hedora

Good for them!

There are a dozen TVs at any decent big box store that meet those specs, and roughly zero monitors, even if you look online.

Seriously: Name one counterexample.

There are also older devices (for Priuses) that just tap into the high-voltage terminals of the battery pack.

They'd have to beat used car battery pricing and I suspect used car batteries are going to be worth ~ $0 until recycling becomes better.

Apparently, it's almost impossible for wrecker yards to get rid of EV car batteries, even if the battery pack is still fine (but the car was totaled).

I know someone that did this with an old Prius. No software hacking required. Just leave the ignition on, and wire into the high-voltage system (not at the same time, of course!). The engine auto-starts when the battery gets too low.

The more interesting approach is to do it with a used EV. You can get a 100-133 kWh car used for $20-30K. The last time I checked, that was below the price of a house backup battery with a quarter the capacity.

Even if you aggressively used the vehicle for this, you're talking about wearing out a ~ $5-10K battery over many years. For reference, a generator that can do this costs $10K, and would be burning way more than that in propane before the car battery wore out.

I don't think either of those are real concerns. The free supercharging did not overlap with homes that could be charged by cars.

Also, safe islanding devices have been very standard for at least 5-10 years. Policy 1: House watches incoming voltage, and turns off the breaker if the grid is down. House electricity + solar stay on; line to power company stays at 0V. Policy 2: Panels see that the house voltage is low, so they turn themselves off.

Policy 1 requires an electrician, but mostly just for permitting. I'd guess a good fraction of the people reading this could safely do it themselves after reading a manual. Policy 2 does not require an electrician or understanding electricity at all. It's how DIY balcony solar usually works.

The F-150 can do this, but by charging the batteries you don't have.

It could also probably run the house off the 240V outlet in the bed, but only if you knife switched the solar + grid off and just ran the house off the truck.

When the sun came out, you could knife-switch the house back, and charge the truck.

Alternatively, you could rip out your solar and put in the one brand that Ford works with (SunRun, I think), and then the truck would be able to bi-directional charge with the house batteries using the solar, or something like that.

(Yes, this is all dumb, especially since there are standards that should allow a dongle to be made to make this work transparently, and to just automatically do the right thing".)

I think the standard is called "V2H". It's unobtanium from what I can tell.

If you have a Ford EV and a SunRun house, then it supposedly has worked for a few years now. (But that's just vehicle to home charging, not the "V2H" standard.)

V2H can charge home battery systems, but V2L "cannot". There's obviously a market for "plug the 240V outlet on my EV into my house battery. Use the car to charge the house battery while the house is running off the house battery".

Someone will make it work.

You're definitely right on the tinfoil hat angle. Vehicle to home is inevitable, but the rollout is intentionally slow / designed to fail, so the utilities can keep milking folks and justify their natural gas peaker plant investments. Also, once it works, vehicle to home will immediately tank the grid-storage and home-storage battery industry.

Some company is going to create a gray-market "high voltage -> top N home battery systems" dongle that you can just wire into the battery pack on your car. That company will make a fortune (but only if they're able to dodge liability).

I've heard of people doing similar with old prius beaters. You wire the 500V (or whatever) DC battery into an inverter, and then plug your fridge, etc into it. Leave the car ignition on, and it runs the gas engine for a few minutes an hour indefinitely because it sees the drain and thinks you are driving it.

Most modern EV's support this sort of thing officially, but they're hardwired to one brand of house battery. So, when you buy a new car, I guess they think you will throw out your house solar panels and backup battery. If you want two cars, then I guess you get a divorce?

I'm in the Bay Area. There's a serious shortage of general practitioners because the patient:doctor ratio is so high. Even if their absolute pay is high, the amount they are paid to see me is minuscule. They can make more and have many fewer patients / appointments per day if they switch to a specialty.

On the other hand, specialists are more profitable for the "non-profit" healthcare networks we have around here, so they're easy to get appointments with.

Some do this (Samsung), but the more common tactic is to throw constant nags up if the telemetry is not being sent to the manufacturer.

I did my research and bought one that does not do this (2025 TCL), but, if it turned out that it did, I'd have shamelessly returned it. I'd also have issued a chargeback if the store gave me any crap.

Even with all that, if you install firmware updates over the network, then disconnect WiFi, the TV becomes unusable until you factory reset it. (I did this because its EDID is corrupted, and I have to override it with a linux cmdline. The update did not help.)

Show me an example of this monitor. Table stakes to compete with a midrange TV:

- >= 85"

- VESA mount

- 4K @ 120Hz (or better)

- < $2K

- "infinite" contrast ratio

Our TV remote can actually control our Apple TV. It's definitely good enough, and through some witchcraft, it works when the TV is not connected to WiFi.

Remember this when you vote. A progressive swing is coming, and if we will ever regain privacy rights, it'll be when the next swing hits.

Our Samsung fridge will mesh network with any Samsung TV specifically to exfiltrate marketing info, at least according to the manual. (The fridge even has marketing surveillance cameras in it).

I assume at some point, appliance manufacturers will start "partnering" with things that actually need WiFi for exfiltration purposes. Phones would be a good place to start.

That way, we'd need to either Faraday cage our friends' phones, not invite them over, or send marketing pervs video feed of our moldy pickles.

The one we have is even worse. It won't really work well outside of things like airplay or chromecast, and those require wifi. It was extremely cheap though.

(It has an HDMI port, but it's clearly a second class citizen in the menus, etc. Default to HDMI on power up is intentionally broken. It's also intentionally designed to turn into a brick if we ever lose the remote. At boot, it puts a screen up saying to press a button on the remote if you want it to display anything else, and that screen never times out. If you plug in an HDMI input, it says "HDMI input detected; press OK.". There's no "OK" button on the projector itself. You have to press the OK button on the remote.)

You have to be careful with this path. Some manufacturers embed LED's into the bezel and blink them at you (part of the IR sensor for the remote, to prevent you from taping over with electrical tape) if they do not have network.

Others just overlay banners on top of the video.

Caveat emptor.

Does this guide eliminate google play services? If not, then you still don't really control it. For reference, on my Pixel 6 Pro, GrapheneOS gets 2x the advertised battery life until you add Google Play Services back into a sandbox. At that point, it gets advertised battery life.

I assume the TVs Google backdoors are even worse (video scraping, etc, etc) since they are not power constrained.

Not the person you are responding to but:

1) All the google data gathering crap, and all the "give permission to garbage preload to turn on the microphone" bullshit (and look for a physical mic switch; ours has that. Also, turn off notifications, because, do you want notifications telling you the wifi does not work? If you have an android phone, do this on your phone first.

2) Less crap = less backlog of surveillance data if you ever accidentally need to put it online. Also, see (1).

3) You can't get a nice 55"-100" desktop monitor for < $2K.

At least on our TCL (which has an array of thousands of back lights) some of the unhance options actually need to be turned on.

We bought it because it has crazy high brightness (it is in a bright room with direct sunlight hitting the panel while we are watching it), and while it can beat back the sun, it cannot do so by just turning all the zones on 100% because it would melt or something.

So, if all the image slopping were turned off, the contrast ratio would drop 100x, and the TV wouldn't really be fit for purpose.

(For when the sun is not actively trying to kill the panel, I have a de-slop shortcut setup. That also has the backlight enhance stuff turned on -- as low as possible -- to get true black on the LCD. It works OK. OLED is not quite there yet for this corner case.)

Our TCL has this option, but there are multiple buttons on the remote that open youtube or ask zuck to club baby seal to death or whatever, and if you press those (i.e., sit on the remote), it goes into a labyrinth of google bullshit that complains about how you are missing important notifications and need to debug your wifi.

F--- Google, but at least the kids know those menus are bullshit, and do not have the wifi password at any rate.

Also, we're probably already to the point where I could just put it on a firewalled network, and have a [chinese open weight] LLM pop the factory android, get root, and reprogram the remote buttons to no-ops.

Or, I could open the remote up, physically cut out the spam buttons, then 3d print an alternative top-half of the shell without holes for them.

So many options, so much enshitification.

The costs are too high, but the health care workers are paid too little.

To see how this is possible, enumerate all the other people getting paid, and then compare to a country with a working health care system.

The most obvious difference is that the US spends an absurd amount of money administering health insurance.

Hoover never attended high school.

Writing a textbook full of non-peer-reviewed nonsense does not make you an academic or intellectual.

I disagree. Here's a reasonable definition of economic efficiency:

Maximize societal benefit per tax dollar spent.

Find one policy in which this does worse than the status quo in the United States. If you want an easier task, change it to:

Maximize long-term economic growth per tax dollar spent.

I still suspect you cannot find an example of how this is worse than current policy. For instance, on the environment, the only path that makes sense on a 20-30 year timeline is to internalize the costs of externalities. That would force cleaner energy or environmental remediation, which would save lots of costal cities in the US, and lower losses due to crop failures and cities burning down. It'd raise the price of gas by maybe $1-2 vs pre-Iran prices.

Speaking of which, we'd never have gone into Iran because there was no economic story for it.

Education is cheaper than prisons and also leads to higher expected growth. Universal health care lowers wasted work on insurance paperwork (which is currently > 33% of US health care costs).

Then there's stuff we wouldn't do: How exactly does policing bathroom gender policies grow the economy again? Allowing food manufacturers to add known poisons to food? Jailing farm workers + their children?

And so on.

Once vehicle to home standardizes (probably not until a competent federal government forces it, at least in the US), then TOU billing becomes a non-issue.

Just reserve 10-20% of your vehicle range to load smoothing, and the entire house can go to negative use during TOU premium windows. (Ideally, with the hypothetical competent gov't the TOU surcharges would be forced to be symmetric, so going slightly negative during peak hours would end up creating a large negative power bill until the surplus charges became obsolete and trended to zero).

Fortunately, making them reliable at small scale is easy, so, problem solved, unless you really like paying corrupt utility companies.

Pretty much all gas water heaters are indoors in the US. I was worried about the electricity consumption of our heat pump water heater, but it's actually minimal.

The coefficient of power is like 5 or something, and, since it's a bit more expensive than a contractor-grade water heater, I think the manufacturer also spent an extra $10 on better internal insulation or something. It uses much less than 1/5th the energy I'd expected, even with the "turn yourself down at night" feature disabled.

Or you could die of carbon monoxide poisoning while you're looking for a jerry can because you have to walk to the gas station because your car has no gas and you cannot fill it at home, but first your wife doesn't notice that the stove didn't ignite so the whole house explodes. At night, you welded the safety shut on the hot water heater, and despite the fire taking out the electrical, the natural gas is still running, so the water heater turns into a missile, takes out a passenger plane which crashes into an oil refinery, creating a poison gas cloud that takes out a neighborhood.

You somehow survive all this and are forced to work in a coal mine so they feed you in the terrorist prison you now live in.

To add insult to injury, they make you use whale-blubber lamps for lighting.