1: The ECHR is not related to the EU
2: It probably is compatible because the base is regarded as US Sovereign territory and what goes on there is technically not subject to British control similar to a foreign embassy. Hence it is compatible but not necessarily compliant.
In fact I grew up in Harrogate and have actually been on to the Menwith Hill base when I was a school kid for a party. They were extremely hospitable and even gave us Coca Cola imported from the US. At the time none of us British kids could understand why US coke tasted so bad compared to British coke and it was not until I was living the US ~10 years later that I heard of the "New Coke" debacle.
Meanwhile, the British people voted very unambiguously on a very clearly worded question to them in a legally constituted referendum.
Really? What about the British people living outside the UK, many of them in the rest of the EU, who did not get to vote? You can't exclude several million citizens who are taking advantage of the freedoms the EU bestows on us and them claim it is a democratic vote. However you did choose your words carefully and I agree it was legal, undemocratic and supposedly non-binding, but definitely legal.
This was a nationwide one-person one-vote plebiscite. Why is that not compatible with a democracy?
If it had been a one-citizen one-vote plebiscite you would have had an argument but it was not. Millions of citizens were excluded from voting because they lived in the rest of the EU i.e. for exercising one of the major benefits of EU membership. How do you think a plebiscite on cancelling the highest income tax bracket would go if the only people who got to vote were those in the top bracket?
I listened to a colleague say "now we're leaving the EU I can fly a Union Jack in my garden".
That's about the stupidest thing I have heard, not for the reason you suggest but because in all probability Scotland will vote for independence at which point the Union flag will no longer exist in its current form and calling whatever it becomes anything with 'union' in it will require far too much sarcasm to be healthy.
Yeah, but at least we Took Back Control and are free to be bossed around be the whole world instead of just the EU!
The Japanese "demands" are nothing more that what a lot of us knew would happen. If the UK leaves the EU a lot of foreign companies will relocate their infrastructure back into the EU. The Japanese can demand all they want but it seems increasingly likely that this unelected PM and her cabinet will drag the UK into an economic dark age simply to control immigration based on the result on an undemocratic vote which excluded millions of UK citizens. Frankly all that remaining part of the single market will do is make it less urgent.
The Japanese are just hoping the UK will go this route because it will make it less painful for them to relocate but at this point I would be astounded if any company manufacturing goods for the EU market locates any new projects in the UK regardless of whether it remains or leaves the single market: why take the risk of the UK changing its mind and leaving completely when you do not have to?
Nobody has left yet: the UK is still a member. The biggest mistake so far has been appointing Johnson as foreign secretary. That makes the team leading the country May, Hammond and Johnson and as we all know from Top Gear the team just doesn't work without Clarkson as the recent "China Special" has showed.
The problem with this is that we did not vote to leave. Several large regions of the country voted to remain and even worse than that several million British citizens living outside the UK were denied a vote altogether. In any modern democracy major constitutional change such as leaving the EU requires a majority in all regions and all citizens have the right to vote. This is particularly poignant in this case because many of those citizens living outside the UK are living elsewhere in the EU and would in all probability voted overwhelmingly in favour of remaining.
For instance; just because one might not see snow-globes with mini statues of liberty in them anywhere else in the natural universe it doesn't mean that they cannot be made to exist by conscious forces like us.
How is this relevant? The laws of physics just tell us what is possible i.e. what things can exist an how they will behave. Astronomers have no control over the processes they observe but what they observe is almost completely consistent with the laws of physics we have discovered so far...and the few discrepancies are pointing to new physics, such as Dark Matter, which we fully expect to exist here too and is something we are actively searching for
Nothing they have seen suggests that the laws of physics are different elsewhere. For example elements in distant stars and galaxies emit the same spectral lines which they do here on Earth, gravity works the same, nuclear decays and interactions are consistent with what we have observed on Earth, relativity works just as we would expect it to etc etc.
All these observations point to the laws of physics being the same everywhere, plus all of the experiments showing momentum is conserved here on Earth, are at odds with this EM drive result. When this happens experience shows that the overwhelmingly most likely explanation is that they have not accounted for some effect consistent with the physics we know. History is littered with examples, some recent ones are: cold fusion, faster-than-light neutrinos etc. However that does not mean this effect should not be investigated because sometimes there are surprising results: indeed as a physicist I would absolutely love for this to turn out to be real because it opens up a huge range of currently unknown possibilities for fundamental physics. At the moment though their evidence could be explained by effects which are consistent with known physics and so they need to come up with far better evidence before anyone will take them seriously.
In order, I'd rank Europe as best at public transit, USA as not great, and Canada as terrible.
You are cherry picking the best of the US and the worst in Canada. Try comparing the transit system in Chicago. The Chicago LRT-equivalent network follows a star pattern so you can only go into and from the centre to the suburbs it serves. Plus it only operates at certain times of the day to serve commuters. This makes it utterly useless unless you are a commuter going to an from the city at normal office hours. Young people need to get from their home often to a job in a shop which is unlikely to be in the city centre and those with jobs in the centre are more likely to have evening cleaning jobs which is after the trains stop running.
If we start to include smaller towns like Lansing, Michigan there is effectively zero public transport there. New York may have decent public transport (I personally do not know because I have never been there) but if so it is the only US city or town that I'm aware of with it. Compare that to Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton etc. which have bus routes serving much of the city so that you can get from A to B in a reasonable time even if neither A nor B are in the centre. The difference vs. Europe is that the frequency of service is less so you do have to look at a timetable rather than just the routes. In the US the routes are so sparse that it is often not possible to get closer than 2-3 km or worse and some parts of US cities are dangerous to walk through.
The "laws of physics" are man made and have been changed before.
Actually I would claim that most physicists view the "laws of physics" as the fundamental properties and behaviour of the universe and the energy and matter it contains. Our understanding of these laws (the human laws of physics if you like) is imperfect and has certainly changed in the past but, so far as we are aware, the laws of physics themselves are constant.
However that does not rule out the possibility that at some point in the future we might be able to change them. Since they are a property of space-time and thought to have arisen from the Big Bang it is conceivable that we could learn to manipulate space-time to change them...but at this point that is only a very wild idea that is more science fiction that science. However we cannot rule out the possibility.
Possibly more interestingly an relevant though is that this rive, if it works as advertized, breaks conservation of momentum. This conservation law results from a very important fundamental symmetry that the laws of physics (in the fundamental sense) are the same everywhere in space. So if this drive violates that law it means that this symmetry is not true and the laws of physics have to change as you move through space. This appears extremely unlikely since astronomers tell us that the laws of physics seem to work as far as they can observe the universe and such extraordinary claims will need extraordinary evidence to back them up.
Do what Europe has been doing successfully for decades. Lower the drinking age to 16 years, and raise the driving age to 18 years.
The problem with that is that if you can only drive when you are 18 you need to have a reasonable public transport system which the US utterly lacks...and lower population density is not an excuse because Canada has a lower density than even the US and yet still has a public transport system which is reasonably comparable to many EU countries.
There is an even simpler solution which does not put a limit on the lifetime at all: make the battery replaceable and sell replacements. You know, like everyone used to do 5+ years ago.
If you cheat on your taxes, then yeah you'd be subject to fines for past tax evasion. But if you followed the letter of the tax law at the time, and some time later the government decided the law was wrong and changed it, then no you wouldn't be subject to retroactive fines.
...but that is not what happened. Eu law has remained the same. Ireland refused to follow that law and as a result Apple has lots of back taxes owing. I would have had a lot more sympathy for Apple if they had been paying a reasonable rate of tax and the EU had come along and said sorry it should have been 12% instead of 10%. However they were paying something like 0.05% (IIRC the Guardian). Sorry but when you are paying such an insanely tiny tax rate you have to know that you are doing something dodgy. Just because it took the EU some time to figure this out does not mean that you should get off scot free.
look at the fact that there are *real* problems here that density cannot solve until the infrastruture to support that density arrives.
Surely the solution then is to hike corporate taxes in a way that the companies doing this provide the funding to build the infrastructure that you need? As you adjust the tax rate higher more companies will be put off coming into your town and eventually you should be able to find a balance where you have enough cashflow to build the infrastructure at a rate which supports the growth? Vancouver did something like this to cool its real estate market which was been driven to insane heights by foreign investors.
why does it seem that zoning laws are allowed to ignore constitutional freedoms? Banning research and development, "including software coding" would seem to ignore the right to free speech, free assembly....Look, I understand that we don't want coal factories building next to residences.
Banning extremely profitable companies is a really stupid idea but violating free speech? Really? How does restricting the allowed uses for a building in anyway violate free speech? Having a right to free speech and free assembly does not mean that you can do this at all times in all locations...and if it ever was interpreted in the extremely broad terms you suggest why can't we have "coal factories" next to residential buildings? If it is 'free speech' to allow software companies everywhere why not "coal factories" as well?
Free speech does not just mean freeing the speech you like to hear it also means freeing all the stuff you hate to hear as well. When it comes to the exchange of ideas and thoughts freedom cannot be beaten. When it comes to letting businesses choosing their location total freedom is a really bad idea. This means that some human somewhere will have the power to decide what to allow and what to prevent and humans are sometimes utter idiots. The way to deal with this is to remove that idiot from a position where they make decisions not to decide that nobody is capable of making such decisions.
It would be better just to hand them a regular satellite phone and let the various intelligence dragnets scoop up the ISIS members and all of their like minded contacts. While we are stuck with all these massive privacy invasions we might as well reap some benefits from them.
Do they really think that if some ISIS guy flies in, he's going to fill out the customs form honestly and say "Yep, my Twitter handle is @jihad4lyfe!"
No, they probably think that he will refuse to give them a handle and then they will use this as grounds to detain him for interrogation. The problem is that some of us don't use Facebook, Twitter etc. and so I don't have an account to give them - other than a dummy Facebook account which is entirely devoid of any personal information and that I only created because our local airport used to insist on Facebook to access the free WiFi. However I expect this will look like I created a dummy account to hide my real account from them.
I'm beginning to wonder whether the US government's long term plan is to make travelling to the US such a horrible experience for us foreigners that identifying the terrorists will be easy because they will be the only ones insane enough to try.
I dunno, I find myself just as interested in the crazy new unconfirmed results and speculative additions/revisions to our model of the universe as I am when most turn out to be wrong...and maybe a few turn out to be correct!
There is nothing wrong with that just as long as you remember that the vast majority will be wrong. The problem is when people, usually in the media, try to hype things up without mentioning that it is just wild speculation and overwhelmingly likely to be wrong because that rather important caveat makes it boring to most people. However if that caveat does not put you off go for it - just be honest about the chances when sharing your enthusiasm with others. Sometimes I also get interested as this stage usually when a model solves some other problem inadvertently i.e. a problem it was not actually intended to solve and/or is something I might be able to test myself with the data we have.
Yes I know this is Slashdot so you are forgiven but if you read the article you will find that my interpretation is actually spot-on. To quote the paper:
We estimate that this vehicle can meet the energy requirements of 87% of vehicle-days across the US, and 84–93% in 12 of the most populous metropolitan areas, even if relying only on night-time charging. This 87% of vehicle-days accounts for 61% of personal vehicle gasoline consumption in the US.
So technically it is only 87%, not 90%, but with a wide margin of error and when it comes to fuel use it is only 61%. Hence my claim that the problem is that for a single vehicle about 13% of the time an EV is not suitable which is the problem because nobody wants the hassle and cost (on top of the EV premium itself) to rent an ICE to replace their EV 13% of the time.
You know you can RENT a non-EV car for that other 10% right ?
Renting is not always possible when you have a family+dog and need to rent a minivan. Availability is usually very limited and often instead of a minivan they will treat some combined SUV+minivan bastard offspring as equivalent which usually have appallingly bad legroom in the rear seats. In addition where I live in Canada the rental companies all put limited mileage on rental contracts from city locations which makes them extremely expensive for long road trips. If you add to this the inconvenience of having to rental several times a year for this and that you are paying more for the EV in the first place it is hardly a viable option.
I expect we will get an EV for our run-about-town car the moment their price drops to something comparable to an ICE. While you may save on the costs of petrol the cost of installing a recharging station plus the cost of replacing the battery every few years is still non-negligible compared to the fuel savings. However these costs are dropping every year so I remain optimistic that they will drop to the point where an EV is economically viable but unfortunately that point is not yet here at least for me.
Please don't. The paper contains a wildly speculative idea which, while technically possible, is based on a single, unconfirmed experimental result. Hundreds of these are published every year even in PRL and the overwhelming majority do not pan out. This is just the very early stage in the scientific brain storming process looking for new ideas which might be right and at this stage almost none of them are. The time to start getting interested is when another experiment appears to have data confirming one of the predictions of this new theory - and even then it does not always work out!
The oil industry and fossil car industries are desperate that people not realise how convenient it is to have a charger in your garage.
For everyday around town use the home charger is fine. The problem is that it is not really 90% of vehicles that the electric car could replace but a single vehicle 90% of the time (which is still 90% of vehicles on the road at any one time). ~10% of the time we used our car for going on holiday or taking long road trips for other reasons. This, along with the incredibly high price, is what makes an electric car impractical for me. The high price will probably get fixed with time but to go on holiday with the family I need a car with a large range that can be refuelled quickly. While I would love to have an electric car with that capability for around the same price as a petrol driven one that is not something I see happening any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
1: The ECHR is not related to the EU
2: It probably is compatible because the base is regarded as US Sovereign territory and what goes on there is technically not subject to British control similar to a foreign embassy. Hence it is compatible but not necessarily compliant.
In fact I grew up in Harrogate and have actually been on to the Menwith Hill base when I was a school kid for a party. They were extremely hospitable and even gave us Coca Cola imported from the US. At the time none of us British kids could understand why US coke tasted so bad compared to British coke and it was not until I was living the US ~10 years later that I heard of the "New Coke" debacle.
Meanwhile, the British people voted very unambiguously on a very clearly worded question to them in a legally constituted referendum.
Really? What about the British people living outside the UK, many of them in the rest of the EU, who did not get to vote? You can't exclude several million citizens who are taking advantage of the freedoms the EU bestows on us and them claim it is a democratic vote. However you did choose your words carefully and I agree it was legal, undemocratic and supposedly non-binding, but definitely legal.
This was a nationwide one-person one-vote plebiscite. Why is that not compatible with a democracy?
If it had been a one-citizen one-vote plebiscite you would have had an argument but it was not. Millions of citizens were excluded from voting because they lived in the rest of the EU i.e. for exercising one of the major benefits of EU membership. How do you think a plebiscite on cancelling the highest income tax bracket would go if the only people who got to vote were those in the top bracket?
Definition of "undemocratic vote" - any election the left looses.
This vote was not an election and it was loosed upon us by the right so your definition is completely irrelevant.
I listened to a colleague say "now we're leaving the EU I can fly a Union Jack in my garden".
That's about the stupidest thing I have heard, not for the reason you suggest but because in all probability Scotland will vote for independence at which point the Union flag will no longer exist in its current form and calling whatever it becomes anything with 'union' in it will require far too much sarcasm to be healthy.
Yeah, but at least we Took Back Control and are free to be bossed around be the whole world instead of just the EU!
The Japanese "demands" are nothing more that what a lot of us knew would happen. If the UK leaves the EU a lot of foreign companies will relocate their infrastructure back into the EU. The Japanese can demand all they want but it seems increasingly likely that this unelected PM and her cabinet will drag the UK into an economic dark age simply to control immigration based on the result on an undemocratic vote which excluded millions of UK citizens. Frankly all that remaining part of the single market will do is make it less urgent.
The Japanese are just hoping the UK will go this route because it will make it less painful for them to relocate but at this point I would be astounded if any company manufacturing goods for the EU market locates any new projects in the UK regardless of whether it remains or leaves the single market: why take the risk of the UK changing its mind and leaving completely when you do not have to?
Leaving the EU was a huge mistake.
Nobody has left yet: the UK is still a member. The biggest mistake so far has been appointing Johnson as foreign secretary. That makes the team leading the country May, Hammond and Johnson and as we all know from Top Gear the team just doesn't work without Clarkson as the recent "China Special" has showed.
You voted to leave, so leave already.
The problem with this is that we did not vote to leave. Several large regions of the country voted to remain and even worse than that several million British citizens living outside the UK were denied a vote altogether. In any modern democracy major constitutional change such as leaving the EU requires a majority in all regions and all citizens have the right to vote. This is particularly poignant in this case because many of those citizens living outside the UK are living elsewhere in the EU and would in all probability voted overwhelmingly in favour of remaining.
For instance; just because one might not see snow-globes with mini statues of liberty in them anywhere else in the natural universe it doesn't mean that they cannot be made to exist by conscious forces like us.
How is this relevant? The laws of physics just tell us what is possible i.e. what things can exist an how they will behave. Astronomers have no control over the processes they observe but what they observe is almost completely consistent with the laws of physics we have discovered so far...and the few discrepancies are pointing to new physics, such as Dark Matter, which we fully expect to exist here too and is something we are actively searching for
Nothing they have seen suggests that the laws of physics are different elsewhere. For example elements in distant stars and galaxies emit the same spectral lines which they do here on Earth, gravity works the same, nuclear decays and interactions are consistent with what we have observed on Earth, relativity works just as we would expect it to etc etc.
All these observations point to the laws of physics being the same everywhere, plus all of the experiments showing momentum is conserved here on Earth, are at odds with this EM drive result. When this happens experience shows that the overwhelmingly most likely explanation is that they have not accounted for some effect consistent with the physics we know. History is littered with examples, some recent ones are: cold fusion, faster-than-light neutrinos etc. However that does not mean this effect should not be investigated because sometimes there are surprising results: indeed as a physicist I would absolutely love for this to turn out to be real because it opens up a huge range of currently unknown possibilities for fundamental physics. At the moment though their evidence could be explained by effects which are consistent with known physics and so they need to come up with far better evidence before anyone will take them seriously.
In order, I'd rank Europe as best at public transit, USA as not great, and Canada as terrible.
You are cherry picking the best of the US and the worst in Canada. Try comparing the transit system in Chicago. The Chicago LRT-equivalent network follows a star pattern so you can only go into and from the centre to the suburbs it serves. Plus it only operates at certain times of the day to serve commuters. This makes it utterly useless unless you are a commuter going to an from the city at normal office hours. Young people need to get from their home often to a job in a shop which is unlikely to be in the city centre and those with jobs in the centre are more likely to have evening cleaning jobs which is after the trains stop running.
If we start to include smaller towns like Lansing, Michigan there is effectively zero public transport there. New York may have decent public transport (I personally do not know because I have never been there) but if so it is the only US city or town that I'm aware of with it. Compare that to Canadian cities like Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton etc. which have bus routes serving much of the city so that you can get from A to B in a reasonable time even if neither A nor B are in the centre. The difference vs. Europe is that the frequency of service is less so you do have to look at a timetable rather than just the routes. In the US the routes are so sparse that it is often not possible to get closer than 2-3 km or worse and some parts of US cities are dangerous to walk through.
The "laws of physics" are man made and have been changed before.
Actually I would claim that most physicists view the "laws of physics" as the fundamental properties and behaviour of the universe and the energy and matter it contains. Our understanding of these laws (the human laws of physics if you like) is imperfect and has certainly changed in the past but, so far as we are aware, the laws of physics themselves are constant.
However that does not rule out the possibility that at some point in the future we might be able to change them. Since they are a property of space-time and thought to have arisen from the Big Bang it is conceivable that we could learn to manipulate space-time to change them...but at this point that is only a very wild idea that is more science fiction that science. However we cannot rule out the possibility.
Possibly more interestingly an relevant though is that this rive, if it works as advertized, breaks conservation of momentum. This conservation law results from a very important fundamental symmetry that the laws of physics (in the fundamental sense) are the same everywhere in space. So if this drive violates that law it means that this symmetry is not true and the laws of physics have to change as you move through space. This appears extremely unlikely since astronomers tell us that the laws of physics seem to work as far as they can observe the universe and such extraordinary claims will need extraordinary evidence to back them up.
Do what Europe has been doing successfully for decades. Lower the drinking age to 16 years, and raise the driving age to 18 years.
The problem with that is that if you can only drive when you are 18 you need to have a reasonable public transport system which the US utterly lacks...and lower population density is not an excuse because Canada has a lower density than even the US and yet still has a public transport system which is reasonably comparable to many EU countries.
There is an even simpler solution which does not put a limit on the lifetime at all: make the battery replaceable and sell replacements. You know, like everyone used to do 5+ years ago.
If you cheat on your taxes, then yeah you'd be subject to fines for past tax evasion. But if you followed the letter of the tax law at the time, and some time later the government decided the law was wrong and changed it, then no you wouldn't be subject to retroactive fines.
look at the fact that there are *real* problems here that density cannot solve until the infrastruture to support that density arrives.
Surely the solution then is to hike corporate taxes in a way that the companies doing this provide the funding to build the infrastructure that you need? As you adjust the tax rate higher more companies will be put off coming into your town and eventually you should be able to find a balance where you have enough cashflow to build the infrastructure at a rate which supports the growth? Vancouver did something like this to cool its real estate market which was been driven to insane heights by foreign investors.
why does it seem that zoning laws are allowed to ignore constitutional freedoms? Banning research and development, "including software coding" would seem to ignore the right to free speech, free assembly....Look, I understand that we don't want coal factories building next to residences.
Banning extremely profitable companies is a really stupid idea but violating free speech? Really? How does restricting the allowed uses for a building in anyway violate free speech? Having a right to free speech and free assembly does not mean that you can do this at all times in all locations...and if it ever was interpreted in the extremely broad terms you suggest why can't we have "coal factories" next to residential buildings? If it is 'free speech' to allow software companies everywhere why not "coal factories" as well?
Free speech does not just mean freeing the speech you like to hear it also means freeing all the stuff you hate to hear as well. When it comes to the exchange of ideas and thoughts freedom cannot be beaten. When it comes to letting businesses choosing their location total freedom is a really bad idea. This means that some human somewhere will have the power to decide what to allow and what to prevent and humans are sometimes utter idiots. The way to deal with this is to remove that idiot from a position where they make decisions not to decide that nobody is capable of making such decisions.
It would be better just to hand them a regular satellite phone and let the various intelligence dragnets scoop up the ISIS members and all of their like minded contacts. While we are stuck with all these massive privacy invasions we might as well reap some benefits from them.
Do they really think that if some ISIS guy flies in, he's going to fill out the customs form honestly and say "Yep, my Twitter handle is @jihad4lyfe!"
No, they probably think that he will refuse to give them a handle and then they will use this as grounds to detain him for interrogation. The problem is that some of us don't use Facebook, Twitter etc. and so I don't have an account to give them - other than a dummy Facebook account which is entirely devoid of any personal information and that I only created because our local airport used to insist on Facebook to access the free WiFi. However I expect this will look like I created a dummy account to hide my real account from them.
I'm beginning to wonder whether the US government's long term plan is to make travelling to the US such a horrible experience for us foreigners that identifying the terrorists will be easy because they will be the only ones insane enough to try.
You are not creating anything new power here.
Indeed you are not. Citizens make very bad fuel which is why crematoriums need to use gas.
The achievement we clearly need to unlock is a self driving car.
I dunno, I find myself just as interested in the crazy new unconfirmed results and speculative additions/revisions to our model of the universe as I am when most turn out to be wrong...and maybe a few turn out to be correct!
There is nothing wrong with that just as long as you remember that the vast majority will be wrong. The problem is when people, usually in the media, try to hype things up without mentioning that it is just wild speculation and overwhelmingly likely to be wrong because that rather important caveat makes it boring to most people. However if that caveat does not put you off go for it - just be honest about the chances when sharing your enthusiasm with others. Sometimes I also get interested as this stage usually when a model solves some other problem inadvertently i.e. a problem it was not actually intended to solve and/or is something I might be able to test myself with the data we have.
We estimate that this vehicle can meet the energy requirements of 87% of vehicle-days across the US, and 84–93% in 12 of the most populous metropolitan areas, even if relying only on night-time charging. This 87% of vehicle-days accounts for 61% of personal vehicle gasoline consumption in the US.
So technically it is only 87%, not 90%, but with a wide margin of error and when it comes to fuel use it is only 61%. Hence my claim that the problem is that for a single vehicle about 13% of the time an EV is not suitable which is the problem because nobody wants the hassle and cost (on top of the EV premium itself) to rent an ICE to replace their EV 13% of the time.
You know you can RENT a non-EV car for that other 10% right ?
Renting is not always possible when you have a family+dog and need to rent a minivan. Availability is usually very limited and often instead of a minivan they will treat some combined SUV+minivan bastard offspring as equivalent which usually have appallingly bad legroom in the rear seats. In addition where I live in Canada the rental companies all put limited mileage on rental contracts from city locations which makes them extremely expensive for long road trips. If you add to this the inconvenience of having to rental several times a year for this and that you are paying more for the EV in the first place it is hardly a viable option.
I expect we will get an EV for our run-about-town car the moment their price drops to something comparable to an ICE. While you may save on the costs of petrol the cost of installing a recharging station plus the cost of replacing the battery every few years is still non-negligible compared to the fuel savings. However these costs are dropping every year so I remain optimistic that they will drop to the point where an EV is economically viable but unfortunately that point is not yet here at least for me.
Attempting to up the hype a bit
Please don't. The paper contains a wildly speculative idea which, while technically possible, is based on a single, unconfirmed experimental result. Hundreds of these are published every year even in PRL and the overwhelming majority do not pan out. This is just the very early stage in the scientific brain storming process looking for new ideas which might be right and at this stage almost none of them are. The time to start getting interested is when another experiment appears to have data confirming one of the predictions of this new theory - and even then it does not always work out!
The oil industry and fossil car industries are desperate that people not realise how convenient it is to have a charger in your garage.
For everyday around town use the home charger is fine. The problem is that it is not really 90% of vehicles that the electric car could replace but a single vehicle 90% of the time (which is still 90% of vehicles on the road at any one time). ~10% of the time we used our car for going on holiday or taking long road trips for other reasons. This, along with the incredibly high price, is what makes an electric car impractical for me. The high price will probably get fixed with time but to go on holiday with the family I need a car with a large range that can be refuelled quickly. While I would love to have an electric car with that capability for around the same price as a petrol driven one that is not something I see happening any time soon.