Consumer choice, or public good/public utility: Choose one.
A deregulated market should provide choice, if it provides monopoly the gov should step in either by breaking up (forcing choice) or making public (forcing good).
I don't think that contradicts what the person you were replying to said. Specifically, they said break it up or make it public. If there is no option to break it up, then making it public is the only option.
I think there's some examples of a split model that work well, i.e. the grid is publicly owned but the retail functions such as metering, billing, and service connections are private and have competitive providers.
> retail functions such as metering, billing, and service connections are private and have competitive providers
I.e., socialize the costs and privatize the profits.
What value can private companies bring to end consumers when they're buying from the same public producer at the same base cost? This is nothing more than a disguised handout.
They are just wildly outdated for most tasks. Even projects like frigate suggest buying different hardware. Coral was released in 2019 and hasn't been updated once. With a jetson nano or even a raspi ai hat you get way more tops
You are forgetting the elephant in the room: the charger at home and all the implications that brings in between costs and actual possibility of installation at all.
You don't need a home charger to enjoy driving an EV. A home charger is a bonus to driving an EV. Do you know anyone who has ever had a "home gas pump"?
Not to mention how many people sleep on Level 1 and Level 2 charging, which are cheap or cheap as free in many homes. (Garages have had electric outlets for a long time. Some have had "dryer plugs" for nearly as long, due to power tools one might own.) Trickle charging doesn't get you to 100% overnight, but no one drives on a 100% full gas tank every morning either.
> You don't need a home charger to enjoy driving an EV. A home charger is a bonus to driving an EV.
I know precisely zero people who have EVs and do not charge them at home. The cost differential is enormous and completely changes the economics of cost per mile.
> Trickle charging doesn't get you to 100% overnight, but no one drives on a 100% full gas tank every morning either.
Sure, but a full gas tank gets you further than a full battery. We have friends with a long range Tesla that takes them days to charge on 120. Despite living in a city with many Teslas, and having an expensive home, apparently it would have cost too much for them to upgrade their panel to be able to charge faster. They are retired so can make do (and they have other cars that use gas).
> The cost differential is enormous and completely changes the economics of cost per mile.
Which is exactly the point and why it is a bonus. You can't do that with a gas car effectively or cheaply. You won't pay someone to come and install a gas service in your home or apartment with the express reason for fueling your car. That you can with an EV and would get a game changing efficiency and cost reduction is an incredible bonus.
> Sure, but a full gas tank gets you further than a full battery.
That seems to be less of a factor today. Most batteries have hit the same or more range as comparable gas vehicles.
Some EV models already have ~600 mile range which is double their gas counterparts.
> We have friends with a long range Tesla that takes them days to charge on 120.
Sure, but that's to 100%. You can drive a car with less than 100% battery. A 120v charge can add as much as 40-60 miles range overnight. That's an average person's regular commute. The car might "never" be at 100% if the 120v charge is all it ever gets, but for some people they might never need a fast charge in an average week or even month.
I don't know how hard it is to imagine the easily elided phrase "garage or parking lot or street parking or whatever parking situation" after apartment, but unless you also park in your apartment on the 6th floor it seems silly to ask this question to me.
EV batteries are reliable. "Range Degradation" is mostly a disproven myth. [0] Range figures vary with driving style, but that's the exact same issue with gas range, gas cars just had very bad/loose/nonexistent feedback on driving style inefficiency.
[0] Outside of the non-temperature controlled batteries of "classic" Nissan Leaf models and early Tesla models, but even then "range degradation" is largely overstated and statistically very few batteries were ever replaced in the lifetime of those cars.
> I know precisely zero people who have EVs and do not charge them at home. The cost differential is enormous and completely changes the economics of cost per mile.
I know multiple people who have EVs and don't have a home charger, so do 90%+ of their charging at work. You're there 8+ hours a day anyway, and many workplaces provide free charging, so it ends up even cheaper than charging at home.
If you have a free work charger, that's almost as good as having charging at home. Most people do not have this, and even if you do then you would be SOL if you switch jobs.
My 35 floors building has exactly 2 chargers. Both are FIFO, max 5 hours or you start parking and both are slow af and pay for charge. Charging M3 on one of those is probably a whole day activity and would cost you probably more than if you get a diesel generator running to power charger.
So I might not know those people, but know of at least 10 teslas that aren't charging at home every day, because usually those spots are taken by polestars.
I have an EV and can't charge at home (condo where cost to add a charger would be obscene). In 3 years there's been maybe 5 times where it's been a mild inconvenience. Which isn't nothing but a few hours of hassle is a pretty good price to pay for the thousands of dollars I've saved on fuel.
>Do you know anyone who has ever had a "home gas pump"?'
You know that's a bad faith argument. Facts are, EVs have friction and that holds back a lot of adoption, and pretending it isn't there isn't going to make it go away.
It's not a bad faith argument, it is comparing like for like. (Saying that it isn't like for like seems to me to be the more bad faith argument in 2026.) If I have a gas car with 300 miles of range I go about 297 miles safely between fill ups. If I have an EV car with 300 miles of range I can go about 297 miles safely between charges. Those are the same characteristics.
The part that isn't like for like sure is that there is an increased friction that even a "fast charger" can take a magnitude more time than a gas pump. But fast chargers are much safer and can be parallel tasked (running other errands while a charge happens) whereas gas is an explosive and requires diligent observation while refueling (despite how many people seem oblivious to all the warnings not to leave a refueling car unobserved and a long history of explosion statistics).
In my experience, fast charging time and lack of home charging ability (and under-estimation of Level 1/2 charging utility) feel like red herrings rather than actual issues. These things get talked about a lot, but the real world experience of them isn't the friction people believe it is. The biggest issues seem to be far more sociopolitical than technical to me. People have invested too much of their identities in gas. Entire political parties seem devoted to propping up gas sales for as long as possible.
I found some data from an auto insurance association.
In US urban areas the average car is only driven 6000 miles a year. That's 115 miles a week. Someone in an urban city would only need to charge every two weeks. Friend has a Chevy Bolt in SF he parks on the street. He says it's not a problem.
I also repeat myself but I've measured how long it take to gas up a car on road trips. It's usually around 10-15 minutes. Oh sure actually filling the car is quick. But you have to drive to the gas station, fill the car, drive away from the gas station.
>But you have to drive to the gas station, fill the car, drive away from the gas station.
Costs you also pay driving to the EV charging station. 10-15 mins really? Maybe if you are taking a poop or buying a sandwich. Usually on road trips gas stations are immediately off the freeway or at major crossroads of state or county roads. You aren't really detouring to get to them.
It is definitely a bad faith argument. That is no friction point really that anyone considers a friction point. The charger situation though is real friction. Take yourself out of your own shoes. I will give you anecdata. I have a friend who bought a tesla with no way to charge it in their apartment. It just seems like such a pain in the ass. So many times they are on like 18% charge and wondering if the car is going to actually make it home. Or they will be about to go somewhere and realize the car isn't going to be charged enough so they call an uber. It is unreliable transport without having a home charger. A new chore you have to remember to do. A bit more mental load making that extra calculation every time you want to leave. Having to actually consider where there might be chargers that you can use and if you'd be able to reach them on your present charge.
Take all of that anecdata and replace a gas car and it is the exact same with the same mental load: I've been on 18% fuel tank and wondering if my car will actually make it home or stall out on the road. I've been about to go somewhere and realized my car isn't fueled and and called a taxi or a Lyft as faster than the detour to refuel my car.
"It's an unreliable transport without having a gas pump at home." That just sounds silly. Funnily enough that was exactly one of the early complaints of gas cars when electric cars were preferred in the very early days of cars. It was a complaint when gas pumps were rare and hard to find, or didn't exist at all yet and you were pulling gas canisters from the back of a pharmacy.
It's a more reliable transport than a gas car because I can charge at home. (I can't do that at all with gas.) It's a more reliable transport than a gas car because in a pinch I can find an outlet on the outside of my hotel and trickle charge enough to get me to the next charger. (When was the last time a hotel had canisters of gas just in case?) It's a more reliable transport than a gas car because I can find RV plugs in national parks and state parks and campgrounds far away from chargers and gas stations. (You ever see what you might get charged for a tow from a remote national park, even if that tow is just dropping off a canister of gas?)
The impression of the charger situation being more inconvenient than gas stations is already flipping and has room to flip a lot more, possibly surprisingly quickly, as gas prices rise and low margin gas pumps go out of business.
> I've been on 18% fuel tank and wondering if my car will actually make it home or stall out on the road. I've been about to go somewhere and realized my car isn't fueled and and called a taxi or a Lyft as faster than the detour to refuel my car.
Ridiculous, since there are gas stations all over and you can get 50 miles of range in 30 seconds, or 350 miles of range in 120 seconds. Even the fastest EVs (which are expensive and therefore not likely purchases for people who are on the fence about EVs in general) do not even come close.
The fastest are maybe 18 minutes from 10-80%, but most are 30-45 minutes (and that's only for 70% of the total range of the vehicle, whereas an ICE can be fully tanked up in 2 minutes.
That's the assumption, though. There aren't. There is an illusion of it, sure. I gave that anecdata from personal experience. It isn't "ridiculous", it's called having lived (and learned to drive) in rural Ohio.
Well, I've lived for several decades in several different states/regions, and in my experience, gas stations are all over. They even have signs on the highway when there's no gas for x miles ahead.
While there may be electricity everywhere, there certainly are not high-speed chargers in places where gas is even close to scarce.
Can you install it in your garage? Sure, if you've got the panel for it. But that's beside the point when we're talking about refueling on trips. That is, and will be for the foreseeable future, faster in an ICE. That's why we have PHEVs. Maintenance may be higher than an EV, but they're much better on road trips.
But electricity is not nonexistent. It's easier to run an EV in rural Ohio than a gas car because you can install a real nice charger in that huge garage you have or outside your big barn next to your gravel lot, whatever, you've got space and a grid connection. That's not currently the average mentality, but that returns us to the sociopolitics of rural Ohio and EV adoption in the US in general more than any of the technicalities.
So just to be clear, we've moved to goalposts from acknowledging there is friction for a lot of people's EV situation to imagining some rural ohioan with a big garage installing their own level 2 charger and using that as justification to gaslight my own garage-less living experiences as a nonexistent friction point towards EV ownership.
No, I've been pretty consistent that I don't agree there's as much friction as people think there is, that in our society right now are a bunch of sociopolitical issues driving people away from doing the real research or actually trying to live with an EV. If goalposts seem to be moving it may be because you can't firm up your point on what "friction" even means to you.
> a "fast charger" can take a magnitude more time than a gas pump
I think that's overstating it a bit. A fast charging stop is 20 minutes (often less) whereas a typical gas stop is 15 minutes according to AAA. Where the gas option has a momentary advantage is that modern gas stations are often attached to convenience stores, and this is not often the case with fast chargers yet.
Is it? Can I get an electric car recharged at a gas station in the same time it takes me to fill up a gas tank?
If yes, cool. If not, then the idea is that I wouldn't want to sit in a parking lot; I'd want to charge at home instead. And if I can't reliably charge at home instead...
Pretty close. ~15 minutes for gas [0], ~20 minutes for electric. People often claim ~5 minutes for gas, but in reality most people stop for ~15 minutes for refueling. According to AAA at least, who I generally trust more than anecdotes on the Internet.
Just timed myself starting from where I turned off the road into the gas station: at ~3m 20s I was pulling over to get air in my tires with a full tank of gas. If I drove back to the road it would have landed right around four minutes. 13.7 gallons went in.
You never did cite btw, I see a [0] but no link. 15m might make sense in a context of a bathroom or snack break, or paying cash, or going out of your way, or filling a pickup truck. But filling up with gas is obviously way faster than recharging a battery.
I'm certain I've never spent 5 minutes putting gas into any vehicle I've ever owned. The AAA reference may be how long it takes from exiting the freeway to re-entering the freeway for a gas fill-up, because sometimes it takes a little while to get to the station you want and complete the whole transaction.
It could also be from old data from back in the day when you had to go in and pay with cash or credit at the register. Now that most places have credit card terminals or Apple Pay at the pump, it takes about 45 seconds from when I pull up to when I'm putting gas in my vehicle.
So are you going to trust dubious pop statistics data from a nonscientific agency and let that gaslight you into imagining you take on average 15 minutes at the pump? Have you ever pumped gas before?
Some people have to park on the street and therefore do not have anywhere to plug in anything. Also, some people park in apartment buildings where there are no outlets near many of the spots.
To be fair, this is most people. A level 1 charging setup is generally good for about 5 miles per hour, most cars parked at least 10 hours overnight, and the average commute just under 15 miles each way.
Level 2 is handy, for sure, but a whole lot of people could absolutely get by with a bog standard 120V socket.
Ya that’s the big issues with EVs. It’s overblown in a lot of ways - it is, ultimately, just getting electricity where you park your car - but power at your overnight parking spot is a massive component of happy EV ownership and we’ve done almost nothing to help or even encourage that for apartment dwellers
Here in Norway condominiums and similar got incentives to install chargers at the shared parking areas.
Harder downtown where there's only street parking, some feaction has been converted to street charging spots by the municipality, but nit that many and pricing sucjs since you have to pay parking fee in addition to charging fee which is considerably higher than proper home charging would be.
From my coworker who had a BEV downtown, it cost about as much to charge per mile as gas, do became a wash.
For me that can charge at home it's a no-brainer, I pay like 15% per mile with pre-Hormuz gas prices, less than 10% per mile now.
Compared to the cost of buying the car, or hell, the cost a few months of gasoline, installing a charger at home is a nothingburger. A one-time investment that immediately pays dividends.
It might cost $300 to $600 to put in a charger at home if all of the wiring is ready to go. That's small compared to the cost of buying a new car, but it's certainly not nothing compared to a few months of gas.
With smaller companies that can't yield global power. It would be better if cloud, office and OS would be separate. Then you wouldn't get shuffed OneDrive into the OS. It's also better for competition if the playing field is equal and one solution isn't the only one that can deeply integrate. Build APIs or don't do it.
500MB is just not enough RAM for a good HA experience. I would go with at least 2GB. If you have a few add-ons running I would go with 4 or more.
If it's an option I would always go with an SSD for HA. It makes a big difference in usability. Writing often and a lot to SD cards, like HA does, kills them way too fast
> 500MB is just not enough RAM for a good HA experience
Strong disagree: my experience has been great, my HA has been running on a Zero 2W for more than 2 years! I have several HACS plugins enabled - just not any if the video or AI stuff. The same Pi concurrently runs PiHole. For a while, it also acted as a git mirror via iSCSI-backed Gitea, but I had to migrate Gitea off of it since it was memory-hungry. You can do a lot with 500MB in headless mode.
People that walk or bike are also more likely to do small shopping locally. This benefits the local economy and gets less money to international big box retailers, which generally pay less taxes.
If you drive by a small market you often won't park your car to go there. Cars and trucks destroy streets fast. Having less of them keeps repairs less frequent. Infrastructure for walking and biking can exist for multiple decades or even millennia
So you’re saying that people should do shopping locally, spend more, and waste more time to prop up inefficient businesses who don’t benefit from economies of scale? Tell that to voters and then try to win an election. Society exists to make our lives easier, not to prop up as many businesses and employees as possible as a make-work make-taxes program.
Oh my god the obsession with 'economics of scale' is such narrow minded nonsense.
Shopping locally is more efficient, because the distribution network distributes things locally much more efficiently then a bunch of housewives in their SUVs.
Sure its cheaper for the shop providing the food, but for the society its more expensive. What you are completely missing is the massive cost of all the infrastructure and the massive subsidizes therein to create these centralized stores. And then the massive cost in time and capital investment for every users to buy a car to pick that stuff up.
You are also ignoring the massive waste this creates because people only go shopping every 1-2 weeks. And you are ignore the lack of fresh foods in the food system because of this behavior. That of course Americans eventually pay in their medical systems.
If you actually do some research you will see the systematic bias that is in the zoning code, infrastructure cost calculation and services. Walmart often consumer more in just police services then they pay in taxes. Walmart is systematically gaming the property rights system to pay almost no taxes. And yet Walmart uses a huge amount of land and requires a huge amount of public infrastructure to sustain itself.
If you really need to do some massive pickup of stuff for a party or something there are still larger stores you can go to as well, just not for everyday stuff.
Actually having a shop where I can locally pick up fresh food every day or every other day is actually much more convenient and saves far more time. And I know this is crazy for Americans to consider, but as a society it would be nice if people without a car could also buy food sometimes. This video points this out:
Cities only exist because of economies of scale! Public transit, road maintenance, utilities delivery, public recreation facilities, and the plethora of small and large businesses are more efficient in a city because of economies of scale.
What people don’t benefit from is laws to artificially benefit small businesses at the expense of the consumer. Here in New York, we have this stupid law that one corporate entity can only have one liquor retail license. This law was created at the “behest” of the lobby of liquor store owners. The end result of this is that liquor is more expensive than my hometown of Vancouver, despite NYS collecting a significantly lower tax rate than BC province. That money all flew into private coffers, and the consumer still gets bent over in the end.
I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society. The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all. The former is a bad idea because Walmart police don’t have the same responsibility or accountability to the public as public police. The latter is a bad idea because society will collapse without property rights.
> Cities only exist because of economies of scale!
Sure if you want to have an intellectual debate about what the economics of scale means then that's fine but your point about economics of scale about suburban super-markets was still wrong and that was the context of my critic.
The rest of your post is irrelevant to my point. I have not advocated for any policy specifically to help small business. Small shops in cities can and are operate by major cooperation. There is no contradiction between large companies and small/urban locations. Not sure why you are even bringing this up. Are you so 'America'-brained that you think large companies can only exist in large commercial zones right of highway exchanges?
> I also take issue with the implication that Walmart incurring policing costs is bad for society.
I didn't say the issue is that its incurring policing cost, I said the cost it incurs is higher then the taxes its paying. The whole point of taxes is that they finance the operation of a geographical area. And everybody living or operating in that area should help finance that area.
If somebody operates in that area that incurs more cost then benefits then that somebody should only continue to be doing so if people consider it a 'social good'. And supporting Wallmart a highly profitable company, clearly doesn't fall under that.
So designing policies so that a multi-billion $ company can show up and extract value from your town is nonsensically stupid.
In fact you are stealing from other business and people in your area to give more profits to wallmart.
> The implication is that Walmart should either have private police or be a shoplifting free for all.
No 'the implication' is that when a community does land use, infrastructure and tax planning it should consider facts, and consider cost to provide services and infrastructure for to those areas.
The fact is, most communities make most of their money in the 'down town' that is true even for very small town and even villages.
What you are proposing is basically that a community should finance, build and maintain a lot of public infrastructure, then finance continue police and other services far away from where most people actually live to protect cooperate property (and specifically the parking lot) all while Wallmart does everything in its power to pay the absolute minimum back to the community it is in. Both by local tricks and by tricks on a federal level.
