> a low SOC battery could not guarantee a minimum runtime for safe shutdown during a repeated outage

A lot of devices are unconditionally safe to shut down. Think network equipment, signs, exit lights, and well designed computers.

> a catastrophic failure (because the battery shouldn't be dead) could be an indication of other issues that need to be addressed before power on

This is such a weird presumption. Power outages happen. Long power outages happen. Fancy management software that triggers a controlled shutdown when the SOC is low might still leave nonzero remaining load. In fact, if you have a load that uses a UPS to trigger a controlled shutdown, it’s almost definitional that a controlled shutdown is not a catastrophe and that the system should turn back on eventually.

All of your points are valid for serious datacenter gear and even for large server closets, but for small systems I think they don’t apply to most users, and I’m talking about smaller UPSes.

a) If the power is out too long for your UPS (or you have solar and batteries and they discharge overnight or whatever) that the system will turn back on when the power recovers, and

b) You will not have extra bonus outages just because the UPS is in a bad mood.

Teflon is PTFE, which is fully fluorinated but is also very much a plastic: it’s a highly unreactive solid at reasonable temperatures (which sadly do not include temperatures commonly encountered on stoves).

By “the Teflon chemical” are you perhaps referring to the various nasty liquid, water-soluble surfactants commonly used in factories that make or process PTFE? Those include PFOA, PFOS, and the newer and not obviously any safer “GenX” compounds.

Stoves seem to be somehow special in safety regulations. I guess regulators assume that they are never operated unattended, so they tend to have no real built in safety features. Both commercial and residential stoves will happily operate unlit at full power.

But I’ve had problems with UPSes that advertise auto-restart but don’t actually ship with it enabled. And that fancy APC unit was sold by fancy Dell sales people and supported directly by real humans at APC, and it would still regularly get mad, start beeping, and turn off its output despite its battery being fully charged and the upstream power being just fine (and APC’s techs were never able to figure it out either).

Even today, a UPS that turns itself back on after power goes out long enough to drain the battery and is then restored is somewhat exotic. Amusingly, even the new UniFi UPSes, which are clearly meant to be shoved in a closet somewhere, supposedly turn off and stay off when the battery drains according to forum posts. There are no official docs, of course.

I admit that I haven’t actually used C# in 20 years or so.

Sure, but the comparable Rust feature is enum, not union.

The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like, may be more complex but is overall much better. There aren’t many personal-use systems like this, but systems like AWS take this approach and generally do quite well with it.

Other languages have unions with named choices, where each name selects a type and the types are not necessarily all different. Rust, Haskell, Lean4, and even plain C unions are in this category (although plain C unions are not discriminated at all, so they’re not nearly as convenient).

I personally much prefer the latter design.

I’m still not an expert, but the strait is narrow and there are plenty of weapons that don’t need a “missile launcher”. You can have fun reading through here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Irani...

Lots of these weapons have more than enough range to shoot clear across the strait and even to hit ships from concealed inland sites.

A poorly armored vessel transiting the strait goes on a narrow, fixed route along a for a shockingly long distance, and basically all of it is within a few miles of Iran’s coast. This isn’t like a rogue country trying to blockade the open ocean — it’s more like if about half of the Eastern bank of the Mississippi decided to blockade shipping, which would have been eminently doable with Civil War-era weapons.

Having personally blown up beverage bottles by overpressurizing them (be very very careful doing this!), when they go, they go violently.

There's a Starcraft-like perspective in which you're right. The US has repositioned a bunch of long-range-attack units and has consumed a lot of single-use weapons, with which we have removed most of Iran's defense towers and generally destroyed a good deal of their fixed military assets. Maybe the US has reduced the other team to a mostly a bunch of drones. It looks like the US's team will definitely win.

But there are quite a few things about this analysis that don't really apply to the real world. First, we're not playing last man standing. The US's goal isn't to wipe Iran off the map -- it's goal is (hopefully) to ensure stability for itself and its allies and to let the probes (commercial trade) go around the map freely. But the US has not even come close to removing enough of the Iranian forces to allow weak units to go through the strait safely (or even perhaps strong units). Secondly, one needs to count units more carefully: Iran has on the order of 1M military units left -- the US has destroyed several thousand big, obvious, expensive units but has barely touched the total. Sure, the US also has a lot of military units, but they are not in Iran and it would be an utterly terrible idea to send hundreds of thousands of troops.

Additionally, one needs to zoom the map out. There are lots of other important things going on. Just one of them is that there has been a standoff for decades across the Taiwan Strait. It's been fairly stable because no one involved wants to start a shooting war that they will lose (yes, all parties can easily lose simultaneously). The US gets significant economic value from having Taiwan be independent and friendly to the US. But a bunch of those single-use weapons used in Iran and some very high value US units had previously been near the Taiwan Strait are are not any more.

Also, the US lost some very very high value units that it no longer has the ability to rebuild (cough, AWACS, cough).

Here's some good reading for a less tongue-in-cheek perspective:

https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/