I think that's sort of the point - so long as people see Venus as "uninhabitable", it'll keep being robbed of funding for robotic missions, as it has been for the past several decades. Having a manned program for Venus - even if manned missions are, for all practical purposes, decades off - has the potential to help get more funding for exploring the planet.
So, what you can see depends on the design approach. I'm not a big fan of the HAVOC approach, where people live in a little capsule under the lift envelope; the Landis approach, where people live and farm in the (huge) lift envelope itself makes far more sense. Therein you have a vast, bright open space full of life and where you can live basically wherever you want; the lowest-mass option for crew quarters is just large tents hanging from catenaries (non-rigid) or the frame (rigid). Don't get along with someone? Move half a kilometer away from them, to the opposite side of the habitat.
What you see outside: With the possible exception of the polar vortices, you never see either the ground or the sun. You have a brightness gradient, where above you is somewhat brighter than below you. You do pass through convective weather systems however that are surprisingly similar to those in Earth's troposphere. We don't know at this point whether there's any precipitation or frosts in these (that's how pathetically little we know about Venus : The data from the Vega balloons has alternately been argued to confirm or deny precipitation and/or frosts), but as far as what you'd see, these clouds would be visible, albeit in relatively low contrast.
As for stepping outside: barring precipitation (which, as mentioned, we don't know whether it actually exists), the outside environment isn't like a sulfuric acid bath. It's several to several dozen mg/m^3 of sulfuric acid mists. By contrast, OSHA allows people to breathe up to 1 mg/m^3 for an entire 8-hour shift. Now, the acid concentration on Venus is higher than it would be on Earth (H2SO4 is highly hygroscopic and absorbs moisture from the air to self-dilute), but the key takeaway is, the environment is more like a very bad smog (or more accurately, vog). The H2SO4 is far more of a resource than a hazard, and it would actually be convenient if it were more common (heating first drives off free H2O; further heating decomposes H2SO4 to SO3 + H2O; and further heating of SO3 over a vanadium oxide catalyst decomposes it to SO2 and O2; contrarily, SO3 can be reused in the gas scrubber as a nucleating agent to help capture free H2O after doing an initial electrostatic and/or ionic liquid scrubbing of the H2SO4 mists).
The funny thing about a Landis habitat on Venus ( = transparent envelope, oxygen / nitrogen lifting gas, people live inside the lift envelope) is that even for a relatively small crew, it's large enough that you could skydive indoors. Perfect place for extreme sports.
Of course, the real "extreme sport" would be going to the surface. Which actually is perfectly achievable with modern technology. It requires hard suits, not soft suits (more akin to the NASA AX-series, or more accurately, akin to atmospheric diving suits used in ocean exploration), along with heavy insulation, and either a phase-change heat absorbing material (such as used by the Venera probes) or a heat pump. Not only would you be exploring a very alien world (where high altitude frosts and snows are made of metals and/or semiconductors), but you could fly up with a small bellows on your back and glide around with small winglets. Ascent back to habitat height requires a two-stage balloon system.
Thank you for demonstrating my point about cherry picking stock start and stop points.
One enters into a long position with an exit horizon based on their thesis. My exit horizon doesn't even begin to open until after the Q4 report. Until then, all this is noise.
It is, of course, still offered (see above). As always, news coverage of Tesla is terrible. What Tesla removed is the $2k discount for buying it early. You can only buy it at full price ($5k) via your Tesla account.
It never had a timeline. And everyone who purchased it knew that. Some people are more optimistic than others about its timeline. I personally am not in that category.
Giga = Gigafactory 1 = The factory in Sparks, Nevada. The one they're building in Shanghai is Giga 3, and they haven't even broken ground yet (hiring for construction and the signing ceremony was only in this past week). It has not been confirmed that Panasonic will be involved, but it's strongly suspected, as they've expressed interest.
Panasonic does already have a lot of production in Sparks - combined with their 18650 supply it makes up over half of the world's total EV battery capacity, in terms of kWh per year. But it's not enough. Tesla's been having to rob cells that were allocated toward Powerwalls and Powerpacks just to be able to do 5k vehicles per week.
If you want to know who's going to be producing - and thus selling - EVs, just follow the batteries.
Gotcha. The system that Consumer Reports rated as the most capable driver assist system on the market and easiest to use is, quote, "a flawed feature" causing "cars [to] pile up".
CR did mark other systems (namely, SuperCruise) as better than EAP in three categories, which were all different variants of "how much it nags you". SuperCruise was so limited that they couldn't even turn it on on their test track (they apparently liked this). Indeed, your living room couch would have rated better than EAP in this regard. But in terms of both capability and ease of use, they found EAP was the best system on the market.
This matches up with the IIHS results, which found that Model 3 was the only vehicle that they tested which never crossed the lines on any of their curve or hill tests and never required manual intervention to avoid a collision in their real-world test. It also had the gentlest braking profile, starting braking before others did. It didn't get perfect marks, mind you - it had several false negative events in the real-world, and in one of their track tests (not real world) it only reduced the severity of impact with their mockup rather than preventing it. But overall its performance was class-leading.
Note that neither CR nor IIHS were using the latest version of EAP (V9), which was a huge upgrade. All cameras enabled now, camera-agnostic processing, full resolution rather than half resolution, and 400% more processing power utilized.
Additionally (apart from noting that Slashdot hasn't bothered to report on Tesla's land purchase, hiring spree, and capital raise in China for the Shanghai Gigafactory): The $45k price includes PUP, which was from the very beginning announced as $5k. That slots the base price of the MR in at $40k (vs.the SR at $35k and the LR at $45k). PUP is, of course, non-optional at present, but they're steadily working their way down through the list.
I do however fully expect the same people who previously were shouting "WHERE ARE THE CHEAPER MODEL 3S???" to now start shouting "SEE, DEMAND FOR MODEL 3S HAS COLLAPSED", because of course, no scenario will ever make them happy, even when Tesla takes steps in the direction that they've been demanding.
The reason for this change is obvious, and the introduction of smaller battery pack Model 3s this fall had been a big topic of speculation on the Tesla forums. The reason is that Tesla's main limiting factor is no longer Fremont, or pack production at Giga, but rather the Panasonic cell lines at Giga. While Panasonic is accelerating their construction of three new cell lines (adding to the 10 that already exist; these are also supposed to be a new generation of faster lines), they are the holdup. By producing smaller pack vehicles, Tesla can produce about 20% more of them. This also means about 20% more customers get the full tax credit. They make it very tempting for people who were waiting on the SR to upgrade to the MR.
I, of course, don't like them stretching out the US market; I'd selfishly rather that they come straight to Europe where they haven't even started touching the demand for heavily optioned out vehicles;) But it's understandable, given the tax credit situation. That said, IMHO, I don't expect that situation to last. I either expected it to be repealed or reformulated (there are bills in congress to do both of those things). I think there's very few people in either party who are happy with the US credit as it stands, as it's increasingly going to be working against US companies (Tesla first, then GM, then Nissan and Ford; three of the four closest to expiry are US manufacturers).
One last note is that their margin target for Q4 is 20%. With a 50:50 mix of MR:LR and a $2k manufacturing cost difference, and reasonable ASP assumptions, that means Tesla expects about 0% margin on an unoptioned MR, about 10% at the MR's ASP, and about 30% at the LR's ASP.
No. You're confusing EAP and FSD. EAP exists, is usable, and is a driver assist, not full self driving. FSD is in development, cannot be activated by users, and is what it says on the tin - full self driving, not a driver assist.
It was an option, it was never "pushed", and it was in no way shape or form "almost fatal for the entire company". Furthermore, contrary to bad reporting (including this article), you can still get FSD. What you can't do anymore is preorder it for a $2k discount; you can only add it in your Tesla account for the full $5k.
As a full self-driving pessimist, I have no interest. But of course it's always ever only been an option for optimists. If you think there haven't been endless discussions on the Tesla forums between the pessimists who think the optimists are dumb for giving money for a feature that's still in development, and the optimists who feel they're taking part in leading the way to a self-driving future.... well, drop by some time.
It should be obvious that neural nets are great at this sort of thing. That's how our brains record and recall events. They're not registering a stream of pixels or waveforms and zipping them up, they're registering chained concepts. Every time we remember, we piece these concepts back together, so yes, there is a lot of "imagination" filling in data in even our most detailed memories. But just like that can work for our brains, it can work for computers.
Thanks for pointing that out. Next time, we'll try to harness geothermal energy in some way other than "forcing volcanoes to erupt";)
(There are actually some CO2 emissions associated with geothermal power, but while they vary by orders of magnitude, they average way less than from fossil fuels. There's also work ongoing toward CO2 reinjection as part of the generation process; we've had great success with the pilot project at Hellisheiði)
The solution is relatively obvious: don't spread BS (the article in the Slashdot headline).
Whenever I see claims that amount to "science says...", I immediately check to see:
* In what journal was it published?
* What is that journal's reputation?
* How does it compare to the overall corpus of research on the topic?
In this case, the "study" fails at the first bar: there's no study at all. The source of this article is "Berylls Strategy Advisors". There is no peer review. It's simply "take the word of a company that describes its business as "modern premium automotive consulting" and works for major established automakers, primarily "Dieselgate" German automakers". And we're supposed to ignore the (contradicting), actually peer-reviewed research in the process. Most of the latter of which is regardless rapidly obsoleted regardless by the ongoing wave of battery manufacturing energy improvements, which comes hand-in-hand with battery cost reductions.
It's "Swedish Battery 'Study' Part Deux".
But indeed, as you noted, the solution is to manufacture using solar. Which is actually a very popular solution among EV manufacturers. Tesla has started installing the solar roof that will entirely power Gigafactory, for example - but they're hardly alone in this regard.
What exactly does a private megayacht contribute to the world? I care about things that contribute to making the world a better place. This includes electrifying transport, cheaper access to space, grid storage, advancements in AI, and many other things. "Sailing the seas to indulge in your pastimes on a megayacht" is not among them.
Maybe if he had spent $250m on cancer research rather than his "Octopus" megayacht (which spent several weeks a couple years ago ruining the views in our harbour), he might still be alive today.
Epoxy-coated rebar actually doesn't work that well. It's been a big disappointment in the industry.
Now, stainless steel rebar works great. Unfortunately it's also 5 times as expensive as non-stainless rebar.
An interesting alternative is FRP rebar. But its behavior is very different to steel, so it's not a drop-in replacement. The best fibre is carbon fibre, which has incredible durability, but is also very expensive. The best balance between price and durability appears to be basalt fibre. As for resins, epoxy is the best.
Still own 5%. And just granted Tesla the right to run wholly foreign owned stores and service centres in the country. And there's supposed to be a huge cleantech announcement on the 18th that many (not including me) are speculating has to do with Tesla.
Needless to say, this is now - not to put too fine a point on it - an uncomfortable situation for Tesla, and the numerous other Silicon Valley companies that find themselves in similar situations. It was always awkward to work with Saudi Arabia, but nobody wants to touch them with a ten foot pole now..
Yep, that's the reaction for CH. There's also C-S-H, which also forms limestone (mainly CaCO3 in the forms of vaterite and aragonite) plus a silica gel. C-S-H is more abundant in cement than CH but carbonation of CH occurs more quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, I believe that in the canon it was supposed to be full of that sort of thing ;)
I think that's sort of the point - so long as people see Venus as "uninhabitable", it'll keep being robbed of funding for robotic missions, as it has been for the past several decades. Having a manned program for Venus - even if manned missions are, for all practical purposes, decades off - has the potential to help get more funding for exploring the planet.
So, what you can see depends on the design approach. I'm not a big fan of the HAVOC approach, where people live in a little capsule under the lift envelope; the Landis approach, where people live and farm in the (huge) lift envelope itself makes far more sense. Therein you have a vast, bright open space full of life and where you can live basically wherever you want; the lowest-mass option for crew quarters is just large tents hanging from catenaries (non-rigid) or the frame (rigid). Don't get along with someone? Move half a kilometer away from them, to the opposite side of the habitat.
What you see outside: With the possible exception of the polar vortices, you never see either the ground or the sun. You have a brightness gradient, where above you is somewhat brighter than below you. You do pass through convective weather systems however that are surprisingly similar to those in Earth's troposphere. We don't know at this point whether there's any precipitation or frosts in these (that's how pathetically little we know about Venus : The data from the Vega balloons has alternately been argued to confirm or deny precipitation and/or frosts), but as far as what you'd see, these clouds would be visible, albeit in relatively low contrast.
As for stepping outside: barring precipitation (which, as mentioned, we don't know whether it actually exists), the outside environment isn't like a sulfuric acid bath. It's several to several dozen mg/m^3 of sulfuric acid mists. By contrast, OSHA allows people to breathe up to 1 mg/m^3 for an entire 8-hour shift. Now, the acid concentration on Venus is higher than it would be on Earth (H2SO4 is highly hygroscopic and absorbs moisture from the air to self-dilute), but the key takeaway is, the environment is more like a very bad smog (or more accurately, vog). The H2SO4 is far more of a resource than a hazard, and it would actually be convenient if it were more common (heating first drives off free H2O; further heating decomposes H2SO4 to SO3 + H2O; and further heating of SO3 over a vanadium oxide catalyst decomposes it to SO2 and O2; contrarily, SO3 can be reused in the gas scrubber as a nucleating agent to help capture free H2O after doing an initial electrostatic and/or ionic liquid scrubbing of the H2SO4 mists).
The funny thing about a Landis habitat on Venus ( = transparent envelope, oxygen / nitrogen lifting gas, people live inside the lift envelope) is that even for a relatively small crew, it's large enough that you could skydive indoors. Perfect place for extreme sports.
Of course, the real "extreme sport" would be going to the surface. Which actually is perfectly achievable with modern technology. It requires hard suits, not soft suits (more akin to the NASA AX-series, or more accurately, akin to atmospheric diving suits used in ocean exploration), along with heavy insulation, and either a phase-change heat absorbing material (such as used by the Venera probes) or a heat pump. Not only would you be exploring a very alien world (where high altitude frosts and snows are made of metals and/or semiconductors), but you could fly up with a small bellows on your back and glide around with small winglets. Ascent back to habitat height requires a two-stage balloon system.
Thank you for demonstrating my point about cherry picking stock start and stop points.
One enters into a long position with an exit horizon based on their thesis. My exit horizon doesn't even begin to open until after the Q4 report. Until then, all this is noise.
Autopilot: 1,2 billion miles driven as of June.
Supercruise: "hundreds of thousands of miles" driven as of January.
Gee....
It is, of course, still offered (see above). As always, news coverage of Tesla is terrible. What Tesla removed is the $2k discount for buying it early. You can only buy it at full price ($5k) via your Tesla account.
It never had a timeline. And everyone who purchased it knew that. Some people are more optimistic than others about its timeline. I personally am not in that category.
Reservations are fully refundable. The $2,5k deposit when you lock in config when it goes into production is not.
Giga = Gigafactory 1 = The factory in Sparks, Nevada. The one they're building in Shanghai is Giga 3, and they haven't even broken ground yet (hiring for construction and the signing ceremony was only in this past week). It has not been confirmed that Panasonic will be involved, but it's strongly suspected, as they've expressed interest.
Panasonic does already have a lot of production in Sparks - combined with their 18650 supply it makes up over half of the world's total EV battery capacity, in terms of kWh per year. But it's not enough. Tesla's been having to rob cells that were allocated toward Powerwalls and Powerpacks just to be able to do 5k vehicles per week.
If you want to know who's going to be producing - and thus selling - EVs, just follow the batteries.
Gotcha. The system that Consumer Reports rated as the most capable driver assist system on the market and easiest to use is, quote, "a flawed feature" causing "cars [to] pile up".
CR did mark other systems (namely, SuperCruise) as better than EAP in three categories, which were all different variants of "how much it nags you". SuperCruise was so limited that they couldn't even turn it on on their test track (they apparently liked this). Indeed, your living room couch would have rated better than EAP in this regard. But in terms of both capability and ease of use, they found EAP was the best system on the market.
This matches up with the IIHS results, which found that Model 3 was the only vehicle that they tested which never crossed the lines on any of their curve or hill tests and never required manual intervention to avoid a collision in their real-world test. It also had the gentlest braking profile, starting braking before others did. It didn't get perfect marks, mind you - it had several false negative events in the real-world, and in one of their track tests (not real world) it only reduced the severity of impact with their mockup rather than preventing it. But overall its performance was class-leading.
Note that neither CR nor IIHS were using the latest version of EAP (V9), which was a huge upgrade. All cameras enabled now, camera-agnostic processing, full resolution rather than half resolution, and 400% more processing power utilized.
The California incentive is $2,5k.
In the past week and a half, Tesla has gone up 4% while NASDAQ has gone down 4%
Should have put your money in TSLA.
Additionally (apart from noting that Slashdot hasn't bothered to report on Tesla's land purchase, hiring spree, and capital raise in China for the Shanghai Gigafactory): The $45k price includes PUP, which was from the very beginning announced as $5k. That slots the base price of the MR in at $40k (vs.the SR at $35k and the LR at $45k). PUP is, of course, non-optional at present, but they're steadily working their way down through the list.
I do however fully expect the same people who previously were shouting "WHERE ARE THE CHEAPER MODEL 3S???" to now start shouting "SEE, DEMAND FOR MODEL 3S HAS COLLAPSED", because of course, no scenario will ever make them happy, even when Tesla takes steps in the direction that they've been demanding.
The reason for this change is obvious, and the introduction of smaller battery pack Model 3s this fall had been a big topic of speculation on the Tesla forums. The reason is that Tesla's main limiting factor is no longer Fremont, or pack production at Giga, but rather the Panasonic cell lines at Giga. While Panasonic is accelerating their construction of three new cell lines (adding to the 10 that already exist; these are also supposed to be a new generation of faster lines), they are the holdup. By producing smaller pack vehicles, Tesla can produce about 20% more of them. This also means about 20% more customers get the full tax credit. They make it very tempting for people who were waiting on the SR to upgrade to the MR.
I, of course, don't like them stretching out the US market; I'd selfishly rather that they come straight to Europe where they haven't even started touching the demand for heavily optioned out vehicles ;) But it's understandable, given the tax credit situation. That said, IMHO, I don't expect that situation to last. I either expected it to be repealed or reformulated (there are bills in congress to do both of those things). I think there's very few people in either party who are happy with the US credit as it stands, as it's increasingly going to be working against US companies (Tesla first, then GM, then Nissan and Ford; three of the four closest to expiry are US manufacturers).
One last note is that their margin target for Q4 is 20%. With a 50:50 mix of MR:LR and a $2k manufacturing cost difference, and reasonable ASP assumptions, that means Tesla expects about 0% margin on an unoptioned MR, about 10% at the MR's ASP, and about 30% at the LR's ASP.
Yes, I always get my news from "CrazyDaysAndNights.net". It's almost as good as "www.geocities.comm.cz:8081/~globalpatriot/TeslaTruthNews"
Yes, we always love to hear the views of people who want to "que a law suit".
No. You're confusing EAP and FSD. EAP exists, is usable, and is a driver assist, not full self driving. FSD is in development, cannot be activated by users, and is what it says on the tin - full self driving, not a driver assist.
It was an option, it was never "pushed", and it was in no way shape or form "almost fatal for the entire company". Furthermore, contrary to bad reporting (including this article), you can still get FSD. What you can't do anymore is preorder it for a $2k discount; you can only add it in your Tesla account for the full $5k.
As a full self-driving pessimist, I have no interest. But of course it's always ever only been an option for optimists. If you think there haven't been endless discussions on the Tesla forums between the pessimists who think the optimists are dumb for giving money for a feature that's still in development, and the optimists who feel they're taking part in leading the way to a self-driving future.... well, drop by some time.
It should be obvious that neural nets are great at this sort of thing. That's how our brains record and recall events. They're not registering a stream of pixels or waveforms and zipping them up, they're registering chained concepts. Every time we remember, we piece these concepts back together, so yes, there is a lot of "imagination" filling in data in even our most detailed memories. But just like that can work for our brains, it can work for computers.
Thanks for pointing that out. Next time, we'll try to harness geothermal energy in some way other than "forcing volcanoes to erupt" ;)
(There are actually some CO2 emissions associated with geothermal power, but while they vary by orders of magnitude, they average way less than from fossil fuels. There's also work ongoing toward CO2 reinjection as part of the generation process; we've had great success with the pilot project at Hellisheiði)
The solution is relatively obvious: don't spread BS (the article in the Slashdot headline).
Whenever I see claims that amount to "science says...", I immediately check to see:
* In what journal was it published?
* What is that journal's reputation?
* How does it compare to the overall corpus of research on the topic?
In this case, the "study" fails at the first bar: there's no study at all. The source of this article is "Berylls Strategy Advisors". There is no peer review. It's simply "take the word of a company that describes its business as "modern premium automotive consulting" and works for major established automakers, primarily "Dieselgate" German automakers". And we're supposed to ignore the (contradicting), actually peer-reviewed research in the process. Most of the latter of which is regardless rapidly obsoleted regardless by the ongoing wave of battery manufacturing energy improvements, which comes hand-in-hand with battery cost reductions.
It's "Swedish Battery 'Study' Part Deux".
But indeed, as you noted, the solution is to manufacture using solar. Which is actually a very popular solution among EV manufacturers. Tesla has started installing the solar roof that will entirely power Gigafactory, for example - but they're hardly alone in this regard.
What exactly does a private megayacht contribute to the world? I care about things that contribute to making the world a better place. This includes electrifying transport, cheaper access to space, grid storage, advancements in AI, and many other things. "Sailing the seas to indulge in your pastimes on a megayacht" is not among them.
Maybe if he had spent $250m on cancer research rather than his "Octopus" megayacht (which spent several weeks a couple years ago ruining the views in our harbour), he might still be alive today.
Epoxy-coated rebar actually doesn't work that well. It's been a big disappointment in the industry.
Now, stainless steel rebar works great. Unfortunately it's also 5 times as expensive as non-stainless rebar.
An interesting alternative is FRP rebar. But its behavior is very different to steel, so it's not a drop-in replacement. The best fibre is carbon fibre, which has incredible durability, but is also very expensive. The best balance between price and durability appears to be basalt fibre. As for resins, epoxy is the best.
Still own 5%. And just granted Tesla the right to run wholly foreign owned stores and service centres in the country. And there's supposed to be a huge cleantech announcement on the 18th that many (not including me) are speculating has to do with Tesla.
Needless to say, this is now - not to put too fine a point on it - an uncomfortable situation for Tesla, and the numerous other Silicon Valley companies that find themselves in similar situations. It was always awkward to work with Saudi Arabia, but nobody wants to touch them with a ten foot pole now..
Yep, that's the reaction for CH. There's also C-S-H, which also forms limestone (mainly CaCO3 in the forms of vaterite and aragonite) plus a silica gel. C-S-H is more abundant in cement than CH but carbonation of CH occurs more quickly.