So we don't have Net Neutrality laws now, but the threat of possibly having it in the future is keeping ISPs in check? That's quite the stretch.

This law has been on and off as the summary states but fundamentally it hasn't changed anything. No providers changed their rules materially, no new services were created or destroyed, no websites failed to function.

I think the pro Net Neutrality side is coming at it from a place of good intent to protect but they fundamentally misunderstand how the big providers operate. This has been true since at least 2003 when the ideas first escaped academia and started a political movement. In 2025, arguably, we are more beholden to the AWS/Azure's of the world than the last mile providers anyway.

With an EV, it depends how I drive my vehicle. If I drive 50 miles every day for 200 days out of the year and I have a home charger, I will occupy a public charger for approximately 0 minutes. I will spend approximately 0 minutes filling up my car over the course of the year.

If I drive 25 miles every day for 200 days out of the year and take 10 road trips each at 500 miles round trip (with only my home charger at the beginning and end of the round trip) then I will have to find a public charger for ~250 miles of the trip.

It's not possible to distill this down to a simple calculation like you suggest for gas cars, because there isn't one single charging speed to consider. We can take some guesses that the roadtripper will only use fast charging (150kW+) and the car will charge at the full rate on average for this time.* If the car gets 3.3mi per kWh (per EPA this is the average) then it's about 75kWh of charging needed per roadtrip, or 750kWh per year. This is about 5 hours of charging at public stations, way above your 85 minute estimate for gas.



*this is a broad simplification but consider that nearly all Tesla's can charge at 250kW when near empty, and can charge at over 150kW when 1/3 full, it makes sense. Other more modern EVs can charge at even higher rates, but finding a charger that supports it is very limited.

I have definitely heard of this for undergrad, but didn't realize they kept doing it for graduate school. Seems like it would be worth it to emancipate yourself as a 22- or 23-year-old (is this even possible?) if you get into Johns Hopkins!

Here's what I don't understand: what medical student's family makes $300K?

These are 23-, 24-, 25-year-olds who are full grown adults usually taking on debt to pay for medical school. Plenty of them are getting help from their parents but aren't they technically not dependent on their parents' income from a financial aid perspective? Sure plenty of these students have parents earning over $300K, but is that relevant for the financial aid calculation? Isn't the student's family defined as them + spouse and their kids, instead of their parents income?

Headline: Some people don't have kids.

You're not entirely wrong about public charging infrastructure, but as an EV owner myself, I don't think your experience is particularly instructive, especially to someone who is buying a vehicle manufactured in the last 3 years.

Tesla owns the market for used right now and for new cars is still outproducing and selling nearly everyone else combined. That means most American EV owners are getting the Tesla Supercharger experience, which is an extremely reliable public charging solution. It's flat out awesome in most cases, and even when crowded, it's not unlikely that you can find another Supercharger within ~30 minutes. This sounds like a lot of driving, but it's nothing if you're on a roadtrip.

The rest of the charging infrastructure is hit or miss, but your 2014 Leaf can't charge on CCS (I'm pretty sure about this but tell me if I'm wrong!) and that rules out a lot of public infrastructure, especially modern fast chargers. You're limited to L2 charging, which was always meant to be a small supplement and never a full solution. For non EV owners, this is like walking around with an Android that charges on Mini USB, and complaining that every time you ask someone to plug in your phone, they only have Lightning cables (Tesla Superchargers), and some people have USB-C (CCS).

But all of this hardly matters. Home charging has always been where it's at. You're correct that unfortunately most people do take a long trip to see family only once or twice a year, and they have to buy a car for that experience. The public infrastructure really only needs to be used in those cases. We can absolutely be 80%+ electric for passenger vehicles (not talking about trucks) with the limited public infrastructure we have planned today.

You can click the link and view the pictures without logging in or having an account.

Density is the big difference here.

Also, unlike many other dense US cities, NYC doesn't have alleys. Philadelphia, for instance, uses alleys for trash, so the trash isn't sitting on the sidewalks. Manhattan specifically doesn't have any access to the buildings except through the street and sidewalk front entrance.

But in NYC, you can't just put it in a trash can and wheel it to the curb when you have 30 - 50 floors of residences, or 100 floors of offices stacked on top of one another, each generating a ~bag per day. Because NYC doesn't want to give away any street parking, that leaves the sidewalk as the only place for trash to exist outside of the buildings. We're hoping that this containerization strategy (that has worked well elsewhere in the world!) will fix this.

Also, just in case you don't think this is a problem that needs solving, you can get a feel for what this looks like on a daily basis, as all the buildings put their trash outside by looking for #TrashCity on Twitter.

I assume you mean Edmonton? There's no way you could fly supersonic over Edmonton (not sure what mileage clearance you'd have to give to go around) but after Edmonton, you're pretty much smooth sailing until you hit Belfast/Glasgow depending on the exact route. You get close to Reykjavik, but I assume the path could be altered pretty easily to get out of Iceland airspace. In fact, the only other city I see on the entire map after Edmonton is Fort McMurray which is a city of ~60,000 people and likely pretty avoidable.

Also, it would likely only take 90 minutes to go Seattle to Edmonton at subsonic speeds, at which point you could go supersonic for however many hours it takes to get to the UK.

By the way, this flight pattern is very similar for Seattle to Amsterdam, Berlin, and a few other European northern cities.

I guess I should have been more clear - I mean western US cities heading to Asia, and eastern US cities heading to Europe.

Also, not for nothing - Seattle to London is mostly over nearly completely unpopulated land (Greenland, Nunavut) and a bunch of water - so I suppose it's possible Canada and Denmark would allow Supersonic over their land, but I am just a guy looking at maps.

Basically every transatlantic or transpacific US originating route is mostly over water so there should be good opportunities to hit supersonic speeds for a big percentage of the flight.

He's 6'0" and over 200 lbs, but sure...
Lots of people use oversized phones because they like them, or they're what's available - I'm not sure body (or hand) size has anything to do with it.

Can someone help explain this to me? Steamboat Willie - the actual artwork, and presumably the audio - can be repurposed, printed on t-shirts, hats, remixed, etc. etc. But the other artwork that Disney has created around the IP of Mickey cannot be repurposed, correct? So, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006) is still off limits - you can't steal a frame from that and use it as a logo, right?

But new original artwork, using the likeness of Mickey is OK, I think? So, if I draw something that looks exactly like Mickey Mouse and call it "Mickey Mouse" - I can profit from that, if the copyright expires? But all the other stuff Disney has created is still owned by Disney -- until that copyright expires (presumably 95 years after the material came out). Did I get it right?

How did people think they were doing the alert identifying to the user when their mic was muted? Magic? I suppose you could process this all locally, but there's very little chance of any of these companies doing anything like that when they can easily collect the data and process it centrally where the CPU/network usage is a rounding error. Use a hardware mute. Don't ever trust software if you can control the hardware.