From another source it sounds like the plant's SCADA system was compromised and shut down/disabled, causing some plants to go offline.

The immediate consequence is they would lose remote control over the pumps, fans, and valves at these facilities and either default to some safe state or just shut down entirely. Someone would have to drive over and manually reset/control everything, which is exactly what they did. Addressed promptly enough most people would even notice something was wrong.

The long term consequences could be that they end up getting incorrect status information about the facility's operation, causing a longer disruption until complaints start coming in and they have to run around trying to figure out what's wrong. Loss of water pressure, distribution of untreated water, distribution of over treated water, depletion of reserves are all obvious problems a bad enough attack could cause. Physical damage to equipment is also not impossible, which would be the worst case scenario.... you're not fixing a broken well/system pump or AOP reactor in two or three hours, and it you lose a bunch of them at once you could be at reduced capacity for months.
=Smidge=

Not legal advice, but lying to police generally is not illegal. You are only subject to criminal charges if you lie about your identity and a handful of other specific circumstances. Giving an "incorrect" password likely would not fall under that, and if it does do to court he can simply claim he misspoke, or that the police entered it incorrectly, or any other number of excuses to create plausible deniability.

He was not under oath, so it's not perjury. He was not under investigation - the phone was seized without a warrant - so it's not obstruction. He did not make false allegations of criminal activity. He did not try to falsify his identity.

His lawyer should have an easy time getting any charges dropped, *especially* with how incompetent the current US DoJ is these days.
=Smidge=

The frequency of ocean waves does not vary a lot, because it's largely driven by the physical properties of the water which also does not vary a lot. Ocean waves are mostly in the 0.10 Hz to 0.50 Hz range.

Amplitude, however... almost nothing to 30+ feet/10 meters peak to trough.
=Smidge=

> It's a nice idea, but who equips their trailer with this to save money for the stranger hauling it around?

Fleet operators, where they don't have strangers hauling around their trailers; e.g. USPS, Amazon, FedEx, UPS.

=Smidge=

> Once, the one time 5% is spent the state will have to figure out how to do the one time 5% more than once to keep feeding the spending machine.

The money to be raised is already budgeted as a separate fund for a specific purpose. It is not intended to be general funds nor is it intended to be ongoing funding.

Think of as a bond. When the government wants to raise money for a project or investment in the future, they will often issue and sell bonds to raise that money. Bonds mature and pay back with some interest, and are not recurring or factored into the normal budgeting.

This is functionally the same thing, except instead of borrowing via bonds and paying back with interest, it's just a straight up tax on billionaires.

=Smidge=

Find an independent EV specialist. They can probably get or build you an aftermarket LEAF pack with more modern guts.

There's a ton of aftermarket support out there.
=Smidge=

> Might be. But it is not far outside the window of actual expense

"Yeah the evidence is fake but that doesn't mean the conclusion is wrong."

That's basically politics in 2026 in a nutshell, I guess.
=Smidge=

Aside from the early LEAF packs being notoriously bad with degradation - both due to early tech AND bad thermal design - it's also worth noting that the main reasons EV batteries enter the secondary market is because the vehicle they were installed in got totaled.

=Smidge=

The most important difference in all your examples is things like tooling and equipment are either strictly necessary to complete the job, or produce so much value in terms of productivity that they are worth the cost. Also, most tooling and equipment lasts longer than an AI token so the cost tends to get spread our over several jobs...

Using AI coding agents has not proven to increase quality or productivity in any meaningful way - increased volume of code does not mean productivity unless you're a middle manager. It's known that it is not strictly needed for the software engineer to do their job. You are not improving the engineer's workflow by mandating AI use, you're just making it more expensive.
=Smidge=

It's conspiring because those loopholes exist on the behest of the manufacturers to begin with. They didn't 'react' to the legislation, they helped in crafting it.

It's not even a 'take' - it's literally what happened. It's reality.
=Smidge=

> Meanwhile, that CAFE standards put in place by Bush and Obama mandated ever larger trucks and SUV

It absolutely did not.

The regulations had an exception for trucks and work vehicles. The auto industry then conspired to sell more trucks as high end personal vehicles in order to keep building vehicles without having to meet the regulatory requirements.

The lack of a small vehicle segment is entirely, 100% on the shoulders of auto manufacturers who desperately do not want to build them.
=Smidge=

You seem to have misunderstood.

The claim here is the battery cells are themselves 3D printed, not that they are stuffing already made cells into a 3D printed object. The batteries would not have to "fit in" the 3D print, they would be the 3D print.

So it's actually dumber than you thought.
=Smidge=

> So I already use a tool like this. It's called Voicy. I use it because I've been writing so many long prompts that I developed relatively severe tendonitis in my left arm.

Have you ever used a computer before LLMs became a thing?

If yes, how did you manage to not hurt yourself before your life was nothing but writing prompts?

(Maybe the solution is to stop writing prompts and go back to doing what you did before, is what I'm suggesting)
=Smidge=

> And what happens is that in the next budget cycle, they say, "Hey, there's all this money over here. We don't need to fund that anymore. And now there's a shortfall again.

I do not know how to parse this sentence.

This isn't intended or designed for ongoing funding. This doesn't factor into the state budget. It's a completely separate fund specifically to shore up health care and education systems that have been neglected due to recent/chronic underfunding. None of this impacts their normal operating budgets year over year,

The best analogy I can think of is a bond. When the government wants to raise money for a project or investment in the future, they will often issue and sell bonds to raise that money. Bonds mature and pay back with some interest, and are not recurring or factored into the normal budgeting. This is functionally the same thing, except instead of borrowing via bonds and paying back with interest it's just a straight up tax on billionaires.

> Absent actual, careful reduction of wasteful spending

I'm willing to bet that there's far less "wasteful spending" than you think there is, and it's just a matter of you not understanding what is being paid for and why. See also: DOGE "savings" and how we're suffering the consequences of cutting "wasteful" spending on programs that were actually really important but not in obvious ways.
=Smidge=

> You both can't be correct.

We can be, because shortfalls and deficit spending are not the same thing.

The new CA budget for this year is, reportedly, balanced. $0 deficit.

But $0 deficit this year does not magically erase the past several years of falling behind due to insufficient funding, e.g. shortfalls. This is why it's a one-time tax, and why I described is as a catch-up. I say "over the next few years" because the tax is expected to raise about $100B but only $25B/year can be withdrawn.

The full text of the bill is linked in the article summary, by the way.
=Smidge=