Lightnings are super popular around here with contractors. They spend most of their time driving around to sites doing estimates or doing supervision. Occasionally they need to haul or tow something. Lightning is pretty much perfect for that use case. The ones with diesel trucks often leave them sitting around idling with the air conditioning on all too much.

Not to mention, "maximising share holder profit" is subject to judgement and interpretation, especially with respect to the Buxton Index (the time horizon over which an entity makes plans).

It's very common for companies, even big tech companies like Amazon, to say "we are deliberately going to show lower profits this quarter because we are planning to maximize profits over a longer period of time". This is so common as to be universal. You can just as easily say "We value our company's reputation and believe in our strategy, so we are not going to engage in (unethical practice X) because we legitimately believe it's in the best interest of the company long-term".

This is not to say that moral hazards exist, and most of those moral hazards can be blamed on regulatory environment that creates them. But whenever somebody says "we have no choice but to maximize quarterly profit", it normally translates to "I get a bonus next quarter if quarterly profit is up, and I don't care what happens to the company in 5 years because I'll be gone by then".

So then you keep using diesel trucks on those types of routes then?

I'll never understand why, on a site supposedly full of tech people, the constant framework of technology adoption is that any new technology must be capable of completely displacing all other technologies in all other uses cases, or else it's worthless. That's not how literally any technology adoption has ever progressed in human history.

European trucks are significantly more capable than American ones. American trucks really haven't technologically advanced at all. The last advance was when Detroit Diesel introduced electronic engine management in the 90s.

The US maximum gross weight is 80,000 lb, while the European standard is 88,000 lb, with categories up to over 200,000 lb.

Higher-power European (diesel) trucks also have more power, with up to 770hp, whereas US trucks rarely go over 600hp.

European trucks are also more aerodynamic (counterintutively), and also have more advanced tires and axles, so they get better mileage on a per-truck basis. But this is even more important on a per-ton basis, because weight doesn't make a huge impact on efficiency compared to aerodynamics. A European truck might get 8mpg hauling 88k pounds, vs. an American truck getting 7mpg hauling 80k pounds, for 30-50% more efficient per ton. All of this with lower emissions too.

Not really defending California, because their housing policies are broken and that's easy to see. Prop 13 should be considered one of the worst laws in the history of the country.

But housing and transportation are linked, and always have been. That's why cities and villages are built along rivers. That's why, including in California, companies used to build streetcars...then they would build houses along the streetcar lines. And often they would do a rugpull and fail to maintain the streetcar, but that's another story.

Legitimately, investing in transportation, almost directly, is also investing in housing.

"they" did consult with SNCF (the French national train company), and SNCF told them to build a train between LA and SF. I.e. connect the biggest population centers. That's the logic in places like France: You build where you will serve the most people possible, sell the most tickets possible, get the most ridership possible, for the shortest distance, and then you build out from there.

For better or worse, that logic doesn't work in America. The American logic is: LA and SF already have (limited) rail connections, but other cities in CA are completely unconnected by rail. Also, I5 is an infrastructure crisis, because it's completely overloaded and there's no solution, and a train between LA and SF wouldn't do anything to solve the I5 crisis. Also, America has broken land policies, and acquiring land between LA and SF is just impossible. Also, taking tax money from the whole state and spending it on infrastructure only for in the biggest cities, isn't politically popular. In France, it's just understood that cities get more amenities than rural areas, and that's the way it is. But in America, we like to shovel pork projects at our rural areas out of some kind of sentimental obligation to prop them up. So you have to bribe rural areas and secondary cities to get things done.

So, for better worse, the voters of California approved CAHSR only on the condition that it connect the inland cities. There's a legitimate logic to it. It's just American logic and not French logic.

And the BYD flash chargers include buffer batteries, so the power load on the grid isn't all that high compared to regular DC fast chargers, or even lower in some cases.

Run my dryer (7200W). Charge my car (9600W). Set my thermostat to crank up my AC to super-cool my house so I can reduce my AC use later (8400W).

Also LynxOS, which is used in some semiconductor tools.

A few months ago when I was in Phoenix, when there was a high demand during some downtown ballgame, I requested an Uber through the Uber app in the usual way. After waiting longer than usual, instead of a normal Uber, a Waymo car showed up, sub-contracted THROUGH Uber. In other words, Uber hired a Waymo to fulfil my ride request.

I'm comfortable riding in Waymos, so I was OK with that (bonus IMO), but this could be annoying for people who are not comfortable riding in robotaxis, to have a robotaxi shoved at them without notification. It looks like we aren't far from a future where even people who try to avoid robotaxis won't be able to, because companies like Uber are just going to start using them.

American codes also have healthy safety margins. Wire sizes are approved based on worst case assumptions, and are often sized based on maximum tolerable voltage drop (i.e. lights dimming when you run the microwave), rather than concerns about wire overloading.

The risk is there, but assuming the devices are limited to a certain size, the risk of wire overloading should be minimal.

More precisely, rural electrification in the US is largely the product of the REA (rural electrification administration) created by FDR during the new deal. It offered financing, blueprints, and technical advice, but did not actually perform electrification. It encouraged formation of user-own co-ops, most of which operate to this day. It also did very little in the way of subsidies or public ownership or investment, beyond providing financing. It's a model that works and should be repeated, but just because it was "federal help" does not imply that all federal help is good or smart.

The modern approach of stimulating development by handing out public money is very problematic. One, because we can't balance the budget and we don't have the public money in the first place. Two, either there aren't enough strings attached so it becomes corrupt (like broadband subsidies that disappear into a black hole), or there are too many strings attached and the money never gets spent or it becomes a different kind of grift (like the NEVI which allocated billions of dollars but only a tiny fraction of chargers were built even many years later).

The government is bad at executing. If the government wants to encourage EV adoption it should do something like the REA and encourage the formation of co-ops and private charging companies by paving the way for them, removing regulatory barriers (not adding a thousand like NEVI), and promulgating standards and blueprints.

That's a good point. Nintendo switch uses SD cards in a special cartridge.

It's disappointing that there was never any good high-resolution physical video media. Unlike CDs, which were good enough for eternity, DVDs fall short for video.

No, HD-DVD and Bluray don't count...both of them were too expensive, too limited and too encumbered by the format war between them, and never became as attractive as DVD. DVD is popular because it's cheap and easy to work with, but it's held back my the legacy MPEG2 codec requirements of the DVD format.

All the world really needed or wanted, was simply an incrementally updated "DVD2" format, that leverages modern codecs to put high-definition content on existing, dirt-cheap DVD-9 discs...giving us 9GB of high-definition video on cheap, reliable commodity hardware, backward compatible with existing DVDs, and then we would be good with that forever, just like we are good with audio CDs forever...but we can't have nice things because mega media corporations, copyright and patent law, and lobbying, so BluRay and HD-DVD will both die, and there will be no suitable final form physical video format.

There have been university-level demonstrations where people unroll Scotch tape in a vacuum chamber and generate enough X-rays to image people's finger bones. Considering a roll of Scotch tape is maybe a couple dollars, this seems competitive with normal Xray sources.