Tesla is one company run by a fascist idiot. He decided to market regular driver assistance features as “auto pilot” and idiots think they can sleep in the car while it drives them off a cliff.

Most modern cars have some form of adaptive cruse and lane assist. My car (not a Tesla) has lane centering where it will follow the lines on the road along with adaptive cruse and makes highway driving way less stressful, but you still have to keep hold of the steering wheel and be ready to take over as it’s far from perfect.

It will sometimes follow off ramps and when lanes split or merge with odd lines it will lose tracking, but as long as you pay attention I’ve not had any issues like some describe with the wheel “jerking hard” to randomly turn. I literally just tighten my grip when I feel it wanting to drift toward a different lane or off ramp and it will keep going straight.

The tech isn’t inherently dangerous if people use it correctly.

As for ICE cars catching fire, they literally do. Not like the movies but an accident that is bad enough and there is a fuel leak that has a high chance to catch fire. Fuel lines can also dry rot or the 12V system can fry itself if there is a fault in a place that won’t hit a fuse.

Also a quick google: https://www.evengineeringonline.com/did-you-know-ice-vehicles-pose-fire-risks-60-times-higher-than-evs/

Gasoline and diesel cars experience 1,530 fires per 100,000 vehicles, compared to just 25 fires for EVs.

That’s from over a year ago, but again goes to show that gas cars catch fire orders of magnitude more often per capita. Oddly enough, hybrid shows over twice the rate of non-hybrid ICE apparently due to them being more complex than traditional ICE or full EVs.

Solid state and sodium ion are better technologies just around the corner

They’ve been “around the corner” for nearly a decade. While the tech is promising, it has yet to really be scaled up for mass market. Also, while I agree lithium has it’s risks, but so do ICE cars and a lot of things we deal with on a day to day. Think of how many lithium batteries exist in the world and how few catastrophic failures there are.

You hear about EVs batteries catching fire because it’s a new technology and corporate media is in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. ICE cars catch fire all the time, so much so that it’s rarely if ever reported on, and only local news if that. Meanwhile every EV fire is a national story because it’s novel and they want to spread misinformation about the tech.

I hear some data centers are using jet engine turbines

Specifically, Twitter AI/Grok is poisoning Memphis, TN because the local infrastructure cannot supply all the power the data center there “needs” (read: wants). They are illegally running diesel generators that are only meant to be used in emergencies because they are so bad with their emissions.

The local neighborhoods have had countless health issues and people have literally died from them. Musk is killing people so his slop machine can generate child abuse material. Also, the neighborhoods in question are prominently black, which adds a whole extra dimension of racism on top of the “fuck the poor” mentality he has.

why Trump relaxed coal and oil regulations

That’s not why he did that. He did that because he is bought by the same fossil fuel executives. He’s done more damage to our energy infrastructure because he’s killed a ton of projects to get renewables deployed.

He also has a personal grievance against wind power, or as he likes to call them “windmills”, because he didn’t like the few off shore ones that he could see from his golf course somewhere in the UK.

The US was poised to be the leader in renewable energy and instead the corrupt politicians, on both “sides” mind you, decided to stifle the innovation on both renewables and EVs, letting China become the current leader.

He and the rest of the fascist have hindered renewable adoption in the US because of their corruption. Rather than be energy independent we are forced to rely on fossil fuels and on top of that we actually export most of the oil we produce because “free market”, as companies get more money selling it abroad than domestically.

So we import oil they make more expensive by tariffs and illegal wars while they prevent us from reducing our reliance on said oil and allow private companies to profit off of oil we produce by exporting it, so we can’t even be energy independent with our own oil.

Also, they fearmonger about China “beating us in AI”, when outside of Deepseek there hasn’t been any big revelations from China and Deepseek was only a big thing because US companies were not innovating but brute forcing the tech. I’m sure China is still doing research on the tech, but they likely understand the limitations of it and don’t have the private investors inflating a bubble hoping/wishing it can replace workers.

So to recap, we are wasting tons of resources on “AI” because companies want to try and replace workers and they use fearmongering about China to excuse the waste while they ignore the fact that China is kicking our ass when it comes to EVs and renewable energy.

Even if that is the case, I would argue the grid could sustain people charging EVs at various times during the day or setting up off-peak charging schedule than it can sustain all the AI slop being generated 24-7.

Yet the people I hear complaining about the theoretical load EVs could technically put onto the grid have nothing to say about the AI data centers that are actively raising energy costs and demanding more power than the local infrastructure can actually provide.

And really, it could sustain if we would have leadership that would support efforts to do so instead of trying to hinder renewables deployment in favor of more fossil fuels that are also going up in price because of their bullshit.

Depends on the type. Newer ones drill a column and put the loop into that. They have to dig deeper, but it means you don’t have to dig up the entire yard for loops of tubing and means that you can install them in locations with limited yard space.

I don’t know why they don’t use geothermal cooling, especially with the footprint these things have. Compared to everything else it wouldn’t increase the cost that much, depending on how they do it, and even if it didn’t cover all the cooling needs it would cut down a lot of it.

Come to think of it, you would think power generation would perceptively increase the temperature in the surrounding air and while I have heard of nuclear plants making bays or rivers a few degrees warmer near the plant I don’t think it’s even been described as this bad.

As someone who grew up with Fahrenheit, it’s an arbitrary scale. 0 is the “coldest thing” that he could create in a lab at the time, basically a bath of ice and salt water, 100-ish was supposed to be the temperature of a healthy human body. They are unrelated things. It has nothing to do with “what we feel”, people only think that because they grew up with it. The same can be said for all imperial measurements because there is no other way to say that 12 inches to a foot and 3 feet to a yard is “intuitive”.

Celsius putting freezing at 0 and boiling at 100 (at sea level) are related to each other because it’s measuring the temperature of water the entire time and then setting that as a the literal metric we use to measure other things.

I switched to Celsius for a couple of years and after going through a couple of seasons or two I had an intuitive feeling for what a value would feel like. It made perfect sense. I only stopped using it because my phone switched back one day for some reason and I was tired of having to convert to freedom units to avoid getting odd reactions from people.

While I don’t like the idea of having to clean up all the slop his crap is generating I like the future job security.