I see a problem if the deposit is less than the value of the battery. If the deposit is equal or exceeds the value of the battery then it is exactly the same cost as if you bought the first one. I suppose you could say you get the money back when you get rid of the car, but that means cars have to be sold or scrapped without a battery which makes them much more difficult to move around.

Thank you. Absolutely the idea that this would be useful for privately-owned vehicles was a scam to try to make EVs sound bad. It is patently obvious that any serious proposal from a company actually intending to make money was to swap batteries in FLEET vehicles. Not private cars, if you think that then you have bought lies from the anti-EV people.

Wayland intentionally sabotaged focus-follows-mouse by making clicking on a window raise it unconditionally. Gnome did the same thing (for a while there was an option to turn off the raise, but they made it also ignore any requests from the program itself to raise the window so you could not actually rearrange windows except by closing and opening them again).

There does appear to be a large faction that wants focus-follows-mouse to go away and will do anything they can to achieve it.

Actually even the big republican states will not give up their power to make the 48% of their population that is not Republican count as Republican votes. Democrat states do support this because it would be a gain for Democrats overall, but I'm sure they would be against it if the population of other states was minority Democrat.

> activate the safety

I recommend doing a quick search for "glock safety" before your next venture into gun analogies.

The Epstein files are full of both Democrats and Republicans (and probably every other political party you have heard of). Nobody in power was ever going to push for their release, since it would be full of implications for themselves and their friends. The side *not* in power will push for the release, safe in knowing that it won't happen.

It seems like they are coming up with a fake release now. Purposely-obvious redaction will discredit it and even exonerate those who are shown, and foot-dragging will not be fought at all seriously.

I saw something that might work: make the districts elect 5 representatives, using proportional representation. This would keep the politicians local, which Americans appear to like. This does mean about 5 parties will be in congress, not more, but judging by what happens in Europe it would not be much different, any fringe party is forced to immediately merge with another and there seems to be about 5 already.

I think this also makes gerrymandering very difficult, though it might be best to just outlaw it. Districts are drawn by a computer with the only rule that they be as compact as possible.

Actually it would work if the electoral votes were proportionally allocated in each state according the popular vote in that state. This would actually result in the same winner as the popular vote in every presidential election in history. The problem is not that somebody in Wyoming has 4x the voting power of somebody in California or Texas. The problem is the fact that the winner in a state gets *all* the electoral votes. This means a member of the minority party in California or Texas has -1 (NEGATIVE 1) voting power, in that their existence adds to the population and thus the electoral votes that go to the candidate they are against.

I don't understand how decreasing import to the USA has increased buying in Europe. Was there a shortage and more was going to the US? Did they reduce prices in Europe? The article says "redirected a tsunami of cheap stuff into Europe", so I don't quite understand how the tariff in the US has increased buying in Europe.

Well, yes. Pretty much so. Wasn't that obvious from about 1933?

Yes, exactly. If my power bill goes up because a datacenter was built somewhere in Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia, then I'd prefer the datacenter to be built where my local tax base can get revenue, in addition to employing people in my county.

This is going on right now in my rural town in Virginia, as they are planning a massive AI datacenter in an industrial park created about 20 years ago that has been mostly empty (except for a few massive tenets, like one of the largest Gatorade plants in the US at 1 million square feet). Environmental groups have already seeded the community with fear (we have this cut-throat Facebook gossip page that was posted to, and now everyone is up in arms). People have been flooding the county supervisor meetings and so on.

Just in the last couple days the county released a much more detailed explanation of the datacenter's consumption of both electricity and water, but I don't think it's eased people's minds much. Our power is supplied by American Electric Power, which has over 5 million customers and very deep pockets. We also have close to 100 MW of solar farms, and two hydroelectric dams on the New River at the edge of the county, and very robust power infrastructure here. So I don't think there would be any regional issues with power (as compared to other states that have much smaller and even municipal-level power companies that have to pass infrastructure spending onto a much small customer base).

What kinds of chips are we talking about here? I doubt these are "Missile Guidance Chip 2000" military-specific chips, but much more generic-use ICs / processors that are ubiquitous and likely even interchangeable with those from other manufacturers.

Exactly, and this is the "natural" way these plants go away over time, as the market and economics make the most sense. It is inevitable, and it is happening, and they will all be gone in our lifetimes.

That's in contrast to making this into a political football and costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in forced incentives and grants to try to speed the process along by a mere handful of years, and in the process riling up voters to fight against it. Like Hillary Clinton did in 2016 saying she would put all the hard-working coal minors out of work by shutting down all coal energy in the country. Just let it happen naturally, where there are less coal miners working due to natural attrition and retirement, as the energy production is moving onto other things.

I didn't know id Software was still a thing, especially after John Carmack left. What are they even doing now?