.

Why do I get the feeling that it will be just like the last time where all of the people who were acting irresponsibly will get bailed out while the taxpayer gets stuck with the bill? Until the irresponsible actors are held accountable for their own behavior, they have no incentive to change.

How many non-technical users upgrade their PC? I expect very, very few...

Having lived with both systems, the US approach is just weird. You buy $10 of stuff, and the cashier demands...$10.70? Huh?

Of course, I do see the problem: different states, counties and towns in pose different tax rates. In countries with VAT this is not the case: VAT is determined at the state or national level.

It's inconsequential for the most part. If it went to Apple instead it would be spread out to shareholders through dividend payments. Large developers that are publicly owned companies may do the same themselves. Either company may invest the that money in something else which pays it to some third party that now has it. This only changes who is doing the distribution and who might be on the receiving end of that. There can be further downstream effects from this which may be more or less beneficial than some alternatives, but these can't be accurately predicted with any degree of reliability.

If the desired goal of the legislation was to reduce prices for consumers then it failed to achieve that goal. Saying that it's still good anyway just for other reasons is only shifting the posts.