Fwiw, different SwissGear model, but after my kids went through cheap backpacks every year like clockwork, I picked up similar backpacks for them, and theyve lasted three years and counting

He was murdered and the criminal who made that decision admitted to the crime publicly (after cowardly trying to blame those he commanded)

Huh, that sounds very different from my experience. Everyone taped from TV, and traded tapes, even people who couldn’t set the time or schedule it. People were so desperate for time-shifting away from TV broadcast schedule and to share videos that they sat through entire shows to record them. There were frequent glitches from people trying to not record commercials, before commercial skipping technology became common. This was also the only reasonable way to have a movie collection, given the obscene prices of movies on tape. And of course child me thought I was clever to figure out how to schedule a recording, only to be frequently screwed up by sports and political events running long - I’d schedule an extra hour and sometimes that wasn’t enough

The problem is they’re not repealing the truck exceptions, they’re repealing the increased efficiency

The problem is it’s very expensive. Solar installers charge tens of thousands of dollars and has a long history of scams. They take the place of the old trope about scammy used car salesmen. They’ve created leases and PPAs in an attempt to make the initial cost easier but only succeeded in being scammy

It doesn’t help that we have tariffs and other barriers to low cost solar panel imports, yet insufficient support for domestic manufacturing to be competitive.

The math is hard. Everyone wants to know the payback threshold from the huge install cost up front but it’s not straightforward.

When I looked into solar I found

• lots of scammers, poor service
• I calculated a payback of 12 years from install cost given free energy, which is longer than I’m likely to own this house. But they claim 7?
• I only have sufficient unshaded roof for half my usage
• is it poor service or scamminess that it’s so difficult to get them to explain that?

A big part of it is being realistic about how often that would come up.

Especially for those with their own house, charging overnight at home (like you do with your phone) is more convenient. It is so nice never having to go to a local gas station!

Forget looking for discounts like Costco, charging from home is half (for me) the cost of gasoline. Everyone likes saving money

The only time this doesn’t work is road trips, where I need to stop for 20 minutes every 4-5 hours of driving. If I’m eating a meal, it’s going to take longer than that anyway.

So

• 90+% of the time an EV is more convenient and much cheaper
• on road trips where I would have stopped to eat, it’s equally convenient
• on road trips where I’m stopping more than I would otherwise and for slightly longer ……. That’s actually very rare

Edit: looking at my charging stats, it’s only been twice in the last year. One of those was a 1,200 mile road trip that did wonders to overcome my range anxiety

most Americans don’t want an EV with batteries at their current state.

That’s a risky assumption given how driven by propaganda this is. The reality is current state of batteries is perfectly fine for most Americans. What if they realize that? It does partly depend on charger availability, which is being rapidly built out despite the efforts of the current administration to block that. What happens as Americans realize how many new chargers are near them?

Can you really not think of anything not included in quarterly profit-taking? Long term thinking? Externalities? Tragedy of the Commons?

This is government failing its duties yet again. Higher Short term profits for a few, at the expense of a livable climate, violence related to petrostates, higher costs for consumers, increased injuries and deaths, increased funding needs for military, infrastructure, etc …… including long term viability of the industry

Is it though? Sure they’ll have a couple great quarters, but the US isn’t the world car market. If they can look beyond a couple quarters, they’re just becoming uncompetitive everywhere else and eventually the hammer will drop in the us as well

Like disneys monorail

Speaking of my town just outside Boston ……

The food is just like the British: we have great Indian food

And after the pre plays out, the land is abandoned back to the government, is listed as a superfund site so the government is in the hook to clean up the pollution

I hope they all noticed Pete Hegseth is a coward who immediately tried to blame it on the guy he ordered. If an order is at all questionable, you will be hung out to dry. Blame only goes downhill

Definitely a bit ambivalent about this one. While this seems exactly the scenario why we need to chill out about immigration enforcement, show some empathy, it’s also what they voted for.

“Have the day you voted for” and I’ll try not to say “told you so”

If the military aren’t going to think about the orders they’re given, maybe it’ll give them pause when the person giving them is clearly a coward who will blame those he ordered

I’ll start a gofundme!

We all should care. Not only is the east wing destroyed but that’s $350M taxpayers money down the drain. If it doesn’t meet building code we’ll also be on the hook to rebuild it. This is yet more harm to the country and its people.

…… while I’m aware taco Don claimed to have secret private donors, does anyone remember how it went for Mexico paying for his stupid wall?

I’ve been through river cleanups everywhere I ve lived. There’s always something toxic that corps got away with dumping for so many years and then just left it. Government on the hook for so many billions of dollars cleaning up the mess. Where’s that sense of personal/corporate responsibility we hear so much about?

Huh, I’ve never seen this, or maybe never noticed it in any car I’ve used. Is this a truck thing? Cool feature but seems like it’d be abused more often than used

IBM doesn’t know how innovation works in corporate America, news at 11.

Of course the entire investment won’t be recovered. No one expects it to. It’s a race, and to the victor goes the spoils. Most of these efforts will fail spectacularly, but a small handful will succeed spectacularly.

• a few companies will make huge profits
• everyone else will have huge tax write offs, offsetting corporate taxes for years
• the rest of us lose