The EU was pushing for micro-USB. Apple ignored them almost completely, doing the absolute minimum required to technically comply with the law. Apple is fond of malicious compliance, and has been for a long time.

For commercial buildings of any significant size, I think it's a much easier sell, because those go out of lease, and you might spend months searching for someone, and if you do it at the end of the lease, you can increase the lease price and make your money back pretty quickly, because you can be almost guaranteed that anyone who leases it will have some employees with EVs.

For apartments, it's potentially a harder sell, because you're dealing with a small number of units coming on the market at a time, and for each unit, you have a one in three chance that the next person will have an EV and will pay a premium for an EV space. So if it takes two or three years to pay for it and there's only a one in three chance that each of those years will have a tenant who wants it, it might statistically take almost a decade to pay for itself. And that's before factoring in the interest on the loan, which is to say it could actually take two or three decades, or almost the lifetime of the building, to pay for itself.

It's way easier to deal with when you're allocating a bunch of units at once (e.g. new construction), because you're not having to try to force people to change parking spaces mid-lease to get the benefit or figure out how to do just-in-time wiring if and only if the person pays an upcharge for an EV space. Possible, maybe, but not necessarily easy to justify the hassle.

Not very well. The requirement is that new construction have 10% of spots with EV charging, and 25% that could have charging if someone installed a charger. This is in a state where 29.1% of new car registrations are EVs. That means even if everyone rented only new apartments, the requirements would still barely meet *current* demand.

With apartment complexes not getting torn down until they are 50 years old or more, anything less than 100% EV ready is unconscionable, because within 20 to 30 years, every car still being driven in California will likely be an EV, to within the margin of error, and the cost of retrofitting is way higher than the cost to do it right to begin with.

Except it won't, for three reasons

• Using PHEVs on workplace charging is really wasteful, because they charge up in three hours, but you're there all day, and swapping cars around really doesn't work very well, so you typically end up with low charger utilization.
• If people don't install a charger at home when they get a car, they usually won't ever install one.
• Chargers in random locations can actually be more expensive than gasoline.

It's not an infrastructure problem. Hybrids are intrinsically a mistake. It's just too much easier to keep using them as ICE cars and not put in home chargers, and without home chargers, you're going to end up doing most of your miles on gasoline.

Apple made that change in March of 2015. The EU didn't even *start* talking about standardizing on USB-C until roughly January of 2020. So I can't say for sure what made them start using separate cables, but I can say with near absolute certainty that the reason was *not* regulatory pressure from the EU.

See, there's just no winning. If we move (back) to cardboard, the argument becomes about trees. If we move to that biodegradable quasi-plastic that some drinking straws are made out of, then the argument is that the change disproportionately affects the poor, since that stuff is somewhere around triple the cost of plastic. If we move to glass, then the transport of the containers becomes far more prone to pollution because of the significantly higher weight of everything. If we eliminate one-time packing entirely, then we deal with health concerns and chemicals to combat those health concerns.

As much as the plastic industry loves to lobby, let's not pretend that it's the only barrier.

Yes, because we all love walking half a mile a day in the rain...carrying groceries in paper bags...or in the cold...or in the heat...or transporting 20-kilo items...or making multiple trips...or are we just ordering everything from Buy-N-Large and no longer in-person shopping?

To the topic at hand, PHEVs are fantastic INTERIM solutions. The charging infrastructure isn't as pervasive as gasoline and diesel, so a solution that both encourages the use of charging stations while enabling the use of existing gas stations is a helpful way to handle the transition. As we get to the point where EVs can get 1,000 off a charge and/or 200 miles of range out of a 5-minute charge, and as the number of charging stations continues to increase, and the grid adjusts to compensate, PHEVs will be less desirable as their reduced EV range will start to become a liability as gas stations decrease in number.

Maybe you don't like the fact that intermediate solutions are compromises by definition, but you won't get a whole lot of folks on board with the expectation that the solution to a global problem for everyone to relocate to walkable cities.

There's a chance I might have accidentally caused that. Way back, when the original MagSafe chargers were around — probably about 2008 or 2009 — I filed a Radar asking for removable MagSafe cables, pointing out that I kept having to throw away $80 chargers over a $10 cable, and that this had been a problem with every Mac charger I had ever owned from the PowerBook 145 all the way up to the MagSafe stuff. And I pointed out that having removable MagSafe cables would also provide a permanent solution to the problem of external battery makers not being able to provide cables that hook up to the MacBook. I think I laid out a pretty solid case for why the charger cables should be detachable.

To be fair, the transition to USB-C might have been the only factor, and my bug might have just sat in some hardware team's queue and never gotten looked at, but other companies do build USB-C supplies with non-detachable cables, so I like to think that maybe at the very least seeing my bug might have gotten someone thinking about the possibility.

I wonder if somebody got to close that Radar as "Hardware Changed" a decade after I filed it. I wonder if somebody is looking for that bug now, trying to get credit for closing it. :-D

As someone who considers Mass Effect their favorite game, all the way to actually-liking Andromeda (I read the novel that replaced the Quarian Ark DLC)...ME4 is something I'm keeping an eye on, but have zero hope about.

We're coming up on four years since the release of the teaser poster, and three years since the trailer...and by all accounts, the game is still in pre-production. *PRE* production, for longer than it took to make ME3, and a year less than the time it took to make ME:A.

This leads me to believe one of a few things: first, that the original push was likely similar to that of Veilguard, namely that EA wanted to make it a casino game, er, "live service"...then, pretty far into the production process, the MBAs were somehow convinced that turning Dragon Age into a live service was going to fail as spectacularly as Anthem, causing a massive pivot back into the single-player narrative game the audience wanted all along. It would shock me more to know that the ME4 story didn't follow a similar chain of events.

Second, I would completely believe that there's a whole lot of internal bickering within the team about how to progress on...basically everything. Amongst the stories about why ME:A was such a disaster was because the team was forced to use Frostbite, which was made for FPSes but not RPGs, leaving the team to waste time building systems for Frostbite that already existed in Unreal...well, it was announced years ago that ME5 would use the Unreal engine again, so 'building the infrastructure' doesn't factor in this go-round. Art assets certainly need to be created, but the use of Unreal means that a good number of assets from the remaster can be utilized, so it's not that sort of baseline stuff.

Let's talk about ME:A for a quick minute...what made it such a letdown had nothing to do with the crappy animations or the fact that there was some transgender NPC in the game...the story itself was the problem. First off, the game's runtime was massively padded with fetch quests - lots of driving around and...retrieving these rocks, scanning this structure, getting this plant...if the missions were limited to unlocking the vaults and fighting Architects, the game would be ten hours long. There *were* pieces that were interesting, but they were few and far between. In terms of the actual narrative...there were two alien factions, the oppressor and the oppressed, and we sided with the oppressed fighting the oppressor...no sign of the nuance or complexity that made one stop and think that the Salarian Dalatross might *possibly* have a point, that curing the genophage might not *actually* be a good idea...just an enemy who wants to destroy everything and a Fern Gully/Na'vi, everyone-gets-along-with-everyone underdog race...that's it. Oh, and dialog choices that never *actually* matter. Either ME4 is spending so much time in pre-production to overcorrect for these issues (I concede that it takes a LOT of time to do either branching outcomes or multiroute missions like the garage pass in Noveria), or it's a bunch of people going to work and arguing all day about how to do things, and the game will be built on a stack of compromises that will please no one.

The fact that they're five years into production - longer than any other game in the series' development cycle - and they still aren't into the actual-production phase - leads me to believe that the game is going to absolutely wreak of compromise at every stage. If the game is in development hell at this stage, I fully expect the release to be about as smooth as Cyberpunk 2077's...and I *don't* expect the sort of stability patches that made ME:A playable in the months to follow.

Really, my pipe dream is that EA will sell the franchises to other developers and stick to a publishing exclusivity deal...they could probably make some decent money doing that with some of their older franchises if their plans involve sticking to FIFA and Battlefield...but I have no hope that Saudi leadership is going to do any better with ME or DA or SimCity than the former owners did.

No question about that. On the flip side, I'd argue that those power projects are corporate welfare, making the entire country pay for power generation that is used by only a small percentage of the country, for the primary benefit of a few power companies that happen to get the grants. I'm not sure that's really a good use of government resources. Power companies should pay for their own construction, or else they should have to pay back the money to the people with interest.

One of the biggest fiscal mistakes in our country's history was spending so much money to build private power and communication infrastructure with public funds. If the government pays for it, the government should own it and lease it out for public benefit without taking a profit. When our government has done it this way — various municipal fiber projects, TVA, etc. — the results have been high levels of efficiency at a low cost. When our government has done it the other way, the results have been monopolies that have to be broken up.

Cancelling projects is frequently stupid because of sunk costs, and I would bet good money that the current administration did not do adequate analysis to determine whether this is the case, because they have a long history of failing to do so, but that doesn't mean that they aren't right to question that spending.

What we need is a few dozen clones of TVA in various regions of the country, operating in a not-for-profit fashion as a government-owned corporation to build and maintain power infrastructure. Federalize as much of the infrastructure as possible, make all future construction paid for by the government be done through one of those companies so that private companies don't solely reap the benefits, etc.

The real problem is that Republicans scream "Socialism", so Democrats try to work around it, and the result is corporate welfare, where everything is as inefficient as possible.

I'm laughing at the failure to recognize that COVID was the driver of those deaths, not the vaccine. That's why the overall death rate in the U.S. actually dropped by about 5% in 2022, making the increase predicted by that website rather laughably wrong.

Before the bots, it was troll farms. Now the troll farmers have lost their jobs, replaced by software. Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.

Easier is relative, though. All the nuclear weapons on Earth would still be two orders of magnitude too little to get an adequate atmosphere. As I understand, you'd need several thousand gigatons to get a low single-digit percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure.

And for humans to survive for more than about a minute even with external oxygen (the Armstrong limit), you'd need to reach about 40% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. There's probably not enough CO2 ice on all of Mars to pull that off. Best guess is that you'd need four or five times as much just to reach that limit, though the best-case estimates would result in exceeding that limit by a factor of two, so there's a lot of uncertainty here.

Whether releasing a lot of that CO2 would cause enough of a greenhouse effect to melt more polar ice is unclear, but one would assume that if this were possible, the planet would not have cooled, so that seems unlikely. Chances are, you would have to melt *all* the ice and periodically add energy from some external source to re-melt it as it forms, or else built planet-sized mirrors in Mars L4 and L5 to increase how much sunlight hits Mars.

16GB of RAM, I'll grant is fine for standard use...but Apple really needs to come up with some sort of solution for storage expansion beyond "bag of USB accessories" or "2TB of iCloud storage"; most Mac owners end up with both.

Sure, 512GB is fine for Apple Chromebooks, but video editors easily end up with either an external storage array or having to do "the project shuffle" of data management that is an absolute chore. There are more than a handful of PC laptops that offer multiple NVMe slots, so 8TB of internal storage is an option on less expensive laptops, that isn't possible on a Macbook, at all, for any price.

Sure, it's not everyone...but soldered-RAM and soldered-storage means that a nontrivial amount of the Mac market (which is disproportionately musicians, photographers, and videographers) is stuck buying the other half of their computer in pieces, including a port replicator to plug them all in simultaneously. This isn't an argument that Apple needs to design some Clevo monstrosity with interchangeable GPUs, only an acknowledgment that there is a sizeable market demographic that is artificially hamstrung.

I swear, the FSF has no concept of onramps, incremental victories, or provisional compromises.

Graphene, iode, and /e/OS exist, in addition to LineageOS. Are they "free enough" for the FSF? No, but to argue that the reason these things don't have mass acceptance is because users can't modify their modem firmware is patently absurd. I can appreciate the desire for purity, and a truly Free/Libre software stack from the low-level firmware to the apps, but this is absolutely the wrong starting point.

For starters, they could throw some funding toward F-Droid. Fund app development contests to improve availabilty of FOSS/FLOSS mobile apps. Users won't move off a proprietary OS if they *also* have to say goodbye to their massive app stack. If apps are available that will allow users to migrate their data to FOSS alternatives that are *also* available on a FOSS/FLOSS mobile OS, the migration path off Google Android becomes much easier to walk.

To double-down on this, the FSF could fund Creative Commons alternatives to Spotify and Netflix and maybe Tiktok or Instagram, and provide music and video streaming platforms for artists to post their music and movies (maybe with a self-hosted/federation option). Sure, it'll be a bit amateur at the beginning, but so was Youtube, and now entire careers exist because of it. If the FSF got behind these kinds of platforms, to the point of releasing iterations of streaming clients in the Google Play and Apple App Stores, it would chip away at the reasons *why* a FOSS/FLOSS operating system has such an uphill climb. Imperfectly, sure...but my wager is that more users would be willing to abandon iOS and Android if they already move over to independent streaming apps, than if the FSF's sales pitch is "you can modify your own firmware".

From there, again, onramps. Make a list of phones that pass certain criteria of freedom - 'copper' for phones with user-unlockable bootloaders and a commitment to release device trees within the first year, 'bronze' for phones that ship with unlockable bootloaders and release device trees on day-one for Lineage-and-friends to modify, 'silver' for phones that ship with unlocked bootloaders and officially supported mostly-Free Android builds with user instructions to load it, 'gold' for phones that ship with a mostly-free Android build out of the box, 'platinum' for phones that are FOSS everywhere except the modem (which has a documented API), and 'diamond' for 'no proprietary code anywhere, at all'. Hell, the FSF could probably make a few extra bucks reselling such phones at all the different levels, and let users decide the level of freedom they're looking for.

Ultimately, starting at the lowest level of the hardware stack might have its place, but it is of no virtue if the LibrePhone has no users (or worse, whose primary users are troublemakers who get IMEI runs blocklisted). Firmware is the least of the problems the FSF is facing, and while a staunch adherence to principles is laudable, it is of no virtue to have an OSS cellular modem that can't make phone calls or text messages because no telco will allow it. It is of no virtue to have a FLOSS laptop who spends its day storing data in Google Drive, acquired from Salesforce, and copied into Quickbooks Online, then going home and listening to Spotify and watching Disney+...and the phone landscape is exactly the same. Without a counterbalance of enabling users to meaningfully interact with their data without being beholden to proprietary systems, the FSF will be the poster child for winning the battle and losing the war.