That heavily depends on the Dem primaries. I think after the unpopularity of Biden and the 2024 loss by Harris there might be more appetite to rock the boat instead of getting another establishment caretaker.
However, the more radical wing of Democrats still have some anti-globalism in them (eg Bernie). But still, imho: Unusual outcomes are on the table for Democratic party leadership at this point.
At this point I don't see a solution to the arms-race of autobesity besides regulation. Cars that represent a larger threat to other road users need to have that externality internalized onto the driver.
Because otherwise we just get things like the Hummer EV which is literally over 9000 lbs.
Imho PHEVs were the right tool for the job before 2020 or so. The cost of batteries was so high and the lack of standardization on charging tech was too tedious. I bought a Prius Prime in 2019 and I absolutely regretted not getting a PHEV sooner. Governments should've been pushing those harder.
But the day of the PHEV has come and gone. The massive price gap between PHEV and BEV is now negligible, and the charging experience is so much better now.
> Israel and Iran are both destroying oil extraction and processing facilities in the gulf region
This isn't like Katrina where oil infrastructure was being temporarily evacuated, shut down, and taking some water and wind damage.
The oil infrastructure is being blown to smithereens. And not just pumps that are sucking oil out of a hole in the ground. Refineries. Big expensive factories that process oil. Stuff we don't even bother to build in progressive parts of the world because the combination of environmental regulations and concerns about climate change mean it's possible they'll never pay off their massive construction costs.
> Stuff we don't even bother to build in progressive parts of the world because the combination of environmental regulations and concerns about climate change mean it's possible they'll never pay off their massive construction costs.
Ignoring pollution and externalities for the sake of argument this is what is very interesting to me. It’s not clear that the capital markets if left to their own devices would even invest in rebuilding these to begin with due to concerns about being paid back.
The oil industry has went from growth based investments to capturing returns on current deployed infrastructure over the past decade or so. Only very limited and calculated capital is being deployed in this sector these days.
It will certainly be interesting to watch. I’m certain those countries will rebuild via government funds, but I’m wondering how profitable that will end up actually being given how expensive that’s become to build, the insane construct lead times these days, and the overall trend in oil demand. Natural gas is even more interesting since it’s firmly directly linked to renewable energy deployment. Gas usage goes up as we deploy more solar worldwide, at least in the short term.
Additionally, the geology of oilfields is complex. They are like huge sponges made of rock with oil in the gaps. Because the oil production techniques involve injecting fluid into the field to extract the oil, if the oilfield isn’t managed correctly, it’s possible for it to shut down and be difficult to restart production even if you could rebuild the infrastructure.
Now that I'm comfy with "oh, install yet-another charging phone app" (a handful offer a website too) and the prevalence and backwards-compatibility of modern DC chargers and learning how to check which standards are supported by where, I'd be comfy with a full-EV, but I could understand being intimidated by that without the practice of driving a PHEV.
But to be blunt: It's a hump you'd get over, as long as you had access to an overnight charger of any kind (even just 110V mains) at home.
The port war is basically over here in North America - CHADEMO and CCS2 aren't a thing here and any charge station that offers those is just an old station that was hedging their bets. The only real standards you'll see are
- J1772 (the old AC power system),
- CCS1 (DC upgrade to J1772, backwards-compatible with J1772 chargers, looks like a J1772 with extra bits on the bottom)
- NACS (the Tesla port).
And unless you've got an old J1772 AC-powered car (like my Prius Prime), you can get adapters. So basically if you get a CCS1 car you need 1 adapter, and if you get a NACS car you need 2 (both CCS1 and J1772) if you want to be able to charge literally anywhere. The only wrinkle then is how fast you need to charge, and AFAIK NACS standard has more options for crazy-fast charging.
In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers.
And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.
I've always been stuck on the deb/apt system because it seems to have the best support but I probably need to move on at this point. It just doesn't work that well.
The problem is modern MS doing three contradictory things at the same time:
- FB's move fast and break things. Constantly launching new libs.
- Linus's we do not break user space. Great commitment to backwards compatibility.
- Never deprecating dead products until they've been de facto abandoned for like decades.
This combination means every MS product is a labyrinth of overlapping APIs with no guidance as to which one is actually the good one. Some are abandoned garbage, some are brand new and incomplete, and some are both, and there's no way of knowing which are which even experts can mislead you.
Well said. It feels like Microsoft is willing to release the intern’s poorly thought out product, and then commits to support the garbage design for all time.
Microsoft, you are a behemoth. There are few domains where you actually compete. Give your products a minute to breath before you cast them in stone.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JroA0Ap7zGU
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