Put your route in while you have Internet. It'll continue providing directions, including to charging stations if required, without Internet. Many areas I drive regularly don't have Internet. Works fine. Alternatively, this is the one case where you might actually have to plan recharging yourself. Unlike with ICEVs, where you always have to do it yourself.

But, yes, if you regularly drive 500 miles, without stopping, through an Internet desert, uphill both ways, then an EV probably isn't for you.

Nah, both are concerns. Neither is actually a large problem in most cases, but both are actual concerns. If you don't have a good way to get a charging cable out to where you park your car, the home charging concern is actually the bigger one. For those with garages, or even driveways, it's not really an issue.

Somewhat, though you don't actually need 240V. 120V is sufficient for most people, as long as there's a fast charger in the area for the occasional top-up when they have a few consecutive days of heavier-than-normal driving. 8 hours plugged into an L1 charger will put ~40 miles into the battery, which is enough to cover 280 miles per week of driving. That's quite a bit more than most people do when not taking a trip. Those who drive more than that on a regular basis need a 240V L2 charger.

So it's more about whether they can get a charging cable out to the car at all, not so much about whether they can specifically get 240V out there. If you're parking on the street you probably can't run an extension cord over the sidewalk, even an ordinary 15A @ 120V cord.

The pinching shouldn't be a significant problem. Garage doors should have a bottom seal that can deal with 3/4" or so of variation in height and still be able to seal well. Just make sure the cable is stout enough (most L2 cables are plenty strong), and if the garage door springs are correctly adjusted it shouldn't have to take too much weight anyway. If counterbalance springs aren't mostly offsetting the weight of the door a typical 1/3 or 1/2 HP garage door opener won't be able to lift it anyway.

An ICE maybe requires less planning if you can't charge at home, but the driver has to do that planning. With an EV, what planning must be done is done by the car, so it's less effort. Well, the driver does have to get into the habit of using the nav system so the car knows where you're going. For daily driving my car is really good at predicting where I'm going so picking the location is two taps, one to open the destination list, one to pick the top item in the list (or one button then speak the destination aloud). And doing that has additional benefits because the car has real-time traffic data and can route around problems.

For people who can charge easily at home, an EV requires far less planning than an ICE. You plug in when you get home, you unplug when you leave. No thought required. The battery is just always full, you never think about refilling. It's still a good idea to use the nav system for optimal routing... and so you can completely ignore the charge state, letting the car manage it entirely.

You definitely don't need (and couldn't even use) all 200A for the car. L2 chargers max out at 80A, most only use either 30A or 40A, and even that much is actually not necessary.

Look at it this way: You only need to be able to replace your average[*] daily driving distance in 8 hours. Suppose your uses 250 Wh/mile, and you average 40 miles per day. That means you need to be able to replace 10kWh in 8 hours, which means you need to charge at 1.25kW, plus a bit for charging losses, so call it 1.4 kW. At 220V, that's 6.4A. You probably wouldn't actually do that, you'd instead set it to charge at 30A so you'd charge at 6.6kW and replace your mileage in an hour and change, but 6.4A is all you'd need.

But, wait... notice that 15A @ 110V is 1.65kW. So, in the hypothetical above, your needs are actually covered by an L1 charger, e.g. a typical wall outlet, which you already have in your garage and many other places! This is the case for the large majority, all they really need is a standard wall outlet 95% of the time. Sure, they might have to spend 10 minutes at an L3 charger once every few months if they happen to have a few heavier-than-usual driving days in a row, but that's still actually less time wasted than going to a gas station every week.

(Note in both of the above paragraphs I'm assuming 220V or 110V, but in practice your power is probably closer to 240V/120V, so you actually get a bit more for the given amperage.)

The erroneous belief that they need to be able to install an L2 charger deters a lot of people, and it really shouldn't. If you can run an extension cord from an ordinary outlet to where you park, and there's a fast charger that you can go to in the relatively rare instance you get low (fast charging is maximally efficient and minimally wearing when the battery is low), you can happily drive an EV.

I've done around 20k miles in long distance road trips all over the western US in the last 8 years and never had to wait to charge, not once. I have a handful of times gone to different charger than the one optimally located for my route because there weren't many chargers available at the optimal location. But my car handled that for me automatically because it knows in real time how busy each charger is, and also knows the historical usage patterns at each.

OTOH, about one time in 20 when I go to refill my diesel pickup I end up waiting for a pump. Maybe less than 1:20; confirmation bias may be kicking in here. But it definitely happens sometimes, and it's never happened to me when fast-charging my EV.

[*] Average case, not worst case. The car's battery acts as a buffer to cover occasional heavy driving days, this is the same reason you don't have to get gas daily.

Why are you such an asshole?

Yeah, and the concern in the summary is just silly. What makes Xesdeeni think that Intuit's desktop software doesn't upload everything to the cloud anyway? For the last several years TurboTax has created cloud backups of your local files by default... and IIRC there doesn't even seem to be a way to tell it not to. As I recall you have a choice of protecting it with a password or not, but I don't think you can tell it not to upload... and even if you can, how would know know if the software is honoring your request?

In general "I don't trust company X with my data, but I use their software" makes no sense, unless you only use their software on an airgapped computer.

No, I don't recall any other discussions about SMRs. It's not something I've ever paid much attention to. If you don't want to explain, don't explain, no need to be touchy about it.

One man plus a few million jackbooted thugs.

What are they?

This has always been true, not just the last 15 years.

The 1935 Social Security Act did define a system that was designed as a pure pay-as-you-go system with the expectation that a large reserve would accumulate, but the 1937 recession convinced people to change that. Some believed that the SSA actually caused the recession because it collected a large pile of money ($2B; that's $48T in 2025 dollars) which was invested by the government, driving out private investment. Also, the recession created suffering among people who would soon be able to receive benefits, but couldn't yet because the benefits didn't start until 1942 and slated to start small. So in 1939 the SSA was amended to start paying out in 1940 and to make the benefits more generous and the contributions smaller. With those changes it was recognized that operating out of the general fund was risky, so the social security trust funds (two of them, one for old age and one for disability) were established. This theoretically turned it into sort of combined pay-as-you-go (for the early beneficiaries) and trust fund-based system (for everyone else). In practice, the social security surpluses were invested in treasuries which effectively returned it to a pay-as-you-go system, which it is today.

Your claim that it's neither pay-as-you-go nor fund-based doesn't make sense. It must be one or the other, or some mixture. Yes it's a safety net and a pension, but the money has to come from somewhere, which means it either comes from current revenues (pay as you go) or it comes from some saved-up fund (fund-based). Well, MMT proponents would argue that it could come from new-issue money, but they are clueless.

No, the trust fund (actually two funds, but those details don't matter) was created when Social Security was created, well before the Baby Boom started -- but it's really a fiction. When social security tax revenues exceed social security payments, the surplus is used to purchase T-bills, which the trust fund holds. When payments exceed revenues, the T-bills are sold to fund the difference. The trust fund will be bankrupt when there are no T-bills in it to be redeemed.

However, the money from T-bill purchases goes into the general fund for Congress to spend, and the money to redeem the T-bills comes from the general fund... so in reality social security revenues and payments are to/from the general federal pot, which is running deficits every year. This means that there will be no practical difference when the trust fund is bankrupt, though unless Congress changes the law (which they obviously will) the Social Security Administration will not legally be able to make social security payments from the general fund (meaning from deficits) when they have no more treasuries to sell.

Both of my Model S's (2020, just traded in for a 2025) came with run-flats. Maybe the Model 3/Ys don't?

ROTFLMAO