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.

I've been seeing tech demos of foldable screens for a decade or two, and the products with foldable screens just don't feel ready to me. A key thing about a phone is that it has to be reliable, and screen folding in current designs feel way too likely to break, with lots of little hinges and of course the screen folding in a sharp bend. I'm waiting to see how they hold out long-term in the field.

The one design that I liked in prototypes that's not made it into production is like a scroll, so instead of having the screen with a sharp bend down the middle, the whole thing rolls up gently. That feels less vulnerable to a failure, with no hinges and no screen fold. I wonder why they didn't make at least one phone with that design? Like this display, for example https://www.zdnet.com/article/... .

Wow, this is surprising. Anybody know what actually happened? The release is quite vague, which isn’t surprising, but it leaves me curious.

Satya Nadella fundamentally changed Microsoft. These days they know they are a player in a heterogeneous world, where they need to interoperate with non-Microsoft technologies. Heck, they not only include Linux (WSL) and Docker, they sell SQL Server on Linux! And they contribute to open source projects. It’s not the 1990s any more!

Inside the right wing bubble you might be upset by the idea that the world is multi-racial but the vast majority of us think that "woke" is a good thing, not a bad thing. https://www.usatoday.com/story...

I think that the TV shows have been better than the movies, because the lower budget allows them to take more creative risks. For example, both Andor and The Mandalorian were much better than the recent Star Wars movies, because they could tell original stories instead of essentially remaking Star Wars again. And similarly the MCU TV shows were much more creative and original than the MCU movies. That says to me that the problem isn't so much that creative folks are stretched too thin but that the movies are too controlled by the corporate finance folks. And they've been marketing Disney+ to the detriment of the theatrical releases. When people know they can wait not very long and watch the movie for free on Disney+ that's great for Disney+ but bad for theatrical ticket sales, which are a lot more money.

The connector is usually not the limiting factor, charging is usually limited by either how much power the charger can provide and how fast the car can safely accept it, where the two negotiate down to the highest speed that both can handle. And it changes as you charge - the more a battery fills up, the slower it can accept more power, so you typically see very fast charging up to 50% or so, then it slows down gradually, and the last 10% can take more time to fill up than the first 50%.

There's no license fee for NACS. Anyone can use it, either car or charger manufacturers, with no licensing cost. Tesla has offered to sell parts for companies that don't want to make or source their own (e.g. several charger networks use Tesla's physical connectors and cables rather than engineer their own), but that's not required.

The part that likely has some costs to it is that GM, Ford, and Volvo (so far) have API access so that they can make their mobile apps and cars do the identical things that Tesla's can, such as in-car and in-app routing to chargers, showing charger status, plug and pay charging to their GM/Ford/Volvo account, etc. I'd guess that Tesla probably charged those companies for the cost of implementing those integrations, and they're worth paying for to get the integrated user experience.

And, of course, when drivers charge at a supercharger they pay for the power they receive. No way around that.

Interoperability in Europe works a lot better - you can even "plug and pay" at most CCS chargers because the networks do cross-billing. So you can (from what I've been told) basically drive up to almost any charger and plug in and charge, and expect it all to work fairly quickly, same experience as Tesla.

In the US, the CCS networks have a 25% failure rate, because they're incredibly badly engineered and badly maintained, on top of which "plug and pay" doesn't work between charge networks, and the charge networks are highly fragmented. When I've used CCS chargers, it's taken multiple attempts (unplug/replug), phone calls to the vendor to troubleshoot, and driving to different locations to try to find a working charger. I've never had to do any of that at Superchargers. The issue isn't just CCS' physical connector (as much as it's not great), it's that the companies running CCS charge networks in the US were (IMO) formed purely as a money grab to collect VW lawsuit money and government grants, not to actually provide great EV charging service.

The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) is the standards body for NACS, and they're working with Tesla and the US Government to fast track the process. https://www.sae.org/news/press...

Yes, Europe got over the "chicken and egg" issue by picking a single standard, mandating it, and funding both deploying chargers and incentivizing EV sales and thus manufacturing, not just with money but with clear long-term commitments to electrification. So EV adoption in Europe is way ahead of the US, and the chargers are all physically interoperable with all the (recent) cars.

The US didn't do those things, or did them later and with less funding, so the car market is fragmented (CCS1, Tesla, CHAdeMO), the charge networks are fragmented, most of the charge networks suck, etc.

150 kW is slower than 250 kW, so a 15 minute charge stop turns into a 25 minute charge stop, but keep in mind that the large majority of CCS chargers are 50 kW, and compared to that 150 kW is a nice step up - the same charge at 50 kW is perhaps 75 minutes.

Moving from v2 to v3 means a different charger, not just the pedestal, so really you're not reusing anything much, perhaps the case. What I've seen so far is that Tesla just builds out more capacity with v3, extending the row of chargers, so you end up with, for example, 10 v2 chargers and then 10 v3 chargers. There's not much advantage to tearing out chargers that are working fine, they might as well leave them available in case people need them.