While the Texas Plate ‘HAIT 88’ seems like it’s fake, I feel that is implied by driving a Cyber Truck. He didn’t need to go through the trouble paying extra for that.

I studied this a bit in my MS and the answer is… probably not. “The grid will collapse” has been an anti-technology or pro fossil fuel talking point for a very long time, whether* its arguing against renewables or against personal computers or against AC units. The most recent was solar. Grid operators were adamant that solar would crash the grid if it accounted for more than 10%, then 20%, then 30% and so on and it never happened. Now it’s onto EVs being the grid destroyer.

The reality is that production and use is not all that hard to predict. Ultrafast charging will eat some power, but that isn’t going to be the norm for wide EV adoption. Public charging will cost more money and be less convenient than charging at home or work over a longer duration. Home chargers are capping around 30-35 amps, generally overnight when grid demand is low. Couple this with the combined low cost for residential solar to change at even lower rates depending on your state/nation’s hostility to solar.

Now, if every car was replaced with an EV tomorrow, the grid would struggle. But that’s not going to happen. Adoption will be a long slow process and energy producers will increase output on pace as demand forecasts increase. A good parallel to this is Air Conditioning adoption. That’s another high demand appliance that went from rare to common. The grid has its challenges, but now the AC usage is forcastable and rarely challenges the grid.

Is it a challenge, especially with higher renewable mixtures, yes. Can utilities fumble? Of course. Will it be a widespread brownout every day during commute hours? Not likely.

I highly doubt this bill goes anywhere. Democrats have a Trifecta in MN. Slim, but still. They were able to narrowly get it out of committee, but getting it to pass on the floor, or even brought to a vote at all, is a heavy lift. Id bet it never makes it to a floor vote and the Rs can say they tried. Committee votes are a very easy and non-significant way to “vote for something” without actually doing anything. Mainly because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea how government works and will take it at face value.

Even if it did somehow pass, no way Gov Walz signs it into law. That sends it back for a 2/3rds vote to overcome the veto and that certainly won’t happen.

Not to mention triggering Article 5 for the rest of NATO and shattering every defense agreement at once. You know, Putin’s wet dream.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/Cy1ei

The fight doesn’t end with a ballot measure, in any state. They will keep trying to ban it forever. A similar thing happened in KS. A ballot measure was created to keep healthcare decisions out of the government’s hands, which was already in the state constitution.

KS GOP said people needed to vote no and that it was in no way an attack on abortion. It had nothing to do with abortion. It was just about making sure people could get medical care, absolutely nothing would be done to abortion rights. Just let the GOP help you get healthcare, they said.

The ballot measure passed, maintaining abortion rights, and the GOP, in a shocking move, immediately tried to ban abortion…twice…in 2 years.

Shhhh. I don’t want these two anywhere near an office or department with merit.

It’s the Tragedy of the Commons defense

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Providing he doesn’t become a dictator, which is certainly probable, his impacts on the environment will be bad, but not catastrophic.

Historically, when the incumbent is out, the president flips to the other party. Businesses plan strategy out for 5-10-20 years. Trump dismantling regulation won’t force them to reconsider their strategy entirely. They’ll use the 4 years as breathing room knowing it’s probable a democratic executive will return in 2029. They’ll slow walk progress, but they aren’t going to abandon everything and start ramping up emissions. They still have to sell products in CA and the 16 states that follow CA emissions rules. We already saw that in 2016, auto makers stayed the course. They enjoyed the extra time to get their fleet MPGs up, but they knew time would eventually out and they’d need to be competitive when that happened.

Trumps “drill baby drill” plan sounds good to idiots, but oil is still subject to supply and demand. They already lease more land than they could ever use. They’ll use trump to buy up leases that would otherwise go to renewables, but they aren’t going to start pumping oil past demand and driving their profits down. Especially considering retaliation tariffs could cut into exports as well.

The IRA benefits red states more than blue and they are already begging GOP leaders to leave it alone. Trump might be able to cut individual tax credits for the middle class. Slow some solar and EV purchases, buy that’ll cut into Elon’s business as well, so maybe he won’t even get that done.

Of course, if he goes full dictator, we’re fucked anyway. But if he stays within the confines of our flawed democracy, and money prefers he do so they can continue to buy laws forever, then there’s a chance his damage will be confined as well.

Fully agree. The sort of good news for driving around them is that most of my frustrations come from it being overly cautious and almost getting rear-ended because it decided to stop for a green light or some other odd decision. It’s rare to have it interact poorly with someone that is driving predictably. Like, cut it off without a signal and you have introduced something has not already accounted for. Driving alongside it on the highway, it sees you and knows where you are. But people are unpredictable and it only takes one mistake.

First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn’t do it either.

That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it’s practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn’t even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn’t used to be this bad.

Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it’s either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you’re in traffic because you know it’ll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don’t. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I’m watching it close. It can’t navigate city streets, but neither can FSD…

TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it’s bad and getting worse, not better. I can’t believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that’s why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.

It’s not much consolation, but I do take a little solace in the fact that nearly all of the Trump-wannabes have crashed and burned on the ballot. So far, it seems like only Trump can pull of Trimpism. His ego won’t let him name a successor, so when he goes, there will be a MAGA void to fill and it might be difficult for a single person to fill it.

Will Trump’s natural death free us from right wing extremism? Absolutely not. But will one savvy politician gather all the support trump has? Not immediately, that’s for sure. When he’s gone, I bet 40% of his base will believe he’s still alive and the deep state is hiding him somewhere while Desantis-Cruz-Vance, etc are false prophets. I mean, Vance was supposed to be the savvy MAGA guy, and look how well liked he is.

Musk’s attorneys filed documents Wednesday night in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, a federal court, requesting the matter be moved to their jurisdiction

Yep, he’s get these charges moved from State to Federal court so Trump can pardon him.

I know Billionaires going to billionaire and all, but with Elon Musk so obviously having a strong position in Trump’s cabinet, wouldn’t it make sense to advocate against that administration? Elon is going to crush every private space and EV manufacturer in favor of his own companies. Elon is doing his best ‘toddler in a bounce house’ impression at the rallies. No way Bezos is going to compete or overcome Elon’s influence, especially since I doubt Trump will give a single fuck what his cabinet does.

Again, avoiding taxes is all they care about, but damn. Harris might raise his taxes a fraction of a sliver, but at least Blue Origin would get a fair shake at contracts.

Somewhere in West Texas, a non-profit company with a staff you can count on one hand is born to sue the FTC for damages claiming their finger muscles were atrophied by the lack of clicking or some other nonsense that will climb to a 6-3 vote.

Spoiler, Walters is 100% buying the Trump Bibles anyway. All this does is open the bidding a tiny bit more. Sure, someone can do a FOIA request and ask to see the bids, but they’ll ignore it. The Oklahoma State AG is currently sueing the Oklahoma State Department of Education for ignoring the AG’s own information requests. It’s just $5-6 million for Trump out of OK schools. But hey, it’s one of the best school systems if you flip the list up side down.

This is one nice thing about a former president running again, we can see what kind of president they will be and…yea, he’d do that, because he kind of already did that, several times.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/coronavirus-trump-says-blue-state-bailouts-unfair-to-republicans.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/this-is-hardball-trump-and-republicans-bolster-red-states-punish-blue/2017/09/25/e114cea4-9ef5-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html

Cabinet and federal appointments are the big thing. That’s why I’ll take Biden over Trump. I’m not just voting for him, I’m voting for the 4000 jobs in energy, health, labor, transportation, etc. to be run by Democrats, liberals, and qualified people.

Trump, and project 2025 plan to fill all those roles with right wing nutjobs who will do anything to please the right. On top of those 4000, they’d expand the presidential appointment power to fire up to 45% of the federal workforce. Meteorologist who said the hurricane won’t hit Alabama? GONE! Doctor who said injecting bleach was a bad idea? FIRED!

I’ll take anyone who won’t put Project 2025 in motion.