John Rice

CBS News Poll: Do you favor or oppose requiring people to show valid photo ID before they are permitted to vote? 🟢 Favor: 80% 🟤 Oppose: 20% —— • Dem: 65-35 (+30) • GOP: 95-5 (+90) • Indie: 79-21 (+58) • White: 80-20 (+60) • Black: 80-20 (+60) • Hispanic: 77-23 (+55) YouGov | 3/16-19 | 2,496 A

WSJ: Tesla Finally Has Its First Semi-Truck and It’s Already a Hit With Truckers. "Truckers who drove it in pilot tests say they loved features including a centered driving position, faster charging and longer range for about $100,000 less than other battery-electric trucks. Angel Rodriguez, a 56-year-old truck driver for Hight Logistics in Long Beach, Calif., recently swapped out a 13-gear diesel truck for a Tesla Semi, which is automatic, for a one-month pilot test. “It’s just easier on your body. It’s less stressful because you’re not really having to engage the clutch and the stick shift.” Big F Transport employs five mechanics to service more than 40 diesel-powered rigs and a fleet of trailer chassis in Wilmington, Calif. “If we go all EV we will only need one [mechanic] to service chassis,” said Geovanny Melendez, the carrier’s VP of operations, who went to see the Semi earlier this month at a ride-and-drive event near the Port of Long Beach. Jennie Abarca, co-founder and CEO of King Fio Trucking in Long Beach, Calif., once worked as a truck dispatcher and her husband is a truck driver, so she knows all too well the toll a diesel engine takes on people’s lungs and hearing. She eventually wants to swap out King Fio’s 27 diesel trucks to create an all-electric fleet. King Fio already has 11 battery-electric trucks from Volvo and Nikola. But the company limits those trucks to shorter trips to and from local ports because they only have a range of about 225 miles. The Semi, by contrast, can travel 500 miles on a single charge, according to Tesla. For King Fio that means two or three round-trips a day from Long Beach to warehouses in the nearby Inland Empire or a single round-trip to Las Vegas. She has 20 Semis on order. “The Teslas change everything,” Abarca said. “It opens up a whole different type of delivery that I can make.”

I'm listening to Plutarch & he starts the life of Pericles with a basically unrelated ramble about how certain women buy 'puppies and young monkeys' instead of having children. Truly nothing is new under the sun

Kardashev II loading… SpaceX filed for 1M orbital data center satellites Starcloud (NVIDIA-backed) filed for 88K sats Blue Origin just filed for 51K sats. These aren’t sci-fi sketches, they’re FCC filings. First nodes of a solar-harnessing swarm are deploying soon.