No organization that takes actions due to genuine concerns about abusive behavior ends up with Lawrence Summers on the BOD - Summers is the dictionary definition of abusive behavior (and stupidly abusive at that). Something else was going on.

Understood, and yet every restaurant I went to in Australia printed the bill with a tip line and handed it to any USian they could identify in the party. So the idea is not unknown there.

Clicking through to the source article the vehicle in question is an MG. You can probably find similar stories from newspapers in the 1920s of MGs going rogue due to electrical system faults. Heck, you might be able to find stories from the 1920s of a prototype electric MG being unable to stop due to all the controls fusing and needing to be crashed to bring it to a halt. And in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s... all the way to the early 1980s.

So, someone finally got around to putting a big enough engine in the Douglas X-3 to get the job done!

Your unstated assumption is the libertarian one, that there can be no collective or societal agreement to set goals that "markets" are not achieving - because markets are universal, perfect, and always reach the absolute optimum socio-economic solution if "government" and "politics" don't "interfere". Whereas from Economics 301 forward - at schools other than the University of Chicago - we learn about market failures, cost of coordination, the corporation conundrum, etc. And some 'librul' schools even study the alternative economic models of social cooperation.to achieve optimum ends.

Which in part is being balanced out by increased solar generation. SoCal and Denver have both had many days in the last 2 years where they have refused sell-back from solar customers around midday; in future that excess power can go to EV charging .

Anyway, I left the electric power industry a while ago but I still keep up on the trade publications. Absolutely no professional in generation, transmission, dispatch, or long-range planning is concerned about future EV loads.

Do you commute 200 miles/day? Because before I spent the $1000 (less $300 rebate) to have a dryer outlet installed in my all-masonry house [1] I charged my PHEV with a regular 120v garage outlet. 11 hours if I let it default to 8 amps, 8-ish hours after I traced the circuit with my IR thermometer and found that it wasn't heating up at all at 12a continuous. I agree if you are driving 200+ miles/day regularly an EV is probably not for you today (a used Volt would be good), but then again you might want to look for a new job closer to home.

[1] more modern frame houses would be substantially less due to the much easier drilling and routing of cables

"As soon as all the minimum wage workers have to "walk" to work the economy is done."

Gaia forbid that the modes of locomotion that won the battle of production in World War II - walking and trolleys - come back into vogue.

Oh yeah: electric railroads between Minneapolis and the Pacific Northwest too.

"We don't know if there would be a better world if resources were invested differently, we live with what we have."

Yeah, without World War I driving the need for long-range heavy vehicles independent of infrastructure today we would probably be where we looked to be going in 1910: electric automobiles for in-town use, interurban trolley/trains for regional travel, and gasoline (later diesel) vehicles for rural/farm/construction.

Here come the listings of the extreme edge cases, generally involving towing massive trailers across country, and horrifying use cases/failure modes that no current EV owner experiences, to discourage people from evening considering an EV.

That's a really interesting question; I can't think of answer that doesn't include its own counterargument. Personally I would say NFT was a separate scam that used some technology from the cryptocurrency fraud world, just as the growth of the telephone network allowed the creation of scams that used the telephone but were not based on it.

Interesting to learn that our technology overlords can't recognize that what is currently being touted as "AI" is simply the next big fraud/grift/pyramid scheme, following right on the heels of "crypto". Good for the early investors in the company that got bought out I guess.

The idea of crowdsourced rating systems was great, and it worked for the first few years of that they were generally available. Then the 10% of the world's population that are grifters and just plain enjoyers of destruction joined forces with the organized pumpers and scammers[1]. As of 2023 one has to assume that every crowdsourced rating system is being gamed by from 2 to n parties for multiple purposes. If you are very careful you can glean a little insight from a carefully chosen few, but generally they are all

[1] and of course one has to consider the actions of even self-styled reputable firms. I have read several articles showing that upwards of 60% of the "local locksmith" businesses found via a Google Maps search are either (a) national locksmith chains with no local presence using phony addresses and phone numbers that redirect to a remote call center (b) just flat out house-theft-by-cleanout scams.

" Not because I think it's a good idea but because I want to hear the screaming of Apple fanbois"

Which right there confirms the suspicion that supposedly 'neutral' standards processes and regulations are being used to punished disfavored firms. E.g. the use of the GSM standards process (in many ways a good thing) to break Motorola's near monopoly on cellular technology and drive them out of the EU.

The various EU environmental agencies have done some good works, but this is not one of them. Apple has sold at least 3 billion Lightning devices and it has proven a vastly superior connector to any other alternatives the EU has pushed - I defy you to tell me if a connector on one of your global devices is mini-USB or micro-USB without googling an illustration, and of course you will always pull the wrong one out of your tangled drawer of various types. We won't even mention the hideous MicroAB Superspeed connector which was being touted as the "next standard" - until Apple released the Lightning and everyone realized what a disaster the EU-driven USB standards process was becoming.

Is USB-C better than Lightning? Potentially, but is it actually better in everyday use? Not certain. And was there justification for forcing Apple to drop the Lightning? I have yet to see any convincing non-circular analysis.