Free Fillable Forms are a no-frills unguided option for federal returns, but at this time they are limited in what forms they can accept. If you need more than a form 1040 with a W-2 and a handful of other basic forms, you're still probably better off filing a paper return. They're a public-private partnership with the IRS, which should make them slightly less scummy than Intuit and co.
Right now my state still won't accept online returns without going through a third party, so the dead tree route is still the only way.

So you're saying that multiple sectors of the economy, including our entire logistics and transportation grid, depend on some kind of single, cartel controlled, strategic commodity?
Good point, maybe we should do something about that. Phasing out subsidies for this single, cartel controlled, strategic commodity could incentivize those sectors and industries to develop and deploy alternatives.

The energy would really have to be free for this process to make economic sense. At 75 kWh per gallon, even bargain-basement commercial and industrial electricity ($0.05/kWh) makes synthetic gas cost $3.75 per gallon, and that's JUST the energy used to make it. Sure, you could theoretically make electricity for less, but then it makes more sense to just sell the electricity to the grid. After you take into account distribution costs and taxes, that holds true even in places with dirt-cheap electricity and expensive gasoline.

This is where someone will have the clever idea to fire up production when there's a sudden surge in supply or sudden drop in demand, and ride the oversupply gap to profitability. But for this process to fully supply US fuel demand, we would need ~8 trillion kWh per year going into fuel production from a grid that currently handles ~4 trillion kWh per year. It's hard to ride the little gaps when 2/3 of your electricity is going into fuel production.

At 75 kWh per gallon, it would take over 8 trillion kWh per year to meet US fuel consumption. At that point, we don't have an electrical grid. We have a synthetic fuel grid with a side job supplying electricity to... well, everything else that uses electricity.

I could see this working as a sustainable (if catastrophically expensive) way to fuel some edge cases in a post-petroleum fuel infrastructure, but it would be at most a niche player.

This is one of those problems where the complexity scales by the square of the speed. Double the speed, quadruple the complexity. You not only need to see a human from farther away, you also need to predict their movement longer in advance.
I'm sure there are systems capable of identifying a human from far away, even at night. The hard part is that this problem has very low tolerance for both false positives and false negatives. You don't want your vehicle emergency stopping on its own in the middle of a highway, and I suspect that's the part not ready for prime time yet.
I hate to sound like a "cost benefit analysis", but at some point you have to say "For the amount this risky, unproven gadget will cost, we would save more lives by spending it on boring, unsexy infrastructure projects, disaster preparedness, proven safety upgrades, etc."

As long as you're in the market for a cushy tech-forward luxury sedan, a generic midsize family crossover, or an enormous truck you're spoiled for choice here.
But small cars? You have the Chevrolet Bolt (which has obsolete charging circuitry and was recently discontinued), the Nissan Leaf (which has an obsolete battery thermal management system and should have been discontinued a long time ago) and... well I guess the Tesla Model 3 is technically a midsize sedan which qualifies it for small-car status in America. Pretty much every other small EV on the market here is a low-effort compliance car (Mini, Fiat, the e-golf).

It's sad that so few manufacturers giving small cars their best engineering talent. With Nissan in a race to the bottom, VW and Mini moving upmarket, Hyundai/Kia and Subaru chasing the crossover bandwagon, and every American manufacturer giving up entirely, the only mainstream companies giving small cars their best effort are Honda and Toyota, neither of which are in a hurry to make an EV.

The Chicago freeze was an interesting confluence of events and should be used as a case study in root cause and corrective action. An important thing to note, however, is that almost all the factors that led to the charging failures are fundamentally solvable engineering problems.

1. Manpower: Rideshare companies and the companies leasing vehicles to rideshare drivers were adding financial incentives to EV leases in certain markets, including Chicago. This had two effects:
1.1: Lots of new drivers with no experience on how these vehicles perform in extreme cold, including the increased power consumption and decreased charging rates in cold conditions, and techniques for mitigating those effects.
1.2: Because many rideshare drivers were unable/unwilling to get off-street Level 2 chargers, they have to rely on DC fast chargers in the area more than the typical EV owner.

2. Mother Nature: Chicago's geography and its proximity to Lake Michigan means the shortest road trip distance between any two points is likely to wrap around the lake shore. This has the effect of concentrating the demand for DC fast charging around the shore.
3. Machine: EVs charge slower when cold and use more energy to operate when cold.
4: Method: To mitigate the low temperature charging rates and reduce energy usage on the road, EVs can precondition their batteries and their cabins to their optimal operating temperature either prior to starting a journey or prior to charging. They have battery heaters specifically designed to warm up a frozen battery. But the procedure for doing so often entails setting up a schedule in the vehicle's computer or entering a charging destination into the vehicle's built-in navigation system (not a connected phone). The vehicle will start conditioning when it plugs into a charger, but that will take a while. Drivers who were unable, unwilling, or didn't know how to precondition arrived at a DC fast charger with severely degraded charging performance.

5. Manpower (2): The additional regional trips generated by a long holiday weekend (Martin Luther King Jr. Day) increased demand on DC fast charging.

Chicago's geography combined with the rideshare companies' sudden push for EV leases stretched the DC fast charging infrastructure thin. Lines for chargers along the lake shore were not unusual even on a normal day during peak hours. The extra holiday weekend road trip traffic pushed the network even closer to the breaking point. On top of that, the cold temperatures meant that drivers had to stop to charge more frequently. And when they did, those that didn't precondition for charging had slower than usual charge speeds. Eventually, cars were arriving at DC fast chargers faster than they were leaving, and the system found its breaking point when vehicles ran out of energy while waiting to get a charge. That's why you saw all the stranded vehicles at charging stations, not on the street. The vehicles themselves functioned just fine in the cold; it's charging (and specifically DC fast charging) that was the problem.

The lessons to take away from that incident are these:
1. Infrastructure: Expand DC fast charging stations to handle surges in demand combined with longer charging times. If possible, protect said stations from the wind to make vehicle heating more effective. Expand access to on-street level 1 & 2 charging to give people without off-street parking a place to charge without putting more load on the DC fast charger network. This is an un-sexy and expensive engineering problem, but it's not impossible.
2. Training: Drivers need to understand how cold weather affects their vehicles and how to mitigate these effects. Pretending that cold weather isn't a problem doesn't help. Drivers need to be taught how to plan for increased power draw and how to precondition. This is a learning curve with any new technology, and it is surmountable.
3. Machine design: Systems for preconditioning should be platform agnostic (e.g. should work with the driver's phone navigation, not just the built in navigation system), and manual preconditioning should be easy and intuitive.

Ford CEO Jim Farley seems to think there are some savings to be had by making smaller EVs, but it's yet to be seen if these savings will be passed on to the consumer.
An important consideration is that the current crop of EVs consists almost entirely of cushy luxury sedans, midsize family crossovers, and enormous trucks; and it's not economically sustainable. Legacy auto has had to put money on the hood just to move some of them. It's possible that smaller EVs could be made more profitably, and I hope he's right on that front. But like you said, it may take some reimagining of what a small car looks like to make that possible.

The telephone. And at grocery stores. And obtained car and home loans. All freely.

Please donâ(TM)t have children. You will sux as a parent.

Government is after these companies for encryption, which the companies claim it is about privacy. But this really should be about security. By using these services, you are nearly guaranteed that end user is who they say. What is needed is for governments to hand out a packet of vetted digital certificates and then use these in various services/applications.

China is pushing massive amounts of effort on AI for industry and military. Doing this should not be an issue. However, these ppl are likely to be a detriment to this. So best thing would be to do a NASA/USAF kind of thing. Split the group into 2 with those that fighting military involvement and put them in a group devoted to industry, pure development while other group continues to do pure development but in all areas including military. For this 2nd group, put in ppl with security clearance.

This has been claimed multiple times over the last 15 years, but their goal is 1.75 TW of coal plants. It will return to adding 40-50 GW new coal plants / year next year, if not this year.

NASA should be creating standards for private space. Not just space suits but even docking, sat capture, etc is a mess.

It used to be that we had intelligent ppl and postings on /.
Nuclear power plants do NOT have hires in their cooling towers, ESP. BLACK ONES. Only idiots bought off on this.
They burned a bunch of tires in the cooling towers to play to the anti-nuclear idiots that run around in the west, so that do not pay attention to things like Ukraine taking a chunk of Russia.