It was Aliens. They were out there raking the sand making it all smooth.

This is the old vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept that has been studied several times; there are actually already some 2-way connectors like ChaDeMo.

Of course this availability of battery power should be compensated somehow, and I can imagine a catchy program like "1 kWh free for every hour you make your car battery available". That would make car charging essentially free for almost anyone, which is not that far-fetched considering how badly California's grid needs flexibility.

However, this is done at the expense of battery lifetime. Several people have already indicated that studies have proven most EV batteries will survive the vehicle they are installed in, but that's because they are normally slow-charged at night and only discharged when used. If they are charged and discharged several times a day, this lifetime will plummet rapidly. When charging an EV battery, you only see the electricity price, but the depreciation of the battery is often much larger (depending on temperature, charging rate, current state of charge and of course enegy & battery prices).

Most EV owners (including myself!) have a very faint feeling for this depreciation when charging their car, so they may be willing to participate to such a scheme. However, if this scheme was profitable overall - why wouldn't utilities just buy their own batteries?

ALL materials are "technically capable" of being recycled, no exception. Even nuclear waste can in theory be put together to U-235, given a particle accelerator and enough energy.

The definition should be: can be recycled at a cost inferior to new production. If it can't, it's not going to be recycled, and for all relevant intents and purposes it's not recyclable.

How to implement: manufacturers claiming their products are recyclable must be willing to take them back, and demonstrate ability to recycle these materials themselves (no subcontracting, dumping, shipping to south-east Asia or other shenanigans). Can't do that? Then it's not recyclable.

It seems most people here are reeling at the social and moral implications of having a relationship with an inanimate algorithm. I am more worried about the insane private data mining potential here: suppose a stressed, lonely bureaucrat with security clearance starts a relationship with an AI, and talks about private matters they would prefer remained private: these personal secrets are a gold mine to leverage people into espionage.

Unless your AI significant one is running on your own iron and is insulated from the Internet, it is most likely a spy - either for governments or corporations.

This is nothing new: in the days after WW2, when supply of German men in marrying age was short, East Germany's Stasi successfully planted lots of "Romeo agents" by seducing secretaries of high-ranking politicians. Only, these digital Romeos and Juliets can be deployed to entire populations instead of targeted to specific individuals, and as algorithm they have absolute loyalty to their master, whereas Romeo agents sometimes became truly involved with their targets and sided with them.

Aside from the absurdity of investing in nuclear from an economic standpoint, given all the foul-ups of Olkiluoto, Flamanville, Hinkley Point C, NuScale etc. for a country that does not have income to squander, instead of simply installing solar (load following can be realised with geothermal and hydro, which Kenya has already a lot of)...

Will Kenya also have its uranium enrichment facilities? The centrifuges are the same as those used for weapons-grade uranium, and that's why no one believed Iran was pursuing peaceful nuclear. Kenya is not exactly Switzerland, while more stable than other African countries.

Why do you think a gun-type bomb won't work with a larger amount of lower-enrichment uranium?

Because U238 gobbles up fast neutrons a lot better than U235, and unless you remove most of it, the average 2,5 neutrons from each U235 fission will be mostly absorbed by U238 instead of starting another fission. Having more mass will simply mean you have more U238 as well.

If they believe that they're far more stupid than evil. At the 1st hint they would try to use nukes, America would turn their deserts to glass.

North Korea has nukes, and they brag about it, specifically about their ability to target the US with them. Haven't seen much nuking from the US, not even threats (beyond 45 saying he had a bigger nuclear button than Kim). Same goes for Pakistan, a nuclear power that established the Taliban and gave refuge to Bin Laden.

It's quite obvious the US does not disturb hostile regimes with nukes. It is fully rational for the scum currently in power in Iran to develop nukes as a form of insurance. They see very well what happens in their neighbourhood when countries with exploitable resources cannot scare off the US military.

Capacitors store electric energy physically (in electric fields) and have far lower energy density and far higher costs than batteries, which store energy chemically.

Capacitors can be used for some niche operations, like storing braking energy in trucks, but last time I looked the prices were in the range of 10,000 USD/kWh. Their main advantage is they can discharge very fast, so if you need a little energy but in a very short time they can be useful.

They have never been, and will likely never be, a serious contender in energy storage. 19x increased storage density is not going to help, even before we consider whether this invention can be mass-produced and what its price would be.

That's not to say this is a small achievement, there are certainly plenty of uses e.g. in power electronics for this technology. But calling it "batteries" and dog-whistling people in thinking this is going to make it in their EV battery is disingenuous.

It could actually be a good way to deal with compulsive smartphone use.

Engineers understand things and want to do a good job.

To be fair, you find greedy and thieving engineers too. It's just that being engineers they will realise that you cannot make a system like MCAS and not have it blow in your face within months the first time a bird strikes the one sensor that was keeping everyone on a plane alive.

The main problem with the McDonnel-Douglas suits was not even their greed or shortsightedness focused only on stock price. It's their outright blindness to the technical reality of the business they were running. This happens in so many sectors (I'm certain people in IT will sympathise), but in aviation you get lots of dead people who paid dear money to use your product, and millions others who will be scared of using your products again, causing the company's demise. In most other businesses, these corporate leeches are simply happy to feast on a rotting body, ready to jump onto a new one when the time is right.

When you feed it a giant cesspool of invalidated data (The internet) you should not expect a single response to be accurate. none of these AI's are fed a carefully curated data set.

But companies are expecting to replace all their programmers with AI.... What could possibly go wrong?

It's a theory that is difficult to prove — but difficult to disprove as well.

By that line of thought, you can accept any absurdity, such as the existence of god. Unless we find some "glitches" in the Matrix (like déja vu was in the movie) that cannot be explained by our current understanding of physical laws, and that somehow can be best explained by the simulation hypothesis, this is just cheap sci-fi. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence.

Besides, as Feynman (IIRC) observed, the most amazing thing about the universe is how few laws actually govern it. We can reduce pretty much our entire lives to gravity and electromagnetism, and together with the nuclear forces this has run the universe for billions of years, with no exception ever registered, and we've been looking. If this is a simulation, it must be really well programmed...

I'm a Norwegian EV owner, I drove two winters ago from Trondheim to Røros, literally the coldest town in Norway, driving about 100 km on a contiguous ice sheet under which the road was, and had absolutely zero problems. Take your bullshit elsewhere.

These problems could be solved with street chargers, but that's a whole can of worms itself.

If your street has streetlights, you have power. Most of these were built in the age of incandescent light bulbs and their wiring is now very oversized in the age of LEDs, freeing up several kW per lamppost. At that point it's just a matter of setting up an authentication system or an app for payment (which can be done at a later point when there are enough EVs to be worth it).

As a Norwegian EV owner myself, I think you would do just fine with 2 kW for overnight charging.