If you've ever visited Disney World, one of the things you might've noticed is that there are quite a few talented individuals working for theme park wages (which if you weren't aware, are fairly low). Very, very few people make what could be considered a good living drawing, dancing, and/or singing for their supper.

There tends to be more than a bit of a survivorship bias among those who've "made it" in any sort of creative endeavor. Yes, if you're one of the lucky few, it is true that you wouldn't have succeeded if you'd given up on your dreams. Thing is, that's like a lottery winner saying they'd never have won if they didn't purchase their ticket. While it's technically true, it completely ignores the millions who, despite also purchasing their tickets, did not win.

Assuming you went with the 8 Ah upgraded battery, your Civic Hybrid has a 1,152 Wh battery. These days, that's roughly the capacity of a $500 portable power station. That's nowhere near what a replacement battery for a BEV costs, so you're comparing apples to oranges.

I shouldn't have to explain this, but EV batteries are vehicle specific. The main reason early Nissan Leafs are junk yard fodder is because it's just not cost effective to put a brand new battery in them, and there's not enough of the cars for competition to kick in and do its thing at making the batteries cheap.

This same sort of thing happens with old ICE cars, too. Eventually the parts go out of production and get rare, and before you know it you're in a bidding war against five other people on eBay for the last new-old-stock part on planet Earth. So yeah, when it's an EV, you just say "fuck it" and scrap the car instead.

I've thought about it from the perspective of using my vehicle's battery for backup power for my home. The reality is that my Bolt's battery holds roughly the amount of power my portable generator can generate in about 13 hours. Sure, I know some people manage to stretch it by running just the essentials (and realistically, you're limited to drawing about 1kW from the Bolt, as there's no true V2L support - power has to be drawn from the 12v system via an inverter), which could last for several days. But... the car would now be tethered to the house, making this sort of backup really only ideal for very short outages.

If it's anything like how they pay for solar, they'll tack on so many bullshit fees you'll be lucky to break even.

I really only see this working out for corporate customers who have a surplus of fleet vehicles that sit parked for prolonged periods.

Spoken like someone who hasn't tried to actually utilize Chevy's warranty. It obviously varies by the dealership, but my local dealer doesn't do loaners and you'd probably have to contact corporate to get any sort of rental reimbursement. I'd rather not wear out my battery.

No more so than any other form of written entertainment. If you go on a killing spree because you read a Stephen King novel, that's on you, not Mr. King.

Now if OpenAI starts wiring ChatGPT up to killbots, that'd be a horse of a different color.

So ChatGPT is responsible in the same way as that refrain that "the left got Charlie Kirk killed"? Obviously if we can't place the blame on the person who pulled the trigger, that's the logical conclusion.

If only humans were so malleable. I'd start by getting you to stop assuming I'm a Republican. After that, you can go outside and cluck like a chicken.

I'm pointing out the hypocrisy of Florida caring about gun violence in instances when they believe it was prompted by a LLM, but not actually doing something sensible to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally unfit in the first place.

It's very on brand for Florida to blame gun violence on absolutely everything except its extremely lenient gun laws. Another contributing aspect is probably that Florida is among the states that rejected the ACA subsidies, so if you're too broke to seek proper mental healthcare, you might actually wind up as the sort of person who talks to a bank of GPUs instead of getting the the help you need.

In the old days, conservative states would blame this sort of stuff on the devil. Never could get the devil to show up in court, though, so they've moved on to tech CEOs.

Apple already has this functionality. Mostly, the issue is that presently you can't get the sort of image recognition technology necessary into the "burner phone" price point. Oh. This all makes sense now.

If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Just because there are FB marketplace listings offering to remove the flashing LED from smart glasses, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a huge market for such services. It reminds me of how a few years ago, a kid made a troll post on some drug forum about Jenkem, and without doing any checking whatsoever to see if there really was any legitimacy to the claims that kids were getting high on fermented human feces, several news outlets just ran with it.

Now, I'm sure there certainly are people who've taken a sharpie or some electrical tape to their glasses to cover up the LED, but they probably didn't pay someone to do it for them.

You just won't have to get gas at a gas station. You might still go to gas stations for the other various things they sell there, and some of 'em have also installed DCFC stations.

My experience with a Bolt is that no, you'd have a rather miserable experience if you tried owning an EV without also having a smartphone. In my case, it's absolutely essential for locating charging stations and checking how busy they are. As for payment, I've only ever seen card readers at EA charging stations - everywhere else I've charged, an app has been mandatory.

Unlike my Bolt, I know Tesla has better integration for things like seeing the locations and status of charging stations directly on the infotainment, and you're automatically billed for charging on their Supercharger network through an account you set up for the vehicle, so you technically don't need a smartphone with a Tesla. Even then though, there's some functionality you're missing out on without using the Tesla app to connect to your car, so I'd say in general it's probably not ideal to have an EV if you refuse to own a smartphone.