Something which makes it easier and more convenient for people to file taxes cannot be tolerated.

Whatever it takes, you will pay. That is their goal.

You guys get that 4.3% is low unemployment, right? Something like 90% of the last 30 years have had higher unemployment rate than that. It's the participation rate that's dropping, and that's almost entirely a demographic issue... there are more people retiring every year than graduating. The labor pool, as a percentage of the total population, is falling. This was all known well in advance and has been talked about to death. Those lower 4.3% of the population... the vast majority of them are really difficult to employ. A small percentage of people show up work late, or get drunk before they come to work, or whatever, and it's that group that finds it hard to stay employed.

Yes. Watt peak. And it does, at least for me. Let's say I can get 120 Watts on average over 8 hrs at 300 days/year, this means that I can get 300 kWh a year. If I pay 20 ct/kWh, it will pay back my initial investment of $300 within 5 years.

There is nothing that forbids me to install more than one of those $300/800 Wp systems in general. But I am no longer allowed to just plug them into the next wall socket according to local regulations, and inform my utility after the fact. If I want more than 800 Wp, I have to apply for a larger system, and I have to get it approved. If for instance, I want 10 kWp, I buy 12 of them, costing me $3600, a power management system for maybe $1500, and I need a board certified engineer to approve the setup. At the end, I'll pay maybe $8000 for the whole 10 kW setup, but not $50,000.

If you're referring to the chargers, I agree. They have a bad reputation currently. But I think a lot of the effort and resources has to go into more generation and distribution infrastructure, which tends to be robust, but expensive and it takes a while. I do think the AI boom is going to leave us with a lot of unused electrical capacity, and I think that's a good think for EVs.

That's not what I claim. But for $300, I can halve my energy bill.

No, but it's not about being off-grid. It's about generating about 50% of the electricity you need over a year yourself - for $300.

...I can see this could be useful for preventing reviews that claim I can't spell or do grammar.

It needs to be opt-in, not opt-out - not only for fear of butchering an author's beautiful sentences, but also because some authors who self-publish in English are successful enough that publishers of books in other languages sometimes pay for the right to publish a translation. Those contracts are usually exclusive, meaning that the author agrees not to let anyone else publish a translation of that book in that language. If Amazon's AI generates one without the author's knowledge, the author could get hit with a breach of contract lawsuit.

Naw. Somehow, this will be Obama or Hillary's fault.

I work in the automotive industry. Two years ago the attitude across the automotive industry was that whole industry was switching to EVs and it was all expected to happen at a completely unrealistic pace. There was still a ton of charging infrastructure to build out, but the industry was expecting high double-digit growth and a rapid phasing out of gas vehicles within a few years. It was absurd at the time. Then a couple years later and the whole industry has flipped (yes, this has a lot to do with government subsidies and Trump winning the election) and now everyone thinks EVs are "dead". This is, of course, just as silly as the continual proclamations that the PC market is dead. In reality, the EV market will continue to exist and mature, and with a number of really promising battery technologies in the pipeline, not to mention a massive build-out of electrical generation capacity to support an AI future that's primed to burst for a few years, there's actually a bright future for EVs. Just not on the ridiculous timeline that everyone was thinking two years ago.

There's another detail that often gets missed. I don't know the details myself, but the way it's been described to me, mid-size pickup trucks fall into a category under the EPA or something which requires them to meet much more stringent environmental and other regulations that full-size pickups are exempt from, and at the end of the day it means that the price difference between a mid-size and a full-size truck was much smaller than it should be based on the amount of materials and extra functionality you get from a full-size truck, so that caused the auto-makers to discontinue most (all?) of their mid-size lineups. You really couldn't buy a smaller truck for about a decade or so. I think the last one was the Colorado.

That's a very U.S. centric problem. Apparently, the U.S. make it extremely cumbersome and expensive to build and own Solar, while I can go to the next departement store or to an online store and buy a 800 Wp setup for $300, mount it myself, and all the paper work I have to do is to tell my utility, that I have that 800 Wp system in place.

If we listen to the current rhetoric, every country is a direct rival. And the idea was that people who trade with you are seldom interested in killing you, because that would stop the trade they profited from all the time.

You are correct about the fascist project, but do you understand that if your alternative is a party (the dems) who have been vocally opposed to the free speech amendment, play with definitions in a weird way a la 1984 (they look stupid when asked to define what a woman is) and doubled down on cancel culture as a way to stifle political speech. So while I agree that Trump and his cronies are fascist, the other side only looks marginally better, and I wouldn't trust them at all. Yes, I would vote democrat, but they're pretty horrible too. I would easily vote a moderate left or moderate right party over either of these alternatives, and I suspect most people would.

Sorry. The matter densities lost their minus signs in the exponent. It's 10^-28 grams per cm^3 respective 10^-31 grams per cm^3.

If you read Fritz Zwicky's original 1933 and 1936 papers, that's what he actually said about Dark Matter.

Helvetica Physica Acta, Vol. 6, p. 122

An expansion rate of 500 kilometers per second per million parsecs is equivalent to an average density of rho = 10^28 grams per cm^3, according to EINSTEIN and DE SITTER. From the observation of self radiating matter HUBBLE estimates rho ~ 10^31 grams per cm^3. Of course, it is possible, that radiating plus dark (cold) matter put together result in a massively larger density, and the value rho ~ 10^28 grams per cm^3 seems not unreasonable.

As you can see, Zwicky himself coins the term Dark Matter as the place holder for non-radiation stuff out there to resolve a discrepancy of 1 to 1000. Better measurements of the Hubble constant, which at the time was estimated to be 500 km/sec per million parsecs, and is now estimated to be 70 km/sec per million parsecs has shrunk the discrepancy to about 1 to 5, but still, Dark Matter is exactly that, postulated stuff to make up for a discrepancy.