Need? There are lots of things you don't "need". But this seems like something that could legitimately improve my oral hygiene because -- like most people, I suspect -- I don't floss nearly as often as I should. Having it integrated into the brushing process would mean I do it 2-3 times per day, rather than once every few days. Is that worth $500? I guess it depends on how important $500 is to you. I'm not very price-sensitive and I am very lazy.

I'll wait until these have been available for a while and see what the reviews look like... but if the reviews are positive I'd say there's about a 95% chance I'll buy one.

I have one, and I don't use it enough. It takes time and effort to fill, use and clean up. Did I mention I'm lazy?

The notion that democracy and capitalism are innately incompatible is rather interesting, given that every long-running democracy has a predominantly capitalist economy. There has never been a durable multiparty democracy with a state-owned or centrally-planned economy. Not one! There are several examples of non-democratic nations with capitalist economies, but the complete lack of any successful non-capitalist democracy argues pretty strongly that capitalism is a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite for a healthy democracy, which is the opposite of incompatibility.

I did note that you attached the qualifier "unfettered", but has there ever been an example of unfettered capitalism? I'm not aware of one, and it seems fundamentally impossible. Capitalism requires a state to enforce property rights and contract law, and it's hard to think how any state could exist that does those things but doesn't also impose some regulation. If by "unfettered" you mean "lightly regulated" rather than the literal meaning of the word, then it becomes a question of degree but democracies have gone through many cycles of liberalizing and regulating without ceasing to be democracies.

No, in fact most attempts at democratic socialism have been entered peacefully. They tend to begin by election of a socialist leader with enough support to begin nationalizing all or most industry. Examples include the Allende regime in Chile, India's government for much of the latter half of the 20th century, Sweden's Meidner Plan, Venezuela (Chavez' second attempt; his first try was a coup but then he was elected), etc.

Socialist revolutions almost always install non-democratic regimes, though many claimed to be democratic (e.g. the USSR had decades of elections in which every race had only a single candidate, chosen by the nomenklatura).

They did make as good an attempt as anyone... but still had to restrict emigration to prevent their population fleeing the workers' paradise.

Fair, many people do use the term imprecisely.

I doubt it. Which is why the cheaper devices being discussed won't provide backup power during an outage.

The discussion is about equipment that is designed to plug into the house wiring via an outlet, not a standalone battery that provides its own outlets. If you want to discuss an entirely different sort of equipment, then obviously the conclusions change.

This is too strong. There's a large distance between "Unwilling to tell a pollster they regret" and "Are quite happy".

I wonder if the GOP has just forgotten what decade it is with a lot of their voter suppression stuff. Yes, they're absolutely working to suppress the vote... but it really looks like most of the people they're going to stop from voting are their voters.

For a long time, the low-income and minority vote was overwhelmingly Democrat, and those same categories were also "low-propensity voters". Make voting a little bit harder and you'd reduce Democrat vote totals, while Republican voters were rich white people who were well equipped to jump whatever hoops you put up.

But there's been a realignment in politics. A lot of the low-propensity voters are now voting Republican, while the wealthy, dedicated and (especially) educated voters are now leaning strongly Democrat. Make voting harder today and you're likely to block as many Republican votes as Democrat votes... maybe more! I don't think they're going to get the return on their voter suppression that they expect.

What would democracy without capitalism look like? Democratic socialism always ends up quickly abandoning either democracy or socialism. Social democracy (e.g. the Nordic model) works pretty well, but that's still fundamentally capitalist.

Gotta stop you there: No, these panels and any similar plug-into-the-wall battery systems that might come with them will never be able to serve as a backup if there's a power failure. When the grid power goes out they will shut off. Even if you have both sun and full batteries, when the grid goes down, you'll lose power.

The reason was mentioned in the summary:

They also must be certified by an outside safety organization like Underwriters Laboratories and have a feature that would prevent electricity from feeding back into the grid if there's a power outage.

If they could energize your home circuitry during an outage, and your home is connected to the grid, they're also going to energize the grid. This has two consequences. One, you would actually be trying to power your whole neighborhood, not just your house, and two (and more importantly), you would be energizing the grid that power company personnel are trying to repair, which could seriously injure or kill them.

If you want to have backup during a power outage, you need another piece of equipment, a backup interface, and it needs to be inserted between your house and the grid, and to collaborate with your inverter(s). Also you inverters that with both grid-following and grid-forming modes.

During normal (grid up) operation, your inverters will synchronize to the sine wave provided by the power grid, putting power into your home (and, if you're not using it all) into the grid, in phase with the grid. When the grid goes down and your inverters see the grid wave go away they must stop putting out power, both because as a practical matter the signal they're syncing their output to has disappeared and because they must not energize a grid that is down.

When the inverters see the grid go down and stop inverting, they also send a message to the backup interface, which is just a big switch. It physically disconnects your house from the grid and then sends a message back to the inverters, telling them it's safe to form a new grid. One of them (they have to be communicating and collaborate on this) creates a new sine wave, the rest sync to it and they all start putting power into your circuits. You're in backup mode.

Note that this doesn't all happen instantaneously. It's common to have a 1-2 second outage while it all happens. I have 40 kWh of batteries on my house, but I also have small 0.15 kWh[*] UPSes on my networking equipment, desktop computer, etc., specifically to cover that small interval. Both times! Because there's a brief outage when the grid comes, back, too.

When the grid comes back, the backup interface sees it, waits a few seconds to make sure it's stable, then sends a message to the inverters: "Grid is back!". The inverters stop inverting and tell the backup interface that it's safe to reconnect to the grid. The backup interface reconnects, and the house is back on the grid. Note, though, that it's only on the grid. The inverters do not start inverting right away, even if you have plenty of sun and/or battery. Instead, they watch the grid for a minute or two to make sure it's stable, then they sync to it and begin inverting, starting by putting a small amount of power out, then ramping up until they're doing whatever they're configured to do (on my system, because I have DC-coupled batteries, they try to produce enough power to zero the grid draw/feed, allowing any excess solar to flow into the batteries until the batteries are full, then they produce enough power to zero the battery draw/feed, which pushes any excess into the grid).

[*] 150 Wh is actually way more storage than I need my UPSes to have. The problem is that AFAICT no one sells UPSes designed for situations where the UPS never has to cover more than 2-3 s of outage. When I buy a UPS I have to buy it sized by the maximum continuous wattage it can provide/relay, and it will typically come with a battery sized to provide that output for ~15 minutes, even though I only conservatively need 10 seconds.

If your home is connected to the grid, what happens in your home reaches outside of your home. In this case it's particularly obvious: If the grid is down and a lineman is working on the grid wiring near your house, he doesn't expect that wiring to be energized. If your house is backfeeding power into the grid, you could injure or kill him, even if he's a mile from your property.

So, there are regulations that limit what you can do in a grid-connected home. If you disconnect from the grid, you can do what you like (though your insurance company may still want assurances that you're following code).

Are two phrases I generally don't use in the same sentence.

From the Great Depression through WWII and to the end of the Cold War, we desperately needed competent elites at the top to keep us from dying or being conquered. But when that ended, we all breathed an enormous sigh of relief and waited for the world to get hugely better. It did improve, but not the way we expected, and there were still a lot of problems. People began to assume that if smart politicians and their expert advisors can't solve whichever problem they personally cared about (and, of course, without an immediate, existential threat, there was a lot of disagreement about what to care about), then smart politicians with expert advisors were useless. Populism is precisely the distrust of smart leaders and experts, derived from the assumption that such people are exploiting the masses for advancement. That assumption isn't entirely incorrect, of course, but neither is it correct. The world is complicated.

This assumption is aided by the fact that there is always a strong strain of distrust of elites. And now, communication technology has supercharged it by giving everyone a platform, allowing everyone to play expert, and to allow pseudo-experts to find enormous groups who would believe them. The ability to rile people up has become far more important than the ability to make good decisions.

Now, we've had a few decades of gradually-rising populism. As populists have captured actual power this has obviously made our problems worse, because the intersection between "populist leader" and "competent leader" is very nearly empty, and the fact that populist leaders must necessarily hire advisors who are loyal first and capable maybe (rarely) means that even the rare competent populist is surrounded by incompetents who lie to them and make them incompetent. Most populist leaders are themselves incapable of doing anything[*], and their staffs are worse.

Most likely, assuming AI doesn't take over and either kill us all or fix things, the way this ends is that it just keeps getting worse until we once again have an existential threat that convinces the masses that we do need competence in government, and we throw out the corrupt, the trolls, the grifters and the culture warriors and replace them with smart, educated, thoughtful people who hire smart, educated, thoughtful experts to advise them.

Buckle up, though, because it's probably going to take a while, and get a lot worse.

[*] I almost wrote "incapable of doing anything but enriching themselves", but they actually suck even at that. A competent grifter would steal much more.

FWIW, here are numbers:

Gasoline-powered cars: 1530 fires per 100,000 sold
Hybrid cars: 3475 fires per 100,000 sold
Electric cars: 25 fires per 100,000 sold

Source: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/s...

An interesting aside: The delivery trucks used by the US Postal Service for the last 40 years are crazy fire-prone. I learned this recently because my brother is a mail carrier and a few weeks ago he was out delivering when he saw wisps of white smoke from under the hood. He pulled over and jumped out to investigate, but by the time he got out it had turned into large black streams of smoke and by the time he walked around to the front he could see small flames. Instead of popping the hood he ran to back and started pulling the mail out. The fire truck arrived about two minutes after he pulled over (this all happened about 100 yards from the fire station) so a couple of packages in back got a little damp but he got everything else clear.

His boss brought him another truck about 10 minutes later and he loaded it up and finished the route. Neither snow, nor rain, nor external engine combustion stays these couriers, you know.

Mail truck fires are so common there's even a web site that tracks them: https://mailtruckfires.com/. This is my brother's truck: https://mailtruckfires.com/uta...

There are four or five distinct serious design flaws that make mail trucks fire prone. Mail carriers are excited about the new trucks that are coming, which should be much better. Many of them will be EVs.

No. I refuse to allow Trump to redefine conservatism. True conservatives may be criticized for caring more about economic competitiveness than people, but Trump doesn't care about either.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.