Long ago when very few people had EVs some bloke saw me plugging mine in for a free charge (those were the days) and asked if I was worried about it catching fire. Mate, you drive around with a tank full of flammable liquid in a car powered by explosions.

The 12V batteries in EVs are much smaller because they don't need to provide cranking amps. They are just there to run the 12V systems, and are topped by by a DC-DC converter from the traction battery.

Of course they can often still provide quite a bit of current for things like heating/heated seats/window defog.

The traction battery is only connected to the DC-DC converter, the charger, and the motors. And there are cut-off for all of them. The motors aren't connected when you are parked, and the charger is only connected when charging/doing vehicle to load.

The switch thing sounds more like the switch gets stuck engaged and doesn't cut out at the limit of the seat's movement, causing the motor to overheat. But generally speaking EVs catch fire less than fossils. There is no hot engine full of flammable liquid and explosions, for a start. When you park over leaves, there is nothing hot enough to ignite them on the underside of the car. Nothing needs active cooling to avoid catching fire - the traction battery cooling is to make it last longer and charge faster, if it fails it's not going to ignite and the BMS will limit power when it gets too warm.

We have the British Library. Not too be confused with the British Museum where we keep all our loot.

I'm struggling to understand the logic, even from a MAGA perspective. How does making tech more expensive for US companies help them compete against Chinese companies?

The problems start when someone falsely accuses you of being AI. I've seen people applying for jobs be accused of it. If your application gets silently rejected because of that it's affecting your life quite severely.

Because there is a lot of negativity about China and Chinese brands.

In the UK you can buy an MG, and they are good, solid, well made cars, at very reasonable prices. MG is a very old British car brand, and stands for Morris Garages. Their cars were crap and they went bust decades ago because they couldn't compete with European and Japanese manufacturers.

Now they are a SAIC (Shanghai Automotive) brand. SAIC sells commercial vehicles under its own name here too, because commercial buyers are only interested in the numbers and no all the nonsense about Chinese products that consumers pick up on.

It works both ways. Berghaus is British, not German. Haggen Dazs is American, not Danish. Matsui is British, not Japanese, as is Superdry (all the Japanese writing on their clothes is nonsense).

But if you don't connect that remote sensor or monitoring station to the internet, they have to send someone to go read it. That costs money, so of course they demand it is on the internet. The marketing department needs that feature because all the competitors have it and the customers put it as a hard requirement in their spec.

These things are never driven by engineering.

Depends if they were prevented from getting up, or not told by the company to get up periodically. Most will include that as part of induction.

They also need to supply a suitable chair, and reasonably ergonomic workspace.

So they need some lithium hydride in there too apparently.

Obviously weight is an issue but so is your staff getting cancer.

I did, no copies in the UK apparently.

The way it works in Europe is that the employer has a legal responsibility to identify things that can harm employees, and take reasonable steps to mitigate them. The three things identified in the lawsuit - passive smoking, night shifts, and cosmic radiation - have all been known to cause cancer for a very long time.

They stopped the smoking in 2000. The night shifts continued, and they didn't install any radiation shielding in the aircraft. They also knew that going over the poles increased the dose their staff were getting, and didn't make much effort to at least rotate them onto different flights.

You have to understand that most of the people using these systems are not highly trained, and if you make them secure they will just blame you for them not doing their jobs and their boss will start shouting at you. It's "this needs fixing NOW, we are losing money!" vs "you might get hacked in future".

Once when I suggested we should secure a system the guy told me that we were not an important enough target to get hacked and so couldn't justify the expense.

The only solution is to make security a legal requirement and enforce it with regular inspections and heft fines.

You can just tell the AI not to do that. I gave Gemini standing orders not to flatter me so much, and not sugar coat things. It works well.

JPEG XL is more efficient in terms of CPU time needed to encode and decode than AVIF, but still not nearly as good as JPEG.

For web it's a trade off between the server saving bandwidth and the device using more energy to display the page.