Are you able to charge at home? What are the costs to charge, especially at home vs at a public charger?

I guess there’s no real point to charging at home when your employer pays for it to be charged at a public charger, other than convenience.

Last year I was in a rental Chevy Bolt EUV for about 6 weeks that Kia paid for while replacing the engine in my wife’s Soul. I was really impressed with how inexpensive charging at home made it compared to paying for gasoline, but DC fast charging was actually more expensive than gasoline when looking at cost per mile.

I’m curious about your girlfriend driving your company car to her job. In the U.S. I would expect that to be generally frowned upon, if not outright forbidden by your employer.

“l’ll give you an idea. Why as a pup, l myself fetched $30,000 on the black market. That was 1954 dollars. Now, for 50 grand, l’ll track him and l’ll find him. And the people that took him, l’ll kick their butts. No extra charge.”

GOG is pretty good because of this. I check in there if I’m considering buying something on Steam. There might still be compelling reasons to buy on Steam, like I bought Parkitect on Steam because a review on GOG specifically called out how the mods really only work well on Steam, but I’m at least checking first and maybe Wishlisting the game on GOG. I have fairly reasonable trust in Valve while Gabe is running it, but I feel like I can have longer trust in keeping copies of installers myself.

I think in the US I’ve heard ETF/ACH transaction fees are usually around $2.50? It might be possible to have that apply across a batch, though, as in if you submit 10 payments to 10 different people as a single transaction it’s still just $2.50, or 25¢ per person. I’m only getting this from hearing accountants complain at companies I’ve worked with, so I don’t understand the details. But I’ve seen it pretty common with companies doing payouts to want to see a minimum amount before they actually send the payment, otherwise it’s not worth doing.

They can bring some nice benefits like remote starting in cold (or hot) climates, but there needs to be much better design to minimize the exploitability of these systems.

I have off-and-on searched for alternative software for personal blogs that can be self-hosted and it doesn’t seem like there are many options anymore. The only ones I’ve seen are WriteFreely and FlatPress. Are there any other options you’re aware of?

I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.

This process has been underway since the project switched their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox. Early Firefox was lightweight with limited features and the idea that you would add your own as extensions for the features you wanted. Then it started gaining traction and the Mozilla developers started forcing features in that should’ve been extensions. It’s been downhill ever since!

Sounds like anon needs some help with social interaction. If mom can schedule the appointment, maybe mom can help anon pick a haircut in advance.

Are you sure this isn’t a scam?

I like the sound of this for a device, but couldn’t it be more for these new ARM laptops?

IIRC the third-party adapters have to be approved by Tesla, but I think there are 3 options right now. The other carmakers didn’t want to risk being hampered by Tesla production bottlenecks.

Ford was the first to sign on but eventually everyone did. Just about all 2025 electric cars sold in the US will use the Tesla plug.

The U.S. decided to let the market decide, which created an annoying mess. Early electric cars, mostly Japanese like the Nissan Leaf, used CHAdeMO. The Society of Automotive Engineers created the J1772 plug for AC charging and the CCS1 plug takes that plug and adds 2 additional connections underneath for DC fast charging. Tesla created their own unique plug that lets DC or AC run over the same pins, making the plug more compact. It uses the same communication protocol as CCS, though, so with an adapter Tesla cars could also use CCS1 chargers. CHAdeMO can’t work with any other system because the protocol is very different (I did see a story about a very expensive adapter that could make it work, but was not certified by any authority).

This Tesla plug is not used in Europe because authorities mandate all electric cars use the CCS2 plug, so they have no choice and this allows other cars to use their chargers. In the US and Canada Tesla built out by far the most extensive network of chargers for their vehicles using their proprietary plug. They also tend to have many more spaces available and the machines are much more reliable. It became a selling point for Tesla cars to have access to this network as well as CCS1 charging stations, giving Tesla drivers the most options. Elon Musk famously offered his plug “free of charge” to any manufacturer, but this was mainly a publicity move. The terms came with the poison pill that any manufacturer would have to join in Tesla’s patent pool and agree not to sue each other for patent violations. While Tesla had a lot of patents related to electric drivetrains and optical driver assistance, they had very little for anything else related to making a car, including radar driver assistance that ultimately seems superior to Tesla’s optical systems. Most other car makers would’ve lost more than they gained, so only small manufacturers joined.

Everything changed with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, aka the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It included billions of dollars for building electric vehicle chargers, but there were stipulations that the chargers had to use standard plugs open to multiple vehicles and accept credit cards. Suddenly Tesla decided to open their plug up and renamed it the North American Charging Standard (NACS). This made the Society of Automobile Engineers grumble because they already had a standard and this hadn’t been submitted as a standard, but they have gone ahead and standardized it as SAE J3400. Ford was the first manufacturer to announce they would switch to NACS for the 2025 model year, and negotiated a deal to let their older vehicles with CCS1 connections use Tesla chargers with an adapter and a software update to the cars. Within a year all the other carmakers selling in the US and Canada made the same deal.

In the end the market did decide, and maybe the plug is better. But it also took a long time to reach that consensus and a lot of cars were sold that now have outdated plugs. The CHAdeMO cars are especially at a disadvantage; there already weren’t many chargers for them, there won’t be many more built, and many that exist will probably go away in the next decade. It’s quite likely that in the future some otherwise usable cars will become unusable simply because they won’t have a plug available.

Yeah, a long shutdown for a fix sounds like they’re needing to redesign something and test/certify the fix. That keeps me more in the mind that this is a unique North America part (unless Europe also announces a recall soon) and that would probably be significantly different for a regulatory reason.

If the US version is not the same as the EU version there’s probably a regulatory reason they’re not using the EU version. Or maybe an EU recall is coming. I don’t know the specifics here, but generally if a US vehicle is different from its EU version there’s a regulatory reason.

Car makers would prefer if North American and European regulators could agree to a single standard for everything because it would simplify their designs and lower costs, as well as open more markets to niche vehicles that aren’t worth the investment to modify, but it hasn’t happened so far. There’s a mix of egos in play as well as legitimately different needs for different regions, but the legitimate issues should be resolvable if there was political will.

EDIT: I suppose it’s also possible the Chattanooga plant just was following a bad assembly procedure or sourced a bad part that isn’t an issue from other factories.

Earlier this year a doctor advised us (male and female) to take prenatal vitamins, and yesterday a nutritionist told us the same. They really just have everything anybody needs, apparently.

I don’t usually install major Apple OS updates on launch; there seem to be major bugs often enough that I try to wait until the first bugfix release.

I counted backwards once and figured out I was conceived the same month as my parents’ anniversary. I thought I might’ve been the result of their anniversary trip to Jamaica, and for some reason that made me uncomfortable knowing that. A few years later they were talking about the trip and that they didn’t know my mom was pregnant at the time. So thinking more it made sense that I was actually probably from a week or two beforehand, but then that means mom was drinking while pregnant because she didn’t know (although I’m assuming that early doesn’t have much impact).