Any of the color e-ink readers from Kobo, Boox, reMarkable?

About $1,000/year, based on a rough comparison of cost-per-mile when my wife’s Kia Soul had a warranty engine replacement and Kia paid for a rental which wound up being a Chevy Bolt EUV for 6 weeks, which I figured was fairly equal in size. The Bolt got about 4.5 mi/kWh city and 3 mi/kWh highway. Our electricity at home was 9.94¢/kWh at the time so the cost per mile wound up being $0.02/mi city and $0.03/mi highway. We don’t keep close numbers on the Soul but it’s rated for 25 mpg city and 30 mpg highway. When the car was in the shop unleaded gas was about $3.39/gal so the cost per mile was $0.14/mi city and $0.11/mi highway.

Of course, the numbers fluctuate as gas prices and electric rates change, and if you drive more the fuel savings become more pronounced, with the flip side being increased wear and tear on the car reducing its value faster. If I bought an electric car I would probably switch our electricity to peak/off-peak rates and try to charge exclusively in off-peak times because the savings would be even higher.

Of course they are! I wouldn’t lease an ICE vehicle but there are several strong reasons to lease an EV right now:

First and foremost, leasing a vehicle brings the $7500 federal tax credit back to a lot of vehicles that no longer qualify when buying under the new rules about where the car is built and where the battery components come from. Some manufacturers are building plants in the US and everyone is changing where they source their batteries so in the long run this will be less of an issue, but for now it’s a strong reason.

Second, I have no real confidence in what the vehicle will be worth once the loan is paid off. With an ICE car I can have some reasonable estimations for different mileages and ages, within a few thousand dollars. Although fears of reduced battery ranges seem overblown, it’s hard to get a handle on what buyers would feel a 6-year-old Blazer EV with 65,000 miles on it will be worth. It’s even harder when newer EVs are less expensive. Tesla significantly dropped the price of popular models like the 3 and Y seemingly on a whim, single-handedly dropping the values of used vehicles for both their own models and other brands. This left many buyers underwater on their loans and was one of the direct reasons Hertz sold off a large part of their Tesla fleet. I’ll let the bank take the risk there. Plus, with a bunch of EVs coming off lease in a few years used prices will probably stay low.

Third, there are some amazing lease deals right now. I was not aware of this, but from the article:

For example, you can get a base-model Hyundai Ioniq 5 for $159 a month with $3,999 down. A Kia Niro EV can be had for $149 per month for 24 months with $3,999 due at signing.

I’m not in the market for a new car right now, but this actually has me wondering if I should sell my current vehicle because even paying off the loan I’d have more than enough for that down payment and it would dramatically reduce my car payment and fuel costs.

This is all wild to me, alarms not required in a building that is largely unoccupied?! Who cares that its purpose is to fight fires? Especially if people aren’t there often it needs an alarm!

And most of your firefighters are volunteers? I can understand having volunteer firefighters in rural areas, but Germany seems like a country where most of the population lives in urban or reasonably dense suburban areas, at least from an American perspective of population density. My midsize town of just under 80,000 people has a population density of around 1100 people per square kilometer and has a professional fire department with about 110 full-time employees working at 6 different stations. It started as a volunteer department a century ago when the town was tiny, but as it grew they eventually switched to a professional force. Our property insurance rates would be very high if it wasn’t professional.

Does Germany not need as many firefighters because many buildings are constructed of materials less susceptible to burning?

Top comment in the article, from “XXX XXX”:

The factory is not state-of-the-art. It was founded 55 years ago, when labour and ground in Brussels were cheap. The inexpensive variants of the Rabbit (Golf) were assembled there from delivered parts, there is no pressing plant. But times have changed. Belgium is now rich and especially Brussels as the headquarters of the EU. In Brussels, labor is scarce and land is very expensive. There is no such large contiguous area in the middle of Brussels again. It is obvious to close this factory and sell the property expensively.

Other commenters in the article explain that the inability to press parts like body panels mean this location is an assembly line only, and seem to imply this is not how most modern auto factories operate.

It seems like there are more factors at play here than just the vehicles being too expensive to have a broad market. The headline in a lot of places seems like it’s just going to be that EVs are too expensive and will kill the auto industry.

I find it annoying how many car manufacturers seemed to look at Tesla’s early success with the Model S and seemed to only find the lesson as, “oh, we can sell $80k+ cars to people when they’re electric?”, like they could just charge people more by selling electric cars instead of considering how large the market is for expensive cars. I might pay a little more for an electric car than a gasoline car, but it looks like my savings by charging at home would only be ~$1,000/year, so figuring I’d keep a purchased car 6-8 years I’d probably only increase my budget by $5k just to be conservative on the savings, or less if I have a shorter loan.

EDIT: clarified that fuel savings are per year, since I forgot to include the time frame.

The article starts out explaining that other devices are not sold in Brazil; Kindle is the only option.

I was wondering why anyone would go to the trouble when you can just buy a different brand.

In Brazil, you can pick any e-reader you want, as long as it’s a Kindle. (Kobo, Boox, and other brands don’t sell their devices here.)

That’s too bad, and surprising since later in the article it mentions that Kobo does have a store in Brazil to sell EPUB files, but not their readers.

I always think of that every time I read about someone dying while running a marathon

Twitter began first and foremost as an SMS-based social network in the pre-smartphone era. Everything was done by text message, including signup IIRC. In the US I think the phone number was 40404. Twitter’s longstanding 140-character limit was a direct result of wanting to make sure tweets could fit into SMS’s limit of 160 characters and still have room for extra data like the username.

I remember going on a family vacation to central Oregon and having no cell signal for several days. When I got back to a connection my phone became unusable for almost half-an-hour because I was constantly receiving text messages from Twitter that had failed to deliver while I was out of reach.

Facebook actually had methods to post from SMS (and email) in those early days but the SMS functionality was limited to certain (mostly national) carriers and back then there were a lot more regional carriers and I was never able to try the SMS service.

I don’t know if MySpace offered anything like that; I never had an account. Back then it was the public social network. Facebook was seen as more private because only your friends could see your posts and it was only open to college students (only at certain universities that had been configured in the software).

It was a brave new world back then that seemed to herald a bright new future, even better than when we’d been using AIM and MSN Messenger.

I’ve read that the low odor ones have residual urine drained, but that doesn’t make much sense to me; wouldn’t it drain automatically during processing?

OP: *posts about wanting to marry a stranger on twitter*
OP: *finds and follows said stranger on twitter*
Stranger: *reads through his new follower’s twitter timeline, responds to marriage comments *
OP:

I’d like to get a Steam Deck but was wondering if it’s getting close to a newer, better version coming soon. This makes me feel more comfortable, not that I have the budget for one right now anyway.

I always find it interesting when a player buys into team ownership after retiring, but certainly more interesting here both with it being Brady and him currently being a broadcaster for the league. I was curious about why the Raiders; didn’t know he grew up in the Bay Area.

I probably wouldn’t go to the trouble of making a database of students who might never apply to my school, but now I’m wondering about the legality of background checks or even cursory Google searches as part of the admissions process, because it would surely show up there.

OP’s version cut out a few panels, I see

I see a lot of people use https://catbox.moe/ for basic videos. You could also find a peertube instance

GM has already announced the Blazer EV will be offered in a police variant. Ford already offers the F-150 Lightning in a police variant but not as a frontline vehicle, more for secondary operations. It looks like Ford might’ve started testing a Mustang Mach-E police version to compete with the Blazer EV, but it doesn’t look like anything’s official about that yet.

Ford replaced the Crown Victoria-based vehicles with Taurus and Explorer based vehicles for model year 2013. The Taurus and its police version were both discontinued in 2019. The Explorer is now Ford’s only offering as a primary police vehicle, but other Ford vehicles are offered as secondary police vehicles including the F-150 Lightning.

Is this also drawn by KC Green?

Maybe the son can sue the attorney or expert witness now for malpractice