Those costs sound quite high. Level 2 chargers are around $400 retail, and if Amazon bought 17,000 of them they presumably negotiated a much lower price, and 240 40 amp lines are routine. Typical delivery van routes are on average around 125 miles, which means that they could easily charge overnight (8 hours) on a 32 amp charger (e.g. a 40 amp circuit). Compared to industrial power usage, e.g. for a warehouse full of people, with lighting, HVAC, and industrial equipment to power, that's not a lot to ask for. And keep in mind that industrial power costs on average less than half as much as residential power. And by definition EV charging is time-shifted, so they can charge at off-peak times when the costs are lowest, which has the interest effect of not only saving Amazon money, but by driving the base load up and reducing the need for peaker plants, making electricity cost less for _everyone_.

And if you're adding up costs, add up the savings. EVs on average cost half as much to maintain, and a quarter as much per mile to fuel, as gas or diesel trucks. I suspect that the savings rapidly offset the costs of installing cheap AC chargers and powering them, heck, the savings when I've looked at it for fleets offset the purchase price of the trucks surprisingly quickly, maintenance and fuel for large fleets really adds up! .

Where did they get the idea that "Our societies have not previously tolerated spaces that are beyond the reach of law enforcement, where criminals can communicate safely"? One-time pads have been completely secure since they were invented in 1882. And, of course, people have always been able to go somewhere isolated and talk with each other face-to-face without any police around. The idea that police have a right to monitor all communications between anyone anywhere isn't reality-based. Are they going to require criminals to record all private conversations just in case police want to listen in?

And no matter what the police demand, criminals could just use end-to-end secure communications anyway, because there are many end-to-end encryption systems already, and nothing the police demand will change that, once software exists, it'll continue to exist. Heck, PGP exists, so criminals could just use that, and ignore whatever the police do to destroy global security, and the criminals would still be secure from the police, it'd just screw things up for everyone else using the insecure communications channels the police prefer, so they can destroy secure global commerce, but not impede the criminals at all.

The tracking was fine. The only 'error' was in that police not using common sense and checking the device's location more precisely after they got there, in which case they would have found the headphones in front of the house, and de-escallated instead of smashing the door down and ransacking the house. Sure, they should be careful when potentially dealing with armed criminals, but ransacking a house when the occupants aren't said armed criminals is foolish.

Nope. Both Apple and Android have tracking tags, and similar find capabilities. And beyond that, Apple and Google are coordinating on a unified standard for trackers, so that both iOS and Android devices will 'find' both Apple and Google tracking tags. https://www.apple.com/newsroom... .

The airpods were in a vehicle stolen by armed carjackers, with "firearms, ammunition, holsters and other firearm-related material". The mistake wasn't in going to the house prepared for armed criminals, the airpods being there is a reasonable clue to follow up on, the mistake was in not de-escallating as soon as they saw that the car, weapons, carjackers, etc., weren't there.

Phone booths have been replaced by cell phones

Ah, but a homeless person cannot hide from the rain in his cell-phone! Ergo, we must fund the phone booths!

Paper books replaced clay tablets and should be saved.

Saved by the government?

What will completely replace AM radio?

Replace in what?

If not radio waves

Oh, it would still be radio waves, I'm sure. WiFi, LTE....

You do realize that the entire population of Israel is not superstitious

Superstitions — like fears of number 13 and black cats — are what people resort to, when religion is taken from them :-)

Many Israelis don't give a flying fuck what rabbis say.

Most care, though.

What you could've pointed out is that it is not wrong for observant Jews to produce non-Kosher foods — as long as they don't eat them. That would've been a valid point.

But you didn't — such was your urge to attack the religious, it blinded you to anything else :)

The eel meat was produced by Forsea Foods in Israel

The rules of Kosher are simple: if it lives in the water, it must have scales to be edible. This excludes eel (as well as crab, lobster, oysters, sturgeon and catfish)...

Now lab-grown could work — because it is fake — but, given rabbinate's earlier refusal to approve fake pork, I doubt, they'll approve fake eel either. Then again, fake crab is fine — because it is made from regular (scaly) fish...

So there is no material difference between receiving a piece of information and receiving ALL information

I don't see any such difference. Do you? If so, can you describe it — well enough to make it possible to outlaw one without outlawing the other?

What else should the government save? How about:

• Phone booths
• Telegraph service
• Cable TV (emergency broadcast system uses it too!)
• Horse-drawn vehicles
• Paper books (and clay tablets)

Anything else?

And the article also points out that one of those early Unix desktops "is still alive, well ...

My XFCE4-desktop is awesome, thank you very much. Last uptime was 386 days — and it only went down, because the video card's fan stopped working...

Firefox, Thunderbird, and Libreoffice have to be recompiled on occasion, but that's nothing compared to the forced biweekly reboots my corporate desktop is undergoing — running the OS, that is alleged to have "won"...

The government isn't paying a witness. It's buying information to find a crime.

Nonsense. Paid informants would often alert police to crimes, that cops didn't know about either.

linked to life experience

I'm not that old :-)

Read the article that your link points too.

My link points to the story of one (in)famous paid informant. Christians — and all of the Founders were such — universally disapproved of the man, but the practice of paying such people for their aid to law-enforcement was not banned by them.

Exactly, as he said it was unimaginable that a private entity could harvest this information. Yes at great cost for one person, completely unimaginable to do it for the entire population, even the paper to write it down would have bankrupted them.

It was just as unimaginable for a government — any government — to amass it too.

Yet, the concept of using paid informants was known for millennia — and none of the Founders thought about forbidding their use.