Electrifying transport will probably require the construction of new power plants (or residential solar). This is a good thing, since those sources can be made zero-emissions.

Trucking is absolutely an issue and is a huge opportunity for electrification. It's something of an ideal use case: batteries are heavy, especially the cheaper but more durable LFP ones. But semis really don't care about a few thousand extra pounds of battery. Meanwhile diesel semis are severely limited by engine power going up hills. But it is easy to make a very high power electric drivetrain. Likewise, trucks have problems sustaining braking force in long downhills, which is not a problem if it can all be absorbed by regen.

I found a listing for a used plug-in Toyota Prius at a Mercedes dealership. It was right next to a Tesla showroom.

I drove out there to testdrive the Toyota. Its battery wasn't charged (meaning I could only test-drive "gas burning mode"), despite the fact that it was literally parked twenty feet away from their Level 2 charger. (After my testdrive I had to ask the guy -- "so, can I charge it?") If they can't even bother plugging the thing in (knowing that I was coming!), they clearly don't want to (or know how to) sell electrics. I imagine their electric-only model on the showroom floor was charged -- probably.

Meanwhile, they had a bunch of Mercedes cars everywhere, including an electric. I wound up buying the Toyota (got it for $18k and it's quite nice), but my jaw hit the floor at the sticker prices for the Mercedeses. So I asked the dealer: "What are people getting if they buy an $80k car from you? Those don't look four times nicer than this one I just bought; what makes them worth four times as much?"

The guy goes "er, um ... they're very quiet! But actually I used to sell Hondas and Honda/Toyota make more reliable cars than Mercedes does. So really you're just getting more quiet." But then my mind went to the Tesla place next door -- if I wanted to spend a lot of money on a "nice car", Tesla would have sold me a very nice Model 3 for way less than $80k.

I don't drive a Tesla but I do drive around mostly on electrons.

The electricity comes from a nuclear reactor up the road that makes approximately no pollution.

Nuclear power is profoundly, incredibly safe by any comparative standard. Brushing your teeth is probably more dangerous than nuclear power.

But the people who *do* drive EV's in the very cold places in Norway and Canada are generally fine. People with EV's report them being fine down to very cold temperatures; the thing that fails is often the auxiliary 12V battery, which also fails in ICE cars.

What happened here has been misstated a bit.

The pile-up at the superchargers involved a lot of Uber drivers who had been using them -- not necessarily apartment dwellers. And a lot of those folks weren't especially familiar with the cars.

Cold does three things to batteries: 1) it dramatically reduces the rate at which they can be charged, 2) it reduces the voltage they will supply at any given state of charge, 3) it creates increased demand for their energy to heat things up.

As the experience of a ton of Canadians and Norwegians shows, Teslas and other EV's are fine in the cold. They can use the stored energy in their battery to warm said battery up, then go on about their merry way doing whatever they would do. If they're plugged in to a slower charger, they can even pre-warm the battery in preparation for departure. When it's moderately cold the waste heat from the motor/inverter/battery is enough to keep the battery warm; when it's extremely cold the battery needs to supply some extra power to do this.

The problem here was the charging side. These batteries charge slowly in the cold and need to be preheated or "preconditioned" -- it prefers to be at 50 Celsius for fastest charging. I believe on Teslas you do this by putting a Supercharger address into the car's sat-nav, and it will figure this out and time the preheating so it's ready to charge when you get there.

The trouble is that people showed up at the Supercharger not knowing to do this. So they plug in, their battery's at -20C, and it is charging VERY slowly until it gets heated up.

Meanwhile there's a line of people waiting in the cold. Some of them probably properly preconditioned their batteries -- which is the right thing to do if you're about to connect to the Supercharger. But they get there and all the plugs are taken up by people charging at 5 kW with frozen batteries. Theirs are nice and toasty, but they are waiting in line to get there ... while continuing to expend energy keeping their batteries at temperature. At some point they have to either turn off preconditioning or run out of energy, leading to a cascade failure.

This could have been solved with either better education about preconditioning or access to more plentiful slower ("Level 2") chargers. I don't know how those are in Chicago, but there are a zillion where I live in Syracuse.

This is not the problem Steam is trying to solve, though. It's like complaining that your car doesn't tell you where would be a fun place to go on vacation.

Steam is not a platform for marketing. It's a platform for distribution.

I don't know people who go to Steam and click around on their storefront to try to find a game to play. Instead people learn about games by other means, go to Steam, and buy them.

Steam doesn't really suffer from having sub-par games on there. If the people who upload them pay for the cost of keeping them around (that $100, I guess), what's it to me?

Or we could just keep calling it twitter, regardless of the desires of the Chief Twit.

There are some surprisingly competent integrated GPU's out there. AMD has some RDNA3 ones that really aren't bad. Same with Apple's.

They're not a Nvidia 4070 but they're definitely fine for what they are.

The only OS's that are just OS's are the ones you don't pay for.

I didn't pay for Fedora, but it treats me with a hell of a lot more respect than the Windows 11 my dad *did* pay for.

Interestingly, my parents are both non-techie people. But I wind up doing a vast amount of phone tech support for my dad's Windows 11 box. My mom's Fedora laptop, on the other hand, just works for her. Linux has now surpassed Windows as an OS for ordinary folks who want a machine that just works and doesn't do stupid shit.

Yes -- they've replaced it with fuckall.

It turns out we *do* have an enterprise license for CC. But logging in (which of course involves a lot of slow web-things and clicking through license agreements and dismissing popups and other such nonsense) while students are asking me stuff and I'm also trying to set up the room audio and juggle demonstrations is ridiculous.

Tomorrow I am bringing my own laptop and doing "okular lecture2.pdf" and that will be that.

Microsoft learned those lessons very well: it's fine to do shady things if you bribe the right people.

That last one -- corporate edict -- is exactly the problem.

I go into the auditorium to teach my 600 student class. There is a computer connected to the projector. I download my slides (in PDF format) onto its desktop and doubleclick to open.

It opens in Edge. Nope -- that won't work.

I right-click it and open in Adobe Acrobat. Our IT folks have removed Acrobat Reader from all the computers. And Adobe Acrobat wants me to log in to my "Adobe Creative Cloud" account. I don't have one of those...

Legal is whatever you can get the government to not prosecute you for.

It was not legal in 2000 when Clinton was president. It became legal in 2001 when Dubya became president and has been legal ever since.