Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.

There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.

It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.

And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.

What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.

For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.

Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.

As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.

If you want to communicate "nuance", maybe start by not using the word "immediate" when you mean in "a few decades".

If you shift school times, you impact parents who have to go to work, so businesses will need to shift their times, too. At that point, you've just reimplemented the clock shift, but in an ad-hoc, unsynchronized and patchwork fashion.

I've done it for most of my career, probably 20 of 35 years, including the near-decade I was a manager -- and I was WFH full-time, not half-time (1000 miles from the office). I did try to get onsite for a week every couple of months. Making it work requires a lot of overcommunication, but it can be done.

Nonsense.

Oh, there are some forces slowing us down, especially the orange man, but even if all of those forces went away or even reversed course 180 degrees there's no way we'd make "an immediate switch". It would and will take many years. It's complicated, there are a lot of moving parts, and we'll get to a point (CA is already there on a lot of days) where renewables frequently have to be curtailed because there isn't enough storage to shift that generation to times of low renewable generation.

Indeed. Case in point immediately above this post.

Indeed. Though, total capacity matters, too. I had a 2014 Tesla that only had ~200 miles of range, and road-tripping with that car was moderately painful. It was especially bad in areas where Superchargers were further apart and when there was a lot of elevation increase from one to the next, because it meant that I often had to charge to full to be able to reach the next. The smaller battery meant a lower miles per minute figure even at the best charge rate, but if you have to charge to full you're also waiting through the abysmal charge rate of the worst miles-per-minute part of the charge cycle.

I don't think you can really boil it down to just one figure. Though if I had to, "miles per minute while charging from 10% to 60%" is probably the best.

Absolutely wrong. A 1C battery is a 1C battery, regardless of how large it is. Different chemistries and configurations can affect this, but size absolutely does not, assuming the charger is capable of delivering power at the max rate the pack can take it at peak flow -- but 350-400 kW chargers are the norm.

Also, learn how to post. All it takes is trivial HTML markup knowledge.

Name-calling, especially when coupled with calling me clueless while demonstrating your own complete lack of understanding, earns you a Foe, which means it's unlikely I'll ever see your posts again.

Not really. You size the power to what the batteries can take at the fastest phase of charging. 350 kW is the norm for fast charging now. A 50 kWh 1C battery that charges at 4C when low (meaning that if it could sustain that rate for the whole recharge it would charge empty to full in 1/4 hour), would max out at around 200 kW. 3C is a more typical max rate, so 150 kW.

From the summary:

The small battery pack also means faster charging times

That's not how this works. Charging time is unrelated to battery size, except that in a given amount of time a larger battery can take in more energy. You charge all of the cells in a battery in parallel, so unless your input power is limited by something, charge time is dominated by how long it takes a single cell to go from empty to full. The number of cells (i.e. the size of the battery) is only relevant to how much power your charging system needs to deliver so that all of the cells can charge as quickly as possible.

There's a little variability among chemistries, but to a first approximation, the Li-ion cells we use today all take about 1 hour to fill from empty, when given power at the highest rate they can handle without sustaining damage. And they can take it faster when they're close to empty.

If you want to minimize the amount of time it takes to add X miles of range, what you want isn't a smaller battery, it's a larger battery. Suppose you want to add 50 miles of range in two minutes. Assuming 165 Wh/mile, you need to add 8.25 kWh. In two minutes a low battery (say, 20% SoC) can add about 10% of its capacity, so to get 50 miles in two minutes at the assumed mileage, you need an 82.5 kWh battery, and a 250 kW charger.

I'm sure Tesla has done the math carefully and weighed size and cost against range and charge times for their expected usage pattern and determined that 50 kWh is the right balance. But a smaller battery doesn't reduce charging times. For a given demand profile, a smaller battery increases charge time and a larger battery decreases charge time.

Maltodextrin is easy to buy online and I imagine you could get it in stores that sell supplements for athletes (it's a common quick-energy booster, being a very rapidly-absorbed carbohydrate). The emulsifier and color you don't really need, though I suspect you could find them pretty easily if you wanted. The emulsifier is mostly to increase shelf life, and the color is for color.

Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

Maybe, but the problem is that the electronics have to run at those temperatures and not have solder joints start popping, or other fun failures.