I have a government for that. I can just have my government do whatever the fuck Google was going to do and then I have more water without greenwashing bullshit.

One of the major reasons you can't afford beef, or at least a good beef, is because we have been in a drought for decades now and it has finally caught up with us on cattle prices. There just isn't enough water especially in Texas to keep all those cattle going so they can be turned into hamburgers.

Water is not an infinite resource. If we had a more functional civilization we could solve a lot of the water problems we have but we don't. So Google lobbying for deregulation and tax cuts so that my government doesn't have the resources to provide water on a consistent basis doesn't help me at all when they offset a little bit of the damage they did from that lobbying.

It is a nice reminder of just how fucking stupid they think we all are though.

Except it's something you can easily verify by doing a discharge test. Maybe you can provide a citation that this data is hidden? Or rather that factories are lying to you, given how many cars actually show you the battery health?

No I won't take your word for it random internet ... I was going to say person, but who even knows if that is true.

If they are actually still at 80% of their capacity then they are overachieving. The batteries used for grid are fundamentally different designs and chemistries optimising for as low cost as possible instead of weight and discharge capability like in cars. As it stands if you go to CATL and buy a run of the mill battery for EVs you'll get something like their Qilin product at 280Wh/kg. If on the other hand you go to ... CATL and buy their absolutely densest top of the line battery storage solution (for small scale high power applications) you'll get something rated around 200Wh/kg. By the way to figure this out is no easy feat because it's not even a metric that is advertised. Typical battery advertising for grid batteries talk about Wh/L or Wh/m^3 as weight just doesn't matter, though you can look at their battery in a container solution and subtract the tare weight of the container itself.

Normal grid solutions have about *half* the energy density of an EV battery. A ex-EV battery finding a new life here with even 70% capacity would be a major upgrade.

That's an interesting theory but it's simply not at all reflected in any of the data. There's no massive array of dead batteries out there to point to beyond a few select issues which generally boil down to:
- Screwed up design - which almost universally fails before warranty.
- Really early tech (your Nissan example isn't an example of anything nefarious, as you can tell by it only affecting a single model of Leaf)
- Accidents.

There's just no examples of mass failures you claim to point to. We're not talking about "ideal" conditions, cars batteries are simply not shown to be the limiting factor under "normal" conditions, and even in some cases under extreme conditions. E.g. Data from taxi associations in Norway show that Teslas have no problem with >85% range remaining even at 400,000km (well beyond the mileage that most vehicles get scrapped at). Heck even in much colder Finland this is reported.

At this point unless you want to point to very specific examples of very specific models any concern with even buying a 2-3 generation old EV second hand are only the result of someone spreading FUD.

I don't think I ever suggested that this was a Trump-only problem... indeed I specifically highlighted at the end that conservatives should worry greatly about what an unlimited liberal president will do, and I pointed out at the beginning that presidents have been pushing the boundaries since Nixon, at least.

Regarding your claims about Biden... bringing him up is kind of a non-sequiteur. As the other commenter pointed out, Biden very much followed the traditional path with respect to treating the independent federal agencies as independent. Do you have any counterexamples? As for #3, Biden did abuse the pardon power and I wish he hadn't done it, but as far as I know there is zero evidence that he did it to protect people from prosecution for illegal acts that he ordered.

Finally, on #1: Yes, the ruling happened during the Biden administration, but the ruling was entirely about Trump. I'd go so far as to say that if Biden had been the subject of the case, the conservative justices would have ruled the other way.

While Trump didn't initiate the move towards a more powerful executive, if he achieves status as king-in-all-but-name, he'll be the one that did 90% of it.

I agree that Trump has not yet achieved full control over the executive branch. The uncertainty over whether Slaughter will go his way is a remaining obstacle. We'll know soon.

At least for that price. The video card in it is roughly equivalent to a 4060 which is okay but for a thousand bucks that's really pushing it.

I really wish we would just shut down all this AI bullshit it's making everyone's lives worse but the people in charge want it and what they say goes. It's funny watching these little communities try to push back against the data centers and then getting their asses handed to them unless it's one of the wealthier communities than somebody just fucked up and didn't realize that.

Somebody ran the numbers and found that most of them are getting put in places with severe water shortages and therefore taking all of what's left of the water. That is of course because of you got a water shortage because of long-standing drought the property values are going to be lower so you're less likely to be able to fight off a data center.

Meanwhile small government conservatives are busy using state governments to force local governments to accept the data centers whether they want it or not. Several States especially Texas have overridden local zoning laws and rulings to force the community to allow the data center and to provide it with the water and electricity.

I guess next to that mess overpriced video game consoles seems a little quaint but it's still infuriating. The handful of things to keep us nerds happy or becoming gradually unobtainable. And of course those small government conservatives are happy to give us somebody to blame that on besides AI slopped devouring all of our opportunities...

Bingo!

"People are catching on to the fact our machine that looks like it's thinking cannot think and costs more to operate than the people it would replace even if it did what we claim it does, so to convince the rest of the world we're the real thing, we'll pretend to do an industry-wide slowdown, and people won't question why it doesn't improve over the next year or two. Plus it'll make it look like we really do have a machine that can think."

This is about marketing. Basically they're making outrageous unsubstantiated claims about their technology and one great way to hype those claims is to propose something equally outrageous.

There's no substance behind the proposal or logic, outside maybe of wanting to do a very public "slow down", with all players participating, in order to justify a lack of progress that was going to happen anyway.

Not at all.

Car batteries have to have high storage to weight ratios. A reduced-capacity battery holds less power but still weighs just as much.

But weight doesn't matter for grid storage. If the batteries only have half as much capacity, just stack up twice as many of them. And in fact it's not a case of "half capacity". I'd bet Waymo retires them when they get to 80-90% of capacity, because reduced capacity means more time spent charging and less time spent working. If the grid storage system gets a battery with 80% of its original capacity, it can likely use that battery for decades before it has to be retired and recycled.

And, of course, lithium ion batteries are highly recyclable, so there's no reason not to expect them to be recycled when they're finally taken out of service in 2060 or so.

That's not really correct, though. The batteries aren't worn out or unusable after 15-20 years... they just have maybe 15-20% less capacity than when they were new. So a battery that provided 400 miles of range, now only provides maybe 320 miles. So it becomes a question of how much range reduction the owner is willing to tolerate.

I bought a Nissan Leaf in 2011. The early model Leafs were something of an outlier because they lacked a thermal management system for their batteries and they had a very small battery, both of which caused them to suffer much more severe degradation than basically all other EV models. My 2011 now has about 70% of its original range, and that original range was only about 80 miles with a good tailwind. So now it can only go about 50 miles on a full charge. In the winter, that drops to about 40 miles... less if you use the heater.

Is the Leaf's battery so degraded as to be useless? Depends on your use case. For many use cases the Leaf's battery was too short-ranged to be useful when it was brand new. For a typical commuter, though... it was fine when it was new, and now it's marginal to insufficient unless you can charge at work.

As it happens, my son -- a college student -- still drives it daily to and from school and work. In the summer it can get him to school and work and home, without charging (he charges it from a wall outlet at his apartment). In the winter, he has to charge either at school or at work. Both have chargers (proper L2 charger at school; wall outlet at work -- but it's enough).

I wouldn't put up with that at my stage in life, but there are plenty of people who would. Heck, in college I drove a car with an unreliable starter; I always parked on an incline so I could start it by rolling and popping the clutch. This is even more true of vehicles that start with a larger range, say 300 miles, and more reasonable degradation. Your 300 mile-range car may become a 250 mile-range car over the course of 20 years of use. More likely, if you're the sort who buys a new car, you'll keep it for a few years and then sell it or pass it to someone else when it has lost only a few miles of range, but there's no reason not to expect it will stay in service for 20, even 30 years... mostly likely until it's in an accident or has other issues unrelated to the battery that aren't worth fixing.

Well yes that's the point. Recycling is THE LAST 'R'.

1. Reduce.
2. REUSE - the thing that is happening here.
3. Recycle.

In that specific order. There's absolutely *NO* reason you should recycle an EV battery at end of life while we live in a world of battery storage capacity shortage on the grid. The grid does not need to maximise Wh/kg like your EV does.

And number 1. is handled in continuous advancement of battery tech which, despite Slashdot's ignorance and general pessimism on the topic, is demonstrating a doubling in energy density per kg over the past 10 years.

That's interesting about the chargers. In the UK we usually don't need a service upgrade, and if changes are needed they are usually free and the responsibility of the supplier. Because the UK is supposed to reach net zero, some work is expected to be done by the electricity supplier, such as "unlooping" (it's a UK thing, was done to save money when copper was scarce after WW2), and fuse/cable upgrades.

Typically an install is in the region of â1,200 here, but you can get it for less with various schemes, sometimes "free" with the car. I had my first one installed on a government scheme that I don't think is running now, but it was free back then, and when I replaced it last year I did the work myself. A bit naughty but if it ever becomes an issue I can get it signed off by an electrician.

If by "dead" you mean passing off batteries that still have more capacity per kg than other forms of grid storage like vanadium redux batteries (which very much are viable and purchased new for some installations) then sure.

Let me guess, you're the kind of person who bought an RTX5090 to make your spreadsheet render more crisply on your screen.

No they don't. Even based on your country there will be ICE passenger vehicles available on the market for the next 20 years, that's how bans on *new* sales work. And by that time they will absolutely work for everyone.

At that point we may even have those magic EVs that you so desire to own with your 1minute charging time because you feel the need to piss yourself while driving to your destination and can't cope with the thought of spending 10minutes to chill out.

(Yes I'm telling you specifically that you are driving wrong. We have data to prove it. If you aren't willing to take a break for 15min every two hours you are a dangerous driver and putting yourself and others at risk. Stop driving wrong).