kgermino

Ya that’s the big issues with EVs. It’s overblown in a lot of ways - it is, ultimately, just getting electricity where you park your car - but power at your overnight parking spot is a massive component of happy EV ownership and we’ve done almost nothing to help or even encourage that for apartment dwellers

And while I haven’t actually done my homework, the push to email-based login seems like it’s really pushing people to start using their own custom domains for logging in

Right there with the Milwaukee Marathon misspelling “Marathon” on their medals this year.

https://marathonhandbook.com/milwaukee-marathon-handed-out-4...

A big part of the issue is that federal funding drives probably the majority of significant projects at all levels. We have a completely broken system where every project is a targeted towards winning a grant as much as if not more than the actual local need.

Milwaukee WI has had several (awarded!) street reconstruction grants killed by this admin because they included bike lanes. They weren't bike lane _projects_, they are to primarily to rebuild crumbling unsafe streets, but they included bike lanes so the Fed's rescinded the grants and now most of the projects are dead. There's no local money to do it without the grants.

The real fix for this is to fix the stupid system we have, but for now it's what we're stuck with and this has a real impact you can't overcome locally.

That's true, but if you stay in the regenerative zone it doesn't (seem to) make that much of a difference in practice.

All the braking power happens in the rear if you only brake the rear wheels

I don't see why it would be an issue in most cases. Obviously you'd want AWD for proper off-roading, but for just driving around on streets it should be fine. My EV van is RWD and it's totally fine in everything I've dealt with - including deep snow - and I really only even noticed when trying to parallel park on ice.

That’s probably true but I wouldn’t count it out. I think you’re more likely to get answers like “we do 10:00 on tuesdays” (timed for schools) than “no”

And the TSA wouldn’t do anything to stop that

Hell the TSA doesn’t do much to prevent that on commercial flights, but requiring private flights to start going through commercial security would be completely pointless

It does depend on what car you get. A RWD Ioniq5 can do about 3 hours on the highway with 20 minute stops (though the stops are a lot longer at the more-available Tesla chargers).

There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense

Isn’t that their entire point?

But it creates other issues, especially for a non-techsavvy user

Pretty badly for both sides

It's primarily done for security and secondarily a benefit making it easier (for everyone!) to identify denomination by feel

That's fair, though it's not a given that the sprinklers are for turf-grass instead of something more important.

More interestingly (to me): did it have a local interface or was the only way to update it tied to the internet?

I agree?

In both cases the control system is physically in your house. It sounds like the sprinkler system did work completely offline (though it's not clear if you'd actually be able to change anything without internet - that would be a problem if not), they didn't set up an account so the system was in "offline" mode and dutifully ran the sprinklers on the last known schedule.

For the thermostat the example was physically removing the control system, which is typically not connected to the furnace through any sort of internet connection, and expecting the furnace to know what to do.

Are there any furnaces that do that?

Certainly, the standard smart thermostat set up is that your ecobee is connected to the Internet, but controls the furnace using good old-fashioned signal wires

Well that brings up two immediate issues

A standard furnace and thermostat won’t even know if you pull the thermostat off the wall, much less have any way to handle it beyond “full blast heat 24/7”

More challenging: you expected the sprinkler setup to do the opposite. Instead of following its last-known plan (the schedule) it should stop doing anything (possibly killing the plants it’s watering)

Good off-line only mode in a reasonable plan for what to do without the Internet makes a lot of sense, but at some point, there’s a control system and you need to change it (or even just have one in the thermostat example)

It wouldn’t _have_ to, that’s a political decision not a mathematical requirement.

But, even if you did it would still help tremendously and possibly still be sufficient. There’s diminishing returns where lower income people get a higher percentage of their income as a social security benefit. As long as that policy is maintained the ultra high wage earners would be contributing far in excess of the benefit they get paid back out

they're regularly revised up or down because they're (very openly) preliminary numbers released just days after the month ends and before many employers have even answered the survey. When the economy reaches an inflection point they tend to be streaky (multiple revisions down or up in a row) but that's nothing new and mostly just means that the economy has been getting worse over the last year and a half, which... that's one of the big arguments for Trump's victory so I'm not sure why it would be a surprise.

6600 lb towing capacity

Towing range is an issue with all EVs and the battery on this one isn't that big, but if you're regularly doing long distance towing I'm not sure why you'd start with a city truck

it does depend a lot on what you buy it for, but obviously 8' is a good benchmark.

But honestly... at 8' I'm not sure why you're bothering with anything (unless you're getting a lot of them), i usually just threw 8 footers in my Honda Fit and closed the hatch.

What? Unintended acceleration happens _all the time_. It’s usually driver error or a stuck floor mat. The vast majority are drivers who hit the accelerator thinking it’s the brakes then panic when the car speeds up. Toyota had some design issues that seemed to make it more likely (though the software was found to be fine) and got attention due to a viral 911 call and a poor response.

They were absolutely not the only make with unintentional accretion reports/issues at that time; nor presumably today, but I haven’t seen recent numbers

I don’t know where we’d draw the line for “quality first” but I’d argue Toyota at minimum qualifies

That doesn’t mean they’re perfect: cars are incredibly complex machines and mistakes are inevitable. But the airbag issue was a vendor (used by many companies) and IIRC the acceleration issue wasn’t that much bigger in Toyotas than other makes

May be my age, but I wouldn't say any of those brands are a mark of quality. Rather the opposite in fact.

They are all interesting in their own way (especially Tesla), but certainly not quality/reliability-first organizations.

Miles (of range) per hour (of charge) is somewhat widely (and accurately) used as a metric for charging speed

Agreed. There’s an EV camper van with rooftop solar. IIRC it gets about 1000W peak, which isn’t bad for the home batteries but is basically nothing for the high voltage drive system

I don’t think you’d have to run the AC any more aggressively with the solar panels than with a traditional steel roof?

If you’re suggesting it wouldn’t work in a garage, that’s obviously true (and another factor in whether car solar makes sense) but many (most?) people park their cars outside during the day anyway. I for one can’t remember the last time I parked under cover

In theory those screens are regulated to be safe to use while driving - my car for example has a lot of more complex features disabled while the car is in gear - while the phone does not have the same safeguards.

Whether those safeguards are effective is a separate, albeit critical, question

I’m pretty sure they mean that the width of the panel is north-south so faces are due east or west

I do know a fair number of people who got married for health insurance (not really legal reasons, but maybe adjacent?).

Though very few of those cases we’re people who otherwise would not have gotten married, rather people who got a legal marriage very quickly to access health, benefits then took the normal amount of time for the ceremonial wedding