Pretty sure they said what they want in the second half of the sentence. Slow the product release cycle to match the pace of technological progress. Hard to imagine it happening in a market-driven world, but a slower release cycle would incentivize more affordable, longer supported products without having to change anything about physics

This makes one of the “solutions” from the article: “A law was introduced at the end of 2023 that will eliminate the need for permits and environmental impact assessments for bridges that are being widened to add lanes as part of renovations.” look particularly shortsighted. Infrastructure is a maintenance debt that we are reckoning with, so we will make it easier to build specifically bigger infrastructure so that in 25 years we will have an even bigger problem to solve? Not to mention the concept of induced demand meaning that those lanes are going to increase the amount of vehicles using the bridge, which would be exactly the kind of thing that should get an environmental assessment, versus repurposing some lanes for sustainable transit or building a separate bridge for those modes

Lifelock marketing department salivating at this new ad script

That’s why fuck Russia and not fuck Russians

Dudes still a nationalist. To make an analogy to US politics, he’s the Liz Cheney to Putin’s Donald Trump. His anti-corruption cause is laudable, and it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t be a huge step up from Putin, but genuinely good is debatable

Yes, but in about 5-6 months, Republicans will have to run against other Republicans in a primary to get their party’s nomination to run as an incumbent in the general election next November, and none of them want to go into that vote with their opponent able to say that they gave Democrats the Speaker seat because the Republican base that votes in the primary cares oodles more about tribalism than a functional government

I hate to break it to you, but Russia crossed that particular Rubicon at Bucha and so many other places already. So first place is already taken

It wasn’t meant to be an attack 🙂. Absolutely, those people should wear proper PPE (bright clothing) when running in the dark. But you have an elevated heart rate because your body is telling you you are in a dangerous situation. And it’s right. Too many drivers (not an accusation at you) either ignore those signals (and mentally normalize driving recklessly) or blindly focus on removing the triggers for those signals at the expense of the safety of themselves and others (by buying larger vehicles or by voting for politicians that make our infrastructure even more hostile to pedestrians than it already is). At the end of the day, driving a car is dangerous. Especially on residential streets where pedestrian interactions are possible or even common). And that won’t change as long as it is a residential street. Being aware of the danger is a positive, if inconvenient, reminder to drive cautiously.

They should. But also, good. You should absolutely feel anxiety operating a multi-ton piece of heavy machinery. Even if everybody was super diligent about making themselves visible, there would still be the off cases. Someone’s boss held them late and they missed the last bus so now they need to walk home in the dark when they dressed expecting to ride home in the day. Someone is down on their luck and needs to get to the nearest homeless resource and doesn’t have access to bright clothes. Drivers should never feel comfortable that obstacles will always be reflective and bright. Our transportation infrastructure should not be built to lull them into that false sense of comfort.

Last one in Europe other than those two. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea all remain in Asia. None are likely to join NATO anytime soon. Georgia may be the most likely, but they have the same problem with outstanding Russian occupation that Ukraine has/had going into 2022. Azerbaijan is aligned with Turkey, who is a NATO member, but does not have contiguous borders with NATO. Kazakhstan has distanced itself from the Ukraine invasion, but is otherwise more similar to Belarus than Finland in terms of alignment. China and North Korea have nukes. Mongolia is up shit creek without a paddle hoping that China and Russia continue to rival each other enough to not want the other to expand into Mongolia really

It is a very solvable problem, and mechanical or thermal batteries are likely to be at least part of the solution. Of the three kinds of gaps/shortfalls that grid storage would have to cover, the milliseconds-long and hours-long gaps are probably the easiest to solve. The days-long gaps (stretches of cloudy days, low winds for extended periods) is probably the most expensive to solve, but even those are not really that difficult (hydro storage is a tested technology that works well and HVDC transmission linking regions together can allow local shortfalls to be covered by remote surpluses). It’s all more a matter of building capacity than needing new technology to solve an unsolvable problem, from what I understand

Powering a couple appliances for a few hours is nothing for a car battery, those things are huge and powerful because cars are so inefficient. That’s not to say that V2G or V2X will work perfectly for everybody, but with the average commute around 25 miles and plenty of EVs out there over 200 mile range (which equates to mutliple days of typical electrical usage), there’s certainly some extra capacity. If you were compensated for the power you sold back at peak times, it could help justify paying for and lugging around the kind of battery capacity that is specced for your weekend/holiday road trips just to make your likely shorter daily commute. I’m using you generically, I don’t know your specific situation, so you certainly could be someone who would not feel a need to engage in that kind of scheme

The issue isn’t really comparing high noon to midnight. The issue is comparing prices at either high noon (when supply is large) or midnight (when demand is small) to the space in between, especially dinnertime (when demand peaks just as solar supply finishes tailing off). There are ways to move some of that peak into noon (e.g: if homes are well insulated, they can be cooled or heated while solar is still up and used as a thermal battery to at least bridge over to the nighttime hours), but some of the peak is much harder to shift around. If everybody starts cooking and turns on the television around dinnertime, the only way to distribute that is to stagger dinnertime, which is easier said than done for a lot of people’s schedules. Having power storage to bridge that gap (wouldn’t it be nice if everyone that has an electric car got home and used whatever range they had leftover in their battery to absorb their extra demand and then start charging again at nighttime rather than immediately start charging at the worst time of day. Or having solar plants that store excess daytime power in thermal, hydro, or chemical batteries to discharge and increase supply later) is likely easier than convincing enough people to work odd shifts or delay their after work leisure activities

But the deniers mentioned in the article are in the UK, hence the relevance

It’s not a baby until it’s born. It’s still a fetus even if it would have been viable if born. Any other deadline is going to be either arbitrary and not a good fit for some subset of cases. Also, wanting something to be legal is not equitable with wanting something to happen, and you should avoid falling prey to that false logic. I don’t think the person you are replying to is saying they would celebrate a last minute abortion, just that they think it shouldn’t be something that the blind hand of the legal system is applied to

They will. When primaries come, the Democratic party will soundly and democratically (little d) reject his attempt to represent them by not voting for him. Even before then, he will be rejected because nobody is going to give him the time of day when it comes to setting up a debate or using party resources to facilitate his campaign. Until then, he is not a representative of the party, just a dude who says he wants to represent the party. I could just as easily say I want to represent the Republican party by running a campaign on aborting every single fetus in the United States and then holding a giant gay orgy before forcing all cisgender people to undergo surgical transition. Obviously I would not be representative of the Republican party. Same with this guy and the Democratic party. The only reason it feels like this guy is in any way legitimate or affiliated with the Democratic party is because of how early primary/election coverage starts.