> If the election were today he loses.

but it isn't today and he won't be there come November

Where the rate structure is managed by an public utilities commission at a State level and things have to be planned out for years.

My apologies, it isn't 10 years, it was 5. I misread. From 2002 to 2021 the compound annual growth rate in electricity prices in West Virginia ranged from 1.76% to 4.96%. It was 2.13% for the utility that services my area. Citation here: https://www.psc.state.wv.us/Special_Reports/ratecomp_2021.pdf

States charge extra registration fees on EVs to cover that. For example, in WV where I live:

I'm not against paying for roads, the cost is covered elsewhere.

Well, no. In this case the popular fad came from people jumping on research results, albeit rather early.

15, based off of 20,000 miles per year of driving. ($2,000 of gas vs $600 of electricity)

But that's comparing a brand new car to on that is 9 years old. A better comparison would be to a used Tesla Model S from 2015/2016. I can find those for between $15,000 - $20,000 whereas I'm seeing the 2015 Honda Civic for between $9,000 - $15,000. So, say a $5,550 difference in price.

Same 20,000 miles a year and now we get just under 4 years difference. ($5,500 / $1,400 = 3.93)

Shelf stable, sure. Ultra-palatable, no. The way manufacturers make ultrapalatable is by putting copious amounts of fat, sugar and salt into them, all of which are fine in *moderation* but bad for health in excess. Ultrapalatable doesn't even mean nice to eat. Think "Cheet-Ohs"; you might enjoy a few, but way past the point you're enjoying them you continue to eat them compulsively, without any real pleasure. Real food doesn't work that way. Even if it's incredible, when you've consumed a modest quantity of it you don't want to eat any more. That's a *good* thing.

This is what I suggested is the extreme limit of what is politically possible, but it's not going to be easy. It's not close to how it works today. Additives are declared GRAS (generally recognized as safe), not by the FDA, but buy the manufacturers, and the FDA vetoes that if it has a problem with the data submitted by the maker. In any case anything in use before 1958 is grandfathered as presumptively safe. This includes many additives such as carageenan which are now looking like a problem.

Even if there were independent scientific review in the approval process, which there is not, the problems with UPFs are cutting edge science and wouldn't be grounds for rejecting an additive yet. There needs to be funding for new science to zero in on the problem additives, and that's not going to be popular with industry because many profitable products are going to get banned.

So the bottom line on UPFs is that if you can afford to do so, you should avoid them. But we have to recognize that not everyone can do this.

A 2018 Honda Civic has a combined MPG of 32. Meaning if gasoline is $3.20 per gallon (about average in US right now) fuel costs you $0.10 per mile to drive that car.

My Ioniq 6 gets 4 mi/kWh and charging at home is $0.12 / kWh. Meaning it costs me $0.03 per mile to drive my car -- less than 1/3 of what it costs you. If I were to charge at an EA charging station, our costs per mile would be about the same.

Gas prices can fluctuate daily. Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico or new craziness in the Middle East and you're prices could skyrocket in minutes. My electricity rates change once every 10 years, and I get advanced notice.

What?! Those numbers are backwards, unless you're driving a 10-year old tiny EV with a degraded battery. They're much, MUCH better now. My Ioniq 6 can go 300 miles on a full charge, which is about 4 hours at highway speeds (70 mph). Then a 20-25 minute rest and I'm back at over 90% charge.

And if you've ever stopped at a truck stop with spouse and kid(s) to stretch, go to the bathroom, get snacks, etc., then you know 20 minutes is about how long it'll take, depending on how busy it is.

Spoken by someone who doesn't own or understand an EV and charging. You bought a car you have to take someplace special to fuel up, and here's why that's different with an EV.

With an ICE car you go to the gas station for the purpose of putting fuel in your car -- gasoline or diesel. That's your reason for being there and everything else, snacks, restroom, food, is incidental. So you want to hurry.

Once a week I drive to Walmart and plug my EV in the fast charger. I then go in the store to shop and my EV is done charging before I am done with weekly shopping. The purpose is the shopping and the fueling the car is the incidental.

For everyday driving, at a gas station, you're waiting on the car. With an EV the car is frequently waiting on you. It really is a mental shift that is hard to make without experiencing it.

I see you've never tried taking a long road trip in an EV. It's really fine. You don't take long, forced breaks. The bio-driven breaks are adequate, though you may spend about five more minutes at each of the non-meal breaks, and 20 more minutes at meal breaks. The biggest impact of driving an EV is not the number of breaks you take or their duration, but their location. You stop where the chargers are, rather than somewhere else. Mostly this is fine, because the chargers are located in good places to stop.

For example, here's how my drive from Morgan, UT to Sequim, WA went last week:

Charge to 100% before leaving home (normally I only charge to 70%). Drive three hours to to Twin Falls, ID.
Stop for 20 minutes to get a snack and look at the river. Drive 2.5 hours to Boise, ID
Stop for 45 minutes for supper at a great little Argentine empanadas place. Drive two hours to Baker City, OR
Stop for the night at a hotel with an L2 charger. Next morning, drive four hours to Ellensburg, WA
Stop for an hour for lunch and to chat with a friend who lives in Ellensburg. Drive four hours to Sequim, WA.

With an ICE car, I don't think I'd have stopped any less, or for any less time. I could have; I could have peed in a bottle and eaten sandwiches on the road, and if you need to be that hardcore than an EV won't work for you on road trips. But if you make normal road trips, with reasonable stops for food and stretching your legs, it's just fine. And as long as people can charge their EVs at home, we really don't need that many public chargers, because road-tripping is relatively infrequent.

There are 82M detached single-family homes in the US, nearly all of which have at least one exterior outlet somewhere. This means there are at least 82M private "charging stations". Yeah, they're L1, but cars spend a lot of time parked at home. An L1 charger provides about 5 miles per hour, so with, say, 12 hours per day of charging that's 60 miles per day, or 420 miles per week. Since the average American drives about 300 miles per week, that's actually completely adequate for normal everyday use. Fast chargers are needed for trips, of course.

It's more indifference than malice. And the effect of regulating UPFs on the poor is going to be complex, with no outcomes that are both happy and easy to achieve.

What we're talking about is the product of technology that allows businesses to take cheap (and indeed federally subsidized) ingredients and transform them into ultra-palatable, shelf stable edible products on an *industrial scale*. This makes them really, really inexpensive and available to people who live in areas with low availability of fresh food.

If you calculated food inflation simply based on the foods that mainstream medicine and nutrition want you to eat, it'd be a lot worse. A diet of fresh, whole, minimally processed foods is expensive -- especially vegetables and fruits which are federally classed as "specialty crops" and don't receive significant government subsidies like corn or soy. Even meat is indirectly subsidized; it comes from animals mostly grown on subsidized crops. A recent study out of Oxford concluded that vegetarian diets are more affordable than omnivore diets, but to arrive at this conclusion the study included the impact of diet on medical costs. This kind of long term orientation is something you can't expect of someone who has to buy his food in a dollar store with very little money in his pocket.

The problem with visionary public policies is the unintended consequences. In this case in the name of improving everyone's health, some people are going to pay for that worthy goal by going hungry. To ban UPFs without providing for replacements that will be available to those people is just as indifferent to their welfare as leaving them to have to subsist on that junk. We'd need a moon shot scale program to make high quality real food available to people who are dependent upon UPFs to make ends meet. That's not a bad idea, but it won't happen in the US.

Since an outright ban on UPFs without such a program would likely be catastrophic, what we need now is a lot more research into exactly what it is about UPFs that is problematic. At present the science is convincing, but highly imprecise, starting with the definition of UPFs itself. Take emulsifiers, one of the most common class of UPF ingredients and important making industrial edible products ultrapalatable. They all pass FDA tests for being acutely toxic and carcinogenic of course, but it's beginning to look like many of the common ones, like maltodextrin, carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80, may be harmful to the gut microbiome health, which is believed to be a key factor driving increasing rates of obesity and diabetes. Others, like lecithins and diglycerides don't seem to be harmful, so if the science pans out it would make sense to ban *some* emulsifiers but not *all* of them.

Accelerated research, followed by surgical strikes against specific problematic additives is an achievable and worthwhile goal, because it benefits all consumers and doesn't harm politically powerful agribusinesses as much. Similarly efforts to subsidize the production and distribution of high quality food is something that could conceivably be achieved for similar reasons (it'll put money in the pockets of agribusiness), although there will be opposition to efforts to get that food into low-income areas.

Because that's what we ask of them. We want them to tell us whether a thing is good -- how many stars? Thumbs up or down? Seondarily, we really want them validate *our* opinions about a thing and get mad at them when they don't.

It's pointless. If you like something an expert's feelings about it shouldn't change that. And it's hopeless. A movie you can spend a tolerably entertaining mindless hour and a half on isn't going to land the same with someone who isn't allowed to turn off his brain. Imagine having to watch hundreds of movies like that a year and have to pay attention because it's your job. You'd be cranky about it too.

But there's another role a critic can play besides handing out stars for works of art. He can increase your enjoyment and appreciation of something, even it's something that you didn't personally enjoy. Maybe he can convince you a movie you didn't like is at least interesting. A competent critic can also help you understand why you like a movie, or see why it might not work for other people.

In other words, a great critic doesn't just validate or invalidate our opinions, he helps us make our opinions better informed and more nuanced.

The existence of a lunatic fringe in the movement unique to libertarians. Everyone has philosophical convictions, but almost nobody has been educated in with no engineering background.

People don't choose a political philosophy after an exhaustive and critical examination of the alternatives. They latch onto a movement that sounds emotionally appealing. So you've got to expect major blind spots when it comes to how they expect to be treated and how they treat other people. Every Utopian revolutionary movement promises liberation, probably sincerely, but they end up delivering a new set of opressors with different rationalization for their shortcomings.

If the current draw is low enough relative to the battery capacity, it might not matter. We should be careful not to extrapolate our most recent experience with backlit color LCDs to a device like this. In a transmissive color lcd panel, the backlight sucks the lion's share of power in the display. A reflective display draws only an insignificant amount of current, and still much less than a color panel when backlit. That's how watches run for a decade or so on tiny tiny batteries.

This is much more like a Palm Pilot from 25 years ago than a laptop. The tiny 3 watt hour battery ran the grayscale display of a Palm V for 20 hours of continuous use. Granted this is a much larger device with a higher resolution display than the palm, but we can expect it to have something like a 30 watt hour battery. Most users will probably go several days between needing a charge, which is not quite as long as an e-paper device, but a lot better than the smart watch battery life that consumers seem to tolerate.

The real wild card isn't the tech, it's human behavior. What the founder has done here is create a device that would scratch his personal itch. That's far from the guarantee there's a sustainable market for the device that entrepreneurs who operate that way assume. Will people buy it when it costs a lot more than an iPad and the pitch is that it does *less*? Will this draw pragamatists after they've exhausted the rearly adopters?