Sigh. We don't teach history anymore.

Those Great Plains you refer to were called the Dust Bowl a century ago.

Not gonna cry for US owners of oceanfront property. Sorry not sorry. You fenced off the ocean.

Dozens of feet? What will we do without Florida? Oh, yeah. Florida swampland has been a real estate joke since the 1920's. You can't be affected unless you spent your life accelerating climate change. I'm sure it will make a nice SCUBA park.

Other countries where they park their slums on the beach I might worry about. If the land goes down and the ocean goes up it's important to teach your children how to swim.

Menu bar isn't moveable, but it can be set to hide when not in use. If hidden it will drop down when the mouse pointer is moved to the top edge of the screen.

Dock is moveable, besides bottom it can be set to left, right. Dock can also be set to hide like the menu bar, and will slide on-screen when the mouse pointer is moved to the appropriate edge.

The menu bar and dock will also hide when an application is switched to full-screen mode; and yes, Terminal can be switched to full-screen mode.

I charged for free at a Volta charger today while I was shopping at Pearland Town Center mall. While the 48 amps @ 206 V isn't high-speed, I still returned home with more range (87%) than when I left (80%) for the mall.

I posted some photos of those units in this tweet chain a couple years ago.

Don't know about Germany, but here in Texas production for renewables:

• * Solar peaks mid-day

• * South (coastal) wind peaks evenings

• * West (inland) wind peaks overnight

See figure 5 on page 8 of Assessing solar and wind complementarity in Texas for a chart showing this.

This has lead to a number of utilities offering "free nights" electric plans to shift usage to the night - Compare Free Nights & Free Weekends Electricity Plans in Texas

I used to be on one of those plans - by scheduling my Model 3 to charge in the middle of the night, and learning how to use the delayed start feature of my dishwasher and washing machine, I was able to cut my monthly bill by 20%.

I've since installed solar, so no longer have a free nights plan. I now use Tesla's Charge on Solar feature to only charge the car when I'm generating excess solar power.

When I want to change what's playing in my Model 3 I:

1. press the right steering wheel button*
2. say "play The Cars"

At this point a song by The Cars will start playing. The voice command can include a specific song, such as "play Shake It Up by The Cars", or specify a genre such as "play metal" or "play jazz"

The Voice Commands can control a lot of things in the car.

* yes, despite what some people would have you believe, there are physical controls in a Tesla.

How do you think we can plug in our 240V stoves, dryers, water heaters, central AC units, and EV chargers?

This YouTube video goes into how we use a 3 wire split phase connection to the grid to get 120V out of that 240V feed.

The reason we do that is historical. Power plants prior to 1900 supplied 110 volts due to early light bulbs, which would rapidly burn out at higher voltages. We eventually had a large base of equipment using 110 volts. When the grid started supplying 240v, presumably to support newer devices that needed more power, they came up with splitting it for 120V to also support all that existing equipment.

As part of their advanced technology program, with the goal of creating green jobs and reducing the US dependency on foreign oil, the government loaned:

$5.900 billion to Ford
$1.600 billion to Nissan
$0.465 billion to Tesla

From Ford's plan to defer government loan payments a 'concerning sign'

2013 Tesla repaid their loan
2017 Nissan repaid their loan
2020 Ford requested and received deferment on payment

And let's not forget the GM bailout in 2008/9, which cost US tax payers $10.5 billion

Tesla Semi is the first of several vehicles to feature a thousand-volt powertrain

“You got three times the power than any diesel truck on the road right now. So you got all the power you need to get the job done. But the other reason that it’s a beast is because it’s also efficient. You can go 500 miles on a single change on one of these things. So it’s the mix of those two, that this is why it’s a game-changer. And what’s awesome is that both of those are enabled by our new thousand-volt powertrain, which is the first vehicle that we’re doing with that ,” Priestley said.

emphasis added. I've seen numerous comments that the Cybertruck and new Roadster will also be 1000v, but don't know if that's been officially confirmed or not.

Average renewables for the US is 20.1%

Feb 2022 article about 2021: Texas led the country in new renewable energy projects last year

Texas installed 7,352 megawatts of new wind, solar and energy installation projects in 2021, significantly outpacing California, which installed 2,697 megawatts of storage projects. Oklahoma, Florida and New Mexico were the other top producing states.

Texas also surpassed other states in the amount of storage it has under construction or in advanced development, reaching nearly 20,000 megawatts, followed by California at nearly 14,000 megawatts.

Current Generation Data from ERCOT, specifically the Fuel Mix Report: 2023 puts Texas electricity generation at 40% renewables (wind + solar) for the first 4 months of this year:

34% Wind
32% Gas-CC
12% Coal
11% Nuclear
6% Solar
5% Gas (without carbon capture)

They're an older less reliable model that can't be refurbished to the current level. That's part of why the no recovery attempt. It was either drop them in the ocean or slag them.

Obviously they wanted as many to reach cutoff as possible and not have so many on one side. So six out isn't ideal. But unless that caused the failure (unlikely) it's acceptable.

Note that each engine generates as much energy as a fission reactor in the volume of your car's engine compartment. 33 of them in a 9 meter diameter circle is a lot of thermal.