Automakers must build cheaper, smaller EVs to spur adoption, report says
jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz Posts 20Comments 537Joined 2 yr. ago
Honestly, I think most of the cost is safety stuff. Much of the weight is that too. To meet crash test standards (well, to get the 5 star) set by countries and some insurance companies, they need automatic breaking for instance. Rear back up cameras are mandated, so now you need a screen in the dash. 10+ airbags, sensors, controllers, and on and on.
We had 2 seater cars that got 50 MPG in the early 90s, passengers just wouldn't survive many crashes they will in modern cars.
I mean, you're not counting the fact that the electricity isn't free either - and KWH costs are just going up. It's debatable how you ought to cost out the electrical work to put in a charger, and the charger itself. I really have no idea about the lifespan of the chargers, so it might not last a full 15 years out in the elements, it might last 50+ years.
The dirty little secret is we've basically done that already - building train lines or subways in the US is so astronomically expensive that no one is doing it "for profit" anymore, and it looks likely that it'll never become financially viable unless something changes massively. I mean, from what I can tell NYC can't profitably retrofit the subways, forget about building a new line. Amtrack is constantly in bankruptcy or being bailed out. No one is going to build a modern train line from Rochester NY to NYC again - there just isn't going to be the passengers.
Yea, Cities are great and all, but I'd argue nothing beats having 103 acres of forest and field and a house or two to play around in. I don't need to go to a park, I step outside. I can have different hobbies with space for a wood shop, a sawmill, a backhoe etc... I can ride 4wheelers and offroad my crossover on a private road / path we built. I don't have to hear sirens daily/nightly, or worry about lights shining in my bedroom window. I can go for a walk or hike on my property and not see any strangers. I can go swimming or fishing in my pond, I can play badminton and boccie ball and croquet in my lawn.
I'm not saying that cities are bad, but to claim rural people don't have beautiful and interesting things easily available to them is just misunderstanding what some people find beautiful and interesting. I'm just back from London, and while Christmas at Kew was amazing, and better than anything I've ever seen in the US, it's not like I don't have access to theaters, stores, and events like Christmas Markets, though we do them as summer festivals and the like. They're also ~ 30 minutes away, similar to how long I'd spend on getting to the tube, on it, and getting to the event location from my hotel. It's just far more convenient to walk a much shorter distance to the car, drive to the local small city, and walk a shorter distance from parking to the festival or show, or whatever. We have local museums, but I think you overestimate how much people who aren't tourists go to the museums. I haven't been to any of my local ones in quite a while, and I remember my NYC family never went to the museums - it's always the "huh, yea, I never had a reason to go outside of a tourist family member showing up".
I suggest you read up on Zero Trust. Corporate networks often aren't any more hardened than the average home router NAT device. VPN done right is no less secure on a home network because you control the endpoints you let connect. But the best plan is not using VPN at all, and instead authenticating the person and device on a per service basis.
I've thought this occasionally, but at least in my job, we've had lots of "remote work" for years by dint of being in a different building than other people. If that was going to be outsourced, I think they would have tried by now. It's really surprisingly hard to get effective consultants when they're based in the same country, but as you go overseas, you quickly end up with paying simply for "check the box", which probably is already mostly self service clicking and AI at the cutting edge (Amazon support "chat" anyone?). The problem is, you can tell an auditor you have function X, but in many cases that function becomes useless to others in the org.
IDK, I think there's been multiple indicators we're not currently on an offshoring swing.
And this kind of shows how useless many meetings are. Luckily, my meetings are very limited in my current job, but even in those I often tune out when a different group of people are discussing something that's within my group, but not part of my job. We've just gotten used to sometimes having to "wake up" someone if the topic changes to something they would have input on. It usually 5 seconds to repeat the starting point of the new topic so it's not really that bad.
Of course, ideally you'd have meetings structured so things broke out so no one is sitting there completely uninvolved in any part - but often that's unrealistic.
Then again, there are people who are paid now to just have a zoom box up with their name showing for hours at a time. I can see how you could easily do something else in that time.
I think the bigger problem is that a lot of middle management was shown to not really do much useful in the pandemic.
I've been saying this forever. We don't need new tech to be developed or rolled out, we don't need to move everyone to a city and take a train, we don't need everyone to buy a new electric car, we just need to take away the reason 1/3 or more of driving occurs. And we already proved we can do it. It's insane to not make that part of the climate goals.
This compounds too - less traffic means less need to add more lanes, or run more trains, or pave more parking lots, etc... So basically "bad, unnecessary" construction can go away. From what I can tell, almost no one actually wants a larger highway except because of traffic. But most of the traffic is commuters. We might have enough capacity (if you remove most commuters) for a very very long time to handle tourists, delivery trucks, and emergency services...
Yea, I think 2.5G is really searching for a market, that may not exist. For home use, 1Gbit is in general plenty fast enough, and maxes out most US customers Internet too. For enterprise use 10G is common and cheap. The cards to get an SFP+ port into any tower or server is just really small. Enterprise is considering how to do 100G core cheaply enough, and looking for at least 25G on performance servers, if not also 100G in some cases. If you've got the budget you can roll 400G core right now in "not insane pricing".
2.5G to the generic office (that might well be remote) is likely re-wiring and unnecessary. And that's if you don't find ac WiFi sufficient, i.e. sub 1G.
I wish people would learn from history more. I don't know that it's possible to eliminate Hamas. I mean, the US didn't manage to eliminate Al Qaeda or the Taliban and they tried for like 20 years.
Is this like the opposite of "go woke go broke"? It sure seems like you lose more money being a hate monger as a public company, or maybe that's just Musk?
The thing is, I agree with striking a balance if possible - try as best as possible to hedge your bets. That said, I also think that I know plenty of people who put off stuff because of financial responsibility or saving, and then end up unable to ever get much out of that. By the time you might retire, you're going to be 68? You might well die first, you definitely won't be as able to travel or take on many hobbies as you could when you're 20,30,40...
Unless you get to be a multi millionaire - you're basically going to be divesting any assets you have till Medicare kicks in if you get really ill at some point, or you're going to be relying on family, or you'll die before that happens. In any of those cases, why do you want to have more money to give to the medical system before medicare kicks in?
If you want to leave a bunch of money to your heirs - well, figure that out I guess, but I'd suggest that genZ etc are not really interested in having 0 life so they can give a fat check to potential kids 50+ years down the road. Know what you want, but otherwise you're hoping we manage to keep Social Security and maybe you get a 401k, but having a large normal savings account or a big personal investment account just generally seems like a losing game.
I just think I have heard this before, that this time is different. I am sure if you look back each major disruption had "this time is different". And from what I've read, at no time did the robber barons of the age want to replace jobs, new jobs just happened.
Oh, I don't think the issue is terrorism. I am just anti-religion in general.
Probably different jobs. We seem to always come up with more stuff to do than we get with productivity improvements. Also with population declines we are seeing impending continued labor shortages. And there's a big need for tradespeople generally due to not enough people going into it for decades.
I keep thinking eventually we'll get to a post scarcity society a la Star Trek and either need a different economic system or we will continue to slide into dystopia and risk revolution, but that also seems further off as I see how slowly the various tech actually improves, mixed with plenty of issues making society unstable happening now. So we might well get dystopia before we lose "all" jobs to automation.
It's worth pointing out humanity has been worried about automation since at least the 1700s and yet even with all the tech advances we still have much higher average and median standards of living over that time.
The only issue I have is that Islamophobia is different from the rest in that as far as I can tell, it's simply being against an ideology. Like being anti trumpist. Are we trumpophobic or something? I think we have to be able to criticize chosen ideologies.
The stupider stuff to me is just because there's public Healthcare doesn't mean there can't also be for profit services. Just that they have to compete on something other than simply existing. It's like k-12 school. There's public school, or you can pay for private school if you want to and can afford it.
People dunk on the VA, and it's not good, but you have to compare it to the existing alternative in the US, and honestly it's not really worse than the average for profit where I live (which is rural NY for context). Something like 95% of primary care might as well be like going to Urgent Care, just with more waiting and lower prices. But it's not like you ever see the same person, or a doctor usually. Just whatever Nurse Practitioner happens to be there, and no one reads your chart so you're just explaining from scratch each person each time, even in the same visit.
And I think I've seen more get it moved along at some local mechanics drive up than at ERs. At this point about the only place to go is either shut down facilities or up IMO.
For a long time there wasn't much incentive to save money as savings interest rates were horrible. Even now, with inflation money is worth less in the future, so things get more expensive over time. So for things you actually need I think it often evened out.
Then there's the want stuff. You don't know how long you have in life to experience stuff, so there's some cost to putting things off where you might never get to do or use or play or whatever. Honestly dying with a lot of debt and no assets seems like a nicrme screw you to the banks and system. You might not ever pay it back, but you got the benefits.
I'm not sure you fully understand the improvements i safety though. Many many of the differences between dead (no air bags, abs, auto breaking, steering column through chest) and saved is extreme.
I. E. With the auto breaking you might just be shocked by a panic breaking but avoid the crash entirely. Or it might change from a 50mph difference to a 10mph, i. E. Fender bender.
I had a relative trying to pass a tractor broadside the tractor in his truck at 55 whe the tractor suddenly turned left in front of him. He scraped his leg a little.
I have been on icy roads with 90s cars and had them slide all over and only skill and a lot of luck let me recover and not head on another car.
My 2015 car with traction control straightened itself out on some unexpected ice before I could even react.
I haven't researched early 90s.cars that much, but the somewhat famous crash video online between a late 50s chevy and a 09 chevy is instructive - the 09 goes through the 50s car. It's not as pronounced with 90s cars but they often didn't have airbags (or just one), they didn't have the offest head on strengthening nor many of the side impact strengthening so I could imagine it being somewhere in the middle.
So if my choice is being paralized or dying, I might agree with you, but if my choice is a scraped leg or having a surprise and a higher heartbeat for a couple of minutes vs dying I'll take the living please.