bluGill

What does that have to do with anything? The need for a draft is one of several reasons why it is unlikely the US will escalate more. However that is a card the US could play quickly, and combined with the existing military would be enough. (Vietnam could have been won as well, but the US made political choices to not do what it takes)

Hormuz is mostly open last I checked. Iran is shouting, but ships are getting through again.

Though the point remains, the US has made the choice to not escalate farther, but there is plenty of power left behind that could be used.

Some mechanical engineers are "professional engineers". That title is a legal liability for messing up. While most of the work designing a skyscraper belongs to any civil engineer, it won't be built until a professional engineer puts his legal mark on it being safe. In turn a professional engineer has the power and legal responsibility to tell management no and he will win against all their pressure. (though sometimes that means the company builds nothing and goes out of business forcing him to find a new job)

The US has chosen not to project all the power they can. That is send soldiers - likely some to die. However the US has the ability to send them if they want, and could supply them if they did - nobody else has anywhere near that ability ready today.

> The US can't even win a war in the middle east without NATO

That is false. The US could win a war in the middle east without NATO.

The US has consistently chosen not to attempt to do so, but there is every reason to think they could. It is good that the US mostly tries to work with NATO on the middle east (and bad that Trump has not).

The US has also consistently chosen to send minimal ground forces, and when they do send them they are very careful to protect the lives of their soldiers at the expense of winning.

However there remains every reason to think the US could make different decisions and win wars in the middle east alone.

That is exactly my point: what is the cost to those "free" to use things? There are a lot of costs that have nothing to do with the price to get them.

But now you are not playing along either...

Correct. As I recall the did a customer survey and customers didn't like (among other things) the number of power outages. The main goal was fixing that, and several side effects of that resulting in less line loss.

Sorry, I'm saying the things I want a citation to look at. A lot of citations are too superficial.

30 years ago my local electric co-op was bragging they got transmission losses down to 4%, when the rest of US was 8% (I'm not sure if that is average or some other statistical term).

But yes, transmission losses exist and are surprisingly large

There are more good qualities to look for than anyone can possess. Just make sure your partner has good qualities and encourage them. Then have "a village" where other good qualities that you have have between the two of you cover as much of the rest as possible.

Before screens you visited even less. Well if you compare the 1960s to today - but the 1960s had the phone as well. Compare 1700 to today and you realize quickly that "visiting your sister who married just one village over is a big deal and it couldn't happen often".

Very much. There are a lot of hidden costs in computers. What does IT cost you? If everybody already knows the other program how much productivity is lost before they figure out the slight changes with the new (they will learn but experts will need time to become experts).

Red Delicious is not a pure clone of the original. Random genetic mutations have happens over the years and those were cloned. Normal breeding has more genetic variation but clones get some

That is a bludgeon masquerading as a solution. People are terrible at planning ahead. Even those who are good at it sometimes plan wrong. There are sometimes energencies which people have to deal with against their plans.

Eventually chargers will be everywhere, but not today. When gas was new in 1900 cars had the same problems.

AT is abused into many places it shouldn't be. That doesn't change that there are places where it is helpful.

You should seek professional help about your emotional issues.

Most of developing good code is not code. I think the person to my left and right will both be here in 3 years despite us all using LLMs. We will spend even more time figuring out requirements, testing to ensure the code meet them and such. Those things were always most of the effort, and while LLMs help with that too there is so much work to be done that we will still be used.

Huh? We are spending a lot of money. (which we were doing before). However we are fixing a lot of bugs. 2024 was not that long ago, it is insane to think we might have fixed all the bugs in that time. I have personally used an LLM to fix a few long standing rare bugs that were hard to figure out. Those bugs are now gone, but there are still many more that we haven't discovered.

LLMs are a great thing for bug fixing. However they are not a miracle. You still need to do all the other things about finding, testing and fixing bugs.

You also need to care about bugs - vibe coding rarely cares about bugs.

The last level 2 charger I used added 15 miles of range over about an hour. I drove a Chevy Blazer, which undoubtedly gives different ranges for some amount of power. Not all level 2 chargers charge at the same rate. As a result YMMV.

The topic here is travel to small towns.

Problem is level 3 chargers are a lot less common than level 2 - at least where I live. Some of those chargers are free which is nice when I happen to be in that area anyway, but most are not.

I own and drive an EV. I know what they are really like and you are trying to wand wave away things as not a big deal that are a big deal.

You seem to have a misconception about how far it is from a small town to a anywhere else. Your 1 hour at a level 2 charger will get you about 15 minutes down the road - where will find the closest public charger in the previous town that you just left. There are a lot of small towns there are over an hour drive to the nearest highway that has level 3 chargers. Even on the highway the level 3 chargers are often an hour apart. So figure 8 hours at the public charger in the small town to hit the nearest level 3 charger.

> it takes a little planning to hit charging stops - but it's not actually much planning

You know how much planning I do when I take the gas car: almost always 0. I know that I'm never more than 15 minutes from a gas station so I just plan on stopping at the next gas when the gauge start to get close to empty and I'm always fine. There is one trip I sometimes make where the gas states are 30 minutes apart (through desert that is almost uninhabited) , and I'm careful to ensure I have fuel before driving that section.

My EV is a GM where I can't use the car's nav system without paying a subscription which I don't. It works fine for most trips, but I wouldn't not recommenced it for road trips or when going small towns.

Most of the public chargers around me are level 2 - hours is correct. Though most are in places where I would expect someone is parking there all day anyway - the parking ramps downtown, campgrounds, and beaches. I don't know what the grocery store with level-2 chargers is thinking though - the range you can get level 2 charging during the typical grocery run isn't worth it. (if the chargers were on the far end where employees park it would make sense, but they are customer parking only)

There are some level 3 chargers, but they are much less common. Maybe your city is different.

GM has a good lineup of EVs now. They somehow don't get recognized for them, but they do. (I own one - the only problem is it doesn't support Android Auto which is enough that I give them a don't buy)

Every try to do that?

The cost of a rental car for a week is high - you can pay for a lot of gas for the cost of renting a car a few times a year.

More than one person I know has tried to rent a car and discovered they didn't have any on the day they went to pick it up. If your car can make the trip you avoid all the issue.

Note the above is about road trips. If you are flying (or taking the train) someplace than you will rent anyway (or have some other plans). However one of the advantages of road trips is you take your own car.

> just enough

That is my objection. There are just enough chargers. However only if you plan around chargers. There is a gas station in nearly every small town. You can safely say any town that can't support a gas station cannot support anything else (no stores, bars, restaurants) and only rarely be wrong. Most small towns don't have a charger at all, and if they do it is often level 2 which means stay overnight to get useful range. (I don't understand these - the ones I've seen are not near anyplace you might stay overnight)

Most people are not fluent in English and not technically inclined. While I haven't seen real numbers I would expect a bit over half of the people here do live in the US.

Even still, people driving from the suburbs to the city are a large part of emissions. People living in the city are already likely to use transit for some trips and so are going to make less emissions. Also for emissions we really shouldn't separate the suburb from the city - they are too close to each other and so one affects the other.

EVs make sense in Texas as well. While gas is cheaper in Texas, Electric is also cheaper and so these balance out.

The above is for most people. There are exceptions in both states where gas makes more sense.

Probably not. Often that 15a is shared with several others nearby. In many cases there is a light sensor on one light that controls them all. Sometimes the transformers that supplies them isn't big enough for more load.

Of course easy city and decade did something different so there is no universal. However issues like the above will mean it isn't easy. You need to examine each street on a case by cases bases and that makes it hard even though the work for any individual street isn't hard. Where it works great, but it isn't easy anymore.

That said, for all new lights they should all have a charger built in. The cost is small and quantity will bring it down even more.

I disagree. While it is possible, it is never easy. You are limited to exactly the features the C provides.

Pointers - better null check them even if you guarantee they won't be null. (assuming they are supported at all in the target, if not copy all the data in out)

Want to use a string - your language probably has a better string type the null terminated C string - are you going to pay the overhead to copy the string (remember to copy it back and forth for each call); or are you going to use C strings in your non-C code? Don't forget to remember the length of the buffer is different from the length of the string if you modify that string.

What to use a list - C supports arrays (which are just syntactic pointers). Nearly ever language has a better list type, which for starters encodes length.

Many languages are garbage collected, which is going to require a lot of work to make work well across the C API.

And so on.

For the above, as a C++ programmer I'm reaching for std::string and std::vector - which are both very good. I have a much better type than the C API allows, but I can't use it. Odds are your language has an equivalent that is just as good (possibly with different trade offs - those details are not the point so lets not argue it here), but since the memory layout isn't 100% the same you can't use my string/vectors directly in code as if they are the native types.

On the surface it seems easy. If you are only doing it a few times it isn't hard. However the details are hard and important and the more you mix the harder it gets since the above details (any many many more on the same lines) start to matter.