If you shift school times, you impact parents who have to go to work, so businesses will need to shift their times, too. At that point, you've just reimplemented the clock shift, but in an ad-hoc, unsynchronized and patchwork fashion.

I've done it for most of my career, probably 20 of 35 years, including the near-decade I was a manager -- and I was WFH full-time, not half-time (1000 miles from the office). I did try to get onsite for a week every couple of months. Making it work requires a lot of overcommunication, but it can be done.

Nonsense.

Oh, there are some forces slowing us down, especially the orange man, but even if all of those forces went away or even reversed course 180 degrees there's no way we'd make "an immediate switch". It would and will take many years. It's complicated, there are a lot of moving parts, and we'll get to a point (CA is already there on a lot of days) where renewables frequently have to be curtailed because there isn't enough storage to shift that generation to times of low renewable generation.

Indeed. Case in point immediately above this post.

Indeed. Though, total capacity matters, too. I had a 2014 Tesla that only had ~200 miles of range, and road-tripping with that car was moderately painful. It was especially bad in areas where Superchargers were further apart and when there was a lot of elevation increase from one to the next, because it meant that I often had to charge to full to be able to reach the next. The smaller battery meant a lower miles per minute figure even at the best charge rate, but if you have to charge to full you're also waiting through the abysmal charge rate of the worst miles-per-minute part of the charge cycle.

I don't think you can really boil it down to just one figure. Though if I had to, "miles per minute while charging from 10% to 60%" is probably the best.

Absolutely wrong. A 1C battery is a 1C battery, regardless of how large it is. Different chemistries and configurations can affect this, but size absolutely does not, assuming the charger is capable of delivering power at the max rate the pack can take it at peak flow -- but 350-400 kW chargers are the norm.

Also, learn how to post. All it takes is trivial HTML markup knowledge.

Name-calling, especially when coupled with calling me clueless while demonstrating your own complete lack of understanding, earns you a Foe, which means it's unlikely I'll ever see your posts again.

Not really. You size the power to what the batteries can take at the fastest phase of charging. 350 kW is the norm for fast charging now. A 50 kWh 1C battery that charges at 4C when low (meaning that if it could sustain that rate for the whole recharge it would charge empty to full in 1/4 hour), would max out at around 200 kW. 3C is a more typical max rate, so 150 kW.

They actually do both, they're known to use their Manna-clone system that orders warehouse workers around to "find problems" with the performance of anyone involved in unionizing and fire them as an early line of defense. They've done this with unionization attempts in the US before (at least one of those warehouses did successfully unionize despite that). Shutting down the FC and moving out of town is their nuke-it-from-orbit option when all else has failed.

Penalties are light and unlikely enough in many jurisdictions for employers to consider it a cost of doing business though. See what Amazon's been doing in their warehouses in Quebec and BC for examples. Coincidentally, guess which Canadian provinces have the most videogame dev studios...

From the summary:

The small battery pack also means faster charging times

That's not how this works. Charging time is unrelated to battery size, except that in a given amount of time a larger battery can take in more energy. You charge all of the cells in a battery in parallel, so unless your input power is limited by something, charge time is dominated by how long it takes a single cell to go from empty to full. The number of cells (i.e. the size of the battery) is only relevant to how much power your charging system needs to deliver so that all of the cells can charge as quickly as possible.

There's a little variability among chemistries, but to a first approximation, the Li-ion cells we use today all take about 1 hour to fill from empty, when given power at the highest rate they can handle without sustaining damage. And they can take it faster when they're close to empty.

If you want to minimize the amount of time it takes to add X miles of range, what you want isn't a smaller battery, it's a larger battery. Suppose you want to add 50 miles of range in two minutes. Assuming 165 Wh/mile, you need to add 8.25 kWh. In two minutes a low battery (say, 20% SoC) can add about 10% of its capacity, so to get 50 miles in two minutes at the assumed mileage, you need an 82.5 kWh battery, and a 250 kW charger.

I'm sure Tesla has done the math carefully and weighed size and cost against range and charge times for their expected usage pattern and determined that 50 kWh is the right balance. But a smaller battery doesn't reduce charging times. For a given demand profile, a smaller battery increases charge time and a larger battery decreases charge time.

Damnit. WFH.

I knew what I meant!

I provide IT support to insurance brokerages - you may or not be surprised to find that since COVID, they're continuing to convert to WFO.

Especially for the boutique shops, I doubt an RTO office can compete financially with one structured under a WFH model.

For most roles in the process, WFH should be very desirable to an employer, so long as the employee signs an appropriate contract indicating that they're obligated to come to the office should their home setup be inadequate for supporting WFH, including mandatory local installations of whatever communications and collaboration tool you decide to employ.

Maybe you require them to attend a certain number of in-person meetings or team building exercises (but not 3/week, I'm talking monthly or less).

It saves on office space and related expenses. Throw up a suitable server farm and have employees remote in - all the horsepower, storage, and data security of a data center, it's potentially more secure than a cubicle farm.

Forcing RTO is just a way to fire people without having to admit you replaced them with a lower quality but much less expensive AI.

Maybe a system where everyone gets a share of collective productivity but has to take a turn at work could make those people feel better. So everyone gets their lifetime supply of food/shelter/healthcare/transportation/entertainment in return for their 5-10 years working or whatever the economy actually needs, so there's no shortage of human labor and nobody feels that there's an unfair division of labor either.

Of course the problem with that is another problem contributing to the current situation, there are people who seek maximally unequal shares of wealth for themselves and would fight an egalitarian utopia tooth and nail. Rich and powerful people who can contribute to the 10,000 year old effort of tricking the proles into propping up the aristocracy.

It's not the worst idea ever but it's worse than better options the billionaires want to distract us from with discussion of UBI, like universal basic services and democratic socialism, ideas where they don't retain as much of their wealth and power as they might with UBI.

I might've gone to one but it seems they're all in the past now. Maybe I'll remember to check next year.