There are a few that are decent, but mostly they are inferior to pure EVs because the design is always compromised by the need to have the fossil drivetrain option.
That said the guy I mentioned who does UK to Italy regularly used to do it in a 6 year old Kia e-Niro, which was available as a hybrid.
High power chargers here come with batteries, sized to cover the peak times.
I hear the grid in the US is pretty crap though.
This is nonsense. People do multi day trips in Europe, e.g. driving from the UK to Italy. There is a guy on YouTube called Andrew Till who does it regularly, and has no issues even in older EVs. Our infrastructure is just much better than the US, it seems.
Or maybe it's exaggeration, because from what I hear the situation in the US isn't that bad now.
Anyway, vehicle too load is great for real camping.
One of the reasons for the war on renewables is the spectre of people being able to make their own energy at home, and even disconnecting from the grid entirely.
Eh, nuclear isn't commercially viable without the subsidies. Onshore wind and solar both are, and offshore wind is getting there.
So the electricity bill might be lower, but it gets paid for out of taxation anyway.
Both datacentres and nuclear plants need a lot of water too.
EV sales are increasing every year in Europe, while fossil sales decline. Same in China, another of Honda's markets.
Honda really screwed up. Their first EV, the Honda e, was small and low range, but it was innovative and really good fun. It showed that they understood EV tech and how to make a great electric car.
For the follow up, they rebadged a Chinese EV, and now seem to have given up. There was supposed to be a cooperation with Sony, but no sign of it.
Quite a few of the Japanese manufacturers missed the EV boat and are struggling now. Panasonic battery tech is okay but struggles against Chinese and Korean products. The Japanese EVs on the market are mostly mediocre. The Ariya is a good car, but the new Leaf is going to struggle to compete on price, and the Micra is a rebadged Renault. Suzuki are messing about with EV versions of fossils. Toyota have and okay but not particularly great EV, but seem to be holding out for the solid state batteries that they have been promising for years. Theoretically great, but in practice they will probably not be competitive on price, at least for as long as it takes everyone else to get their own out.
Meanwhile BYD are installing 1500kW chargers in Europe, and selling cars that take 5 minutes to go from 10 to 90%. Even the daftest EV sceptics have a hard time arguing with that.
Princeton alumnus here (undergrad, staff, grad, and later for a time townie and tigernet user). I agree things need to change -- and using AI as a tutor is a great option for some situations (even as doing that prevents the strengthening of human communities through human interactions).
A couple essays I wrote on that, the first from 2007 focusing mostly on K-12:
https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process.
And a Princeton-specific one from 2008 (and revised later):
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? Or, generalizing on Mayeroff's theme, will people have the courage to discover and create new meanings for old institutions they care about as a continuing process?
When I think back on someone like, say Shinobu "Dink" Asano of the PU psychology department staff related to undergraduate students, I can imagine no finer or more caring a person. Her presence made my life better at PU, both as an undergraduate and also when I was a graduate student. We still chatted a few times and she read one of my grad school papers I gave her ("The Self-Replicating Garden"). She pointed out correctly how alienated it sounded, and that was something I really had not noticed or thought much on (although she used more compassionate words, of course). I hadn't know until just now on using Google that she and her husband had spent time in Japanese-American internment camps in the USA during WWII... [Although I think on this over a year later and think now she did mention that her husband did not like reunions because of putting up the walls but I did not think much on it at the time, as many will not think much on the points here at the time?] That obviously has implications both in seeing alienation first-hand and also seeing the limits of walled gardens (as opposed to, say, networked ones). I made improvements to that idea later in both those ways. Here is a two-author paper (my wife and me) on people networking to build self-replicating gardens.
Which leads me to reflect on something. I am sure she tried her very best to make the PU psychology department a humane place, and I have fond memories of her. Nonetheless, what Gatto suggests applies to K-12 (school mainly as social control, not education), I suggest applies equally well to college as it is currently constructed as an institution. And it applies even more so to graduate school, which is becoming more and more a perceived requirement of any sort of professional career in the USA. [See the book "Disciplined Minds" on that.] I suggest it applies no matter how many nice people there are at PU, as long as its mythology for both undergraduate and graduate education revolves around scarcity, and related themes of elitism (alienation), competition (destructiveness), and excellence (perfectionism). I suggest it applies no matter how prettily you architect a place in faux Cambridge-style
Teams and Copilot didn't exist 25 years ago. It's the fact that they bundle a whole office stack under one subscription, which means companies end up being 100% Microsoft for cloud storage, messaging, email, AI, office and so on is the issue.
Just Windows and MS Office being incompatible with anything else apparently didn't meet the threshold.
I honestly can't understand how Teams can be so very, very shitty. Microsoft must use it internally, and most of the staff must hate it as much as we all do. Yet nobody at Microsoft is able to fix it. In fact, it keeps getting worse.
One aspect of enshittification that people don't talk about much is that sites do need to make money to continue. They can't be free forever. Often they make money in really shitty ways, like the recent RTINGS debacle with subscriptions, but you are absolutely right that none of them can continue to provide a free service forever when servers and staff cost money.
It's impossible to know how worthwhile a $2000/year saving (using one of the examples in the summary) is. They say their audience grew by 22% in a year, but not how much they expected it to grow had they stuck with Substack.
While you could do all this manually, AI combines some tools in ways that makes it a hell of a lot easier.
Notebooks are a good example. You can OCR them, you can type stuff in manually, you can extract all the text and throw it into a password cracker. It's laborious though. Now you can just take a photo of every page on your phone, throw that and your personal files from around that time, and have the AI do it. Maybe throw in some ebooks you facebooked, which you read around that time, in case you used a phrase from one of those. Some song lyrics too.
I've been doing something like that with AI lately. Take some order sheets and photos of bags of electronic components, and have the AI extract all the information and maintain a spreadsheet of my inventory.
All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
