Most referenced is Star Trek from the 1960s. how much of that is real now in some form or another?

Tablet computers, voice interfaces to computers... What else, exactly?

Roku lost me when they became an advertising company.

I bought my elderly dad a Roku stick a couple of Christmases ago. It was under thirty bucks, and to my surprise it included a massive amount of free content and channels.

With them practically giving away the hardware + content like that I don't know how they could be anything but an advertising company and still stay afloat.

Tokamaks also have no solution to the fast-neutron problem, which "embrittles" the core components of the reactor itself into powder over a few years of operation.

Only magnetized target fusion, like what General Fusion is pursuing, solves that problem.

I'm not sure that fusion will ever reach economic viability. But they're literally the only ones that even have a chance.

All of the above, plus billions of dollars that could flow into the economy from building, assembling and maintaining green-energy infrastructures around the world. All the good-paying manufacturing and service jobs that Trump is always bleating about.

But no. Republicans and their voters have decided the future is determined by the 44,000 people mining coal in the USA - 26,000 fewer than will sit in SoFi Stadium on Valentine's Day to watch the next Super Bowl.

Next week I will have had my EV for seven years.

I have never charged at home via an "L2" 240v charger. I've always just used a regular plug in the wall.

115 volts at 12 amps is around 1,400 watts - 1.4kW.

If I plug my car in at home for 10 hours that adds 14 kWh. 12 hours is 16.8 kWh.

Energy use depends on highway vs city, temperatures etc. but right now I get around 4 miles/kWh (I'm Canadian, but I've converted to freedom units for you Americans.)

So that means I add around 60 miles every night just on a regular outlet.

The same MAGAts who scream about SOCIALISM would be the first to loudly embrace this idea.

yeah if you make things affordable more people buy them.

Part of the challenge until recently has been that all the market research performed by EV manufacturers in North America has returned the same data point: Potential customers are obsessed with range.

People with a 20-mile daily commute insist that they need an EV with 600 miles of range or they won't even consider it. They claim they need to be able to drive 800 miles nonstop to Grandma's house twice a year, and if they can't do that EVs are useless to them.

Hell, the common refrain from EV haters on /. is "I have a 300-mile daily commute, therefore EVs are impractical for everyone".

When someone asks me about my EV the first question is not about how it drives, or the economy - It is "What is the range?"

The battery is generally the most expensive component in an EV, so in order to deliver what the market is telling them (big range), EV manufacturers generally only offered expensive cars.

As the North American market has gradually re-calibrated to be somewhat less obsessed with range (and the costs of battery technology have declined), manufacturers have started to risk offering more affordable options (with less range) into the market. And people are finally buying them.

Give free money for people to sit around and smoke pot all day.

There are around 50M retired people in the USA at the moment. Of course some of them are impoverished, so let's for the sake of argument say that 75%-ish are not.

So that's 38M retired people.

Do they sit around and smoke pot all day?

If you don't know your wings aren't generating lift anymore, this isn't an unreasonable reaction.

If your wings aren't generating lift anymore then you're in a stall.

So it is in fact an unreasonable reaction, because in a stall you push the nose down to gain airspeed, unless you don't have the altitude to do that.

If employees are being "paid well" to make goods then they inevitably make those goods too expensive to sell realistically.

Yes and no.

Go look up a Sears catalog from 1960.

A basic American-made fridge was the 2026-equivalent of around $5,000. An American-made 23" TV was the equivalent of $2,300. A clock radio was the equivalent of $350.

Middle-class people had these things in their homes. The difference was the guy working at the television factory was earning enough at his union job to buy that fridge, television and clock radio.

Customs has always had discretion for who it will allow into the country at ports of entry.

I'm an older GenX Canadian. This is of course correct.

The difference now compared to 20 years ago is the outright hostility you encounter more often than not from American Customs and Border Protection agents.

While never particularly friendly, in the before-times they were very rarely antagonistic. It was an efficient, almost boring exercise.

Contrast that with now while they angrily scroll through your phone in case you have JD Vance memes while barking orders (yes, they could always look through your phone, but they were looking for CSAM or evidence of immigration violations, not whether you had an AI-generated image of Putin and Trump smooching.)

Canadians like me are saying "screw that" and going to Costa Rica, Mexico, Europe or a hundred other places instead.

We're off to the Netherlands on Thursday. Two years ago we would have gone to the Eastern Seaboard.

Of course the Trump supporters reply "Fuck you, America doesn't need you anyway" but the fact remains that across the USA there are campaigns desperately trying to get Canadians to come back. To which we respond "Fuck you, America."

BoP is collecting and distributing funds

Specifically, American taxpayer dollars.

Trump's goal is to distribute those taxpayer dollars into his pockets and his corporations. Seems to me a stablecoin would be a good way to launder that money.

What do you mean *now* it's the obvious choice?!

Battery technology has improved a lot in the last 30 years. There's been approximately a 90% reduction in cost per kWh since 2010 and a roughly fivefold increase in energy density.

Will Hyundai ever fix the stupidity where you cannot precondition the battery for fast charging without being forced to use the in-dash navigation system?

I live in Canada. I have a 2020 Kia EV (Kia & Hyundai largely share the same tech stack).

My EV has a "Winter Mode" setting. When I turn it on it automatically preconditions the battery at -5c or colder.

I almost never use DC Fast Chargers, so it's turned off, but it is just a "switch" like you're asking for.

https://uni.hi.is/helmut/files...

Also no Uighur slave labor to keep costs down.

I used to think this way, but if you look at videos of the auto plants you'll see that the costs are kept down mostly through the use of robots. There are almost not people at all on the factory floors, slaves or otherwise.

(Now of course maybe the slaves are building the robots, but I assume eventually robots are building the robots that are building the robots...)

I think you see maybe a dozen people in this whole video -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...