I had that problem back in the day with an original Leaf, and its small battery. Would pop in to IKEA for some free charging and lunch, and my phone would notify me of the charge ending before I was done eating.

You would have less illegal immigration if there were more legal ways to immigrate. Not just work visas, but family reunion visas too.

Work visas need to be for more than just skilled people. Americans don't want to do the hard, unpleasant work of picking crops for minimum wage. That's fine, it's a choice, but you need someone to do it.

Then there's the fact that your whole economy is based on the premise of never ending growth, and your birth rate is falling. Either you start with the handmaid bullshit, you make up the numbers with immigration, or you tell the billionaires that they need to adjust to a shrinking economy while still increasing your wages.

Human beings are not machines, they do not produce a constant stream of output while they are working. Outside of simple manual jobs, at least. They get tired, they have lives outside the office, stress and overworking make them sick.

Turns out that 5 days a week is less efficient than 4 days a week for most people, i.e. they can get the same amount of work done in fewer hours if the duty cycle is reduced. It's a win-win - the employee has more free time and better quality of life, the employer loses nothing in terms of productivity and saves money on their energy bills.

It's main advantage seems to be that it knows where the pieces are on the board.

I've had ChatGPT forget the current state of things with other stuff too. I asked it to do some web code, and it kept forgetting what state the files were in. I hear that some are better like Claude with access to a repo, but with ChatGPT even if you give it the current file as an attachment it often just ignores it and carries on blindly.

In fact one bug it created was due to it forgetting what it named a variable, and trying to use a similar but different name in some new code.

Speaking of which, EV articulated lorries (big trucks) are a thing in Europe and seem to be working just fine. Norway has EV ferries too, some with wireless charging.

Once people own an EV and understand what the range means and how charging works, they tend to lose interest in hybrids. You have so many downsides - a whole ICE that you have to lug around and maintain, combined with a small battery.

To give you an idea, Bjorn Nyland does 1000km tests of EVs against a reference PHEV that he filled up with dino juice. The PHEV clocked in at around 9.5 hours, and the best EVs are under 10 hours. He hasn't tested the ultra fast 5m charging ones yet.

Most people will want a break on a 9.5 hour journey, so in practice the difference is zero. Charge while you get a coffee. Even the more affordable cars like the MGS5 and Renault 5 add less than an hour, which again is typically less than most people spend on lunch and comfort breaks.

25% VAT is normal in Europe. To be part of the EU or EEA you have to have VAT between something like 20% and 25%, I forget the exact numbers. It's on the high end, but not massively out of whack with what most Europeans pay in tax on cars.

As for it being a "small" country, it is physically large and has a fairly hostile climate. That makes it good for stress testing EVs, and they have proven to cope better than fossil fuel powered cars. In particular, EVs offer much better comfort in terms of things like climate control and noise levels, as well as driving better in low grip situations. Some of them charge faster than you can refuel a fossil too.

Most EVs in Norway are not made there, they are imported from elsewhere in Europe, or from China. There is no shortage of vital materials. The issues in the US seem to be largely because of Trump's tariffs and China's reciprocal limits on exports of rare earths there.

It's getting to the point in Norway where it's inconvenient to need fossil fuels. Pumps are being ripped out and replaced with EV chargers and battery swap stations.

That raises an interesting point. DVDs are encrypted, but for all intents and purposes are DRM-free these days because the code to decrypt them was released decades ago. Bluray is somewhere in the middle, the encryption being crackable but still needing some effort when a new disc with new keys is released.

From a right to repair standpoint, is it allowed to have some encryption that might prevent casual copying or cheating, but is also easily bypassed by repairers and archivists?

My first thought was that it is most likely an attempt to block exploits. The original Switch was exploited via flaws in external interfaces, so locking them down as much as possible is the obvious response.

The US government takes it seriously enough to sanction the university that did this. It has a solid record in this kind of technology, being involved in earlier hypersonic vehicles that it has been confirmed that China has actually deployed,

We defeated ourselves on this one. The scepticism is so strong when it comes to China that people dismiss everything. Then when it's driving past their house they claim it was built with slave labour. And finally they buy one because it's cheaper and better than what the domestic manufacturers produce.

Even the military isn't immune. Everything is an inferior copy and doesn't work, until in a few years time, probably in some export market, one zooms overhead.

Not just clamping down on emitting cars and bikes, and many of the bikes were already electric (lead acid battery) anyway.

They set a goal to dominate EV tech, and achieved it. They banned a lot of domestic and business pollution, particularly wood and coal burning near cities. Interestingly, wood burners are becoming popular in the UK again, as a "feature", and people are complaining about the pollution and massively impacted AQI.

China also invested heavily in public transport. They have more metro lines than the rest of the world combined, built in an incredibly short time. Forget Musk's crappy tunnels, the Chinese have refined the process to be incredibly efficient and fast, and put proper trains in them. Bus services (electric) are excellent too, and of course high speed rail. Again, more HS rail than the rest of the world combined, and they are now building ultra fast maglev lines base don domestic technology, which will probably open before Japan's does.

They also have the majority of the world's tallest bridges, and are able to build those at record pace too, which reduces journey times and the emissions from them, as well as making EV range even less of an issue (not that it is - they have 5 minute recharging and battery swap tech).

That that could be used to sue over the effects, or challenge refused insurance pay-outs on an "act of god" basis, that sort of thing.