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.

I have been able to "smarten" dumb appliances by plugging them into smart power switches. For less than $8 each I bought a couple boxes of smart switches from Amazon, then reflashed them with Tasmota -- no more cloud! -- and joined them to Home Assistant. Now any device I want to be smart, I plug it into a smart switch and monitor the power.

One of my scripts monitors the power draw on my dryer, and when it goes above 100W for a minute then drops below 10W for 15 seconds, it knows the cycle is done and alerts us to go down to the basement and take out the clothes before they wrinkle. A similar script monitors the washer.

The refrigerator's plug has a script alert me when the average daily power draw is higher than normal. I added that after my son called me from his most recent vacation and said "my refrigerator is using more power than it should, can you go check it?" Sure enough, their freezer door had been left open by their toddler. Of course the food was already thawing, but we cleaned it out a week before they would have come home to a house full of rotted food stench. And before you ask, yes, when I installed Tasmota I configured the switch to be "always on", so that even if Home Assistant thinks it would be a good idea to shut off the refrigerator's power, it can't.

I also have a small water pump on a smart switch. Normally the pump draws 36W, but when it runs dry it draws 30W. Now if the power consumption drops below 33W and stays there for a few minutes, it shuts off the pump and alerts me that the water is low.

So I get what I need -- timely information about the equipment in my home, automated reactions when things go bad that might keep things from getting worse, and no cloud involvement from any sleazy appliance manufacturers. And an $8 plug is a lot cheaper than paying a $400 premium for a "smart washer".

Tuya's become a nightmare to deal with. They've decided they fear local integrations because they're losing ad revenue when people don't use the Tuya app. They have been going to progressively greater lengths to prevent device buyers from bypassing the Tuya servers and running their stuff locally.

My understanding is you can no longer register for a free Tuya developer account that lets you set it up with the "Local Tuya" integration for HomeAssistant -- you have to have a paid developer account, if it works at all. And their libraries used to flash right onto an ESP32, but now they're encouraging developers to more secure chips, in an attempt to prevent end users from reflashing their own devices with firmware (like Tasmota) that no longer communicates via Tuya services.

I wouldn't buy anything Tuya with the hopes that it will someday integrate with anything else. If you buy them, expect them only to work with the official apps.

PKIs were designed for offline use. There are a couple hundred trusted Certificate Authorities that each issue a "root" certificate. These root certificates are distributed worldwide, in browsers, operating system distros, phones, etc. When you encounter a certificate in the wild, you have to verify the certificate before accepting it, which is done by checking what you can locally: is it expired? Does its DNS name resolve to the name on the cert? Does it have a valid signature? This means checking to see if it was signed by a CA certificate that you already have in your local trust store; if so, you can accept it without going online.

Not to say that the online component of certificate validation isn't important, but it's of varying importance depending on the risk level. When online you should check for certificate revocation, which is to check to see if a previously issued certificate has since been flagged by the CA as compromised and revoked. This can be done by looking for it on a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) published by the signing authority, or by querying the authority's Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) server. But it's an optional step, and can be skipped in low-risk situations (such as being offline.)

*the most expensive MSRP allowed is $55,000. MSRP cannot exceed that amount to get the $7,500 refund.

https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/ta...

The list of Electric Vehicles Assembled in North America that hasn't hit manufacturer caps is pretty short and excludes all the models I'm interested in:

https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/e...

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.