Yeah Walmart are supposedly putting in their own charging hardware and presumably some kind of network they control and profit from directly.

The ChargePoint chargers at a Sam’s Club near me have been inoperable for about 4 months and when I reported it, ChargePoint said the “owners of the stations declined to repair them”.

So I assume that means they are pending rollout of their own charging. Really inconvenient for now though.

I was thinking about this, and to defray the cost and make EVs more plausible in suburban US areas, they could make one simple modification.

Instead of the current model where only certain businesses are electing to spend $10-20k per level 2 charger, they should just aim to build almost all new businesses (this would include hotels, apartments, etc.) with basic-bitch 120v 15A outdoor-rated wall outlets in front of every parking spot. The outlets could be on a post, on a wall, built into the concrete curb, whatever is up to code and can be done cheaply.

The cost per spot would be relatively low compared to level 2 or DC fast charging and then people could charge using their own portable level 1 charger and the provided outlet. Level 1 charging at virtually any parking lot, plus being able to overnight charge where you live, covers almost all use cases.

Back in 2017 there was also the framework of an agreement to have the US help develop and profit from gold and rare-earths in Afghanistan.

I’ll leave you to speculate how that turned out.

That and there are second-order effects. If your business ordered a bunch of shit prior to all of this, and it’s now coming into port you may say “fuck it, send it back” or you may decide to accept it, eat the tariff, and preemptively increase your pricing on your future finished landed goods because you are now having to factor in pricing instability of the input components/materials.

Likewise, during the several months period of fluctuation, many businesses likely made a reasoned decision to stop ordering for the future because they don’t know if the market will tolerate them having to increase their prices by that much and they can’t afford to sit on inventory they will never sell. So even if the government declares “ha just kidding” and completely abandons tariffs today, there could be a period of 2-5 months where many products aren’t available because industries paused proactive ordering based on projected demand.

I really think PHEV is a good intermediate step for most suburbanite Americans. They can do 99% of their driving on electricity while still retaining the ability to do longer trips without extended stops, when needed. It is still progress.

I knew this was a fucked up industry when I heard they were successfully diversifying into women-centric gatcha games where the game is also centered on gooning over various character designs but the gatcha pulls correspond to specific romance scenes and interactions.

Japanese companies really have minmaxed exploiting every demographic. They have this garbage for the young people and pachinko parlors for old people and rural folks.

The most-aggressively short timelines don’t apply until 2029. Regardless, now is the time to get serious about automation. That is going to require vendors of a lot of off-the-shelf products to come up with better (or any) automation integrations for existing cert management systems or whatever the new standard becomes.

The current workflow many big orgs use is something like:

1. Poor bastard application engineer/support guy is forced to keep a spreadsheet for all the machines and URLs he “owns” and set 30-day reminders when they will expire,

2. manually generate CSRs,

3. reach out to some internal or 3rd party group who may ignore his request or fuck it up twice before giving him correct signed certs,

4. schedule and get approval for one or more “possible brief outage” maintenance windows because the software requires manually rebinding the new certs in some archaic way involving handjamming each cert into a web interface on a separate Windows box.

As the validity period shrinks and the number of environments the average production application uses grows, the concept of doing these processes manually becomes a total clusterfuck.

What many Americans would gravitate toward in the market is a “transitional” medium SUV or crossover type vehicle that is a Plugin Electric Hybrid (PHEV). This is the best option for many suburbanites because the infrastructure isn’t there for full electric for most uses cases, but most people living in single-family homes could afford to retrofit their residential electrical service at their own cost, and thereby do 90% of their driving on electricity while still retaining the capability of doing longer trips with gasoline. They need to be able to take the kid to baseball practice and fit the other kids Tuba or Cello in the back hatch etc.

Personally I know many people who would settle for this compromise as a transitional vehicle. We just need a few more options that aren’t $50K+ new.

Even if the stated goal was to reshore large amounts of production of goods to the US, there are several problems with that.

One, history shows that it is largely not possible, at least in any practical sense. US companies make t-shirts in Vietnam and Pakistan because they can sell them to consumers here for $10. Are US consumers magically going to decide they’re OK with an Old Navy (low quality) garment costing $35 instead of $10?

Secondly, standing up manufacturing and distribution domestically isn’t an overnight thing. Funding, site selection, construction, supply chain integration etc. all take time. Trump thinks he can trade a few weeks of bad headlines and market hit, for some magically reappearing domestic manufacturing. It doesnt work that way. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t create positive economic conditions on any kind of timeline sufficient to offset the negative effects real consumers are already experiencing.

“Sorry little Johnny, not only can we not afford new Nikes for you anymore, but also you can forget about that Nintendo Switch 2 for Christmas because we can’t even order one. But at least we know your GED-educated uncle Jimbo in northern Michigan might be able to get a lower-middle class factory job assembling widgets again… maybe… in 2 years.”

That isn’t a good economic pitch for most people.

AI can look at a bajillion examples of code and spit out its own derivative impersonation of that code.

AI isn’t good at doing a lot of other things software engineers actually do. It isn’t very good at attending meetings, gathering requirements, managing projects, writing documentation for highly-industry-specific products and features that have never existed before, working user tickets, etc.

“It’s all Isekai?”

“Always has been”

This sucks. I love that app.

My friends dumbass 12 year old kid was told he wouldn’t be given access to any social media until he was at least 16. He claimed he understood, and then proceeded to make an Instagram account with his real name and started sending pervy messages to various insta thott accounts.

Basically as a parent you have to give them access to very limited apps and make them repeatedly demonstrate they won’t misuse them. Then as they get older, assuming they don’t do anything stupid or illegal, training wheels gradually come off.

… and to avoid a boots-on-ground invasion of the main landmass of Japan, which would have cost probably a million soldiers lives, and who knows how many Japanese civilians.

"Put all your changes on 3 separate sharepoint calendars a minimum of 2 weeks in advance. Also do the normal approval garbage in ServiceNow and attend a 2 hour CAB for final approval. If you didn’t select the right dropdown menu option in the ticket details, you’ll have to start this whole process over.

Also, why does it take you guys so long to get stuff done?"

“Its not in the budget to apply security patches this quarter”

Do I get any kind of points for thinking Tesla sucked before all the political windshift relating to Musk?

I’ve said from jumpstreet that, at best, Tesla is like the Apple of the car world:

• Model releases considered “cool” for the first year or so, because it’s a way to flex on the plebs.

• Pretty soon everybody and their mom has one and the design isn’t very remarkable in and of itself. Therefore the iPhone becomes the basic bitch phone, and the Tesla becomes the basic bitch vehicle.

• Overpriced relative to similar performing products.

• Horribly invasive sensors, bad data privacy, and generalized ecosystem.

I recently vacationed in Germany and the immigration polizei agent asked me, in English, “what’s the purpose of your visit here?” and I said something like “Urlaub machen und Bier trinken, naturlich!” He applied the stamp and waved me through without incident.

So… Thanks for being cool, Germans!

I have awesome luck with this kinda thing. Was in Paris during a huge garbage strike a while back, and may be arriving in Germany during this.

Chinese cars are a known data privacy nightmare with proprietary software/ecosystems.

Tesla is much the same in the US… I’ve heard it analogized as “Tesla is the Apple of the automotive industry” and it is hard to argue they’re not. Like the iPhone at its first launch, Teslas were the “new hotness” until they became so ubiquitous they are now the most basic bitch car ever. They’re massively overpriced for what they are, they promise lots of features that often fall flat in execution, they are terminally online and reliant on proprietary cloud services. They collect tons of user data and do lord knows what with it.

All that said, can you imagine if Apple itself had successfully launched a car in the US market? Its fanbase would be beyond insufferable and it would likely have all the worst issues of both Chinese cars and US EVs.