I've been on the 'bottle of rum train' for a LONG while now. It's simply not worth it to either maintain a half dozen monthly subs or try to "buy" movies that still can only be watched in certain specific ways.

Especially when you can buy VPN per year for what netflix charges per month...and then watch nearly anything at any time on any device and share with anyone else who also wants to watch it.

Your words all make sense but your points don't.

First: trucking is NOT efficient. Railways are far more efficient for moving bulk goods.

Consistent grades are still grades and waste a ton of fuel that can't be recaptured - except with an EV and, to a lesser degree, a Hybrid.

A hybrid will improve efficiency vs ICE in local delivery/traffic but a full EV is still significantly more efficient.

Putting a hybrid drivetrain into a trailer is ridiculous for the vast majority of situations. There are about 3 semi-trailers for every semi-truck to start with so that's simply wasteful and expensive.. If you only using them for 'special' runs then you complicate logistics which gets expensive fast.

Substations catch fire? I mean, sure. So do fuel stations...which ironically to your point also don't operate without power. So yah, win for EV there.

The /best/ approach is to build out the rail system and leverage EV Semi's for what would then mostly be local/regional delivery.

We won't do that so the next-best approach is to continue building out EV Semi's while focusing on where their immediate strengths are - local and regional shipping. As that continues, the 'charger deserts' become less and less ... while technology evolves to support higher speed charging and more energy dense packs. The need for long-haul diesel diminishes.

These trailers are just a solution looking for a problem. I'm sure they'll find some niches, but just that. It probably makes more sense adding a diesel generator to an EV semi than adding batteries to a semi trailer...but I'm not about to math that out.

Your claim is trivial to disprove.

Installed Solar capacity might go as low as $1/W at scale ... but you get 5-6Wh/day under ideal conditions. If you want 1W average output across the day, you need 4x the capacity PLUS GWh scale batteries.

So $4/Wh/day * 1GW = $4B for the panels
Batteries will run another $billion per GWh...

The possibility of nuclear fallout remains zero for nuclear plants.

Get back to me when places like NY and CA stop letting repeat violent offenders out on 'cashless' bail.

If you're accused of assaulting someone for the 2nd (or 3rd and more) time before your first case even makes it to court, you should not be free to continue your rampage.

Equally, we should not make any conviction a lifetime sentence of un-/under-employment. People need the ability to rejoin society and a normal, productive person who made a mistake.

Lastly, when a significant portion of the money spent on prisons is going to corporate profits, we are doing something very very wrong. It's a race to the bottom for everyone but the shareholders.

The irony of you being the only one here going on about the n-word and calling people fascists.

Assuming anyone who rejects this unhinged nonsense is a bot is just another way to reinforce your echo chamber. It's much easier to label someone a racist and dismiss them instead of considering the garbage you're spoon fed (lol AP) is unbiased and accurate.

It's easier to just believe and repeat than take a few moments to think...and then possibly disagree with your "friends".

This is made even worse by the pervasive way cancel culture has seeped into every day life. It's not the rock star getting canceled for hospitalizing their wife for the 3rd time. Sadly we skipped right over that and went to cancel someone unknowingly using a commonplace but mildly offensive term.

Now it's people deciding you can't be friends because of an all-or-nothing approach to every political belief they hold - with zero room for a nuanced discussion.

I'm more worried about the 2/3 (actually much less) that you didn't mention ... who mindlessly believe any nonsense that comes their way if it aligns with their political (dis)beliefs. The idea that the left has a monopoly on "the truth" is comically out of alignment with reality. Worse, the pseudo-religious dedication prohibits any kind of rational, neutral conversation. This isn't to say the right is always...right. They've got plenty of stupid too but generally seem more open to conversation or even criticizing their own without being excommunicated.

That aside, flock cameras need to be broadly outlawed. Otherwise illegal surveillance shouldn't suddenly be legal if a private company does it then sells the data to police/gov't officials. Honestly the same for revenue cameras...aka "speed cameras". If pols actually followed what the public wants, none of this would be permitted. But when there's reelection money on the table we all get told what we want. The only choice is if your moron's name is highlighted in red or blue.

Kind of waiting to see the large-scale rejection of surveillance/plate readers where people "adjust", cover, or otherwise disable them.

The solar-scam model is well established by now and has lots of creative permutations. It's at the point where finding a legitimate company to install them without shenanigans is ... difficult.

All the rebates and other incentives played a huge part in creating this of course. Shocking how 'free money' drives up prices and brings corruption so consistently. /s

The very concept of a 'wealth tax' is just retarded.

I start a company. It grows. I hire more people. More growth. It's popular, great place to work, sells a bajillion widgets. One day someone decides it's worth $500mm. The next day they seize 80% of my company?

Now who runs it? Why do I have any interest in it's growth anymore? Heck, it would make me want to keep my company poor and smaller...and incapable of doing the things at scale that our society needs. Things like launching an electric car company or developing viable, cost-effective, reusable space launch capabilities...or providing internet to the underserved parts of the world?

What companies SHOULD be forced to do is give back a much larger portion of their net income and equity to their employees. Stop with the 'let's steal labor and wealth from people and make it taxes' and turn it into 'people collectively building valuable companies should be rewarded much more in proportion to their contributions in building them - not just if they invested $ to start it up'.

The only way I'm giving AI access to that level of personal information/interaction is if I own - and retain EXCLUSIVE access to the data.

Basically, the AI and data are mine and no one but me ever has access. No spying. No viewing. No data mining, anonymous or not. ZERO access during normal use unless I intentionally share something with a specific person or company. Think zero-knowledge encryption, but for my 'personal AI'.

Granted, companies want you to use AI largely so they can mine your data and it's gotten so expensive all the advertising/data-mining can't pay for it anymore...so they want to charge now. Nope. No thanks.

The biggest risk with any cloud storage is that it goes away without notice.

"That never happens" but it does. If they flag and shut down your account(s) they can, and have, hung people/small businesses out to dry that either didn't have a proper backup-to-the-backup solution or needed too long to restore the data and transition to another platform.

Your data is not private on DropBox and there's no option for Zero Knowledge Encryption/BYOK. 3rd party tools exist (ugh Vera) but they make the experience even worse.

I dislike Apple's ecosystem, but that's one thing they do extremely well, and pretty much seamlessly. I wish MS/OneDrive had a consumer-level option for this.

I used to get crashes out of DropBox years back when I moved many (many) thousands of files repeatedly and the database couldn't keep up but otherwise it was fine-just-fine in that regard.

> Winning
You would like losing a LOT less.

I'm no highly respected scholar on the middle east like you clearly are but a nuclear-armed terrorist-state doesn't tickle my happy places.

Nuclear weapons would give them actual /control/ of the Strait of Hormuz vs the temporary interdiction while they ensure the rest of their middle-eastern 'brothers' want nothing to do with them.

Trump is good at making enemies, but they still need him for better or worse.
Iran is making lots of enemies, none of which want or need them at all. Heck, even Russia who quite possibly would have /lost/ their war if not for drones and drone tech from Iran is doing fuck-all to help them out.

Funny thing that. You can buy digital goods that don't technically exist, labor, services, etc. ... you pay the apple tariff.

But you buy physical goods (amazon, walmart, temu, etc.) and ... no apple tariff.

... 1986 when the pols insisted on complicating an already very hard problem by building a "reusable" spacecraft with boosters from jurisdiction for votes while launching in another...then both cutting safety factors AND ignoring warnings from the actual engineers. I was a child and watched 7 people die on live TV.

The people who actually build rockets are AMAZING. When pols get in the way it gets expensive and dangerous. This is why SpaceX - literally - revolutionized space launch and everyone is desperately struggling to catch up to their soon-to-be-retired platform. Love em or hate em, Musk put the actual engineers in charge and ... yah. Winner winner chicken dinner.

When the goal is cost-plus we all lose. When the goal is 'do the thing' and then they'll come...we all win.

OMG NO!

You've hit on un-mined gold which...I hope will cause a revolt.

Imagine of monitor mfgs. build in a motion sensor to briefly activate and show ads? So you could still be 'green' but also abruptly blink-on with some stupid paid-for-reason-to-punch-a-screen?

It's bad enough...please no