Actually, the biggest reason that adoption rates are much, much higher in Australia (despite lack of infrastructure), is that Australia has access to less expensive vehicles imported from China and SK.

The US, otoh, is too busy trying to protect its legacy automakers, who, much as they did in the 70s, decided to ignore trends and continue to sell oversized, overpriced, gas-guzzling vehicles for as long as they could convince the American market to buy them.

"You presume they have the available funds to update the household. It's an easy thing for early adopters who tend to be wealthier. Its another things for the mass market that is more budget conscious. And may also live in older homes that may need some modernization for the charger installation."

Level one charging can in fact be sufficient for those with commutes less than or equal to the national average. It even works for longer commutes to "top off" the battery during the week and hitting the afore-mentioned Walmart or other charger on the weekend while shopping.

"What is “local” is different in the US and EU.."

Again, you focused on the EU while ignoring China and Australia. Australia, in particular, almost exactly mirrors the US in regard to size and driving patterns. But again, local is local. The average commute in the US is 27min. It's 25min in the EU. Australia takes 63.7 minutes! (And before you start on transit, driving is the still most common way to get to work in Europe, with 59% of EU workers using private cars as their primary mode of transportation,)

"They’ve done far better with the public infrastructure required "

Nope. The United States has a significantly more extensive and robust public charging infrastructure than Australia. The US benefits from a massive rollout of Tesla Superchargers open to all EVs, billions in federal NEVI (National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure) funding, and rapid deployment of high-voltage (800V) stations by networks like Electrify America and Ionna.

Your arguments are a couple of years out of date, and again keep focusing on how we're so "different" from the rest of the world.

We're not that exceptional.

As an EV owner, I have to disagree with most of what you said.

The U.S. driving pattern also isn’t nearly as unique as it’s often portrayed. Like Europe, most driving consists of commuting, errands, and local trips. Roughly 90% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas, and only a minority take multiple long-distance road trips each year.

Charging infrastructure has improved enormously in just the past few years. Companies like Shell and Walmart are building networks alongside Tesla, and even my local Walmart in the Midwest has chargers. Chargers continue to get faster, but even today’s charging times often line up with the rest stops or meal breaks I’d be making on a road trip anyway.

About two-thirds of U.S. households own their homes, giving them access to some form of home charging. The biggest challenge remains apartment dwellers, where charging infrastructure still lags. That’s a legitimate issue, but it’s an infrastructure problem, not a flaw inherent to EVs.

And it’s worth noting that EV adoption has surged in countries like China and Australia, the latter having driving distances and population distribution that are often compared to the U.S.

I’m just tired of hearing that America is somehow “special,” and that technologies and solutions working successfully in much of the rest of the world are uniquely destined to fail here.

It is more than that. Americans are buying a few more EVs, but by and large most of the sales are going to oversized, overweight, fully automatic SUVs and pickup trucks.

On one hand they've bought into Detroit marketing that tells them that's what they want and need... and on the other, it may in fact be what they need since US obesity rates are at all time highs.

Many simply don't fit in small sedans and sport cars any more.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

It has never⦠donâ(TM)t know why it ate my apostrophe.

Microsoft had/has an app store. Itâ(TM)s never gotten developer or customer traction.

Applications written directly using APIs on the platform theyâ(TM)re running on (Windows, macOS, Linux, etc. this is in contrast to progressive web apps (PWAs) or platforms like Electron, which are intended to be more portable, but donâ(TM)t âoefeelâ like the platform theyâ(TM)re running on, even if they hook into platform-specific APIs too.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.