Actually, it was a bit worse than that. Old color CRT screens drew the image as a series of 3 electron beams scanning the phosphor coating. To a creature with fast enough visual perception, it doesn't even look like an image at all.

Some people even got eye strain and headaches from looking at a CRT for too long.

That actually was a stipulation Verizon agreed to when they licensed the 700MHz "C Block" LTE spectrum. Then, sometime around 9 years ago, they just started locking their phones anyway. Political leadership changes at the FCC probably had something to do with it.

The carriers' argument is that they want to be able to offer subsidized prepaid phones, and without the SIM locking they'd up with people buying phones to use on competing services (though you'd figure that'd probably end up being a wash, with there only really being 3 major carriers in the US), and/or the phones being shipped overseas by resellers.

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, it's obvious they aren't going to be capable of generating anywhere near the same amount of suction as a vacuum powered by the mains. That's even assuming they use suction at all - most of the ones I've seen could more accurately be described as robotic carpet sweepers, where a rotating brush pushes dirt and debris into a little collection bin.

Now, this isn't to say you couldn't design something with a massive battery pack (maybe something in the order of 1kWh) and a real motor, but it'd be extremely expensive and just as loud as a standard vacuum cleaner. Plus, I think the target market for these things necessitated that they be priced more in the realm of impulse buy for a gadget that kind-of-sort-of works, rather than upwards of a grand for something that genuinely replaces the need to use a real vacuum cleaner. As you said, most people don't actually hate vacuuming enough to drop serious money on not having to do it.

I've yet to experience a podcast that wouldn't have been better as a written article. It's such a slog to get through someone droning on for 20 minutes, when I could've just skimmed the same article in a few seconds and gotten the gist of it.

I can only assume some people actually enjoy listening to yammering, and just getting to the fucking point already, is secondary.

Actually, it's crazier than that - X managed to convince some of its users to actually pay for the privilege of de-anonymizing themselves to the platform. That makes it really easy to sue the person who got you sued.

Huh? This is the first I've heard of this and wasn't able to find anything about registration and a fee being required for section 230 protection. ChatGPT said the DMCA safe harbor provisions of the DMCA require registration of an agent who will receive takedown notices, but that's something like a $6 fee (and it's in regard to a totally different law which is really only applicable if you'd be dealing with the possibility of users uploading pirated content).

Or basically the death of online anonymity, as platform operators will demand ID verification and make you agree to a pass-through liability as part of their TOS (if they get sued for something you said, then you'll be sued by them to recover their loss).

Ironically, X actually already charges its users for the privilege of knowing exactly who they are.

If natural gas was as easy to get to the refinery as a barrel of crude oil, you better believe they'd process it into something more marketable. Of course, if it was easier to transport, they'd just sell it as-is to power plants.

That probably was me, and I've brought receipts.

EVs represent 1.4% of the US vehicle fleet. There's a lot of cars in the USA. If you assume demand is linear and just added an extra 1.4% to the price of gas, well, that'd raise the current average price of gas by about $0.04/gal.

Granted, the real economics are probably a bit more squirrely if say, a magic genie showed up and granted the petroleum industry their wish that every EV instantly became a dino-juice burner, as the sudden surge in demand would cause a massive price spike at the pump. But in an alternate reality where Musk decided that drones to deliver fast food were more interesting than EVs, their gas prices aren't far off from ours (and they're getting burgers from heaven, so maybe it's not so bad).

From 2018 through 2024, about $16 billion was spent (or more accurately, mostly consisting of income tax money returned to taxpayers) on federal EV subsidies. Nice if it helped you afford an EV (raises hand), but admittedly, a pretty lousy bargain in terms of the amount of gasoline demand it abated.

Less demand for gasoline would probably make diesel and jet fuel (kerosene, basically) cheaper, since refineries already do crack heavier chains into gasoline fractions.

Damn it, that should've read "A 4 mile per kWh EV". The math is otherwise right:

(13596 / 4) * 0.18 = 611.82

It's a good thing we don't let AI run the oil refineries (yet). The gasoline fractions can be cracked into lighter fuels, such as propane and butane, or reformed into heavier fuels such as diesel.

The technology to do this is already in use.

That has always been the most paradoxical aspect of Tesla ownership - if you can afford a Tesla, you probably also can afford gas.

For a very brief period in time the numbers almost worked out for my partner. Back when gas was more expensive, there was still a tax credit and discounts were being offered on the Model 3, the gas savings would've made buying a Model 3 just a sliver cheaper than his current car payment plus what he was spending in gas every month (for a longer-than-the-national-average commute). That was when we test drove one, and ended up actually not liking it. The insurance quote for the Tesla was also brutal. We went with a Chevy Bolt EUV instead, which was a bit cheaper to boot.

Our take away from the test drive experience was that no, people probably aren't buying Musk's cars to save money. They're buying them because it's something akin to a fashion fad, where you get to be part of the group that is experiencing something new and trendy.

In today's market though? Buy a damn Toyota Camry and drive around with a big fat grin that you don't have to ever think about charging infrastructure.

You really should read up a bit on the modern chemistry involved in oil refining. Nothing is really a "byproduct" anymore - the output can be entirely tweaked using additional processing.

Around here in FL at least, you absolutely could own an EV that you charged exclusively at DCFC stations - and you'd pay through the nose for it. That's not an infrastructure problem, it's a capitalism problem.