Oops

It may be possible that the "conquer the world with bots and a purely unemotional approach" won't work either.

And in fact, the thing the TechBros are planning on to accomplish their goals of dominance and control are the very things that will defeat them. 

New chatbot on Trump’s Truth Social platform keeps contradicting him

An “answer engine” on Trump’s social media site says the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, tariffs aren’t boosting the stock market and Barack Obama is seen favorably.

President Donald Trump and the new AI search tool on his social media network, Truth Social, don’t exactly see eye to eye.

Truth Search AI contradicts the president by saying that tariffs are a tax on Americans, the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and his family’s cryptocurrency investments pose a potential conflict of interest. Asked about Jan. 6, 2021, it said the “insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol was violent and linked to Trump’s “baseless claims of widespread election fraud.”

Trump and his allies, after years of criticizing tech companies and news organizations as biased and untruthful, have worked to develop Truth Social as part of an alternative social media ecosystem where they’ve said their viewpoints will not be suppressed.

But as companies expand their use of chatbots and “answer engines,” the rollout of Truth Search AI highlights one challenge for that approach: Artificial intelligence tools don’t always give the answers their owners might want or expect.

“Their own AI is now being too ‘woke’ for them,” said David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who studies political communication, using a term commonly employed on the right to describe liberal viewpoints.

Trump Media and Technology Group, Truth Social’s owner and parent company, unveiled the tool Wednesday, calling it a “public beta test.” The company cited an executive at the search engine’s developer, Perplexity, saying the tool offered “direct, reliable answers” and would “bring powerful AI to an audience with important questions.” The chatbot is free for all Truth Social users.

AI search engines and chatbots are trained by being fed large amounts of information from across the internet. But the “black box” nature of AI tools makes it challenging for developers to fully control what they say.

Many of Truth Search AI’s answers to questions posed by The Washington Post linked to sources based on conservative news outlets, such as Fox News, Newsmax and the Washington Times. But the tool did not say specifically which sources it had drawn from.

Jesse Dwyer, a Perplexity spokesman, said that Truth Social had used a “source selection” feature to limit the websites the AI tool relied on but that Perplexity did not know which websites those were. “This is their choice for their audience, and we are committed to developer and consumer choice. Our focus is simply building accurate AI,” he said. (After this article was published, Dwyer clarified that Truth Social probably had used source selection but that he could not be sure because Perplexity does not see or control what any developer is doing with the company’s application programming interface, or API.)

The White House declined to comment. Trump Media spokeswoman Shannon Devine said: “With transparently asinine stories like this, Washington Post reporters indict themselves as irrelevant partisan hacks who will probably soon join the growing exodus of left-wing shills from the paper.”

Trump Media sued The Post alleging defamation in 2023, saying the news organization had reported incorrectly on allegations relating to its early financing. The case is ongoing.

The tool’s politically inconvenient answers, Karpf said, show the limits of any attempt to recast or contest the prevalent view of a past event.

“There are things they can do to actively assert that what was true yesterday is no longer true, and they can put a lot of power behind that,” Karpf said. “But they can’t change the things that were actually said in previous years that are archived somewhere.”

The tool is promoted high on the sidebar of the social media network’s website. That can make for a slightly awkward pairing, given that Trump uses his account there as his main online sounding board. When asked if crime in Washington is “totally out of control,” as Trump posted there last week, Truth Search AI said it wasn’t and noted that the FBI and Justice Department had reported “substantial declines in violent crime” through 2024, italicizing the word “declines.”

When asked if tariffs were having a huge positive impact on the stock market, as Trump had posted Friday, the tool said “the evidence does not support the claim.”

“Recent market gains have occurred alongside new tariffs due to other factors,” such as higher corporate earnings, it wrote, adding that analysts had warned that the tariffs’ economic risks “remain substantial” and that the American economy was “at risk of gradual erosion.”

Trump last month signed an executive order attacking “woke AI,” saying generative AI tools should be “truth-seeking,” “neutral” and not encoded with “partisan or ideological judgments.” And many conservatives have complained that AI developers with liberal biases could warp chatbots’ answers — and, more broadly, public understanding — in insidious and undetectable ways.

Sorry not sorry, guys - but the truth will out, and it doesn't matter what the boss insists on telling people.

When you feed your AI thingie every bit of information that's ever been put on the web - and you have to do that if you expect it to work as advertised - then your false narrative doesn't hold up, because it can't.

Like Ayn Rand said: "Contradictions can exist, but they can't prevail. Because in the end, they're self-defeating."

But companies that have sought to bend the chatbots’ thinking along ideological lines, either in pursuit of pure neutrality or political point-scoring, have faced their own disasters.

After billionaire Elon Musk pushed his company xAI to make its Grok chatbot more “politically incorrect,” the AI tool began blasting out Nazi messaging and calling itself “MechaHitler.” Grok officials last month said the tool had inadvertently been made too vulnerable to parroting “extremist views” and blamed a code update, which had instructed the chatbot to not “blindly defer to mainstream authority or media” or be too “afraid to offend.”

The Truth Search AI answers do not always contradict Trump. Asked if AI is one of the most important technological revolutions in history, as the president said last month, the tool agreed by saying it’s “widely recognized” that the impact of AI would surpass or rival “major historical milestones like the Industrial Revolution.”

But the size of their disagreements suggests that, if the tool were a person, it may not last long as a Trump employee. Asked to name the best president, Truth Search AI said “recent public opinion polls show that Barack Obama holds the highest favorability among living U.S. presidents,” listing as its source a Fox News article from shortly after Trump’s second inauguration.

The tool did note, however, that “conservative commentators” had often named Trump as the best. “Different groups and surveys prioritize different qualities,” it said.

The New Whiz Kids

So the trend here seems to be:

"Let's just run all the data through the new HAL 9000, and make life-n-death decisions based on nothing but the fly specks it puts on the spreadsheet."

In WW2, Bob McNamara and his merry band of Whiz Kids went to work on the problems of very heavy losses in the daylight bombing campaign over Germany. They studied the damage sustained by the B-17s that came back all shot to hell, and decided they needed to armor up the planes in a particular way.

Unfortunately, the losses didn't drop. And they were kinda stumped, but finally somebody pointed out that the planes that made it back weren't the problem, so all they'd really done was invent "Survivor Bias". The survivors only proved where the damage could be sustained - the effort needed to be concentrated on the planes that weren't taking hits in non-vital places.

Lesson learned - at the expense of the lives of thousands of young men.

They never really figured it out, and the losses didn't decrease significantly until long-range escort fighters came along.

And McNamara? He went on to fail us in much the same way in Vietnam.

My point is that doing anything strictly by the numbers is just peachy if getting the numbers right is the only concern. But since humanity is pretty much the whole fucking ballgame here, maybe we could lose the arrogance of chasing some kind of machined perfection, and get back to thinking about the people for a change.

Because it looks like we're doing it again. AI being all the rage right now, I think the big push is to let the machine do everything and make all the decisions. And it's not unreasonable to think that most of the problems we've seen in all that DOGE bullshit stems from trusting AI to do all the work.

When you start to think

people are expendable

because they're too expensive

you're about to go over the edge

into the abyss

“The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention

One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating violent extremism.

When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.

His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.

News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.

Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.

“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administration’s decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”

“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.

The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.

The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.

Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.

Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.

In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugate’s unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.

The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”

DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization.

Rising MAGA Star

The CP3 homepage boasts about the office’s experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.

Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.

On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”

Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.

Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.

The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.

Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Fugate at the Republican National Convention Credit:Via Fugate’s Instagram account
By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trump’s advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”

“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.

In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.

In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the office’s achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the office’s 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.

In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to “career counseling.” DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.

One grant recipient called Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.

“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee said. “Now that’s all gone.”

Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.

“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Security official said. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”

Season of Attacks

Spring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.

In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.

Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s charges include a federal hate crime.

If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.

“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.

Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” against terrorism and targeted violence.

But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The former Homeland Security official said the decision “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”

Overheard

Never apologize for missing an email, or a text, or something on the news about all the weird shit that's happening.

Remember: You're processing an ever-increasing flood of information using a brain designed to sit in a cave munching on seeds and berries, while chipping rocks to make spear points.

Crashing And Burning

I need someone to explain to me how Teslas aren't just fancied-up versions of the '72 Pinto.

Automated Vehicle Safety - Phil Koopman (Substack)

People are still being burned alive in Teslas

Tesla manual door releases are a deadly problem. It just happened again.

Yet another tragic story of people being trapped inside a burning Tesla, this time in Toronto. 

Four dead; one rescued when a bystander smashed a window: https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/four-passengers-die-after-being-trapped-in-burning-tesla-after-electronic-doors-seemingly-wont-open/ar-AA1tYcwj

This has been going on for years. At least some of the victims were definitely alive and trying to escape a burning Tesla when door lock power was lost. Some escaped. Some did not. Below is a writeup I posted on a blog in 2022. Nothing has really changed. The Tesla door release situation is a fatality-via-burning-alive waiting to happen. As it has multiple times at this point.

The usual Tesla fan response is that drivers are responsible for knowing the arcana of their car and, apparently, deserve to die if they cannot operate a manual release in a crisis. In some models this requires removing a speaker grill. While the car is actually on fire.

I have even less sympathy for that argument when casual passengers in the back seat don’t know the emergency release is under the carpet (model S), possibly requiring a screwdriver to access, or that there is no emergency release in the back seat at all (model 3). Do you read the owner manual when someone gives you a ride? Is it OK to not be able to open rear doors when the battery catches fire after a crash? This is a problem long past due for improvement.

Phil Koopman, (May 25, 2022) The Tesla manual door releases -- and lack thereof in some cases -- present unreasonable risk. What in the world were they thinking? Really bad human interface design. The door handles are not operable from the outside if electrical power has been lost. And from inside you need to use a manual release. Cool design shouldn't come at expense of life critical peril. This article sums up the latest, but this has been going on for a long time.

Tesla fans seem to be saying that it is the driver's responsibility to know where the manual release latch is to escape in case of fire. Anyone who doesn't is (and has in past fires) been ridiculed on-line for not knowing where the manual release is hidden. Even if they died due to not successfully operating the control, or having to kick the window out, somehow they are the idiots and it is their fault, not Tesla's. (If someone you love has died or been injured in this way you have my sympathy, and it is the trolls who are idiots, not your loved one.)

On-line articles saying "here's how to operate the door release so you don't die in a Tesla fire" tell you there is a problem. This design is unreasonably risky for real world use. A "bet you didn't know -- so here is how to not die" article in social media means there is unacceptable risk. Example: "Tesla Model Y fire incident: remember, there's a manual door release, here's how to use it in an emergency."

Front doors you have to lift up a not particularly obvious lever in front of the window switches that is easy to miss if you don't know it is there. Maybe if you have used it a few times -- but if you never realized it is there or you have rented/borrowed the car, good luck with that. I'd probably have trouble finding it even if I weren't suffocating from smoke from a battery fire. (Have you ever had to consult the owner manual to find your hood release? Imagine doing that to find out how to open the door when your car is literally on fire -- oh, but if it is an electronic manual and you've lost power, you can't do that on the center console, can you?)

And if you're a passenger and driver is unconscious you will have issues. Do you read all the safety instructions in the driver manual when you catch a quick ride as a passenger with a friend? Does your friend brief you on escape safety features so you can exit before a 5 minute ride? Thought not.

But wait, there's more (pictures later in this writeup).

Model S rear door: "fold back the edge of the carpet" to find a pull cable; some report needing a tool to access the pull.

Model X falcon wing doors: "carefully remove the speaker grille from the door and pull the mechanical release cable..." You might need a tool to do this as well.

Model 3 rear door -- NOT EQUIPPED WITH MANUAL RELEASE (from manual: "Only the front doors are equipped with a manual door release")

So I guess the passengers in the back are kind of expendable. Good to know when you’re in the back seat of a Uber/Lyft Tesla ride.

This is stunningly bad human interface design. It is entirely unreasonable to expect an ordinary car owner to know where a hidden/non-obvious emergency control is and activate it when they are trapped inside a burning car. Possibly using a tool they don’t have available. Let alone passengers. Apparently without mandatory training and mandatory periodic refresher training.

Anyone who thinks it is reasonable to expect someone not trained in military/aviation/etc. to get this right probably has not served or been through that type of training. I have been through tons of training. Emergency drills that might give some nightmares (sealed inside a tank with broken pipes and told to plug the flooding was extra-special — all three times). And sometimes the real thing. Not always with perfect execution, because there is compelling data showing humans suck at performing complicated, non-reflex-trained tasks under stress (and thus, more practice, more drills).

Education and shaming won't prevent the next death from this unreasonable risk. Everyone should be thinking twice about risking their life on this hot mess of an egress system.

I can't imagine why NHTSA wouldn't want to do a recall on this.

Today's Reddit

I think I'm less worried about AI taking over than I am about cynical manipulative assholes who'll use it to fool otherwise decent people, getting them to do astonishingly appalling things to each other. 

And now they can talk
byu/Lord2troie inmidjourney

Electrifying The Hardhats

Progress is convincing the workin' guys that the cool new gear is all electric.

The fact that it's better for the future of their kids is, for now, secondary at best. What they care about right now - IMHO what they should care about - is whether or not the stuff works, and can it be a real benefit to them on the job?

SHIPPENSBURG, Pa. — On a 40-acre dirt and gravel lot, I climbed into the cabin of a 55,000-pound excavator. Construction crews use these hulking machines to dig trenches for laying pipes and wires or hollowing out building foundations. I took it out for a joyride.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

When I switched on the motor, there was no ignition roar and no belch of diesel fumes from a tailpipe. This machine, powered by four batteries that each are big enough to run a small electric car, came to life silently.

The quiet didn’t last. The excavator’s giant treads trundled noisily over the gravel until I reached a good spot to dig. Then I grabbed hold of two joysticks and sank the bucket arm down into the dirt to scoop out as much earth as the claw could carry. I hit a big rock. The machine momentarily pitched forward, straining to loosen it from the ground — and then the electric motor heaved the boulder and a clod of dirt into the air in a puff of dust.

When they run on diesel, the biggest pieces of construction equipment can churn through 10 or more gallons of fuel per hour, emitting as much carbon and air pollution as several cars combined. Off-road equipment, including excavators, bulldozers, cranes and tractors, create about 3 percent of U.S. carbon emissions — roughly the same as the airline industry. Making these machines carbon-free would be almost as big a step toward halting climate change as taking all commercial planes out of the sky.

It won’t be easy. Electrifying off-road vehicles presents all the same challenges as replacing gas-powered cars with EVs, including worries about charging infrastructure, battery capacity and high upfront costs — plus the added challenge of digging, pushing and lifting heavy loads for hours at a time.

“They are more difficult because most of these vehicles don’t just propel themselves, they also do work,” said Kim Stelson, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Minnesota who studies off-road vehicles. “But if we want to solve the overall problem [of climate change], we have to solve this one.”

Despite the obstacles, electric machines are slowly starting to show up at farms and construction sites. John Deere plans to sell more than 20 models of electric and hybrid construction equipment and tractors by 2026. Construction giants Caterpillar and Komatsu are developing electric excavators and wheel loaders. Volvo Construction Equipment, which made the excavator I was driving, sells seven electric models. “Almost all the major companies are working on electric solutions,” Stelson said.

How are electric and diesel machines different?

Volvo’s electric machines are very similar to its diesel machines, with the exception that their engines have been swapped out for batteries. The 55,000-pound electric excavator, for instance, has 264 kilowatt-hours of battery storage — the same as nine Mini Cooper EVs, or a little more than one electric Hummer.

I drove both the electric and diesel versions of the machine, and the differences between them mirrored the differences between EVs and gas-powered cars. The electric machine idled silently and its controls were slightly more responsive than the diesel one, since its electric motor can deliver power faster than a combustion engine — similar to the way an EV can accelerate faster than a gas-powered car. But both machines pulled dirt out of the ground with the same power.

You can see the similarities on display on the assembly line at Volvo Construction Equipment’s North American headquarters in Shippensburg. Similar hulking, half-formed chassis move down the lines for both types of vehicles. But, halfway through, a huge hook hanging from the ceiling will either lower an engine or a battery pack into the machine for workers to install.

The electric machines are catching on slowly. Of the 60,000 pieces of construction equipment Volvo delivered to customers last year, 895 were electric according to the company’s annual report. The company said it aims to offer electric versions of more than a third of its models by 2030.

Where might you spot electric construction equipment?

Electric machines are good for a particular kind of job site. The machines need a place to charge — which could be the same level 1, 2 or 3 chargers that EVs plug into in buildings, parking lots or charging stations. And ideally, they wouldn’t have to move heavy loads for very long shifts.

“If you have a 24-hour, round-the-clock type of [work schedule], battery electrics aren’t very practical because you can’t stop to plug in for the four or five hours that it would take to recharge it,” said Ray Gallant, vice president of sustainability and productivity services at Volvo Construction Equipment.

Volvo says it often sells or leases electric machines for job sites where it pays to limit noise and air pollution. The Toronto Zoo used one of the company’s machines to avoid upsetting animals while repairing their enclosures. Cemeteries have bought excavators to quietly dig graves without disturbing mourners. Construction crews working on busy city streets use the machines to avoid annoying the neighbors or polluting their air.

At the Molly Pitcher dairy farm five miles down the road from Volvo Construction Equipment, farmers use an electric wheel loader to move feed, clean out barn floors and help lift and maintain pumps. The farmers say it’s better for the cattle to be around quieter machinery. Plus, they can charge the battery for free because the farm generates its own electricity using a device that converts manure into power.

“The more I can use that electricity, the more profitable we are,” said Keith Jones, the farm owner.

On other job sites where electric vehicles aren’t practical, construction crews can cut their emissions by running their machines on greener fuels, such as renewable diesel made from crops or used cooking oil. California now requires all off-road equipment to run on renewable diesel.

“There, you’re getting up to a 70 percent carbon benefit relative to running a diesel fuel, so that could be a really key intermediate step,” said Tom Durbin, a faculty researcher at the Center for Environmental Research and Technology at the University of California, Riverside.

One day, crews could upgrade to machines that run on pure hydrogen, a fuel that creates zero carbon emissions — but those mainly exist as prototypes today.

Today I Learned

Ten years ago, corn stalks were 13 feet tall.

Now they're about 5 feet - and each plant is putting out 3 times as many kernels.

3x

Hacking the genome of corn (aka: they GMO'd that motherfucker), makes for a plant that can put more of its energy into producing the food instead of making the stuff we can't eat.

Hey There, Elmo

• Handles well
• People look at it
• It's fun to kick 
• Cool that Tesla had the balls to make something this stupid

Adam Something

We Are The Stupid Country

Can't wait to see just how stupider we get with this shit.

Yes - it's a robot dog with a flamethrower - The Thermonator

Today's Nerdy Thing

IBM 5150

$1565.00 retail

2 floppy drives (5¼") One for the system, and one for the apps

Memory: 256KB

Fuck, I'm old.

It's Already Here

There's still a great big bunch of buggy whip and wagon wheel executives (ie: the schmucks who run the Dirty Fuels Cartel) trying very hard to tell us the EV is just not good enough, that it'll take generations before we get the market to where it needs to be, and in the meantime, just relax and keep artificially propping up an industry that should've died 25 years ago.

ELECTRIC CARS ARE ALREADY UPENDING AMERICA

After years of promise, a massive shift is under way.

One day in late November, I cradled a red Samsung flip phone in my hands as if it was a ruby gemstone. To me, it was just as precious. Deep inside an overstuffed dresser in my childhood bedroom, I had spotted the glint of my first-ever cellphone, a Samsung SGH-A707 purchased in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency. The device, no bigger than a credit card, had long ago succumbed to the spider web of cracks on its screen. For a moment, I was brought back to life before the smartphone, clicking the phone’s plastic keys for the first time in more than a decade.

This device, and every other phone like it, of course, was made obsolete by the touchscreen slabs now in all of our pockets. Perhaps you have heard that we are now on the cusp of another iPhone moment—the rise of a new technology that changes the world. No, not that one. Despite the post-ChatGPT frenzy, artificial intelligence has so far been defined more by speculative hype than actual substance. Does anyone really want “AI-powered” smoothies, sports commentary, or roller skates? Assuming the bots don’t wipe out humanity, maybe AI will take the jobs of high-school teachers, coders, lawyers, fast-food workers, customer-service agents, writers, and graphic designers—but right now, ChatGPT is telling me that Cybertruck has 11 letters. There’s a long way to go.

Meanwhile, electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.

If the story of American EVs has long hinged on one company—Tesla—then this was the year that these cars became untethered from Elon Musk’s brand. “We’re at a point where EVs aren’t necessarily exclusively for the upper, upper, upper class,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the market-research firm AutoPacific, told me. If you wanted an electric car five years ago, you could choose from among various Tesla models, the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf—and that was really it. Now EVs come in more makes and models than Baskin-Robbins ice-cream flavors. We have more luxury sedans to vie with Tesla, but also cheaper five-seaters, SUVs, Hummers, pickup trucks, and … however you might categorize the Cybertruck. Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn’t go half that distance.

All of these EVs are genuinely great for the planet, spewing zero carbon from their tailpipes, but that’s only a small part of what makes them different. In the EV age, cars are no longer just cars. They are computers. Stripping out a gas engine, transmission, and 100-plus moving parts turns a vehicle into something more digital than analog—sort of like how typing on an iPhone keyboard is different than on my clackety old Samsung flip phone. “It’s the software that is really the heart of an EV,” DeGraff said—it runs the motors, calculates how many miles are left on a charge, optimizes the brakes, and much more.

Just like with other gadgets that bug you about software updates, all of this firmware can be updated over Wi-Fi while a car charges overnight. Rivian has updated its software to add a “Sand Mode” that can enhance its cars’ driving ability on dusty terrain. Many new cars are getting stuffed with technology—a new gas-powered Mercedes-Benz E-Class comes with TikTok integration and a selfie stick—but EVs are capable of more significant updates. A gas car is never going to meaningfully get more miles per gallon, but one such update from Tesla in 2020 increased the range on its Model X car from 328 to 351 miles after the company found ways to wring more efficiency out of its internal parts. And because EVs all drive basically the same, tech is a bigger part of the sell. Instead of idly passing the time while an EV recharges, you can now use a car’s infotainment system to Zoom into a meeting, play Grand Theft Auto, and stream Amazon Prime.

The million-plus new EVs on the road are ushering in a fundamental, maybe existential, change in how to even think about cars—no longer as machines, but as gadgets that plug in and charge like all the others in our life. The wonderful things about computers are coming to cars, and so are the terrible ones: apps that crash. Subscription hell. Cyberattacks. There are new problems to contend with too: In Tesla’s case, its “Autopilot” software has been implicated in fatal crashes. (It was the subject of a massive recall earlier this month that required an over-the-air update.) You now might scroll on your phone in bed, commute in your EV, and log into your work laptop, all of which are powered by processors that are constantly bugging you to update them.

If cars are gadgets now, then carmakers are also now tech companies. An industry that has spent a century perfecting the internal combustion engine must now manufacture lithium-ion batteries and write the code to govern them. Imagine if a dentist had to pivot from filling cavities to performing open-heart surgery, and that’s roughly what’s going on here. “The transition to EVs is completely changing everything,” Loren McDonald, an EV consultant, told me. “It’s changing the people that automotive companies have to hire and their skills. It’s changing their suppliers, their factories, how they assemble and build them. And lots of automakers are struggling with that.”

Take the batteries. To manufacture battery cells powerful enough for a car is so phenomenally expensive and arduous that Toyota is pumping nearly $14 billion into a single battery plant in North Carolina. To create software-enabled cars, you need software engineers, and car companies cannot get enough of them. (Perhaps no other industry has benefited the most from Silicon Valley’s year of layoffs.) At the very low end, estimates Sam Abuelsamid, a transportation analyst at Guidehouse Insights, upwards of 10,000 “software engineers, interface designers, networking engineers, data center experts and silicon engineers have been hired by automakers and suppliers in recent years.” The tech wars can sometimes verge on farce: One former Apple executive runs Ford’s customer-software team, while another runs GM’s.

At every level, the auto industry is facing the type of headache-inducing questions about job losses and employment that still feels many years away with AI. “There’s a new skill set we’re going to need, and I don’t think I can teach everyone—it will take too much time,” Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, said in May. “So there is going to be disruption in this transition.” Job cuts are already happening, and more may come—even after the massive autoworker strike this year that largely hinged on electrification. Such a big financial investment is needed to electrify the car industry that from July to September, Ford lost $60,000 for every EV it sold. Or peel back one more onion layer to car dealerships: Tesla, Rivian, and other EV companies are selling directly to consumers, cutting them out. EVs also require little service compared with gas vehicles, a reality that has upset many dealers, who could lose their biggest source of profit. None of this is the future. It is happening right now.

But if EVs are having an “iPhone moment,” we are still in the days when a few early adopters had the clunky, OG version. Most cars you see are a decade old; for all these EV sales, just 1 percent of cars on the road are all-electric. Even if we hit President Joe Biden’s EV target of 50 percent of sales by 2030, the sheer life span of cars will mean that gas vehicles will still greatly outnumber electric ones by then. Gas stations are not closing. Parking garages are not buckling under the weight of EVs and their hefty batteries. Electric cars remain too expensive, and they are limited by janky public chargers that are too slow, assuming they work at all. If you don’t have a house where you can install your own plug, EVs are still mostly just unrealistic. Most alarming might be the politics that surround them: Donald Trump and lots of other Republicans are vowing to stymie their growth. Carmakers are not even hiding that next year’s election might lead them to reconsider their EV plans.

Even so, the transition is not slowing down. Next year, America should hit 1.9 million EV sales, Corey Cantor, an EV analyst at BloombergNEF, told me. Another burst of models is coming: A retro-futuristic Volkswagen van! A Cadillac Escalade with a 55-inch touchscreen! A tiny Fiat 500e for just $30,000! And yes, they are succumbing a bit to hype themselves. In June, Mercedes’s infotainment screen got an optional update. Now you can talk to it through a chatbot.

Saw It Coming

The bad guys are out there. The bad guys are always fucking out there.

AT&T's TouchTone phone becomes the dominant telecomm gizmo in the early 70s, and within 3 or 4 years, there's an army of teenagers stealing long distance service, and then eavesdropping on conversations, and 2 or 3 years after that, we've got some serious crooks trying to rob banks with this spiffy new tech shit.

Human wisdom is always at least a generation behind its technological capabilities.

Bigots use AI to make Nazi memes on 4chan. Verified users post them on X.

The ecosystem for explicitly racist and antisemitic memes starts on a fringe site, but ends up in the mainstream through Elon Musk’s platform.

It looks like a poster for a new Pixar movie. But the film’s title is “Dancing Israelis.” Billing the film as “a Mossad/CIA production,” the poster depicts a caricatured stereotype of a dancing Jewish man whose boot is knocking down the World Trade Center towers — a reference to antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Posted to X on Oct. 27 by a verified user with about 220,000 followers who bills himself as an “America-first patriot,” the image garnered about 190,000 views, including 8,000 likes and 1,500 reshares. Content moderators at X took no action against the tweet, and the user posted it again on Nov. 16, racking up an additional 194,000 views. Both tweets remained on the site as of Wednesday, even after researchers flagged them as hate posts using the social network’s reporting system.

An antisemitic post on Elon Musk’s X is not exactly news. But new research finds the site has emerged as a conduit to mainstream exposure for a fresh wave of automated hate memes, generated using cutting-edge AI image tools by trolls on the notorious online forum 4chan. The research by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), shared with and verified by The Washington Post, finds that a campaign by 4chan members to spread “AI Jew memes” in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack resulted in 43 different images reaching a combined 2.2 million views on X between Oct. 5 and Nov. 16, according to the site’s publicly displayed metrics.

Examples of widely viewed posts include a depiction of U.S. Army soldiers kneeling before a Jewish man on a throne; Taylor Swift in a Nazi officer’s uniform sliding a Jewish man into an oven; and a Jewish man pulling the strings on a puppet of a Black man. The latter may be a reference to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which was cited as motivation by the 18-year-old white man who slaughtered 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y, grocery store in May 2022, and which Musk seemed to endorse in a tweet last month.

More than half of the posts were made by verified accounts, whose owners pay X a monthly fee for special status and whose posts are prioritized in users’ feeds by the site’s algorithms. The verified user who tweeted the image of U.S. Army soldiers bowing to a Jewish ruler, with a tweet claiming that Jews seek to enslave the world, ran for U.S. Senate in Utah as a Republican in 2018 and has 86,000 followers on X.

The proliferation of machine-generated bigotry, which 4chan users created using AI tools such as Microsoft’s Image Creator, calls into question recent claims by Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino that the company is cracking down on antisemitic content amid a pullback by major advertisers. In a Nov. 14 blog post, X said it had expanded its automated moderation of antisemitic content and provided its moderators with “a refresher course on antisemitism.”

But the researchers said that of 66 posts they reported as hate speech on Dec. 7, X appeared to have taken action on just three as of Monday. Two of those three had their visibility limited, while one was taken down. The Post independently verified that the 63 others remained publicly available on X as of Wednesday, without any indication that the company had taken action on them. Most appeared to violate X’s hateful conduct policy.

Several of the same AI-generated images also have been posted to other major platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and Facebook, the researchers noted. But the CCDH said it focused on X because the site’s cutbacks on moderation under Musk have made it a particularly hospitable environment for explicitly hateful content to reach a wider audience. The Post’s own review of the 4chan archives suggested that X has been a favored platform for sharing the antisemitic images, though not the only platform.

X’s business is reeling after some of its largest advertisers pulled their ads last month. The backlash came in response to Musk’s antisemitic tweet and a report from another nonprofit, Media Matters for America, that showed posts pushing Nazi propaganda were running alongside major brands’ ads on the site.

Among the companies to pull its spending was Disney, whose brand features prominently in many of the AI-generated hate memes now circulating on X. Speaking at a conference organized by the New York Times last month, Musk unleashed a profane rant against advertisers who paused their spending on X, accusing them of “blackmail” and saying they’re going to “kill the company.” He mentioned Disney’s CEO by name.

This is the growing list of companies pulling ads from X

The most widely shared post in the CCDH’s research was a tweet that read “Pixar’s Nazi Germany,” with a montage of four AI-generated scenes from an imaginary animated movie, depicting smiling Nazis running concentration camps and leading Jewish children and adults into gas chambers (Pixar is owned by Disney). It was one of the few posts in the study that had been labeled by X’s content moderators, with a note that read, “Visibility limited: this Post (sic) may violate X’s rules against Hateful Conduct.” Even so, as of Wednesday, it had been viewed more than half a million times, according to X’s metrics.

Another verified X account has posted dozens of the AI hate memes, including faux Pixar movie posters that feature Adolf Hitler as a protagonist, without any apparent sanction from the platform.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has sued both Media Matters for America and the Center for Countering Digital Hate over their research of hate speech on X. After the latest wave of criticism over antisemitism, Musk announced strict new policies against certain pro-Palestinian slogans. And he visited Israel to declare his support for the country, broadcasting his friendly meeting with the country’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yaccarino, who was appointed CEO by Musk in May, said in a November tweet that X has been “extremely clear about our efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination.” The company did not respond to an email asking whether the antisemitic AI memes violate its policies.

4chan is an anonymous online messaging board that has long served as a hub for offensive and extremist content. When Musk bought Twitter last fall, 4chan trolls celebrated by flooding the site with racist slurs. Early in October of this year, members of 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” message board began teaching and encouraging one another to generate racist and antisemitic right-wing memes using AI image tools, as first reported by the tech blog 404 Media.

The 4chan posts described ways to evade measures intended to prevent people from generating offensive content. Those included a “quick method” using Microsoft’s Image Creator, formerly called Bing Image Creator, which is built around OpenAI’s Dall-E 3 software and viewed as having flimsier restrictions on sensitive content.

“If you add words you think will trip the censor, space them out from the part of the prompt you are working on,” one 4chan post advised, describing how to craft text prompts that would yield successful results. “Example: rabbi at the beginning, big nose at the end.”

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the focus among 4chan users on antisemitic content seemed to sharpen. Numerous “AI Jew memes” threads emerged with various sub-themes, such as the “Second Holocaust edition” and the “Ovens Run All Day edition.”

Microsoft’s director of communications, Caitlin Roulston, said in a statement, “When these reports surface, we take the appropriate steps to address them, as we’ve done in the past. … As with any new technology, some are trying to use it in unintended ways, and any repeated attempts to produce content that goes against our policy guidelines may result in loss of access to the service.” Microsoft did not say how many people have been denied access to its imaging program because they violated its rules.

The ability to generate extremist imagery using digital tools isn’t new. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop have long allowed people to manipulate images without moderating the content they can produce from it.

But the ability to create complex images from scratch in seconds, whether in the form of a Pixar movie poster or a photorealistic war image, with only a few lines of text is different. And the ability of overt hate accounts to be verified and amplified on X has made spreading such messages easier than ever, said Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s CEO. “Clearly the cost of producing and disseminating extremist material has never been lower.”

Sara Aniano, disinformation analyst at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said AI seems to be ushering in “the next phase of meme culture.”

The goal of extremists in sharing AI hate memes to mainstream social media platforms is to “redpill” ordinary people, meaning to lead them down a path of radicalization and conspiracism, Aniano added. “You can always expect this rhetoric to be in fringe spaces. but they love it when it escapes those spaces.”

Not all of the AI memes flourishing on X are antisemitic. Ashlea Simon, chair of the United Kingdom’s far-right Britain First party, has taken to posting apparently AI-generated images that target Muslim migrants, suggesting that they want to rape white women and “replace our peoples.”

The party and some of its leaders, boosted by Donald Trump on Twitter in 2017, had been banned from Twitter for hate speech under the previous ownership. But Musk reinstated them soon after buying the company, then gave the party its gold “official organization” verification label in April.

While Musk has said he’s personally against antisemitism, he has at times defended the presence of antisemitic content on X. “Free speech does at times mean that someone you don’t like is saying something you don’t like,” he said in his conversation with Netanyahu in September. “If you don’t have that, then it’s not free speech.”

Ahmed said the problem is that social media platforms, without careful moderation, tend to amplify extreme and offensive viewpoints, because they treat people’s shocked and outraged responses as a signal of engagement.

“If you’re Jewish, or if you’re Muslim, and every day you open up X and you see new images at the top of your timeline that depict you as a bloodsucking monster, it makes you feel like maybe these platforms, but also society more broadly, might be against you,” he said.

On Climate And Stuff

How fast do you have to buy EVs and heat pumps to avoid the worst effects of climate change?

Judging by the surging sales of green technology, U.S. households appear to be on the verge of a low-carbon future. Millions of Americans are buying electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction ranges.

But those numbers belie a starkly different present. Just about 3 percent of Americans, for example, reported owning an induction stove in 2022.

That’s close to the share of the U.S. population that owned a cellphone in the late 1980s, a few years after the first models came out. It took more than two decades for wireless technology to eclipse home landlines.

Time is tighter for the climate. To meet net-zero emissions targets, and avoid the worst effects of warming, most households will need to embrace a new suite of low-carbon technologies by 2050, says the electrification nonprofit Rewiring America.

To make it happen, they’re betting on the “S-curve.”

Virtually every major technology over the past two centuries has followed the same swooping S from virtual obscurity to near-ubiquitous adoption. Economists can now predict this basic shape with surprising accuracy, though the exact nature of the curve or slope change varies by product.

Some technologies that spread across the U.S. in the early 20th century took several decades to become ubiquitous.

But more recent innovations were adopted more quickly.

Experts say green technologies such as electric cars and rooftop solar panels could follow a similar pattern of rapid adoption even if they require you to spend tens of thousands of dollars upfront.

Not all new technologies make it big: Segway, Palm personal device, 3D television. But those that start ascending this curve tend to transform societies.

How fast Americans reach that point with green technologies is up to early adopters, about 15 to 20 percent of the population. They set the stage for this exponential growth by trying products before others do.

Take the thousands of die-hards who leased the first modern electric car, the EV1, released by General Motors in 1996. It had a 74-mile range at a time when drivers had virtually nowhere to charge except their garage.

“They are a special group of people that are willing to go through the pain of an early product,” says Carolina Milanesi, president of the technology research firm Creative Strategies, “and they take pride in that.”

Then mainstream customers, roughly 60 percent of the public, only embrace the technology once it matures into familiar, established products, well after its arrival, fueling years of sustained and exponential growth.

The final stage is dominated by “laggards,” those least willing to adopt the new technology, such as flip-phone owners in the age of smartphones.

How fast will you adopt the clean technologies needed to decarbonize America’s homes and driveways?

Rewiring America modeled the S-curve that products must follow to meet the Biden administration’s zero-emissions targets by 2050.

Americans are on track to meet those goals, but reaching higher levels of adoption will require overcoming barriers such as high costs and a limited number of available models.

“We have every reason to believe electrification technologies are following the same S-shaped curve that other technologies have followed in the past,” says Cora Wyent, Rewiring America’s director of research. “We haven’t missed the boat on any of them.”

The steepness of the slope depends on how many households have already adopted the technologies, and what percentage could reasonably adopt it by mid-century. The calculations assume Americans replace these technologies roughly every 15 years.

Here’s a look at where we are and where we need to be over the next couple of decades, and the role for early adopters.

Heat pump HVAC

(space heating and cooling)

Heat pumps are no longer reliant on early adopters despite being early in the cycle, suggesting Americans are well on track to meet net-zero goals by 2050. As far as clean technologies go, it’s the one most popular among Americans so far.

U.S. households installed 4 million new heat pumps last year, about half of new sales of residential heating systems, eclipsing gas furnaces for the first time.

Since several regions of the country have been installing them for years, 16 percent of U.S. homes already use electric heat pumps for space heating.

Heat pumps, in many parts of the country, are already cheaper to install and operate than fossil-fuel-powered furnaces, saving up to about $1,000 annually over conventional furnaces, while slashing emissions by several tons per year. Layer on generous new incentives from state, local and federal programs, and many units can pay for themselves over their lifetimes.

“Heat pumps make economic sense for many U.S. consumers,” says Erich Muehlegger, a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis. “The main driver is not people who want to be the first one on the block to own a heat pump, but someone who needs to replace something and sees heat pumps as a nice opportunity.”

The biggest barrier may be awareness: In a 2020 survey, the home electrification and insulation company Sealed found half of the respondents had no idea what heat pumps were.

Electric Vehicles

Electric cars are racing up the adoption curve. The United States has already surpassed the possible “tipping point” of around 5 to 10 percent of new sales, when researchers say growth accelerates.

Though most EV owners are still early adopters, early mainstream buyers are likely to switch to EVs in the coming years as the technology gets cheaper and more convenient.

In the first half of 2023, EVs accounted for 8 percent of all passenger vehicles sold in the United States, according to BloombergNEF, a clean-energy research group.

Still, the vast majority of the more than 280 million cars on U.S. roads run on fossil fuels, and just 4 percent are electric.

A skeptical public and spotty changes in infrastructure are acting as a drag. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found nearly half of adults say they still prefer owning a gas-powered car or truck. Only a third or so say EVs are better for day-to-day driving.

“As the EV market pushes into higher and higher levels of adoption, it bumps into groups that are going to have to make meaningful sacrifices,” says Muehlegger. “The technological adoption of EVs is not going to occur smoothly since it’s occurring at the same time all these other pieces of the transportation network are falling into place.”

A more likely scenario may be that regional, urban markets take off early, while areas with fewer charging stations and incentives lag.

Home solar panels

Five percent of U.S. homes have solar panels on their roofs, most of them in California.

Not all roofs are suitable for solar panels, and other options such as utility and community solar exist, so Rewiring America is targeting well under full adoption — 65 percent, or 80 million homes — by mid-century.

This will be a gradual transition that won’t fully pick up speed until later this decade. But with solar panel and battery prices set to fall, and as new incentives for building owners kick in, we will probably see a massive surge in installations.

Home solar installations have risen steadily, adding a record 6.4 gigawatts in 2022, enough to power about 1 million homes, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. A 2022 January Pew Research Center survey found 39 percent of homeowners had seriously considered installing solar panels in the past year.

Cooking

Most Americans already cook with electricity. That means fewer of them need to transition into a new, cleaner cooking technology, so Rewiring America is predicting a relatively flat S-curve.

About 39 percent still rely on gas and propane stoves. Induction stoves are the leading contender to electrify them, but so far they’re only in about 3 percent of households.

It will take a while for Americans to get to the 43 percent of homes Rewiring America estimates should make the switch by 2035 to meet climate goals. To get there, the nonprofit estimates an additional 1.8 million induction stoves above the current pace of sales in the next three years to keep the technology on track. By 2032, it estimates, sales must soar five times above the current trajectory.

The S-curve for induction stoves is relatively flat since so many homes already have electric stoves. It plateaus around 43 percent of homes by 2035, ensuring almost all homes switch out gas and propane well before mid-century.


Fortunately, induction stoves are having a moment. A record number of models are being rolled out by brands from GE to Viking at lower price points, although they remain more expensive on average.

Water heating

Just 1 percent of U.S. homes have installed heat pump water heaters, which deliver hot water with ultra-efficient heat pumps, making them one of the least-common climate technologies in U.S. homes.

Even well into next decade, only a sliver of households will have one, according to Rewiring America’s estimates. To meet climate goals, then, heat pump water heater sales will have to dramatically ramp up from 2030 to 2040.

Only about 140,000 units were sold last year, less than 2 percent of total water heater sales, according to the latest Environmental Protection Agency data.

Few homes have these appliances installed. Since heat pumps are much more efficient than both electric-resistance water heaters and natural gas, they are expected to fully displace all other kinds of water-heating technology.

Sales are growing fast, roughly doubling since 2017. Early adopters have the biggest role to play here, says Wyent. “Very few people know they exist,” she says. “They have the longest way to go. That’s an exciting place for early adopters to play a role.”

The biggest reason to switch is saving money. The appliances are as much as four times more efficient than comparable gas water heaters, saving one ton of CO2 annually on average, reports the nonprofit New Buildings Institute. The appliances cost about $117 annually to operate for a family of four compared to $200 for a gas water heater or $550 for electric resistance.

Gas-fired water heaters, now around half of all water heater sales, may have already begun their terminal decline.

Are we on track?

Early adopters may be driving growth of electrification technologies, but without a concerted effort behind them — incentives, tax credits, public education and workforce training for installation — the process will move too slowly.

Economics, policy and technology are finally pushing in the same direction. The Inflation Reduction Act and state and local incentives are expected to bring down the costs of climate technologies by about 40 percent, according to an analysis by market intelligence firm Sightline Climate. When it comes to clean-energy options, people have never had better products, lower prices or more generous incentives.

“Are we on track?” asks Doyne Farmer, director of the complexity economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. “We’re more on track than people realize. … The thing about exponential [growth] is it’s small, it’s small, it’s small, and then suddenly it gets very big.”

In the early 1980s, AT&T asked consultants from McKinsey to estimate how many wireless customers it might have at the turn of the century, according to a report in the Economist.

Their answer — 900,000 subscribers — turned out to be the number of new customers joining mobile phone services every three days by 2020.