the vehicles start looking more like a wingless airplane than a car.

And what does the company's name mean? ;) (Hint: it's Greek)

It adds up to 40 miles per day, not 5. 5 would be a cloudy day.

I used to be anti-solar-panels-on-cars back when solar panels were expensive, and ones of reasonable efficiency were even more expensive - the argument was, "put it on your roof where it belongs". But that's just not the case any more. Adding solar is just not that much of a cost to the car. It adds some complexities, but mainly in the design / early manufacturing phase.

Also:

The average American drives 37 miles per day.

1) So if you're in a sunny climate, it covers all of said average-driver's driving. Otherwise, said average-driver has to plug in occasionally, but not nearly as often.

2) Most people drive less than the average (the average is skewed by a long-tail - small numbers of people who drive very far every year). What you actually should be meaning is the median US driver; the median drives 23 miles per day. Most Europeans, even less.

3) Even for said "average american", their daily average is skewed by long drives (e.g. road trips and similar). Wheren of course you're plugging in, you'd be plugging in even if the car was adding 80 miles a day. But when not on road trips, their daily average is lower.

4) Surely you can see the appeal of the tangential benefits, such as being unstrandable - where even if you run out in the middle of the desert 20 miles from the nearest town, you're still going to get there, just delayed (remember that EV ranges, if you drive very slowly, increase like 2x, so 40 miles a day becomes 80, so a 20 mile shortfall is only a ~4h delay on a sunny day).

5) Nobody is saying, "One car for everybody". Of course appeal varies by person and by location. Here in Iceland for example we have three problems. One, very little sun at all for a good chunk of the year. Two, even in the summer, when the days are long, the sun is mainly low and circles around you. Solar power just kinda sucks here in general. And three, the three-wheel config would mean that the centre wheel wouldn't align with tracks in the snow from other cars (although there is a slight advantage, in that it also wouldn't align with road ruts from studded tyres, which often fill with water in the rain and become hazardous).

But somewhere in the southern US, it's a great option.

Are you sure you're not an LLM?

I think this is the result of their trainers trying to reduce hallucination. And hallucination *has* been reduced, so it's probably been largely successful, but it has produced this era of versions that are concerned about honesty, that claims of honesty or apologies for lack or honesty, are pervasive in their output.

My iron rule is that Claude is not allowed to modify git state, not even to stage or unstage, and definitely not to commit. As long as that rule is followed, any mistakes can be cleaned up easily.

And even people who don't drive stick regularly (but know how) quickly stop having to pay attention. I haven't owned a stick shift since the mid 90's, but I often get them when renting cars overseas. It takes a day or two of paying attention, and then it just becomes automatic and effortless.

BTDT when coming home from a trip where I'd been driving a manual for a couple of weeks.

About 3% of registered road vehicles are motorcycles. When you include dirt bikes the number of riders is higher, but it's still very low compared to the number of automobile drivers. I don't think motorcycle riders are likely to shift the overall numbers very much.

Reading comprehension is not your strong suit, I see.

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.

The guideline in question is "Gotta kick up to the big guy". If you don't pay your "taxes", you're gonna have a bad day. And, no, I'm not talking about the IRS.

I wish it were that simple.

First, note that there isn't one emoluments clause, there are two. And they're quite different.

The Foreign Emoluments clause prohibits any officer of the government, which would include the president, though that's not specifically stated, from accepting a "present" from any foreign government. The problem with this is that it's not clear how it's supposed to be enforced with respect to the president. Traditionally, presidents have treated gifts as gifts to the country, and when they wanted to make an exception they asked Congress to authorize it. Mostly. George Washington famously kept a painting the French gave him. Trump, er, took a different approach, simply ignoring the Foreign Emoluments clause, which the Constitution says isn't allowed... but then what? Congress never passed any law defining how exactly the clause was supposed to apply to the president (there are laws about not accepting gifts for pretty much everyone else in the executive branch)... so, how it might work is undefined.

During Trump's first term, a bunch of Congressional Democrats sued Trump for violating the Foreign Emoluments clause, and their suit was dismissed for lack of standing. Courts ruled that individual legislators (much less individual Americans) lack standing to sue over it, only Congress as a body has standing, and Congress as a body hasn't been interested in acting. There were also some suits by DC hospitality businesses claiming economic injury because foreign visitors chose Trump's properties to curry favor. The district court said they didn't have standing but that was reversed on appeal.. but never decided because it was mooted when he left office. The DC and Maryland governments sued and courts went back and forth on their standing, but that was never decided either, then mooted when he left.

So... at present there is no enforcement mechanism unless Congress creates one, or unless the courts decide that someone (and it's not clear who that might be) has standing. And we also have no idea what the remedies might be.

The Domestic Emoluments clause is more precise, but very narrow. It says Congress can't change the president's salary during their term, and that the president can't be paid by the federal government (other than his salary) nor any state government. That says nothing about Wall Street bros buying insider info, people paying for pardons, hodlers buying crypto to get a sit-down... none of that.

Not exactly a yawn. More like a shake of the head at more evidence that all politicians are on the take, perhaps with a wry grin that "their guy" is smarter and better at it and so makes a lot more money.

I mostly don't talk politics with my family because they're Trump supporters and it creates friction, and accomplishes nothing. This morning, though, when I saw this news, I started typing a post on the family chat to ask if they're really okay with it. By the time I got to the end, I realized I knew exactly what their response would be "Nancy Pelosi does it, too, Trump just does it better", so I deleted my post, unsent.

That reply is wrong in degree, of course, but, sadly, it's not wrong in kind. We've long tolerated insider trading by Congress, and a revolving door between regulators and the companies they regulate. The Supreme Court has allowed its justices to take veiled bribes, and even ruled that government officials can accept bribes as long as the payoff comes after the action. Prior to Trump, presidents and their staffs stayed out of this mud, but if others can do it, why not the president?

The root of the problem is voter acceptance of corruption. Too many Americans just assume that all politicians are corrupt and there's nothing you can do. They're wrong on both points -- and in fact the US previously did have massive public corruption and then mostly shut it off, but Americans don't know their own history -- but until voters care enough to get Congress to act, this is the new normal.

If that were the only impact, it wouldn't matter.

But the fact is that Trump regularly posts official public policy announcements that move markets, so getting the bullshit early can make you money.

It should be, but the Emoluments Clause has never been enforced and "Emoluments" isn't even clearly defined, legally speaking. It's pretty much a dead letter.

The only practical backstop here is impeachment and conviction, but the Republicans in Congress aren't going to allow that, not until and unless their voters begin to care.

The AC who replied is technically wrong: The immunity ruling only applies to official acts, and Trump's participation in TMG is not official. However, Trump would probably claim that he had nothing to do with this decision and the immunity ruling also effectively prevents investigation of any personal crimes that were committed because it blocks investigation of anything that touches on official acts. So as long as Trump made the call ordering it from the from the Oval Office, it's unlikely that any evidence could be obtained. If someone in the know at TMG testified against him, that would work, but it's very unlikely anyone with a conscience has direct knowledge.

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.