"Net zero" basically boils down to "use electrical appliances instead of natural gas because it's way easier to generate electricity cleanly than it is to produce gas cleanly, and build efficiently so you need less energy overall."

Those are not bad goals to have, and we should be moving away from natural gas in homes in general. Combustion products suck for our health, even natural gas ones, and the global warming potential of methane is insanely high and having leaks on residential delivery hurts.

If the argument was that local governments shouldn't do it because it's going to be implemented at the state level, that would be one thing, but the explicitly stated justification was that net zero is not in Florida's energy plan and they don't want anyone trying it. I guess they want everyone paying out the nose for inefficient cooling and leaky houses?

The simple answer is that you do it by recording the birthdate, and then updating the category the user falls into based on the calendar. You only need to expose the category upon request, not the birthdate.

They are not verified. They throw a penalty for lying in ($2,500 per "accidental" violation and $7,500 per intentional), and there is a provision for allowing vendors to ignore the token if someone is obviously lying about age, but the actual token is never verified and there are no provisions to do so.

The primary goal of CA's bill isn't to stop underage kids from accessing content for adults. That's what it looks like on the surface, but the *actual* goals are:
1. Eliminate liability and complexity from marketplaces so storefronts don't have to worry about age verification, and
2. Prevent data scrapers from using "age verification" as a backdoor into making giant databases of real identities and mapping them to digital ones.

The former is covered expressly by a liability limitation to stores and other users that make a good faith effort to validate and use the tokens, and the latter is covered by a clause that says "no other form of age verification may be required by application developers beyond the checking of this token," which shoots companies like Persona directly in the face.

This is really what will enable the mass adoption of EVs. Yes, the back-end and power generation needs to keep up, but that is a comparatively straightforward problem compared to getting a large enough network of chargers to cover the last mile problem.

Now if they can get the number of offline or damaged charging points addressed, we'll be cooking.

I don't know if you've looked at any modern gasoline or diesel engine made since the eighties, but uh... they're just as packed with black box computers and proprietary firmware.

You can still get a sense of what's going on because OBD-2 exists and the CAN bus is an open standard, but let's not pretend that ICE powered vehicles are any less packed full of microprocessors and sensors than an EV.

Your gas tank does not stretch to the degree that would allow that much more fuel. You can usually get more than the rated capacity of the tank by filling the feeding lines leading to it.

ICE engines typically lose ranges for the same reason that they lose power: Parts wear out and tolerances loosen. There's a reason vehicles start to fail smog tests as they age, and it's not because they retroactively tighten the restrictions on emissions. The catalytic converter starts to fail, your backpressure profile changes, piston rings loosen and wear, piston liners or pistons themselves wear, cam lobes wear and change your timing... all of these can lead to inefficient combustion, which means you need to burn more fuel for the same power, and your peak power drops off as well.

To make it better, if you list Democratic policies (but change the names), they're quite popular - over 60% of the people surveyed for most of them approve.

But as soon as they're associated with the Democratic party, approval drops to just under 50% for the exact same policy.

People (across all parties, but especially Republicans) aren't making decisions about policy; they're engaging in a giant tribal pissing match.

My grandparents used to all be Republicans, back when Republicans were pro-union, pro-medicare, and significantly less prone to random flights of fancy that the Democrats were at the time. They all changed parties in the 70s and 80s when the Republicans brought in the southern religious groups to gain political power and threw all the science-based policy out the window.

Low sulfur fuel was not about reducing global warming. The goal of low sulfur fuel was to increase the effectiveness of catalytic converters and lower the amount of sulfuric acid produced by interactions with water in the atmosphere.

There's a reason we don't hear much about acid rain any more, and that's because the move to low sulfur fuels and the shuttering of coal plants in favor of natural gas and other low-sulfur energy sources made it basically a non-issue in north america and europe.

That's definitely fair, although I will say that in my (admittedly limited) experience with the tools that do this, it's more like a more human usable google than a full on conversational partner.

For example, if I asked it "who is allowed in level 3 secured areas" it would reply with "X, Y, and Z class personnel are allowed inside level 3 secured areas as per detailed in "

In theory, it could be wrong, but I never encountered cases where it was. If it didn't have an answer from the text it would say "Sorry, this system cannot find an answer in the documentation" rather than hallucinating something.

So is the story here that they have terrible network security, is it that they're using AI to make medical decisions, or both?

Because a *lot* of companies use chatGPT (or other LLM) powered frontends to provide a human interface for reams of technical data, to enable people to ask questions like "what are the coverage limits for the gold star plus plan" and have the thing summarize and cite the documentation. That's a pretty inoffensive use of LLMs, and not one I really take issue with. Now, if they're using a chatbot to make medical decisions, that's a whole different story.

In either case, their network security is shit, though, so we can always yell at them for that.

Socialism really is the best of both worlds. It offers safety nets to ensure that no matter how far you fall, you're never so far down that you can't pick yourself back up and try again, and it allows the dedicated to excel to their own benefit but not to the point where they begin to break the system for everyone. It combines a solid launching off point with the freedom and selfish motivation to grow.

Communism is when me and my friends all get on a survival game server, work together toward a common goal, pool the fruits of our labor and divvy them out based on who will make the best use of them.

It tends to break down beyond the social group scale, which is why we have systems like socialism that incorporate the good parts of communism (support for varying levels of individual capability, ensuring a share bare minimum) with the good parts of capitalism (giving rewards to selfish innovators rather than relying on altruistic innovators, more effective filtering and selection for acumen in predicting future events and trends).

At least out here in CA, same-day registration doesn't let you skip any of the checks. It lets you, as an individual say "yes I am a citizen and I am not banned from voting." Once you say that and provide a modicum of contact info, they let you cast a provisional ballot and conduct the normal validation steps. If that all goes through smoothly, great! You're registered and they add your ballot to the total. If you lied, or you're missing something, they'll throw your provisional ballot out and possibly charge you with a crime.

It would be VERY silly to just take everyone at their word.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

You can make an argument that poor software security policies are incompetence, not malice, but when the functional outcome is the same I'll say that it doesn't matter *why* the security holes are there; banning the gear still is a reasonable move.