Well, yes, there are trades. But the data shows that non-degree workers *as a whole* are earning about 25% less than they were in 1980.

It's pretty easy to offer consumers a great deal when you're willing to dump wheelbarrows of cash into a furnace to do so.

You probably don't know any trans people personally. I grew up with the same beliefs about transgender people you have, until I actually got to know some of them. As impossible as it is for us to understand and as nonsensical as it appears to us, it's clearly not something most trans people choose.

It's OK for people to be different in ways we don't understand. Nobody has a duty to make sense to *us*. In any case, only about 0.6% of the population identify as transgender. Even if you completely outlawed gender reassignment surgery an gender-affirming care, it wouldn't budge the fertility needle even assuming trangender people decided to have children -- which they won't.

Of course, there's a counter example for any theory about people in general, so there's probably someone out there who chose it as a lifestyle. But that's just not the norm.

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

Also, employment is a lot less stable than it used to be. When I entered the workforce in the early 80s it was still common for people who were retiring to have worked for the same company all their lives. Young people now live in a gig economy; if they *do* work for a company, often they don't know how many hours they'll get from week to week.

And while things like TVs are cheaper than ever, essentials are often far more expensive. Median rents for a studio apartment in the US were about $250 when I got out of school; today they're $1200. If you have income twice the poverty rate and you follow the advice we were given back then to spend no more than 20% of your income on housing, you'd be looking to pay $483/month in rent. In most of the US even if you have roommates you'll be spending over $1000 per month.

Today it's more economically important to have a degree than ever. While wages for new college graduates have increased only modestly, wages for non-college graduates have dropped since the 1980s. Let's say you're thrifty and decide to commute to a state college. Your four year costs have risen from $3,200 to over $44,000. So families in their prime reproductive years are burdened with debt; it takes years to overcome that and to raise.

We often take poor families to task for being irresponsible and having children they can't afford, but the fertility rate in families below the poverty line isn't that high and it's remained steady for decades. What's happened is that the fertility rate at 200% of the poverty line has crashed.

Most women, with access to contraception and abortion, are doing what we told them is the responsible responsible thing. But if they *all* did it, it would be a demographic catastrophe.

He's an idiot. Overestimates the ability of the technology.

Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..

It works out to $638/per registered car.

You sure you're responding to the right person?

Funny that to you, "Israel" and "Jews" are synonymous. As if all Jewish people unconditionally support all actions of the state of Israel, even those which are highly controversial within Israel itself.

This false synonymy creates an extremely harmful backlash. Stop doing it.

One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

Ukraine is not free

Give me a list of Ukrainian prime ministers since 2000, and compare it to a list of Russian presidents since 2000 . Thanks in advance.

Even before the conflict it was the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe

This is not even remotely true. Ukraine's Rule of Law Index in 2022 was 0,50; contrast with NATO members Turkey at 0,42 and Hungary at 0,52. And its scores were dragged down by the consequences of the war in Donbas.

with a military second in size in Europe only to Russia (hence the poverty)

Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent before the current invasion was 3,2%, and that was *with* the ongoing Donbas conflict . By contrast, the US, at peace, spends 3,45% of its GDP on the military. For some European contrasts:

Azerbaijan: 4,5%
Armenia: 4,3%
Russia: 4%
Greece: 3,7%

Before the 2014 Russian invasion, Ukraine's percentage of GDP spent on the military was 1,6%.

ED: Just saw your second paragraph. But the things you speculate on are not exactly common on Titan, if they even exist on the surface at all (it's an icy crust ,not a rocky one). And either way, it'd be much easier with compounds other than methane.

And no, there doesn't seem to be meaningful amounts of nitrates in the atmosphere at least. You can see a list here. Nitrogen compounds are cyanide and nitrile compounds.