It was already quite bad before then, in one way at least. The Espionage Act (passed in 1917) does not allow for any public interest defense. That is, if you steal government information in order to show the American people that their government has been doing legitimately bad stuff and hiding it from them, information that the American voters really should have, you're just as guilty as if you stole it in order to aid the enemies of the US. I think this is a big problem, and it's one that should be corrected. I think if it were corrected, Snowden would return to the US and make the case that his acts were not harmful and were intended to be beneficial, and he might just get acquitted. Not sure about Assange.

Given that mines close for various reasons, preventing new ones from being opened will reduce supply. Maybe fast enough to keep the price from dropping fast enough to induce more demand -- possibly even fast enough to increase the price and thereby reduce demand even further. In the do-nothing alternative world, unless there was actually no financial incentive to open new mines, opening new mines would reduce price and induce demand. If there actually is no financial incentive to open new mines then Biden's action does nothing at all but generate some political goodwill among both greenies who want to see coal curbed and among those on the right who want to maintain the livelihoods of existing mine owners and workers. It will provide ammunition to Biden opponents who interpret any anti fossil fuel move as bad, but none of them were going to vote for him anyway.

Sure, but in this case we have a reason to want to accelerate the obsolescence.

AFAICT, no EV has an Internet connectivity requirement. They all work just fine without any connectivity. You lose some features without connectivity, of course.

If you know of any EV that actually requires connectivity, please share.

So... every EV purchased from China sucks significant value out of the Chinese economy? That seems like a good reason to buy lots of them.

I've owned three, and that does not accord with my experience. My experience is that they usually lose 2-3% in the first year, then continue losing range at a nearly imperceptible rate after that.

I'd love to buy an EV truck, but there aren't any on the market with a sufficiently large battery. I'd love to be able to tow my camp trailer up into the mountains and then use the truck as a power supply for a week or two (supplemented with solar panels on top of the trailer), then tow it home. But when I say "up", I mean "up", and towing an 8000 pound trailer up several thousand feet of elevation is going to take a lot of juice. My diesel pickup has a fuel tank that's large enough to take me about 600 miles when not towing anything and driving on flat ground at highway speeds, but my normal 20 mpg fuel efficiency drops to about 10 mpg when towing the trailer on the highway, and about 5 mpg -- or less -- when going up steep mountain roads. So my 600-mile tank is more like 200 miles, and that's enough, but without a lot of spare capacity.

So for an EV truck to work for me it will have to have a nominal range of at least 500 miles. That probably won't give me enough juice to run the camp trailer from the truck the way I'd like to, but I'm probably okay with that. If I have to drive down the mountain to the supercharger after a few days, I'd be okay with that -- we often make a grocery run once per week or so, and filling the battery while doing that would work well and since we wouldn't be hauling the trailer we'd get back to the campsite with probably 80% charge, which would be enough to run the camper for months.

That's just me, though. Other people have different usage patterns. But I suspect that once cost-effective EV trucks with 200 kWh batteries are on the market, they'll sell very well. "Cost-effective" being around $100k. Diesel trucks like mine already cost close to that much, and an EV would be a portable power station as well as a truck, making it worth a little more, as well as being cheaper to operate.

So it'll come, but currently-available EV truck batteries are too small.

EVs could even start acting like the hospital you mentioned, able not only to shed charging load when necessary but able to supply power to the home to shed even more grid load, or possibly even being able to feed stored power back into the grid.

Luckily, as was just posted a couple of posts up-thread, we have statistics for this vast country, and those say that about half of Americans have access to charging at home. https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...

By the time that half has gone electric, demand will have motivated nearly all apartment complex owners to have installed at least L1 charging and probably L2 in their parking lots. By the time those are all in use, public charging infrastructure will have been deployed sufficiently to address the rest.

This problem will take care of itself. But, right now, you should probably not buy an EV if you don't have a good way to charge it.

Coal demand is elastic. As the price of coal rises or falls, demand decreases or increases. This isn't true of all commodities, but it's true of all commodities that have alternatives. In this case, coal's primary use is power generation and there are many alternatives. A crucial alternative is natural gas, which produces far less CO2 than coal per kWh generated, and is also a better solution than coal for addressing the intermittency of PV and wind, which are the cheapest and lowest-emitting alternatives. Which is why at the same time the Biden administration is moving to reduce the supply of (and therefore demand for) coal, it is moving to increase the supply of natural gas.

This is a good and well thought-out strategy to reduce CO2 emissions at relatively little economic cost.

It's also a politically-savvy move. There is a very small but fairly loud minority in the eastern US that depends on coal mining for their livelihoods. Shutting down that coal production would be politically disastrous. Preventing the expansion of coal mining in the western US will actually help to prop the price of coal up. Propping up the price of coal will reduce demand for coal, but in the short term it will help the existing mining operations to remain profitable. Eventually those eastern mines will close, too, either because demand falls too far or because they are played out, but that's a problem for a future administration.

Personally, I think a carbon tax would be a better strategy, one that would require less direct government meddling with supply and demand and would harness the power of free markets to most rapidly and efficiently reduce emissions, at minimal cost. A carbon tax would also allow us to eliminate subsidies on solar and wind, and would likely make nuclear more competitive. But a carbon tax (and corresponding carbon tariffs, to prevent us from just pushing the emissions overseas) is politically intractable at present, so the government has to use these sorts of narrower and less efficient methods.

I think there's some punctuation missing:

"We take our customer's data, seriously - and value, their patronage..."

Maybe tack a Zuckerbergian "dumb fucks..." at the end...

In other IT-relevant news - their newest video is using the 300 ton press to make espresso...

...to mention that "Delta Emulator" is a Nintendo systems emulator for iOS?

There's that little known channel on YouTube that has a bit of experience with crushing things with a hydraulic press, and Lauri wasn't exactly thrilled by the ad either... :D

"Airbus" rebrands itself to "Airwolf" to cash in on that sweet 80's nostalgia...

Nah, you'll get even more stupidity. Trump is proposing blanket tariffs on everything from China.