They're not random; they're statistically weighted!

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> Which ones in particular?

One easy example.

> It wasn't a counter-proposal.

It was though. You attempted to replace the given bad analogy with an even worse one.

> No it's not, and it never was. In the earlier days

In the early days, nobody kept adapters in their cars because adapters didn't exist. Only a handful of Tesla chargers include their "Magic Dock" adapter which is only technically possible because, again, EU law forced Tesla to adopt CCS. You obviously have no practical knowledge of this situation so I'll say it explicitly: Prior to 2017, Tesla used their own proprietary DCFC protocol (derived from Chademo) and connector. Only Tesla vehicles can use V1 and V2 superchargers, and Tesla vehicles made 2017 or earlier can only use V1 and V2 superchargers unless they've had their charge controllers replaced. Tesla CCS adapters were physically impossible for nearly a decade because the vehicles and chargers spoke different languages.

After the EU forced everyone to start using CCS2 circa 2014, with full compliance due this year (2025), Tesla started building EU market vehicles with CCS2 ports and compatible hardware. To save money, Tesla then switched to using CCS hardware in all their vehicles and, a few years later, adapters started to become available.

If the US had put their foot down in a similar way, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Everyone would be using the same physical connector and the same protocol, and they would be legally required to work together instead of relying on the honor system like we have now so they would actually be tested and certified to work lest someone get their asses sued.

Needless to say, the EU has virtually no problems with their charging networks while the US remains a shitshow.

  >And we've since standardized around NACS, which is what most EVs and chargers already had

NACS is only the physical connector. The underlying protocol is CCS as I've already explained.

As for it being "what most EVs and chargers already had" is incorrect. NACS was declared adopted as standard J3400 in 2023; CCS cables outnumbered Tesla cables by nearly 3:1. The difference is all the Tesla cables were Tesla but CCS is spread out among a dozen plus brands and manufacturers. Tesla also enjoyed all the publicity and sexiness/clickbait attention which made them seem more prolific than they were.
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Yeah, I just saw a movie yesterday where there was some (very mild) tits and nudity and serious theme of sleeping with other people and I was like... how long ago was it that I saw a tit in a movie ? It seems nudity was in every movie (even unrelated ones) a couple decades ago, and now it's all "hide sexual thoughts and body parts or the evangelicals will become incensed..."

For info, the movie was Le semeur and it's okay but not great.

> That's a shitty analogy (not to mention, that doesn't seem to be forbidden by any regulation.)

I mean, there *are* laws regarding standardization of payment methods. The original analogy still sucks though, just not as much as your counter-proposal.

If we want to talk about reliability, then the single largest source of the woes is lack of standardization mandate. In Europe, they rather quickly passed a law saying that all public charging stations must have CCS2 plugs (they can also have other types, but CCS2 must be included). The result is every vehicle made for the EU market uses CCS2, because by law it's guaranteed that all public charging infrastructure will have at least some capacity - and as a natural result, *all* EVs sold in the UE market - including Tesla - use CCS2. (You can thank the ability to use TeslaCCS1 adapters to the EU law too, since it de-facto forced Tesla to put CCS hardware into their North America market vehicles)

In the US, no such regulation was created. We got CCS1, we got Chademo (briefly), and we got Tesla. The industry was left to figure it out themselves without a mandate to work towards, and predictably it's been a fucking nightmare with everyone rolling their own solution to a poorly enforced standard.
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> The ChargePoint chargers at the local Whole Foods, though? Both of them have been broken for months.

FYI; That specific Whole Foods location is responsible for the maintenance. Chargepoint's business model is only selling and installing the equipment, and offering payment processing subscriptions on the back end.
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A tiny fraction of biodiesel is made that way, and almost all by DIY enthusiasts. As far as I'm aware, no recycled cooking our is sold commercially as vehicle fuel. Unsurprisingly used cooking oil has a lot of contamination in it...

Regardless; as much as Americans love deep fried everything, there is not enough used cooking oil to make a dent in fossil fuel consumption. We would have to dedicate large portions of farm land and water resources to the task even if we went with the algae route.
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> Biodiesel is moderately easy to produce

Biodiesel also gels in the cold and is subject to growing bacteria and mold.

Not to mention we are still using arable land and dwindling water supplies for making fuel to burn rather than food to eat, so a blight or drought would be doubly devastating.

Biodiesel is a good stopgap tech that fills some important niches but it is not a solution in and of itself.
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I hope that you either find peace, or that otherwise that your inevitable suicide is painless.

18%. Slightly lower than the ~23% for the city as a whole but roughly 1 in 6 people who live in Manhattan are below federal poverty level.

People who've never been to NYC forget that Manhattan doesn't stop at Central Park North...
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Remember back in the early days when they were pretending that they weren't an illegal taxi service, but rather were just normal people "sharing a ride" to where they wanted to go anyway, and so called it "rideshare" to avoid prosecution?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

My level of pessimism about things like regrowing limbs has declined a lot in recent years. I mean, there's literally a treatment to regrow whole teeth in human clinical trials right now in Japan, after having past clinical trials with mice and ferrets.

In the past, "medicine" was primarily small molecules, or at best preexisting proteins. But we've entered an era where we can create arbitrary proteins to target other proteins, or to control gene expression, or all sorts of other things; the level of complexity open to us today is vastly higher than it used to be. And at the same time, our level of understanding about the machinery of bodily development has also been taking off. So it will no longer come across as such a huge shock to me if we get to the point where we can regrow body parts lost to accidents, to cancer, etc etc.

Whether someone is "curable" or not doesn't affect the GP's point. A friend of mine has ALS. He faced nonstop pressure from doctors to choose to kill himself. Believe it or not, just because you've been diagnosed with an incurable disease doesn't make you suddenly wish to not be alive. He kept pushing back (often withholding what he wanted to say, which is "If I was YOU, I'd want to die too."), and also fighting doctors on his treatment (for example, their resistance to cough machines, which have basically stopped him from drowning in his own mucus), implementing extreme backup systems for his life support equipment (he's a nuclear safety engineer), and the nonstop struggle to get his nurses to do their jobs right and to pay attention to the warning sirens (he has a life-threatening experience once every couple months thanks to them, sometimes to the point of him passing out from lack of air).

But he's gotten to see his daughter grow up, and she's grown up with a father. He's been alive for something like 12 years since his diagnosis, a decade fully paralyzed, and is hoping to outlive the doctor who told him he was going to die within a year and kept pushing him to die. He's basically online 24/7 thanks to an eye tracker, recently resumed work as an advisor to a nuclear startup, and is constantly designing (in CAD**) and "building" things (his father and paid labour function as his hands; he views the world outside his room through security cameras).

He misses food and getting to build things himself, and has drifted apart from old friends due to not being able to "meet up", but compared to not being alive, there was just no choice. Yet so many people pressured him over the years to kill himself. And he finds it maddening how many ALS patients give in to this pressure from their doctors, believing that it's impossible to live a decent life with ALS, and choose to die even though they don't really want to.

And - this must be stressed - medical institutions have an incentive to encourage ALS patients to die. Because long-term care for ALS patients is very expensive; there must be someone on-call 24/7. So while they present it as "just looking after your best interests", it's really their interest for patients to choose to die.

(1 in every 400 people will develop ALS during their lifetime, so this is not some sort of rare occurrence) (as a side note, for a disease this common, it's surprising how little funding goes into finding a cure)

** Precision mouse control is difficult for him, so he often designs shapes in text, sometimes with python scripts if I remember correctly

> If you killed off everyone that lived in between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, you would destroy far more people than Thanos did with "The Snap".

This region makes up 36% of the Earth and holds roughly one-third of the Earth's population.

Pretty sure Thanos dusted more than a third of the population. Turns out the majority of people live north of the Tropic of Cancer because that's where the majority of the habitable land mass is.

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> application of law(s) used in the case and whether those laws are compatible with the constitution

What laws, exactly? Plaintiff is accusing defendant of being responsible for the death of a family member through negligence. What is there to interpret the applicability of law for in a lawsuit that does not allege any laws were broken? Are you suggesting that they appeal all the way to SCOTUS on the idea that it's unconstitutional to settle grievances in civil court?

We are definitely not saying the same thing...
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> The second part of that is correct, though the first is not.

Article 3, Section 2

The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;--to Controversies between two or more States;--between a State and Citizens of another State;--between Citizens of different States;--between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

In simpler terms, the SCOTUS power applies to:
- Questions regarding the constitutionality, validity, and applicability of laws and treaties
- Lawsuits involving government officials and employees
- Lawsuits between states
- Lawsuits between citizens and the government
- International lawsuits

So no, not "any case" could come before the Supreme Court, only cases that are characterized by one or more of the above. A person or group of people suing a private company falls under none of them.

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