Can you name a new chemical non-drug that has made an important impact the last 20 years? I bet you can't.

I moved a couple times when I was young and stayed at hostels until I could figure out a living situation without being under pressure to find one.

I think you have it backwards. Corporations should prove that a new compound is unambiguously harmless before they can use it in consumer products. We are at the point of diminishing returns in material science, how much new crap do we need?

Quite. This is *exactly* what the "retching & gagging" audio emoji is for!

Oh, wait...

They still have these classes. My son took 'financial literacy' as an easy to graduate math class his senior year he says he learned more in that class than any other he's taken.

Sure, but a battery that would give just the cab 100 mi range would be a lot different than one hauling a load for hundreds of miles.

Yeah, there was 1,000 years to prepare for Y2K, COVID not so much.

Sounds like the fool from the OP is going to pay a couple thousand interest on top of the overpriced amount he payed originally.

It's 2024... you should be pretty embarrassed to be surprised about price drops on new gadget releases.

Why charge trucks? Trailers sit in berths for extended periods. Put the battery under the trailer.

They'll probably just use the MAC for the initial password because, as you say, the device has almost certainly already got a printed label with it on and it doesn't involve any special characters, so no change to the manufacturing process at all - just a bit of code and a documentation update. Equally, a hardware reset would simply reset the password to the MAC as well as wipe any config info, so no issues with generating extra e-waste, unless the device with shit to start with (we are talking IoT afterall).

It's a start, but MACs are 6-octets, and the first three of those are the vendor-specific OUI, so a dictionary attack is definitely possible without a mandatory password change on first boot if you can fingerprint the device, work out the vendor, then look up the possible OUI(s), and anything else they may have done - like including the brand/model name as a prefix. Three non-specific octets is ~16.7mil combinations, so well within reach of a brute force attack given even a modest amount of time & bandwidth. Of course, the chances are non-zero that unless they're also forced to use something with more entropy the user will just set it to something stupidly easy to guess like "password", but that's now the user's problem.

I always thought the best approach for electric long haul would be a battery in the floor of the trailer since they spend so much time sitting at their destination.

It's funny now Conservatives are the ones now that don't want to pollute the planet. We live in the age of techno-facism, if it's novel and new, it must be good.

You could chemically bond hydrogen to carbon and combine into long chains so it is a easily handled liquid. It would have great energy density too! Where is my Nobel Prize?

Don't PG&E have a cheaper rate option overnight? The math on green generator+battery combos isn't so much selling the excess for buttons, but that you used your free, locally generated, capacity as much as possible during the daytime peak rates, with any excess going into the batteries, then topped off the batteries at the cheap rate each night. Any shortfall in your demand against local generating capacity during the day is then drawn from the batteries, so (system inefficiencies aside) you're basically getting cheap rate electicity during peak rate periods.

For my UK supplier, there's around £0.20 per kWh difference in the two rates, so every 5kWh of battery capacity saves me about a £1 per day. A decent 5kWh modular battery pack can be had for around £1,500 so, allowing for some inefficiencies, RoI is around 5 years, and the battery packs are often guaranteed to last for at least 10 years, with some allowance for capacity reduction - typically to less than 80% with that kind of daily cycle pattern. The practical capacity limit on stacking the modular batteries is how much charge you can get into each stack within the cheap rate window, but you can run and charge more than one array of batteries in parallel if you know what you're doing. We currenly have a little over 20kWh of batteries installed and even with a PHEV our bill is almost entirely based on the cheaper overnight rate, rather than the daytime peak rate.