Tesla is doing very well on sales. But if the other car companies actually shipped "Tesla killer" products, Tesla's sales could be jeopardized.
My claim is that Tesla has the fundamental technology right, and nobody else does. Thus Tesla will not face any "Tesla killer" cars in the near term. Thus, anyone who wants a quality electric car will buy a Tesla for the near term. And the middle term. Long term, presumably the other car companies will get their acts together and actually compete with Tesla.
Tesla just paid off nearly a trillion dollars in debt... paying in cash. Off of money they made by selling cars. I'm predicting they will keep selling all the cars they can make and keep making profits on those sales, and therefore will not go bankrupt.
Also, as Rei pointed out, SpaceX is very profitable now and if Tesla got into serious trouble it's likely that somehow SpaceX would bail them out. Suddenly discover that they need a bunch of Model 3 motors or something.
Tesla will be bankrupt in 5 years. Pretty sure VW will still be around.
You're silly. Tesla is doing all the fundamental technology stuff right, better than any other company. That will carry them through a lot of possible problems, including self-inflicted ones.
Tesla more than any other company has invested with the long term in mind. They have their own factory for battery cells. They have their own network of charging stations. Other companies are making big promises... VW promised that it's helping build a charging network that will rival Tesla's someday! All vapor so far, while Tesla owners can charge their cars today at real Tesla chargers.
And Tesla has barely begun selling outside the USA. And Tesla hasn't sold the Model Y yet. And the pickup, and the semi....
Very few people can afford $60,000+ EVs. Tesla is done.
Quite a few people have decided they can afford the Model 3, which starts at about $40K. In fact Tesla is selling all they can make.
I guess you have missed all the stories about pharma raising prices
Apparently you read at0mjack's post and didn't understand anything. at0mjack even mentioned insulin. Since you didn't understand it, I'll restate it using littler words. Hope this helps!
Because the FDA requires insane red tape, companies that successfully get past the red tape then charge a bunch, knowing that other companies can't compete (since the other companies haven't gotten past the red tape). The big companies that can get past the red tape are okay with this situation since they like being able to charge a bunch of money.
Cutting down the red tape at the FDA would allow the free market to operate and would prevent companies from charging too much money for well-proven things like insulin.
Another classic example: the EpiPen. Since the technology is decades old, it's no longer under patent. Since epinephrine is a well-understood drug, many companies can make it. Yet the EPA still requires crazy red tape before something like an EpiPen can be sold, and as a result only one company can sell the EpiPen and that company is free to jack up the prices. If the drug market was more of a free market, there would be more than one company making epinephrine self-injectors and competition would bring the prices down to a sane level.
When this was discussed here on Slashdot, some commentators said "it makes sense to have the FDA put a bunch of red tape on this. What if some stupid company sold something like an EpiPen that didn't work right? People could die!" But the current red tape is so bad that the company can charge $600 for a device that costs something like $5 to make, without facing any competition... that's pretty bad red tape.
So, there is definitely blame here for a failure of the market, and at least some of that can be laid at the feet of regulatory capture by the pharma companies, but the FDA (and lawmakers) are equally to blame and it's not a "conspiracy".
In other words, drugs are expensive due to the situation, and the drug companies are partly to blame but the rest of the blame is on the FDA and the lawmakers. Or in other words, you are criticizing someone who has a much more complete understanding of the situation than you have.
A couple of years ago I read about an exciting new approach to treating cancer: DNA nanobots. These are very simple machines made from DNA.
How simple are they? They are hollow capsules with a hinge and a latch. The one function of the nanobot is to pop the latch open under the correct circumstances.
(Note: I'm a software developer, not any kind of doctor or scientist, and I'm describing this in my own words based on my own understanding. Apologies if I get anything wrong. Links at the end so you can go to better sources.)
The latch can be configured to open only when it bumps into a specific protein. For example, a protein only found on the cancer to be treated.
The idea is that a nano-dose of strong medicine is inserted into the "nanobot" capsules. Each does of medicine is tiny but there are literally trillions of capsules. (That's why they are made out of DNA... no person and no machine can make these, they are self-assembling.) Then the capsules are introduced into the body of the patient. They travel along through the body, bumping into things, and the medicine doesn't do anything because it's contained inside the capsule. Then, when the capsule happens to bump into a cancer cell, the latch opens, the medicine is released, and a nanodose of the medicine is administered directly to the cancer cell.
What I found exciting about this is that it decouples the problems of being both safe and effective. We have plenty of effective anti-cancer drugs, but many of them are useless because they aren't safe. They aren't selective enough; they will kill healthy tissue as much as they kill cancer cells. But if we can program the latch to open only when near the cancer cells, potentially these same drugs would now become safe to use. The nanobot makes the effective drugs safe.
The research from the news story identifies many targets. If the latch can be programmed using this new data, potentially the nanobots can be tailored to attack any kind of cancer and not hurt any healthy tissue.
From time to time I check the news to see if there is anything new about DNA nanobots. The original research I read about has gone silent... I read somewhere that a major drug company had bought the research so maybe it's quietly being developed (and the staggering piles of paperwork quietly started at the FDA).
[Surfaces in the ISS] would have to have been designed for steam cleaning, though.
I'm not sure of that. My house wasn't particularly designed for steam cleaning and it works quite well.
My biggest concern would be whether plastics might outgas some vapors when steam cleaned. In a house one needn't worry too much; one can just open a window. Obviously not an option in the ISS.
NASA being NASA, they won't just ship up a cleaner, they will run tests and studies for a long time. This is bad because they take forever to do things, but this is good because they can avoid risks.
In principle a steam vapor cleaner ought to work as well in microgravity as on Earth, once the tank is filled. The one I bought doesn't have any pumps, it just uses steam pressure to spray out the steam.
The article suggests that formation of biofilms could lead to problems.
The ISS needs a good way to kill biofilms and leave surfaces really clean. However, as a closed system, the ISS needs to be careful about chemicals, and it's expensive to ship anything up there.
Therefore I suggest the ISS should use a steam vapor cleaner. The ISS has plenty of water, and its environmental system already has to be able to remove water vapor from the air. I commented about steam vapor cleaners in another story from last August, and cited studies about their effectiveness:
I found a link to a study showing that a particular model of commercial steam vapor cleaner was effective against biofilms, but I don't know if other good models are equally effective or if there was something specific about that one.
I wonder if it would be feasible to simply take an off-the-shelf steam vapor cleaner to the ISS. I don't know what their power budget is... the steam vapor cleaner I bought (a Vapamore MR-100) has a 1500 Watt heater, according to its manual. I know the ISS has a lot of solar cells but I don't know whether 1500 Watts would be a problem or not. Also, filling the water tank in microgravity might be a problem.
Keep in mind that Tesla has started shipping cars to Europe and China. Last I saw, they were making 7000 cars a week.
I do think Tesla may be reaching the limits of the American customers who will pay above $35K to get a fancier Model 3 now instead of waiting for the $35K model to actually ship. There are a lot of people who are waiting for the $35K car and when it starts selling, Tesla will sell all they can make, at least for a few years.
Tesla promised that the $35K Model 3 was about to ship, but it hasn't shipped yet. This is kind of weird but I am trusting that the car really will ship one of these days. Tesla is known for doing what it says it will do, and also known for doing it much later than the plan.
I think Europe has plenty of customers who will buy the more expensive (i.e. more profitable for Tesla) versions of the Model 3; so it makes sense to me that Tesla is diverting a chunk of their production over there.
Delaying production? I really don't think so. Tesla makes a profit on every car they sell so they want to sell as many as possible. They sure have plenty of expenses they need to cover. Rather than slowing production they are currently building two more "GigaFactories".
I used to work for a world-class audio expert. One time he and I were talking and he mentioned that cats hear very differently than humans do.
Cats can hear up into the ultrasonic. They can also hear sounds in the range audible to us. But he said that while their range is much wider, this has the tradeoff that it's more difficult for cats to tell the difference between some sounds that sound different to us.
The base set of sounds that we identify to distinguish words are called formants. He told me that cats have trouble distinguishing formants, but on the other hand they can track a mouse in 3D space by the mouse's heartbeat. (Consider how small a mouse heart is and then imagine the audio spectrum of its heartbeat.)
A cat can't respond differently to its name if it can't tell the difference between its name and some other word. I wonder if the researchers allowed for the physiology of cat hearing at all in their tests.
Now, this next part isn't anything the audio expert said, it's me trying to fill in the blanks with what I know.
The sound of the letter 's' (called a sibilant) is basically white noise and thus covers a lot of the spectrum. Thus I'm pretty sure cats can at least distinguish between sibilants and non-sibilants. My wife and I have two cats right now, and one of them is named "Saga" while the other is named "Harbard". I'm pretty sure that those names will sound different even to a cat.
But if we had third cat named "Samba", I'm not sure they would be physiologically able to distinguish that name from "Saga".
The social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook say that they are platforms, and therefore they should not be held liable for awful things that people say on their platforms. They aren't curated information streams like a newspaper, where nothing is published without editorial oversight.
However, they have been indulging in quite a bit of curation. And it hasn't been even-handed. If they like you, you can literally get away with inciting violence; if they don't like you, they will strike you down or shadow-ban you for any reason or no reason.
There are numerous cases of conservatives being suspended or banned from social media over relatively mild stuff (for example, telling a journalist to "Learn to code") while liberals can make jokes about the President being assassinated, wish for conservative people's children to be raped, etc. The post "#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper" did not result in any punishment from Twitter. This tweet was accompanied with a cartoon picture of a man feeding a body into a woodchipper and bloody snow. By "#MAGAkids" he meant some high school students who were in the news at the time.
Keith Olbermann wrote on Twitter these words: "we should do our best to make sure the rest of his life is a living hell." Who was the target of his wrath? A man who had a permit to hunt turkeys who shot a turkey. Olbermann has a million followers and some of them went on to harass the hunter. Twitter did not punish Olbermann in any way. (Faced by a backlash of bad publicity, Olbermann made a follow-up tweet saying that his words were not intended as an actual threat.)
I tried to use Facebook Messenger to send a link to a satirical essay. It would not allow me to send it, and it gave a totally nonsense reason. I just tried it again just now and the same thing happened; here's the error:
It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You've been blocked from using it.
Learn more about blocks in the Help Center. If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards let us know.
I was "going too fast"? After not using Messenger for over 24 hours, I attempted to send a single URL, so that message is clearly nonsense. Obviously I was merely guilty of wrongthink. The essay makes the point that the USA is spending so much money that it's not possible to "soak the rich" to pay for it all, using a sort of reducto ad absurdium. Clearly someone who works for Facebook doesn't like this essay or doesn't like "Iowahawk". If you want to read this forbidden essay, here you go:
Then there is the current controversy over Twitter apparently shadowbanning the movie Unplanned. So far Twitter has adamantly maintained that everything that looked like shadowbanning was just buggy code, but this seems really egregious. The Unplanned Twitter account at one point had more followers than Planned Parenthood, and then suddenly it had zero followers. Peopl
...Obama tried to work out compromises with Republicans on health care by picking a Republican plan, taking months to vote on Republican amendments...
The Republican amendments were not in the final bill. The final bill was made by rewriting a totally unrelated bill, and less than a week elapsed between the introduction of this final bill and its being voted into law in the Senate (on a 60-39 straight party lines vote). Please read this history by the Washington Post's fact checker guy Glenn Kessler.
The key work on creating the Senate version of the ACA was done in secret. Let's take a trip down memory lane.
[...]...consideration of the bill "proceeded on two parallel tracks," starting when the Senate returned to work on Nov. 30. The first track was public, with the illusion of debate and votes on amendments. The official record shows 506 amendments were offered.
[...]
[John Cannan:] "In actuality, only a tiny fraction of these amendments has any significance" to the bill's legislative history. Only a handful of amendments covered by a unanimous consent agreement (UCA) reached between the two sides had any relevance, he concluded. Meanwhile, "all of those amendments not covered by UCAs were ordered to lie on the table as soon as they were introduced and had no parliamentary standing at all."
That's because the real work was going on behind closed doors, back in Reid's office...
[...]
Once the deals were in hand, Reid on Dec. 19 revealed a manager's amendment revising the proposed bill, which was also scored by the CBO. He filed three successive cloture motions to end debate on the revised manager's amendment, on his original amendment and on the original House bill. He also filed three other amendments that had the effect of "filling the amendment tree" — cutting off opportunities for the Republicans to alter the text.
[...]
The late David Broder, the fair-minded Washington Post columnist, was scathing in his criticism of the spectacle in a column headlined "Health Reform's Stench of Victory." Reid, he wrote, "reduced the negotiations to his own level of transactional morality. Incapable of summoning his colleagues to statesmanship, he made the deals look as crass and parochial as many of them were — encasing a historic achievement in a wrapping of payoff and patronage."
But you said that President Obama, specifically, "tried to work out compromises" with the Republicans. Could you please show me some kind of news story or something where he told Harry Reid not to do what Harry Reid did? I don't remember anything like that.
Consumers are just starting to grasp color temperature, perhaps they can't handle CRI yet.
It's on the box but it's in the fine print. I haven't seen anyone make a big deal about CRI as such. I read about it when doing my homework before investing in LED bulbs.
I did a web search and found a page that goes into some detail. It has some great examples of how the CRI isn't perfect... it shows one light with a CRI of 80 whose spectrum has three strong peaks, so it passes the test but won't look very good in normal life (any color that is in-between the peaks won't look right).
I personally find "daylight" bulbs very harsh, and I'm wondering if you got one of those. They are slightly brighter than "warm" bulbs but I don't like the color.
Ironically we say "warm" bulbs for bulbs with a lower color temperature. Color temperature is measured using the number of degrees that an ideal black-body radiator would be to glow at that color. "warm" bulbs are 2700K, and "daylight" bulbs are 5000K. The hotter color temperature means the light is shifted toward blue, so it's brighter. The "warm" temperature is less bluish. (We are used to fire being considered warm, and it's only red-hot; blue-hot is hotter. But ice looks bluish so I guess we think bluish colors are cooler.)
I have Cree brand tube bulbs that replace fluorescent tubes and they are 3000K color temperature. I like 3000K; the "warm" temperature of 2700K seems kind of yellowish to me. I found that Cree has some 3000K bulbs on the Home Depot web site (I've never seen them in a store) and I plan to try buying some.
Also, bulbs have a metric called "CRI", which I believe is "Color Rendering Index". A CRI rating of 100 is theoretically exactly as nice as sunlight. Higher is better. The most expensive Cree bulbs have CRI of over 90. Your "harsh" bulb may have a low CRI.
Not many glasses frames fit me properly, I have to try them on.
One of those online sites I looked at has a system where they send you 5 frames, you try them all on and send them back, and then you order glasses.
Also if the glasses are one-third to one-fifth the price, maybe you can pay someone local to you a "fitting fee" to fine-tune them, or learn to fine-tune them yourself. It's been a while since I got glasses but I remember the guy doing something with a screwdriver, and bending the nose pieces a little... those are things I could learn to do if it would save me hundreds of dollars.
a) You see an eye doctor, you get a prescription, and then you order the glasses online. What's so impossible about that?
Why do you care whether they are made in a lab you can see or in a lab in some distant place, as long as the glasses are good and the return policy is acceptable?
Okay, in an emergency, maybe you can't wait. But when the glasses are literally one-third the price, even one-fifth the price(!), maybe you can just buy some spares as a hedge against an emergency.
P.S. The glasses I am wearing now cost $500 at LensCrafters. (If I recall correctly, this premium cost was for progressive multifocal lenses with their best "pattern", their best anti-scratch coating, and maybe a slightly better grade of optical plastic. Plus thin-and-light metal frames.) I got these glasses at LensCrafters because the insurance I was getting through my employer at the time only worked at LensCrafters. But I'm overdue for an eye exam, and when I get my new prescription I think I'll try Warby Parker and see how that goes. There are two Warby Parker retail locations in Seattle so maybe I'll just go to one of those.
If the invisible hand is working, we should have alternative sources selling eyewear at a lower prices. Do we? It turns out that yes, we do have alternative sources selling at lower prices.
Warby Parker was founded specifically because some business-school students noticed that glasses were overpriced and thus there was plenty of room in the market to sell a product at a lower price and still make money. (The same guys who founded Warby Parker also noticed that razors were overpriced and then founded Harry's.)
In this Slashdot discussion several people have said they bought from Zenni Optical and saved money.
That's two, and I'm pretty sure that if you dig you can find more.
If you can observe something, it is part of the universe.
I think of it as: anyplace that a photon could travel to in the normal way that photons travel would be part of our universe.
People have posited the existence of other universes. It would require some unknown method of travel to go from one universe to another. The collection of all universes can be called the Multiverse.
I recently saw, in a comic, the idea that there could then be multiple Multiverses. That doesn't make sense to me any more than the idea of multiple Internets.
I read a web comic called Unicorn Jelly that really gave me some food for thought. How could you visit another universe where the physical laws are different? Only two ways: either you would have to travel in a little bubble where your usual physical laws apply somehow, or else you would have to be translated into the new universe. The Universe of Unicorn Jelly isn't made out of atoms, it's made out of "tratoms", and in order to visit you would have to have your body translated into tratoms. In principle there could be an infinite number of universes with different physical laws, and only in a tiny fraction of them would people survive the translation necessary to enter a universe. Luckily the universe of Unicorn Jelly is one where people can survive, or else there wouldn't have been a comic.
P.S. Unicorn Jelly, in the beginning, seems like a slightly silly and harmless story. It's a bigger story than it first appears, and I don't want to spoil it, but I will say that it is a story that could only be told in the universe in which it is set. The very nature of the Universe of the story drives the plot! So, the story of Unicorn Jelly meets my personal standard for science fiction: the story wouldn't be the same if you took away the science (fictional science, here).
P.P.S. If you like Unicorn Jelly and want more multiversal craziness from the same author, the follow-on story To Save Her is kinda set in the same universe. I mean, it's actually set in an infinite number of variations of the same universe, and features a somewhat infinite cast of characters, but we follow along a half-dozen or so through their story arc, as they visit about a half-dozen alternate universes. (They only visit alternates of their own universe, where the physical laws are the same.)
However, all food is "natural", using such wording makes me doubt the origin of your viewpoint. All food is natural. There's no such thing as synthetic food, in essence. Just processed or unprocessed.
I think most people understand the idiom where "natural food" means less-processed food. In case anyone didn't get that: when I said "natural" I meant "less-processed, fresher food, as opposed to more-processed food that may have had nutrients stripped out to make it more shelf-stable or more palatable."
The reason your manufacturer no longer makes "Omega-3 chocolate truffles"? They were a processed food that likely eliminated most of the Omega-3 in their production (like any processed food)
Huh? They were truffles made with flax oil. I am certain they contained flax oil, as I could taste the difference between them and normal truffles. I'm not sure on what basis you feel it is likely that their processing eliminated their primary selling point.
Honestly, if you haven't read up on this stuff, you shouldn't be offering nutritional advice
Huh? I read a book, and I discussed what I remembered from the book, with attribution giving a link to a GoodReads page so you can find the book and double-check me. I totally agree that I'm not qualified to give nutritional advice, which is why I didn't give any.
Oh wait, looks like I did give one piece of advice: eat fiber to help control cholesterol. Sorry, I didn't give attribution on that one. I didn't think that one was at all controversial.
Like fibre, vitamin C and many other things, including oxygen - being DEFICIENT in it isn't good for you. But consuming more of it doesn't make you healthier.
As I said, the book claims that 95% of people in North America are deficient in it, with deleterious effects.
I really wonder how many of the maladies of old age are actually deficiency disorders.
Vitamins were discovered when someone figured out that people going months without eating Vitamin C got sick. Someone empirically figured out that eating citrus fruit staved off scurvy and that led to the discovery of Vitamin C. Other vitamins are also important but take longer before a deficiency makes you sick.
Natural food has all kinds of stuff in it and I wonder if some of it is healthy in really subtle ways that take a very long time to show up.
Also, processed foods lack fiber, and you need some in your diet, to help your body control cholesterols.
Finally, omega 3: I read a book called Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill that claims that omega 3 fatty acids are essential to health but at least 95% of people in North America don't get enough of it. Omega 3 is not found in processed foods, because omega 3 oils go rancid very quickly. Before processed foods, everyone got omega 3 naturally (for example, by eating fish or eating meat from grass-fed cattle) but these days people get very little, and get other kinds of oils instead. Since your body is made from what you eat, if you don't eat enough omega 3, your body has to use the other oils and it doesn't work as well. The book claims that while our bodies can't make omega 3, our bodies can convert it from one form to another; so it would suffice to eat only fish oil or only flax oil or whatever and trust the body to convert DHA to GLA or whatever.
My wife and I buy flax oil blend and use it to make salad dressing; it's a painless way to add omega 3 to your diet.
Simple salad dressing recipe: 3-4 tablespoons of oil (flax oil, or olive oil) 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar (or any other vinegar you like) sea salt to taste black pepper to taste
We measure into a convenient cup, then whisk with a small wire whisk. It's fast and easy. We have figured out how many cranks of the pepper mill or how many twists of the sea salt grinder measure out the amount we like so it's a quick grind-and-count, no need to use measuring spoons for the salt and pepper.
Sometimes we put in some tomato paste; you can buy tomato paste in a tube, and it's a handy way to add just a little bit when making just enough dressing for a couple of salads. Or garlic powder or any other spice that suits your taste. It's easy to tweak the recipe. We don't bother buying pre-made salad dressing anymore.
We used to buy omega-3 chocolate truffles. They were expensive but were a tasty way to add omega-3 to our diets. Sadly the manufacturer no longer makes them... I think they were too expensive and didn't sell fast enough.
Electric cars, and Teslas in particular, are a teensy, tiny minority of all the cars out there, and a teensy proportion of new sales.
Teslas look quite a bit better if you only consider their share of markets Tesla actually is in. The number of cars sold worldwide would include the number of cars sold in India and China where Tesla has no serious business yet.
I was surprised to read that in the state of California, about 1 in 22 of all cars sold in the third quarter of 2018 were Teslas (actual number: 4.6% of "light vehicle sales"). That's not their share of BEVs, that's their share of all cars sold.
It's true that BEVs are still a tiny slice of the worldwide car market. There was a time when car sales were tiny compared to horse-drawn buggy sales. The past doesn't guarantee the future.
Musk is a salesman. [...] But the giants can stamp on him any time they like.
I used to think there was some truth to this idea. Now I scorn it.
For "the giants" to "stamp on him" they would have to produce so many electric cars that they steal away his customers. One question for you... where will they get the batteries? Have they invested staggering sums of money into their own battery factory, as Tesla did?
Also, will their cars be just as good as a Tesla? I don't take seriously any car design that doesn't have a front trunk. The new electric cars that just have an electric motor under the hood instead of an ICE engine seem like slap-dash last-minute catch-up designs by companies that aren't ready to compete with Tesla yet.
It's not that I think the front trunk by itself is that big a deal; the front trunk is the by-product of a clean-sheet new BEV design. Why would you want a complex drive train when you can have a motor right between the two wheels? For all-wheel drive, why would you want anything other than two redundant motors? If a car company hasn't even gotten that far, how competitive can its cars really be to Tesla?
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care.
That's an interesting idea. I doubt you can support it.
In the "large luxury car" segment of the market, Tesla ate everyone else's lunch. Not that many people will pay $80K or $100K or more for a car, so a Tesla sale is a sale some other company didn't get. Tesla got more sales than BMW or Mercedes or any other luxury maker.
Are these companies blithely unconcerned about Tesla? Really?
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care. Their EV models make them no more than Tesla, which is a drop in the ocean to them. It's chicken-feed to them, in a niche market.
As I understand Elon Musk's claims: car companies currently make a lot of money off of car repairs; BEVs need less repairs and don't cost very much to repair; car companies have been reluctant to switch to BEVs because they stand to make much less money off of BEVs.
Using the Tesla mobile app, it has been possible for at least a couple years to leave the air conditioning on inside the car while leaving the car. I read about a Tesla owner who had a note taped to his car window: "This is a Tesla and its air conditioning is running. The dog is fine. Please don't break my window."
More recently Tesla added a feature where you could use the touchscreen to do the same thing. In the climate controls dialog there is a button, "leave climate control running when car is stopped."
Now the screen will be used to display a message telling people that the pets are fine, please don't break the window. Why not!
This is one of those emergent features that nobody predicted years ago.
Another one: Elon Musk wanted the Model 3 to have a clean look, so Tesla engineers wound up inventing a computer-controlled steerable air blower for the dashboard. You don't have to touch louvers to direct the air, you use a GUI on the touchscreen. This not only looks cleaner, but the computer remembers the air settings per driver, so if a husband and wife want different settings the car just handles it.
One day someone on Twitter said "Hey Elon Musk, when I use the mobile app to turn on the air conditioning and cool down my Model 3 when it's been parked in the sun on a hot day, how about pointing the air blowers at the seats to cool them down?" And Elon Musk replied "Great idea, I'll make it happen." (Quotes paraphrased from memory.)
The Nissan Leaf is very affordable if you buy one used... because the resale value plummets. A new Leaf is $30K and I can buy a low-mileage 2017 Leaf for $15K. A 2012 Leaf is $8K. For a second car, to be used in local driving, a used Leaf is a great value.
A Tesla holds its value much better, perhaps partially because Tesla engineered active cooling in the battery pack so charging doesn't cook the cells. Teslas only lose about 1% battery capacity per year and they start with much higher capacities. Plus Tesla has the Supercharger network. A Tesla really can be your only car, even if you need or want to make long road trips.
Note that the Model 3 costs more than the Leaf and is harder to get. Yet it's still outselling the Leaf. That's customers voting with their money. You may think that Nissan is doing a better job, but the market does not agree with you.
I call BS. Why would people WANT to stop for an hour or two, when they could swap out their battery in 2-3 minutes?
Tesla Superchargers take roughly as long as people need for a meal. And Tesla cars can go hours on a freeway. So a long road trip looks like: drive for hours, stop at a Supercharger, get a meal while the car charges, continue the trip.
It's not as convenient as gasoline or diesel, because with those fuels you can go from empty to full in 5 minutes or less, and you get longer ranges as well, so if you are really tough or determined you can spend more time driving and only stop when you choose to. But no matter what kind of car, on a long road trip I want to take rest breaks and get snacks... don't you? And Tesla cars pretty much can go about as long as I would want to go without a break.
So it's not actually insane that Tesla customers preferred Superchargers over the battery swap. The logistics of battery swapping guarantee that swapping will always cost more than Superchargers, and people just didn't want to pay the higher cost. (Particularly since when Tesla tried the battery swap, all their customers had free unlimited use of the Supercharger. A battery swap was something like $40 and the logistics were a hassle.)
And with Nio (who's cars are definitely competitors to Tesla) now having a network of hundreds of battery-swap stations in China - and plans to expand into the US - Tesla is about to find out it's ancient technology. Why plug in? Just change...
Tesla's system recharges the battery in your car, and you have the choice of buying different cars with various sizes of battery. If you are wealthy, you might buy the new Roadster when it finally ships; that is supposed to have a range of over 600 miles. I'm guessing these standard battery packs will have a shorter range than most Teslas so you will need more swapping stations.
Battery swapping means you don't own your battery and you are locked into a standard. And I predict that the costs will always be higher. Spare batteries for the swap are inventory... you need storage for the inventory of batteries, automated swap machines, and chargers. For the Supercharger you just need the chargers.
Tesla has active thermal management to keep the battery packs from cooking, so they can really dump power in to recharge. I'm guessing these swappable packs are simpler and thus cheaper, but that also means you need to charge them more slowly or you cook them. That in turn means you need more of them.
There might be room for a swappable battery system, but really for most people Tesla's technology meets the Good Enough standard and actually is better in some ways.
For taxis in crowded big cities, the swappable packs might be attractive. If the cars are zipping back and forth they never get too far from a swap station.
Another problem is that many people think that nuclear materials are magically dangerous.
There are nuclear materials that radiate energy fiercely, and would kill you in seconds if you stood next to them.
There are nuclear materials that will still be around 30 thousand years from now.
But there are not actually any nuclear materials with both of the above properties at once. The ones that are super dangerous also have a short half-life, so they decay away to nothing in a relatively short time. The ones that take forever to go away are quite mild.
But some people who don't understand the above point are worried that nuclear materials are super-deadly things out of nightmare.
The above point is not original with me; I saw it on Slashdot years ago, and don't remember who posted it or else I would give credit.
I'd be willing to consider something else, but I really don't want to go back to Windows and there aren't any interesting Linux laptops available.
I'm running Linux on a Thinkpad T-series and I recommend it. There are several models, ranging from thin-and-light to the "performance" model.
I currently have a T460p, from the older generation that have a special docking port on the underside. The newest Thinkpads have a docking station that uses a USB C port on the left-hand side of the laptop, and I haven't tried that. I found some comments on Reddit that a T480s works great in Linux with the Lenovo USB C dock.
I'm running Linux Mint MATE edition, which IMHO steals the best parts of Mac OS X and the best parts of Windows. But if you want a desktop environment that works very much like OS X you do have options.
TL;DR A Thinkpad is a lot like a MacBook Pro that didn't get stupid-thin, and you might like one.
Starting a couple of months ago, I've received a huge number of extortion emails. At this point it's extortion spam.
All the emails follow the same pattern, and all including somewhere (usually in the To: line, for some reason) an old "burner" password I used on web sites where I don't care if the password leaks.
Here's a rough paraphrase:
Hi, I'm an elite international hacker, and I've hacked your email. You can tell I'm for real because I used your own email account to send this to you.
Go ahead and change your password, but it's too late to protect you from me. I installed a secret program on your computer and it has been logging everything you do, including collecting images from your computer's webcam. I have collected a list of all the porn sites you visit and made a video showing what you were doing while you visited them. You have interesting tastes in porn, don't you!
When you opened this email a timer was automatically started, and you have 48 hours to pay me money or else my automatic program will send all the dirt I have on you to all your friends I harvested from your email address book.
You can use $CRYPTOCURRENCY to send me the money. Send $AMOUNT to $ID_NUMBER. [$AMOUT is usually $700 or $800 or so.] If you don't know how to use cryptocurrency, just Google it, it's easy.
Be more careful in the future so this doesn't happen again to you.
I have received dozens of copies of this email, with the text slightly different. Some of them end with "Don't hate me, everyone needs to do their own job." Some of them call the mysterious malware "RAT software". A couple of times the email was translated into Japanese. (I can read just a little bit of Japanese and was able to recognize it, and I showed it to a fluent friend who confirmed that it fit the above pattern.)
<sarcasm>I must say, my computer is running pretty well considering how many elite international hackers have been messing with it and installing RAT software and such.</sarcasm>
As it happens, I got one copy of the email at least a week before the deluge started. I realized it would have been very scary for someone who uses the same password everywhere and doesn't know how easy it is to forge the "From:" header. Doubly scary if that person actually visits porn sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Tesla is doing very well on sales. But if the other car companies actually shipped "Tesla killer" products, Tesla's sales could be jeopardized.
My claim is that Tesla has the fundamental technology right, and nobody else does. Thus Tesla will not face any "Tesla killer" cars in the near term. Thus, anyone who wants a quality electric car will buy a Tesla for the near term. And the middle term. Long term, presumably the other car companies will get their acts together and actually compete with Tesla.
Tesla just paid off nearly a trillion dollars in debt... paying in cash. Off of money they made by selling cars. I'm predicting they will keep selling all the cars they can make and keep making profits on those sales, and therefore will not go bankrupt.
Also, as Rei pointed out, SpaceX is very profitable now and if Tesla got into serious trouble it's likely that somehow SpaceX would bail them out. Suddenly discover that they need a bunch of Model 3 motors or something.
Tesla will be bankrupt in 5 years. Pretty sure VW will still be around.
You're silly. Tesla is doing all the fundamental technology stuff right, better than any other company. That will carry them through a lot of possible problems, including self-inflicted ones.
Tesla more than any other company has invested with the long term in mind. They have their own factory for battery cells. They have their own network of charging stations. Other companies are making big promises... VW promised that it's helping build a charging network that will rival Tesla's someday! All vapor so far, while Tesla owners can charge their cars today at real Tesla chargers.
And Tesla has barely begun selling outside the USA. And Tesla hasn't sold the Model Y yet. And the pickup, and the semi....
Very few people can afford $60,000+ EVs. Tesla is done.
Quite a few people have decided they can afford the Model 3, which starts at about $40K. In fact Tesla is selling all they can make.
I guess you have missed all the stories about pharma raising prices
Apparently you read at0mjack's post and didn't understand anything. at0mjack even mentioned insulin. Since you didn't understand it, I'll restate it using littler words. Hope this helps!
Because the FDA requires insane red tape, companies that successfully get past the red tape then charge a bunch, knowing that other companies can't compete (since the other companies haven't gotten past the red tape). The big companies that can get past the red tape are okay with this situation since they like being able to charge a bunch of money.
Cutting down the red tape at the FDA would allow the free market to operate and would prevent companies from charging too much money for well-proven things like insulin.
Another classic example: the EpiPen. Since the technology is decades old, it's no longer under patent. Since epinephrine is a well-understood drug, many companies can make it. Yet the EPA still requires crazy red tape before something like an EpiPen can be sold, and as a result only one company can sell the EpiPen and that company is free to jack up the prices. If the drug market was more of a free market, there would be more than one company making epinephrine self-injectors and competition would bring the prices down to a sane level.
When this was discussed here on Slashdot, some commentators said "it makes sense to have the FDA put a bunch of red tape on this. What if some stupid company sold something like an EpiPen that didn't work right? People could die!" But the current red tape is so bad that the company can charge $600 for a device that costs something like $5 to make, without facing any competition... that's pretty bad red tape.
ACHS -- Government Is The Big Reason EpiPen And Other Generics Are So Expensive
Face it, pharma is the poster child for greed.
Let's go back and see what at0mjack wrote:
In other words, drugs are expensive due to the situation, and the drug companies are partly to blame but the rest of the blame is on the FDA and the lawmakers. Or in other words, you are criticizing someone who has a much more complete understanding of the situation than you have.
A couple of years ago I read about an exciting new approach to treating cancer: DNA nanobots. These are very simple machines made from DNA.
How simple are they? They are hollow capsules with a hinge and a latch. The one function of the nanobot is to pop the latch open under the correct circumstances.
(Note: I'm a software developer, not any kind of doctor or scientist, and I'm describing this in my own words based on my own understanding. Apologies if I get anything wrong. Links at the end so you can go to better sources.)
The latch can be configured to open only when it bumps into a specific protein. For example, a protein only found on the cancer to be treated.
The idea is that a nano-dose of strong medicine is inserted into the "nanobot" capsules. Each does of medicine is tiny but there are literally trillions of capsules. (That's why they are made out of DNA... no person and no machine can make these, they are self-assembling.) Then the capsules are introduced into the body of the patient. They travel along through the body, bumping into things, and the medicine doesn't do anything because it's contained inside the capsule. Then, when the capsule happens to bump into a cancer cell, the latch opens, the medicine is released, and a nanodose of the medicine is administered directly to the cancer cell.
What I found exciting about this is that it decouples the problems of being both safe and effective. We have plenty of effective anti-cancer drugs, but many of them are useless because they aren't safe. They aren't selective enough; they will kill healthy tissue as much as they kill cancer cells. But if we can program the latch to open only when near the cancer cells, potentially these same drugs would now become safe to use. The nanobot makes the effective drugs safe.
The research from the news story identifies many targets. If the latch can be programmed using this new data, potentially the nanobots can be tailored to attack any kind of cancer and not hurt any healthy tissue.
From time to time I check the news to see if there is anything new about DNA nanobots. The original research I read about has gone silent... I read somewhere that a major drug company had bought the research so maybe it's quietly being developed (and the staggering piles of paperwork quietly started at the FDA).
Here is the research I originally read about:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2014/12/ido-bachelet-announces-2015-human-trial.html
I didn't find any follow-up about the human trial. I'm wondering whether the treatment worked and the patient was saved.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/5nck89/what_happened_ido_bachelet_and_leukemia_nanobot/
Here's what appears to be another research team pursuing the same idea.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212112000.htm
[Surfaces in the ISS] would have to have been designed for steam cleaning, though.
I'm not sure of that. My house wasn't particularly designed for steam cleaning and it works quite well.
My biggest concern would be whether plastics might outgas some vapors when steam cleaned. In a house one needn't worry too much; one can just open a window. Obviously not an option in the ISS.
NASA being NASA, they won't just ship up a cleaner, they will run tests and studies for a long time. This is bad because they take forever to do things, but this is good because they can avoid risks.
In principle a steam vapor cleaner ought to work as well in microgravity as on Earth, once the tank is filled. The one I bought doesn't have any pumps, it just uses steam pressure to spray out the steam.
The article suggests that formation of biofilms could lead to problems.
The ISS needs a good way to kill biofilms and leave surfaces really clean. However, as a closed system, the ISS needs to be careful about chemicals, and it's expensive to ship anything up there.
Therefore I suggest the ISS should use a steam vapor cleaner. The ISS has plenty of water, and its environmental system already has to be able to remove water vapor from the air. I commented about steam vapor cleaners in another story from last August, and cited studies about their effectiveness:
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12424966&cid=57052404
I found a link to a study showing that a particular model of commercial steam vapor cleaner was effective against biofilms, but I don't know if other good models are equally effective or if there was something specific about that one.
I wonder if it would be feasible to simply take an off-the-shelf steam vapor cleaner to the ISS. I don't know what their power budget is... the steam vapor cleaner I bought (a Vapamore MR-100) has a 1500 Watt heater, according to its manual. I know the ISS has a lot of solar cells but I don't know whether 1500 Watts would be a problem or not. Also, filling the water tank in microgravity might be a problem.
Keep in mind that Tesla has started shipping cars to Europe and China. Last I saw, they were making 7000 cars a week.
I do think Tesla may be reaching the limits of the American customers who will pay above $35K to get a fancier Model 3 now instead of waiting for the $35K model to actually ship. There are a lot of people who are waiting for the $35K car and when it starts selling, Tesla will sell all they can make, at least for a few years.
Tesla promised that the $35K Model 3 was about to ship, but it hasn't shipped yet. This is kind of weird but I am trusting that the car really will ship one of these days. Tesla is known for doing what it says it will do, and also known for doing it much later than the plan.
I think Europe has plenty of customers who will buy the more expensive (i.e. more profitable for Tesla) versions of the Model 3; so it makes sense to me that Tesla is diverting a chunk of their production over there.
Delaying production? I really don't think so. Tesla makes a profit on every car they sell so they want to sell as many as possible. They sure have plenty of expenses they need to cover. Rather than slowing production they are currently building two more "GigaFactories".
I used to work for a world-class audio expert. One time he and I were talking and he mentioned that cats hear very differently than humans do.
Cats can hear up into the ultrasonic. They can also hear sounds in the range audible to us. But he said that while their range is much wider, this has the tradeoff that it's more difficult for cats to tell the difference between some sounds that sound different to us.
The base set of sounds that we identify to distinguish words are called formants. He told me that cats have trouble distinguishing formants, but on the other hand they can track a mouse in 3D space by the mouse's heartbeat. (Consider how small a mouse heart is and then imagine the audio spectrum of its heartbeat.)
A cat can't respond differently to its name if it can't tell the difference between its name and some other word. I wonder if the researchers allowed for the physiology of cat hearing at all in their tests.
Now, this next part isn't anything the audio expert said, it's me trying to fill in the blanks with what I know.
The sound of the letter 's' (called a sibilant) is basically white noise and thus covers a lot of the spectrum. Thus I'm pretty sure cats can at least distinguish between sibilants and non-sibilants. My wife and I have two cats right now, and one of them is named "Saga" while the other is named "Harbard". I'm pretty sure that those names will sound different even to a cat.
But if we had third cat named "Samba", I'm not sure they would be physiologically able to distinguish that name from "Saga".
The social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook say that they are platforms, and therefore they should not be held liable for awful things that people say on their platforms. They aren't curated information streams like a newspaper, where nothing is published without editorial oversight.
However, they have been indulging in quite a bit of curation. And it hasn't been even-handed. If they like you, you can literally get away with inciting violence; if they don't like you, they will strike you down or shadow-ban you for any reason or no reason.
There are numerous cases of conservatives being suspended or banned from social media over relatively mild stuff (for example, telling a journalist to "Learn to code") while liberals can make jokes about the President being assassinated, wish for conservative people's children to be raped, etc. The post "#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper" did not result in any punishment from Twitter. This tweet was accompanied with a cartoon picture of a man feeding a body into a woodchipper and bloody snow. By "#MAGAkids" he meant some high school students who were in the news at the time.
https://www.rt.com/usa/449368-disney-producer-threatens-maga-kids/
Keith Olbermann wrote on Twitter these words: "we should do our best to make sure the rest of his life is a living hell." Who was the target of his wrath? A man who had a permit to hunt turkeys who shot a turkey. Olbermann has a million followers and some of them went on to harass the hunter. Twitter did not punish Olbermann in any way. (Faced by a backlash of bad publicity, Olbermann made a follow-up tweet saying that his words were not intended as an actual threat.)
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/03/27/keith-olbermann-urges-followers-make-hunters-life-living-hell-killing-rare-turkey/
I found an article that claims that a statistical analysis shows that this isn't just a few anecdotes, it's a trend.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/
I tried to use Facebook Messenger to send a link to a satirical essay. It would not allow me to send it, and it gave a totally nonsense reason. I just tried it again just now and the same thing happened; here's the error:
I was "going too fast"? After not using Messenger for over 24 hours, I attempted to send a single URL, so that message is clearly nonsense. Obviously I was merely guilty of wrongthink. The essay makes the point that the USA is spending so much money that it's not possible to "soak the rich" to pay for it all, using a sort of reducto ad absurdium. Clearly someone who works for Facebook doesn't like this essay or doesn't like "Iowahawk". If you want to read this forbidden essay, here you go:
Iowahawk: Feed Your Family on 10 Billion a Day
Then there is the current controversy over Twitter apparently shadowbanning the movie Unplanned. So far Twitter has adamantly maintained that everything that looked like shadowbanning was just buggy code, but this seems really egregious. The Unplanned Twitter account at one point had more followers than Planned Parenthood, and then suddenly it had zero followers. Peopl
...Obama tried to work out compromises with Republicans on health care by picking a Republican plan, taking months to vote on Republican amendments...
The Republican amendments were not in the final bill. The final bill was made by rewriting a totally unrelated bill, and less than a week elapsed between the introduction of this final bill and its being voted into law in the Senate (on a 60-39 straight party lines vote). Please read this history by the Washington Post's fact checker guy Glenn Kessler.
History Lesson: How the Democrats pushed Obamacare through the Senate
But you said that President Obama, specifically, "tried to work out compromises" with the Republicans. Could you please show me some kind of news story or something where he told Harry Reid not to do what Harry Reid did? I don't remember anything like that.
Consumers are just starting to grasp color temperature, perhaps they can't handle CRI yet.
It's on the box but it's in the fine print. I haven't seen anyone make a big deal about CRI as such. I read about it when doing my homework before investing in LED bulbs.
I did a web search and found a page that goes into some detail. It has some great examples of how the CRI isn't perfect... it shows one light with a CRI of 80 whose spectrum has three strong peaks, so it passes the test but won't look very good in normal life (any color that is in-between the peaks won't look right).
http://www.olino.org/blog/us/articles/2009/11/30/a-close-look-at-the-color-rendering-index-cri-or-ra
Since LED bulbs will theoretically last for 20 years, I'm willing to pay a bit more for a good CRI.
the light from LED bulbs seems more harsh
I personally find "daylight" bulbs very harsh, and I'm wondering if you got one of those. They are slightly brighter than "warm" bulbs but I don't like the color.
Ironically we say "warm" bulbs for bulbs with a lower color temperature. Color temperature is measured using the number of degrees that an ideal black-body radiator would be to glow at that color. "warm" bulbs are 2700K, and "daylight" bulbs are 5000K. The hotter color temperature means the light is shifted toward blue, so it's brighter. The "warm" temperature is less bluish. (We are used to fire being considered warm, and it's only red-hot; blue-hot is hotter. But ice looks bluish so I guess we think bluish colors are cooler.)
I have Cree brand tube bulbs that replace fluorescent tubes and they are 3000K color temperature. I like 3000K; the "warm" temperature of 2700K seems kind of yellowish to me. I found that Cree has some 3000K bulbs on the Home Depot web site (I've never seen them in a store) and I plan to try buying some.
Also, bulbs have a metric called "CRI", which I believe is "Color Rendering Index". A CRI rating of 100 is theoretically exactly as nice as sunlight. Higher is better. The most expensive Cree bulbs have CRI of over 90. Your "harsh" bulb may have a low CRI.
Not many glasses frames fit me properly, I have to try them on.
One of those online sites I looked at has a system where they send you 5 frames, you try them all on and send them back, and then you order glasses.
Also if the glasses are one-third to one-fifth the price, maybe you can pay someone local to you a "fitting fee" to fine-tune them, or learn to fine-tune them yourself. It's been a while since I got glasses but I remember the guy doing something with a screwdriver, and bending the nose pieces a little... those are things I could learn to do if it would save me hundreds of dollars.
I cannot buy glasses online.
a) You see an eye doctor, you get a prescription, and then you order the glasses online. What's so impossible about that?
Why do you care whether they are made in a lab you can see or in a lab in some distant place, as long as the glasses are good and the return policy is acceptable?
Okay, in an emergency, maybe you can't wait. But when the glasses are literally one-third the price, even one-fifth the price(!), maybe you can just buy some spares as a hedge against an emergency.
b) Warby Parker has some brick-and-mortar locations, and is expanding.
P.S. The glasses I am wearing now cost $500 at LensCrafters. (If I recall correctly, this premium cost was for progressive multifocal lenses with their best "pattern", their best anti-scratch coating, and maybe a slightly better grade of optical plastic. Plus thin-and-light metal frames.) I got these glasses at LensCrafters because the insurance I was getting through my employer at the time only worked at LensCrafters. But I'm overdue for an eye exam, and when I get my new prescription I think I'll try Warby Parker and see how that goes. There are two Warby Parker retail locations in Seattle so maybe I'll just go to one of those.
If the invisible hand is working, we should have alternative sources selling eyewear at a lower prices. Do we? It turns out that yes, we do have alternative sources selling at lower prices.
Warby Parker was founded specifically because some business-school students noticed that glasses were overpriced and thus there was plenty of room in the market to sell a product at a lower price and still make money. (The same guys who founded Warby Parker also noticed that razors were overpriced and then founded Harry's.)
In this Slashdot discussion several people have said they bought from Zenni Optical and saved money.
That's two, and I'm pretty sure that if you dig you can find more.
If you can observe something, it is part of the universe.
I think of it as: anyplace that a photon could travel to in the normal way that photons travel would be part of our universe.
People have posited the existence of other universes. It would require some unknown method of travel to go from one universe to another. The collection of all universes can be called the Multiverse.
I recently saw, in a comic, the idea that there could then be multiple Multiverses. That doesn't make sense to me any more than the idea of multiple Internets.
I read a web comic called Unicorn Jelly that really gave me some food for thought. How could you visit another universe where the physical laws are different? Only two ways: either you would have to travel in a little bubble where your usual physical laws apply somehow, or else you would have to be translated into the new universe. The Universe of Unicorn Jelly isn't made out of atoms, it's made out of "tratoms", and in order to visit you would have to have your body translated into tratoms. In principle there could be an infinite number of universes with different physical laws, and only in a tiny fraction of them would people survive the translation necessary to enter a universe. Luckily the universe of Unicorn Jelly is one where people can survive, or else there wouldn't have been a comic.
P.S. Unicorn Jelly, in the beginning, seems like a slightly silly and harmless story. It's a bigger story than it first appears, and I don't want to spoil it, but I will say that it is a story that could only be told in the universe in which it is set. The very nature of the Universe of the story drives the plot! So, the story of Unicorn Jelly meets my personal standard for science fiction: the story wouldn't be the same if you took away the science (fictional science, here).
P.P.S. If you like Unicorn Jelly and want more multiversal craziness from the same author, the follow-on story To Save Her is kinda set in the same universe. I mean, it's actually set in an infinite number of variations of the same universe, and features a somewhat infinite cast of characters, but we follow along a half-dozen or so through their story arc, as they visit about a half-dozen alternate universes. (They only visit alternates of their own universe, where the physical laws are the same.)
However, all food is "natural", using such wording makes me doubt the origin of your viewpoint. All food is natural. There's no such thing as synthetic food, in essence. Just processed or unprocessed.
I think most people understand the idiom where "natural food" means less-processed food. In case anyone didn't get that: when I said "natural" I meant "less-processed, fresher food, as opposed to more-processed food that may have had nutrients stripped out to make it more shelf-stable or more palatable."
The reason your manufacturer no longer makes "Omega-3 chocolate truffles"? They were a processed food that likely eliminated most of the Omega-3 in their production (like any processed food)
Huh? They were truffles made with flax oil. I am certain they contained flax oil, as I could taste the difference between them and normal truffles. I'm not sure on what basis you feel it is likely that their processing eliminated their primary selling point.
Honestly, if you haven't read up on this stuff, you shouldn't be offering nutritional advice
Huh? I read a book, and I discussed what I remembered from the book, with attribution giving a link to a GoodReads page so you can find the book and double-check me. I totally agree that I'm not qualified to give nutritional advice, which is why I didn't give any.
Oh wait, looks like I did give one piece of advice: eat fiber to help control cholesterol. Sorry, I didn't give attribution on that one. I didn't think that one was at all controversial.
Like fibre, vitamin C and many other things, including oxygen - being DEFICIENT in it isn't good for you. But consuming more of it doesn't make you healthier.
As I said, the book claims that 95% of people in North America are deficient in it, with deleterious effects.
I really wonder how many of the maladies of old age are actually deficiency disorders.
Vitamins were discovered when someone figured out that people going months without eating Vitamin C got sick. Someone empirically figured out that eating citrus fruit staved off scurvy and that led to the discovery of Vitamin C. Other vitamins are also important but take longer before a deficiency makes you sick.
Natural food has all kinds of stuff in it and I wonder if some of it is healthy in really subtle ways that take a very long time to show up.
Also, processed foods lack fiber, and you need some in your diet, to help your body control cholesterols.
Finally, omega 3: I read a book called Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill that claims that omega 3 fatty acids are essential to health but at least 95% of people in North America don't get enough of it. Omega 3 is not found in processed foods, because omega 3 oils go rancid very quickly. Before processed foods, everyone got omega 3 naturally (for example, by eating fish or eating meat from grass-fed cattle) but these days people get very little, and get other kinds of oils instead. Since your body is made from what you eat, if you don't eat enough omega 3, your body has to use the other oils and it doesn't work as well. The book claims that while our bodies can't make omega 3, our bodies can convert it from one form to another; so it would suffice to eat only fish oil or only flax oil or whatever and trust the body to convert DHA to GLA or whatever.
My wife and I buy flax oil blend and use it to make salad dressing; it's a painless way to add omega 3 to your diet.
Simple salad dressing recipe:
3-4 tablespoons of oil (flax oil, or olive oil)
1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar (or any other vinegar you like)
sea salt to taste
black pepper to taste
We measure into a convenient cup, then whisk with a small wire whisk. It's fast and easy. We have figured out how many cranks of the pepper mill or how many twists of the sea salt grinder measure out the amount we like so it's a quick grind-and-count, no need to use measuring spoons for the salt and pepper.
Sometimes we put in some tomato paste; you can buy tomato paste in a tube, and it's a handy way to add just a little bit when making just enough dressing for a couple of salads. Or garlic powder or any other spice that suits your taste. It's easy to tweak the recipe. We don't bother buying pre-made salad dressing anymore.
We used to buy omega-3 chocolate truffles. They were expensive but were a tasty way to add omega-3 to our diets. Sadly the manufacturer no longer makes them... I think they were too expensive and didn't sell fast enough.
Electric cars, and Teslas in particular, are a teensy, tiny minority of all the cars out there, and a teensy proportion of new sales.
Teslas look quite a bit better if you only consider their share of markets Tesla actually is in. The number of cars sold worldwide would include the number of cars sold in India and China where Tesla has no serious business yet.
I was surprised to read that in the state of California, about 1 in 22 of all cars sold in the third quarter of 2018 were Teslas (actual number: 4.6% of "light vehicle sales"). That's not their share of BEVs, that's their share of all cars sold.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/02/tesla-4-6-of-california-vehicle-sales-in-q3/
It's true that BEVs are still a tiny slice of the worldwide car market. There was a time when car sales were tiny compared to horse-drawn buggy sales. The past doesn't guarantee the future.
Musk is a salesman. [...] But the giants can stamp on him any time they like.
I used to think there was some truth to this idea. Now I scorn it.
For "the giants" to "stamp on him" they would have to produce so many electric cars that they steal away his customers. One question for you... where will they get the batteries? Have they invested staggering sums of money into their own battery factory, as Tesla did?
Also, will their cars be just as good as a Tesla? I don't take seriously any car design that doesn't have a front trunk. The new electric cars that just have an electric motor under the hood instead of an ICE engine seem like slap-dash last-minute catch-up designs by companies that aren't ready to compete with Tesla yet.
It's not that I think the front trunk by itself is that big a deal; the front trunk is the by-product of a clean-sheet new BEV design. Why would you want a complex drive train when you can have a motor right between the two wheels? For all-wheel drive, why would you want anything other than two redundant motors? If a car company hasn't even gotten that far, how competitive can its cars really be to Tesla?
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care.
That's an interesting idea. I doubt you can support it.
In the "large luxury car" segment of the market, Tesla ate everyone else's lunch. Not that many people will pay $80K or $100K or more for a car, so a Tesla sale is a sale some other company didn't get. Tesla got more sales than BMW or Mercedes or any other luxury maker.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/01/1-tesla-model-s-dominating-large-luxury-car-sales-in-usa/
If you add up Mercedes S-class sales, and BMW 6-series and 7-series sales, that's roughly the number of cars sold as the Tesla Model S alone.
The picture looks actually worse when you compare the Tesla Model 3 to its competitors. It's crushing them.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/08/tesla-model-3-completely-crushing-us-luxury-car-competition-10-cleantechnica-charts/
Are these companies blithely unconcerned about Tesla? Really?
To hear Musk (and others) speak, you'd think BMW are scrambling to catch up. They're not. They just don't care. Their EV models make them no more than Tesla, which is a drop in the ocean to them. It's chicken-feed to them, in a niche market.
As I understand Elon Musk's claims: car companies currently make a lot of money off of car repairs; BEVs need less repairs and don't cost very much to repair; car companies have been reluctant to switch to BEVs because they stand to make much less money off of BEVs.
Using the Tesla mobile app, it has been possible for at least a couple years to leave the air conditioning on inside the car while leaving the car. I read about a Tesla owner who had a note taped to his car window: "This is a Tesla and its air conditioning is running. The dog is fine. Please don't break my window."
More recently Tesla added a feature where you could use the touchscreen to do the same thing. In the climate controls dialog there is a button, "leave climate control running when car is stopped."
Now the screen will be used to display a message telling people that the pets are fine, please don't break the window. Why not!
This is one of those emergent features that nobody predicted years ago.
Another one: Elon Musk wanted the Model 3 to have a clean look, so Tesla engineers wound up inventing a computer-controlled steerable air blower for the dashboard. You don't have to touch louvers to direct the air, you use a GUI on the touchscreen. This not only looks cleaner, but the computer remembers the air settings per driver, so if a husband and wife want different settings the car just handles it.
One day someone on Twitter said "Hey Elon Musk, when I use the mobile app to turn on the air conditioning and cool down my Model 3 when it's been parked in the sun on a hot day, how about pointing the air blowers at the seats to cool them down?" And Elon Musk replied "Great idea, I'll make it happen." (Quotes paraphrased from memory.)
The Nissan Leaf is very affordable if you buy one used... because the resale value plummets. A new Leaf is $30K and I can buy a low-mileage 2017 Leaf for $15K. A 2012 Leaf is $8K. For a second car, to be used in local driving, a used Leaf is a great value.
A Tesla holds its value much better, perhaps partially because Tesla engineered active cooling in the battery pack so charging doesn't cook the cells. Teslas only lose about 1% battery capacity per year and they start with much higher capacities. Plus Tesla has the Supercharger network. A Tesla really can be your only car, even if you need or want to make long road trips.
Note that the Model 3 costs more than the Leaf and is harder to get. Yet it's still outselling the Leaf. That's customers voting with their money. You may think that Nissan is doing a better job, but the market does not agree with you.
I call BS. Why would people WANT to stop for an hour or two, when they could swap out their battery in 2-3 minutes?
Tesla Superchargers take roughly as long as people need for a meal. And Tesla cars can go hours on a freeway. So a long road trip looks like: drive for hours, stop at a Supercharger, get a meal while the car charges, continue the trip.
It's not as convenient as gasoline or diesel, because with those fuels you can go from empty to full in 5 minutes or less, and you get longer ranges as well, so if you are really tough or determined you can spend more time driving and only stop when you choose to. But no matter what kind of car, on a long road trip I want to take rest breaks and get snacks... don't you? And Tesla cars pretty much can go about as long as I would want to go without a break.
So it's not actually insane that Tesla customers preferred Superchargers over the battery swap. The logistics of battery swapping guarantee that swapping will always cost more than Superchargers, and people just didn't want to pay the higher cost. (Particularly since when Tesla tried the battery swap, all their customers had free unlimited use of the Supercharger. A battery swap was something like $40 and the logistics were a hassle.)
And with Nio (who's cars are definitely competitors to Tesla) now having a network of hundreds of battery-swap stations in China - and plans to expand into the US - Tesla is about to find out it's ancient technology. Why plug in? Just change...
Tesla's system recharges the battery in your car, and you have the choice of buying different cars with various sizes of battery. If you are wealthy, you might buy the new Roadster when it finally ships; that is supposed to have a range of over 600 miles. I'm guessing these standard battery packs will have a shorter range than most Teslas so you will need more swapping stations.
Battery swapping means you don't own your battery and you are locked into a standard. And I predict that the costs will always be higher. Spare batteries for the swap are inventory... you need storage for the inventory of batteries, automated swap machines, and chargers. For the Supercharger you just need the chargers.
Tesla has active thermal management to keep the battery packs from cooking, so they can really dump power in to recharge. I'm guessing these swappable packs are simpler and thus cheaper, but that also means you need to charge them more slowly or you cook them. That in turn means you need more of them.
There might be room for a swappable battery system, but really for most people Tesla's technology meets the Good Enough standard and actually is better in some ways.
For taxis in crowded big cities, the swappable packs might be attractive. If the cars are zipping back and forth they never get too far from a swap station.
Another problem is that many people think that nuclear materials are magically dangerous.
There are nuclear materials that radiate energy fiercely, and would kill you in seconds if you stood next to them.
There are nuclear materials that will still be around 30 thousand years from now.
But there are not actually any nuclear materials with both of the above properties at once. The ones that are super dangerous also have a short half-life, so they decay away to nothing in a relatively short time. The ones that take forever to go away are quite mild.
But some people who don't understand the above point are worried that nuclear materials are super-deadly things out of nightmare.
The above point is not original with me; I saw it on Slashdot years ago, and don't remember who posted it or else I would give credit.
I'd be willing to consider something else, but I really don't want to go back to Windows and there aren't any interesting Linux laptops available.
I'm running Linux on a Thinkpad T-series and I recommend it. There are several models, ranging from thin-and-light to the "performance" model.
I currently have a T460p, from the older generation that have a special docking port on the underside. The newest Thinkpads have a docking station that uses a USB C port on the left-hand side of the laptop, and I haven't tried that. I found some comments on Reddit that a T480s works great in Linux with the Lenovo USB C dock.
I'm running Linux Mint MATE edition, which IMHO steals the best parts of Mac OS X and the best parts of Windows. But if you want a desktop environment that works very much like OS X you do have options.
TL;DR A Thinkpad is a lot like a MacBook Pro that didn't get stupid-thin, and you might like one.
Starting a couple of months ago, I've received a huge number of extortion emails. At this point it's extortion spam.
All the emails follow the same pattern, and all including somewhere (usually in the To: line, for some reason) an old "burner" password I used on web sites where I don't care if the password leaks.
Here's a rough paraphrase:
I have received dozens of copies of this email, with the text slightly different. Some of them end with "Don't hate me, everyone needs to do their own job." Some of them call the mysterious malware "RAT software". A couple of times the email was translated into Japanese. (I can read just a little bit of Japanese and was able to recognize it, and I showed it to a fluent friend who confirmed that it fit the above pattern.)
<sarcasm>I must say, my computer is running pretty well considering how many elite international hackers have been messing with it and installing RAT software and such.</sarcasm>
As it happens, I got one copy of the email at least a week before the deluge started. I realized it would have been very scary for someone who uses the same password everywhere and doesn't know how easy it is to forge the "From:" header. Doubly scary if that person actually visits porn sites.