Over 5 years ago it was reported that 31 "national emergencies" were in effect including "The National Emergency With Respect to Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities" (April 1, 2015, related to Chinese cyber attacks).

I'm as concerned about Chinese cyberattacks as anyone, but the U.S. is supposed to be a free country and leader of the free world. If China were launching huge cyberattacks or at least a military buildup to invade Taiwan (and if we were still committed to containing "communism", which nowadays just seems to be capitalist dictatorship, but containing dictatorship is more important to me anyhow)... then I could understand taking some "emergency" measures. But I'm not seeing any emergency yet.

What are the other "national emergencies"? Let's see...

• Nov 14, 1979: The National Emergency With Respect to Iran, in response to the Iran hostage crisis.
• Jan. 2, 1995: The National Emergency With Respect to Prohibiting Transactions with Terrorists Who Threaten to Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process (the peace process where the US enabled Netanyahu to destroy both the two-state and one-state solutions and now people are being killed by the tens of thousands? That peace process?)
• March 1, 1996: The National Emergency With Respect to Regulations of the Anchorage and Movement of Vessels with Respect to Cuba
• Sept 23, 2001: The National Emergency With Respect to Persons who Commit, Threaten to Commit, or Support Terrorism was in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11
• March 6, 2003: The National Emergency With Respect to Blocking Property of Persons Undermining Democratic Processes or Institutions in Zimbabwe (an effort to punish associates of Robert Mugabe.)

you keep using that word. I do not think it means what the rest of us think it means.

Based on what? Musk's tweets?

Waymo and Cruise delivered a self-driving taxi years ahead of Tesla. And among level 2 cars on the consumer market Tesla is only middle of the pack. As for level 3 self-driving consumer cars, there's only one and it isn't Tesla.

Tesla was the first to put it in vehicles, and it's arguably the most aggressive in pushing the tech, but I don't see evidence that they're the best. And honestly, I think the reason is Musk. He's a smart guy, but he doesn't know ML as much as he thinks he does. Basically every researcher in the field thinks LIDAR is the answer, but Elon Musk's liked the idea of CV so Telsa is going CV only. And because LLMs are so successful he thinks he can do the same with self-driving, but neural networks are fundamentally probabilistic, which is fine for writing suggestions but not self-driving.

Just watch this review from a Tesla fan, too close to the curb, too aggressive making a left turn in front of a bus, missed a turn signal, crossed centre line when it didn't need to, waffles coming up to turning lanes, risked getting stuck on the train tracks. And that's in just 7 minutes of driving! You think they're close to full autonomy?

It's far from clear that Musk isn't pushing Tesla into a self-driving dead end.

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.

Tesla is a massive #1 in market cap and a dismal 14th in sales.

Traditional manufacturers have only started showing any interest in BEVs at all in the last couple of years. It's far from clear that Tesla could remain the #1 BEV brand when they start showing interest, it's also far from clear that even if Tesla maintains it's dominance that it justifies it's valuation.

It's more than 10 years ago that Elon Musk predicted that full self-driving was just around the corner. Now that multiple other companies have surpassed Tesla in self-driving tech he's onto Robots as his next pile of magic beans.

Car notorious for big gaps and other manufacturing flaws. Telsa's benefited from selling somewhat sloppy vehicles as luxury vehicles, but that won't sustain when other manufacturers jump into BEVs. And it certainly won't sustain when Musk insists on making himself into an alt-right icon.

As everyone has pointed out the article is click-bait. That "massive loss" is basically the cost of an unscaled R&D project selling only 10k vehicles, it's a completely meaningless number.

Or do you like the methodology and you think the Cybertruck should be evaluated by the same metric?

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.

What relevant characteristics of a "virtual town" do you believe make it different from a "company town"? In both cases these spaces are held open to the public. In the case of the virtual town public discourse is its express purpose.

The "platforms" clearly act as town squares.

The real world fact of the town square open to the public impacts balancing of competing interests. One can't simply declare their little public virtual town square is in fact something else when it isn't and therefore assert no competing public interest applies.

"Women over 40 have the lowest birth rate" shouldn't come as a shock to anyone

Older does tend to mean wiser, after all. Well... okay, for some people.

Destroying middle class has predictable consequence of tanking birth rate. News at 11.

"We must have constant inflation or people might, you know, save!"

Then... basics cost (a lot) more and mid- to low-tier wages don't even come close to keeping up

Brutal housing, education, medical, food, vehicle, and fuel costs, crushing taxes on the lower tier workers... gee, sounds like a great circumstance to bring some ever-more-expensive rug rats into.

The "American Dream" is deader than Trump's diaper contents for a large swath of those of an age to be pumping out crotch goblins. But hey: The stock market is doing Great!

Or perhaps it's just that no one wants to hump someone with their pants falling off their butt — or otherwise dressing like a refugee.

Obligatory: get off my lawn.

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..

You sure you're responding to the right person?

I don't see the relevant distinction between a virtual town created by a corporation and a company town.

The crazy thing is if you go to for example YouTube's website.
"Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world." sounds like a town to me.

It's hard to argue with this. Uncontrolled lawless immigration is a disaster on multiple fronts.

It further destabilizes origin countries whose societies invested in the education and upbringing of people who will not see that investment paid forward.

Lack of managed integration increases the chances of ghettoization and follow on societal problems.

It contributes to criminal enterprise and exploitation both in terms of smuggling and exploitive labor once in country.

Flows place strains on government and housing market dramatically inflating property values and with it massive financial strains on legal citizens who did not cheat the system for a "better life".

I don't think you can call it an invasion if you ask for more people and they come which is effectively what the US is doing through its policies.

The current policy of allowing asylum to be exploited as a backdoor to sidestep legal immigration has been around for decades with ample opportunity for both or either party to address it. Seems the donor class want cheap labor and while republicans will pound and scream from the rooftops about invasions they don't really want to fix anything.

I agree, if anything they should have merely provided the authority and worked it like OFAC. I wouldn't even care if they called it the TikTok act so long as they didn't single out a single company in the text of the bill that subjected it to unique criteria different from what any other company that could possibly be subject to the same legislation would be judged by.

This to me clearly isn't equal protection and while people can argue it's a foreign company it has local infrastructure, offices in numerous states and a market for content and advertising that very much gives it a legal nexus to the US.

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.