It's local and does not rely on the internet for anything but remote access as far as I know, but still buggy now and then.

It has a number of Tesla PowerWall batteries. Compared to a Generator they don't last very long. For the price they paid for everything, I would have added a generator as the secondary backup method when the PowerWall batteries become exhausted. There have been several times when there were prolonged blackouts in the area, and most of the other homes you hear the gennies kicking in.

I don't allow smart appliances or home automation in my house. And really, it's an easy choice. The cheapest stuff does not include that technology. You have to spend more to get a fridge with a screen.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues and information sharing, which all of us here are familiar with, there's another overriding reason not to have smart appliances or home automation - reliability. When you add complexity, things break more often, and costs go up. Obsolescence of your investment happens fairly quickly.

My line of work involves sometimes working inside of very high end homes and the newer ones contain every automation bell and whistle you can think of. And they break, and fail, a lot. One particular home is a brand new, probably a $25 million dollar plus creation, very modern and sleek. The entire house, HVAC, lighting, cameras, gates, door locks, etc. is controlled by a central service on a network. Things go wrong all the time. When the system goes down, nothing works. The more complexity you add to a system, the greater chance of a failure. These are people that paid a premium for these features, and I think they were sold a bill of goods.

Home automation companies market whiz-bang features to high end home builders and their customers, not letting on that A. The ecosystem of hundreds of different products they are assembling is not perfect nor trouble free, and B. Whatever they are putting in the house now will be obsolete in 5 or 10 years, and it will become more difficult to maintain over the next 10, 20, 30 years without substantial upgrades and replacements. What is state of the art now will probably be seen as fairly archaic when the house is sold again. For large homes and mansions, there is probably a middle ground somewhere that allows for some automation, but has enough manual control so that if something fails the device in question is still operable. This is not what I'm seeing in the newest systems. They are entirely reliant on a server for things as basic as turning lights on and off. Where a light switch would be, there is a keypad with five or six buttons, none of which anyone ever uses except the top button that turns the light on and off, and it's harder to find and press vs. a traditional light switch. The idea of being able to have dimming presets, etc. sounds flashy, but in reality they go largely unused. The biggest visual effect of course is when you push the button, it slowly fades the lights on. I find that annoying. I just want it on. Maybe that's just me and my old school ass that grew up with regular light switches. Being around this stuff has completely absolved me of ever wanting it in my own home, and I used to be a pretty big home automation enthusiast in the early days of Homeseer, X-10, Insteon, etc.

For a regular sized home on a regular suburban lot, there is no need for home automation. It is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. If you want to change the temperature, go adjust the thermostat on the wall. If you want to turn on a light, go hit the switch. There have been plenty of examples of home automation companies going under and the network enabled features of their appliances are suddenly rendered useless. With my dumb home, the problems don't exist. I don't have to do anything, maintain anything or subscribe to anything. It's bliss.

This is why it's better to separate the car from the entertainment system and just use it as a dumb screen when it comes to apps that are not directly related to the operation of the vehicle. It's easier to manage something like that on a phone. If it kills android auto, just switch to bluetooth audio until it's fixed.

And GM wants to get rid of Android Auto and Apple Car Play? Expect more of this, plus locked-in, walled garden garbage so they can sell more of your data...

Consider the cost of a new EV, and the insurance, the end of the federal EV incentive program this year and what an Uber driver makes these days, and it may not be enough of an incentive. Certainly, Uber trips are probably an ideal case for electric vehicle use (short trips, lower speeds with stop and go regen braking) but the economics of Uber driving are probably pretty touch and go from the various reports I am reading. (I would like to hear from Uber drivers directly on this matter)

Most Uber and Lyft rides I've taken are in older, well maintained cars. They probably are owned outright or the payment is reasonable. Insuring an older internal combustion car is cheap. Yes, there is a savings in fuel with an EV IF you can charge at home most of the time and you have an EV discount with your provider or you live in an area where electricity is cheap to begin with, but often the other costs can outweigh that. Just looking at the payment and insurance for my wife's (purchased used for around $30k) Tesla, and I am not sure if there is any financial savings in the fuel costs in the end, compared to my high-MPG Mazda3 which is paid for and is cheap to insure, and has had almost no maintenance needed since new, No one who is just getting by is going to do it out of the the kindness of their heart for the environment.

You also have to consider the shelf life of the battery, and amortize the cost of the car over time. A lot of these things don't matter if it's your personal vehicle and you're getting enjoyment out of owning an EV on top of it being useful, but if you're looking at it as a business case that you depend on for your survival, it's a different matter.

Any rideshare drivers here who would like to comment? The above is speculation based on my own experience owning both types of vehicles at the same time, but not as a rideshare driver. I have more questions than answers.

I think this incentive would appeal most to someone who lives in a household with multiple incomes, where the rideshare income is supplementary to another, higher income. Then it would be an incentive for someone who can actually afford to take advantage of it. My three cents.

True, and that system does work pretty well.

Of course, it's not the whole story. Vietnam is far from the only time the US got up to some unilateral shenanigans (i.e. bypassing all that nice world institutions stuff).

The US has a long and copious history of invading other countries, destabilizing governments (democratic and otherwise) and assination plots of everyone up to and including heads of state, and there's no shortage of it after WWII.

The outright annexation did stop post WWII. Well, except for a bunch of Pacific islands, which was done with UN endorsement.

The recommendation was not to expose babies to tree nuts in any form because so-exposed babies seemed to be more likely to develop nut allergies. It turns out that was due to recall bias and the opposite is actually true.

Assuming you are older than 25, you (and I) were probably exposed to peanut butter, along with other common food allergens, on purpose by our parents around four or five months old. As I recall (can't confirm) that was the general recommendation prior to 2000. Around 2000 the EU said five months and the US said 36. Current guidelines are 4-6 months.

I do think there is a bit of a difference between the agenda of a limited term presidency of extremists and the agenda of the Chinese communist party though.

The US has invaded all of its neighbours, most multiple times. Many of those neighbours got annexed and remain so. There was even a whole holy destiny religious thing to justify it. You didn't have to be a neighbour though, the US would invade you no matter where in the world you were.

Are. It's not in the past. Since WWII the US decided all the other powers should give up their colonies and the US and USSR would have "spheres of influence" instead. So not outright annexation, but if you don't do as you're told, more invasions.

It's not "a limited term presidency of extremists." The current bunch are just less subtle. They're also more talk and less invading, so far.

Now?

It didn't explode out of nowhere. Some people have always been allergic to nuts. Pediatricians jumped the gun a bit around 2000 based on poor evidence and started recommending completely avoiding exposing high risk babies to nuts until they were three years old (in the US). This turned out to be exactly the wrong thing to do and produced a generation of kids with much more severe nut allergies. More kids with more severe allergies caused even more restriction on exposure.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fa...

As I replied to you elsewhere, yes, the per capita rate is imporant, but Americans insist on making absolute comparisons.

The absolute comparison also isn't entirely irrelevant. The article uses electrical generation as a proxy for GDP, a widely used practice and one that probably underestimates China if anything. So total electrical generation indicates the economic power represented by a particular political entity. Monaco and Liechenstein are not superpowers even though their GDP/capita are more than twice the US's and the threat of sanctions from Ireland doesn't carry the same weight as those from the US.

No, they were still terrible. But they were all there was.

Perhaps you've never had or don't remember the experience of carefully checking the polarity and voltage on a wall wart barrel jack and then holding your breath as you plugged it into your expensive gizmo.

Many cell phone chargers will charge a laptop. You can charge a Macbook pro using an iPhone charger.

But sure, you might have one of the old 15 W phone chargers. So chargers state their power output and the USB spec limits the current so any up to spec charger that advertises 36 W (12 V @ 3A) or more should charge any laptop, unless you've got something super weird.

USB guarantees negotiationless current at 5V and 0.5 A. Raspberry Pi decided to use an optional negotiationless mode instead of implementing PD like they should have.

You're very unlikely to find a 15W+ charger that doesn't offer the optional 5V 3A though. No, the Pi 4 doesn't require 4 A, which is not a supported configuraiton under the USB spec, even with PD.

The little two-shot moka pots are great for camping too.