Because when something grows to some very large amount of value, if it's not divisible it essentially locks out the possibility of trade to all but a handful of people.
And there were both higher and lower value tulips.
Not really though since once you have a bulb, you can divide it to create more
1. Tulips are not freaking potatoes. You can't just cut a bulb into pieces and have each bulb grow a new tulip.
2. It was an *annual, seasonal market*. Most people were buying tulips to sell *that year* to consumers. With some of the rarer varieties, particularly those with viral traits that could only be reproduced by the slow process of budding, a purchase may instead be to breed it to eventually bring it to a wider market. However, for the most part, tulips were purchased with the intent of sales.
The fact that it is not a currency tied to any one country has huge value
This in and of itself is fundamentally wrong. Being tied to a country means it has the backing of how much that country is trusted. Having no country and no assets backing it means it has no backing at all.
You ask like Steam being out is a deal-breaker. But anyone can see long term the trend is growth in acceptance.
Yeah, only Steam. And Dell, of course, And Newegg Canada. Oh, and Baidu. And... you know, just go down the list of early announcers of companies that let you pay with bitcoin; you'll find that a large chunk of them don't let you pay with it anymore.
And it always runs the risk of governments cracking down on it
Please tell Venezuelans how "real" currencies have no risk at all from government action.
Yeah, nice try. Your response has no bearing whatsoever to the issue raised, and even if it did, Venezuela didn't "crack down" on its currency, they just made bad financial decisions, causing currency holders to lose faith in the country's backing of its own currency (see the previous comment about backing of currencies).
The fact is that Bitcoin is far more removed from such concerns because a government may be able to crack down on exchanges but cannot actually do anything about Bitcoin itself
Yeah, totally! I mean, all governments could do is make it illegal to own, close all public exchanges, make it radioactive to any investors and investment firms who want to remain in compliance with the law (the vast majority of all capital), prevent businesses from accepting it, and so on. But apart from that, sure, it's got a solid future ahead of it for buying weed and laundering money.
The U.S. in particular will prop up Bitcoin forever because all they really care about is visibility into transactions.
Right. The US is totally indifferent to illegal purchases, secret financial transactions, money laundering, etc, etc. Also don't care a whit that by crashing Bitcoin they could crash North Korea's savings.
So long as the level of problems stays small enough, I expect no action. But whenever it does? Bitcoin, in its current form, dies, and goes back to being fancy digital drug money.
According you China dropping out of support for Bitcoin should have crushed Bitcoin use. Yet obviously it did not. Can you explain why?
It did crash. This was later more than compensated for by growth in the US and EU based on Greater Fool investment.
Now where exactly do you think is would compensate for the loss of the US and EU?
Yes it is, but an even GREATER fool is one that believe any currency is not at even greater risk
Yes, totally. Because when I use a Euro one day, it's worth half as much o
No. 50% of gold is used in jewelry. The 40% that's used for investments is backed by the fact that people want it for jewelry and similar.
How's your new bitcoin necklace looking?
This said, it's not that bitcoin doesn't have a base market. It does. Buying illegal things, paying ransoms, and laundering money. Of course, that's not exactly the sort of base you want if your hope is that governments will never take measures against your "currency".
Tulips are not durable, not scarce, not programmable, not fungible, not verifiable, not divisible, and hard to transfer. But tell me more about your analogy...
The tulip market was by design an annual market, with traders fighting over the rarest cultivars on a seasonal cycle.
Rare tulips were indeed scarce. Each year, new cultivars of tulips were developed and only available in small numbers, while the demand for the rarest tulips was huge. The rarest types of tulip were rare because of a virus (tulip breaking virus) that was only transferred from an infected plant to its buds; since only a few buds formed per year, only a few new tulips of that variety could be formed per year. This guaranteed an enforced scarcity.
Tulips of the same cultivar were fungible, for whatever that's worth.
Tulips were verifiable in that they were purchased in formalized markets, even futures markets, with enforceable contracts (although short selling was made illegal).
I'm not sure what the point of tulips being divisible is. Neither are yen, but people seem to have no problem using them.
Most importantly, tulips were actually in demand in and of themselves. There was a lull in the Thirty Years War, and tulips were a highly in demand luxury item at wealthy estates. What's the value of bitcoin in and of itself? What's that? An alternative payment system to credit cards? Yeah, how is that going for you? Backwards, is how - the few places that had previously started experimenting with accepting bitcoin as payment are one by one backing out of it. Even if you ignore the volatility, the overhead in bitcoin transaction processing makes it stupid as an alternative. And it always runs the risk of governments cracking down on it due to the one thing that people actually value bitcoin for in and of itself: illegal purchases and money laundering. Don't think governments can crack down on it in a way that utterly crashes its value? Yeah, good luck with that notion.
Bitcoin is currently in the "greater fool" investment mode. We know how these things end.
1) It's not even remotely close to the limit of what's possible. Within orders of magnitude.
2) It's designed for a specific, 50mi trip, not go to on arbitrary routes. Most coliers are.
3) It probably was pretty darn cheap. The battery should be around $300k, which for a collier... that's nothing.
4) Staffing should be the same or less. There's not much really to operate.
5) It should be significantly cheaper per unit distance traveled; electricity is cheaper than oil, by a good margin. It should also be more maneuverable.
6) Only 2/3rds of Chinese electricity is coal, and that number falls every year.
7) A battery of this size should be about 8 cubic meters. Hardly "hull fulling".
ALL solar systems are very much affected by particulate matter in the air. fact most of them require large amount of water to constantly clean the fucking things.
A large portion of China's solar power deployment is west of the industrial heartland, in the high deserts, connected to cities by HVDC lines. Furthermore, solar panels don't "breathe"; most pollutants don't affect them, and nor do they care about whether PM is fine/health effecting, or natural coarse PM blown up from the ground. Solar farms are cleaned regularly for a reason.
Whether you like it or not, this is happening. Already is happening, continues happening, the rate keeps accelerating, and the fundamentals support the rate to continue accelerating. The sooner you get used to these facts, the better.
Do all of you people who keep proposing this stop and wonder why almost nobody in the industry ever takes this concept seriously? And the few that did went out of business or stopped doing so?
A vehicle is not its fuel/battery; you have to look at the whole picture. When you electrify a vehicle of any kind, you add some things and remove others (and also change how it's built - batteries add some structural support and can be located anywhere, which frees up design constraints in other regards). As an example, the Model 3 SR is almost the exact same weight as the similar-powered, similar-sized BMW 330i.
If you tried to make, say, nonstop transpacific cargo ships with li-ion batteries, that would be a non-starter. Even nonstop transatlantic would be priced out of the market, with huge capital costs and low cargo capacity. However, for legs under around 2000km or so, electrified freight shipping should be highly competitive. I don't expect it to take off quickly, if only for the reason that it'll take time for battery production to scale up that far. But already it should be a winner from a cost perspective. That doesn't mean you can't do transoceanic shipping - you can - but it also requires deepwater wind and/or floating solar (and / or, obviously, island stops).
There are a couple interesting side benefits as well. One, ports have to have large battery buffers (several to several dozen GWh for a port dealing with large cargo ships), which trickle charge from the grid and use that to surge charge ships. But these buffers do double-duty; they'd also buffer generation and demand fluctuations onshore, to a tremendous degree. In an emergency you could even have ships haul energy over a several hundred kilometers to places in power emergencies; when you run the numbers, you find that the rent on the ships should be quite justifiable if there's a power emergency somewhere (such as after a natural disaster). A large cargo ship might carry a gigawatt hour or so each, which is massive.
Another side effect relates to design. You can use as many, smaller propellers as you want (to gain this advantage, some ICE ships run generators alongside / instead of direct drive, just to be able to do this), since efficient electric motors are much more compact and easier to locate anywhere vs. ICEs. This helps lower your draft (shallower ports become more accessible) and makes the ship much more maneuverable. The extreme end is that of azipods - electric motors on azimuth mounts which can rotate any direction as needed. An increase in the number of propellers also increases ship resilience against accidents / damage.
I did notice that your graph mentions that only about 4% of that power comes from Wind and only 1.1% comes from solar
That's because A) they've been undergoing an exponential scaleup, meaning the quantities didn't become meaningful until recently, and B) it takes time to replace an entire electrical generation system. In 2016 alone China installed 35GW of solar capacity, for example, nearly doubling their total (coal is 943GW currently installed). It's clear that it's only a matter of time.
Nuclear has been restricted to shipping that either requires very long deployment times or very high power outputs simply because it's too expensive for general shipping use.
Yes, because internal combustion engines are made from fairy dust, and petroleum appears out of thin air.
People who complain about the horrors of lithium mining simply demonstrate that they have no clue how lithium is actually produced. The majority of the world's lithium supply is produced from salar brine. Look at it. The horror. The horror, right? They pump brine up to the surface into ponds, let it dry out to deposit unwanted salts (leaving a lithium-rich concentrate), then send that for refining. On many salars, the entire salar floods annually, wiping out the evaporation ponds, which they have to rebuild. Nature literally reclaims the "mine" annually. Its hard to picture a less environmentally impacting resource production process.
The remainder of lithium is produced from spodumene. Spodumene mines are listed as having no particular environmental impacts associated with them apart from the general impacts of hard-rock mining; the largest impact risk is listed as suspended solids in waterways - aka, silt from the rock crushers. Which is a risk from anything that crushes rock.
Do I even need to mention that there's not actually that much lithium in lithium-ion batteries, or that - as large boxes full of useful minerals - recycling rates will be nearly 100%?
And coal is in the progress of being replaced with solar and wind, whether you like that or not. In China, in the EU, and in the US. Some places have some other types of power that are also on the rise - for example, in the US it's "wind, solar, and natural gas" - but coal is in a death spiral everywhere.
Too little power density for modern cargo transport needs - even with modern techniques such as rotosails and kite sails (although they can reduce ship consumption.
A much more plausible approach would be deepwater wind turbines and floating solar, both of which exist (but aren't currently as cheap as their onshore equivalents). Floating "gigachargers", if you will, across major sea lanes. As XKCD put it...
Meanwhile, the second round of config invites to non-Tesla/SpaceX Model 3 customers just went out, and the first round's deliveries start in the first few days.
More specifically: Tesla's biggest challenge with improving Autopilot is processing power; this was discussed a month or two ago. With a car, you can't offload something like that to the cloud, since you can't trust in 100% unbroken connectivity. But better capabilities requires neural nets, for image recognition tasks (you can't decide how to respond to something if you can't recognize what you're seeing) - and neural nets are extremely computation-intensive. They've been working (and having success) at reducing the processing power for the nets they want to deploy, but news like this doesn't surprise me at all. The more processing power they can deploy, the better the results they'll be able to get. And neural nets should lend themselves very well to custom hardware.
I did not say "most currently mined cobalt", because currently mined cobalt simply will not support battery production scaleup. I said "most cobalt", period. You have to look at where additional cobalt for batteries is going to be coming from. And it's not going to be coming from the Congo. Yes, part of the supply will come from expansions to major Congo mines, but most is going to come from new cobalt projects and from adding cobalt recovery to the tailings of existing mines.
It's nothing at all analogous to "cobalt on Venus". As was explicitly stated: "Cobalt, however, is found in significant consequence everywhere that nickel, copper, and many other commonly mined metals are."
Yes, I'm sure that all of the institutional investors, whose entire businesses depend on the accuracy of their due diligence, are wrong on the fact that Tesla is earning a 25% margin on S and X and is likely to earn a 25% margin on the 3 when in full production.
Ed: Or instead of the Model 3 SR we could compare the Model 3 LR. Starts at $44k and is as fast as the BMW 340i, same handling advantage, also $5k cheaper. And actually goes *farther* than the BMW in city driving.
Yeah, who would pay $35k for a vehicle that's faster than a BMW 330i, $5k lower MSRP, handles better (according to Motor Trend), and which every former BMW owner I've talked to who's sat in has said is more comfortable. Which can be preheated/precooled remotely (including melting ice off your windshield), no carbon monoxide concerns, with no idling wear, no idling noise, and without draining a tank that you have to go out to a chunk of concrete and stand outside in whatever weather you're wanting to avoid while paying out the nose to pump carcinogens into a tank. Which starts each day in your normal life with a full charge in exchange for ten seconds of your time (5 to plug in, 5 to unplug) in the comfort of your garage, rather than randomly hitting you up for 5 minutes of your time, regardless of what's going on. And which even on long trips - the exception to the rule - can charge enough during meal and rest stops to not slow you down at all.
No, I can't understand why anyone would buy such a thing.
When the very summary is wrong, where does one even start? "Most" cobalt is not in the Congo. The cheapest primary cobalt is found in the Congo, with the caveat that it's not been that heavily explored due to previous levels of demand (there's a new wave of exploration at present). Cobalt, however, is found in significant consequence everywhere that nickel, copper, and many other commonly mined metals are. Some places recover it in the tailings, but most don't bother because, again, historically demand hasn't justified it.
Cobalt isn't a rare metal. In the crust, it's 2-3 times as common as lead, 40% as common as copper, a third as common as zinc, etc. Nor is it "spread out"; as mentioned, it's associated with many commonly mined minerals.
As for mining in Congo itself: at least 80% is mined in big international mines with modern equipment and practices; how much "over 80%" is uncertain. The remaining percentage is so-called "artisinal mining" - improvised mines mined with manual labour and primitive equipment (aka, generally not very safe). Some are villages mining their own land, while others are outsiders exploiting locals. In the past year, there's been a big crackdown on artisinal cobalt, with major buyers taking steps to track the origin of their products better and keep it out of their product streams. Of course, one can always expect artisinal producers to try to do more to hide the origins of their cobalt, and/or sell to less scrupulous buyers (such as in China).
The environmental impact of shipping a tonne of batteries from east Asia is the same as the impact of shipping a tonne of steel from east Asia.
And for the record: Model 3 SR is pretty much the same weight as the similar-sized, similar-accelerating BMW 330i. Model 3 LR isn't much heavier (and is faster).
Lastly: life cycle assessments aren't conducted by guesswork and speculation. They're done in peer reviewed studies. For example.
As Electrec notes, it's almost impossible that this report is correct. Model 3 uses 2170 cells, not the standard 18650s, while Model X and Model S have always used imported cells, so nothing has changed there.
Slashdot Mirror
And there were both higher and lower value tulips.
1. Tulips are not freaking potatoes. You can't just cut a bulb into pieces and have each bulb grow a new tulip.
2. It was an *annual, seasonal market*. Most people were buying tulips to sell *that year* to consumers. With some of the rarer varieties, particularly those with viral traits that could only be reproduced by the slow process of budding, a purchase may instead be to breed it to eventually bring it to a wider market. However, for the most part, tulips were purchased with the intent of sales.
This in and of itself is fundamentally wrong. Being tied to a country means it has the backing of how much that country is trusted. Having no country and no assets backing it means it has no backing at all.
Yeah, only Steam. And Dell, of course, And Newegg Canada. Oh, and Baidu. And... you know, just go down the list of early announcers of companies that let you pay with bitcoin; you'll find that a large chunk of them don't let you pay with it anymore.
Yeah, nice try. Your response has no bearing whatsoever to the issue raised, and even if it did, Venezuela didn't "crack down" on its currency, they just made bad financial decisions, causing currency holders to lose faith in the country's backing of its own currency (see the previous comment about backing of currencies).
Yeah, totally! I mean, all governments could do is make it illegal to own, close all public exchanges, make it radioactive to any investors and investment firms who want to remain in compliance with the law (the vast majority of all capital), prevent businesses from accepting it, and so on. But apart from that, sure, it's got a solid future ahead of it for buying weed and laundering money.
Right. The US is totally indifferent to illegal purchases, secret financial transactions, money laundering, etc, etc. Also don't care a whit that by crashing Bitcoin they could crash North Korea's savings.
So long as the level of problems stays small enough, I expect no action. But whenever it does? Bitcoin, in its current form, dies, and goes back to being fancy digital drug money.
It did crash. This was later more than compensated for by growth in the US and EU based on Greater Fool investment.
Now where exactly do you think is would compensate for the loss of the US and EU?
Yes, totally. Because when I use a Euro one day, it's worth half as much o
No. 50% of gold is used in jewelry. The 40% that's used for investments is backed by the fact that people want it for jewelry and similar.
How's your new bitcoin necklace looking?
This said, it's not that bitcoin doesn't have a base market. It does. Buying illegal things, paying ransoms, and laundering money. Of course, that's not exactly the sort of base you want if your hope is that governments will never take measures against your "currency".
The tulip market was by design an annual market, with traders fighting over the rarest cultivars on a seasonal cycle.
Rare tulips were indeed scarce. Each year, new cultivars of tulips were developed and only available in small numbers, while the demand for the rarest tulips was huge. The rarest types of tulip were rare because of a virus (tulip breaking virus) that was only transferred from an infected plant to its buds; since only a few buds formed per year, only a few new tulips of that variety could be formed per year. This guaranteed an enforced scarcity.
Tulips of the same cultivar were fungible, for whatever that's worth.
Tulips were verifiable in that they were purchased in formalized markets, even futures markets, with enforceable contracts (although short selling was made illegal).
I'm not sure what the point of tulips being divisible is. Neither are yen, but people seem to have no problem using them.
Most importantly, tulips were actually in demand in and of themselves . There was a lull in the Thirty Years War, and tulips were a highly in demand luxury item at wealthy estates. What's the value of bitcoin in and of itself? What's that? An alternative payment system to credit cards? Yeah, how is that going for you? Backwards, is how - the few places that had previously started experimenting with accepting bitcoin as payment are one by one backing out of it. Even if you ignore the volatility, the overhead in bitcoin transaction processing makes it stupid as an alternative. And it always runs the risk of governments cracking down on it due to the one thing that people actually value bitcoin for in and of itself: illegal purchases and money laundering. Don't think governments can crack down on it in a way that utterly crashes its value? Yeah, good luck with that notion.
Bitcoin is currently in the "greater fool" investment mode. We know how these things end.
Right. All of the supermassive solar and wind farms that can be seen from space are fakes, and nobody noticed.
1) It's not even remotely close to the limit of what's possible. Within orders of magnitude.
2) It's designed for a specific, 50mi trip, not go to on arbitrary routes. Most coliers are.
3) It probably was pretty darn cheap. The battery should be around $300k, which for a collier... that's nothing.
4) Staffing should be the same or less. There's not much really to operate.
5) It should be significantly cheaper per unit distance traveled; electricity is cheaper than oil, by a good margin. It should also be more maneuverable.
6) Only 2/3rds of Chinese electricity is coal, and that number falls every year.
7) A battery of this size should be about 8 cubic meters. Hardly "hull fulling".
Re-read and try again.
A large portion of China's solar power deployment is west of the industrial heartland, in the high deserts, connected to cities by HVDC lines. Furthermore, solar panels don't "breathe"; most pollutants don't affect them, and nor do they care about whether PM is fine/health effecting, or natural coarse PM blown up from the ground. Solar farms are cleaned regularly for a reason.
Whether you like it or not, this is happening. Already is happening, continues happening, the rate keeps accelerating, and the fundamentals support the rate to continue accelerating. The sooner you get used to these facts, the better.
Do all of you people who keep proposing this stop and wonder why almost nobody in the industry ever takes this concept seriously? And the few that did went out of business or stopped doing so?
A vehicle is not its fuel/battery; you have to look at the whole picture. When you electrify a vehicle of any kind, you add some things and remove others (and also change how it's built - batteries add some structural support and can be located anywhere, which frees up design constraints in other regards). As an example, the Model 3 SR is almost the exact same weight as the similar-powered, similar-sized BMW 330i.
If you tried to make, say, nonstop transpacific cargo ships with li-ion batteries, that would be a non-starter. Even nonstop transatlantic would be priced out of the market, with huge capital costs and low cargo capacity. However, for legs under around 2000km or so, electrified freight shipping should be highly competitive. I don't expect it to take off quickly, if only for the reason that it'll take time for battery production to scale up that far. But already it should be a winner from a cost perspective. That doesn't mean you can't do transoceanic shipping - you can - but it also requires deepwater wind and/or floating solar (and / or, obviously, island stops).
There are a couple interesting side benefits as well. One, ports have to have large battery buffers (several to several dozen GWh for a port dealing with large cargo ships), which trickle charge from the grid and use that to surge charge ships. But these buffers do double-duty; they'd also buffer generation and demand fluctuations onshore, to a tremendous degree. In an emergency you could even have ships haul energy over a several hundred kilometers to places in power emergencies; when you run the numbers, you find that the rent on the ships should be quite justifiable if there's a power emergency somewhere (such as after a natural disaster). A large cargo ship might carry a gigawatt hour or so each, which is massive.
Another side effect relates to design. You can use as many, smaller propellers as you want (to gain this advantage, some ICE ships run generators alongside / instead of direct drive, just to be able to do this), since efficient electric motors are much more compact and easier to locate anywhere vs. ICEs. This helps lower your draft (shallower ports become more accessible) and makes the ship much more maneuverable. The extreme end is that of azipods - electric motors on azimuth mounts which can rotate any direction as needed. An increase in the number of propellers also increases ship resilience against accidents / damage.
You mean things like "Oh...and Ironically, the world's first all-electric cargo ship is being used to move coal."?
That's because A) they've been undergoing an exponential scaleup, meaning the quantities didn't become meaningful until recently, and B) it takes time to replace an entire electrical generation system. In 2016 alone China installed 35GW of solar capacity, for example, nearly doubling their total (coal is 943GW currently installed). It's clear that it's only a matter of time.
Nuclear has been restricted to shipping that either requires very long deployment times or very high power outputs simply because it's too expensive for general shipping use.
Yes, because internal combustion engines are made from fairy dust, and petroleum appears out of thin air.
People who complain about the horrors of lithium mining simply demonstrate that they have no clue how lithium is actually produced. The majority of the world's lithium supply is produced from salar brine. Look at it. The horror. The horror, right? They pump brine up to the surface into ponds, let it dry out to deposit unwanted salts (leaving a lithium-rich concentrate), then send that for refining. On many salars, the entire salar floods annually, wiping out the evaporation ponds, which they have to rebuild. Nature literally reclaims the "mine" annually. Its hard to picture a less environmentally impacting resource production process.
The remainder of lithium is produced from spodumene. Spodumene mines are listed as having no particular environmental impacts associated with them apart from the general impacts of hard-rock mining; the largest impact risk is listed as suspended solids in waterways - aka, silt from the rock crushers. Which is a risk from anything that crushes rock.
Do I even need to mention that there's not actually that much lithium in lithium-ion batteries, or that - as large boxes full of useful minerals - recycling rates will be nearly 100%?
And coal is in the progress of being replaced with solar and wind, whether you like that or not. In China, in the EU, and in the US. Some places have some other types of power that are also on the rise - for example, in the US it's "wind, solar, and natural gas" - but coal is in a death spiral everywhere.
As of 2016, it was down to 2/3rds. Like everywhere else, China's grid is changing fast.
Too little power density for modern cargo transport needs - even with modern techniques such as rotosails and kite sails (although they can reduce ship consumption.
A much more plausible approach would be deepwater wind turbines and floating solar, both of which exist (but aren't currently as cheap as their onshore equivalents). Floating "gigachargers", if you will, across major sea lanes. As XKCD put it...
Meanwhile, the second round of config invites to non-Tesla/SpaceX Model 3 customers just went out, and the first round's deliveries start in the first few days.
More specifically: Tesla's biggest challenge with improving Autopilot is processing power; this was discussed a month or two ago. With a car, you can't offload something like that to the cloud, since you can't trust in 100% unbroken connectivity. But better capabilities requires neural nets, for image recognition tasks (you can't decide how to respond to something if you can't recognize what you're seeing) - and neural nets are extremely computation-intensive. They've been working (and having success) at reducing the processing power for the nets they want to deploy, but news like this doesn't surprise me at all. The more processing power they can deploy, the better the results they'll be able to get. And neural nets should lend themselves very well to custom hardware.
Never said there wasn't a waiting list. ;)
I did not say "most currently mined cobalt", because currently mined cobalt simply will not support battery production scaleup. I said "most cobalt", period. You have to look at where additional cobalt for batteries is going to be coming from. And it's not going to be coming from the Congo. Yes, part of the supply will come from expansions to major Congo mines, but most is going to come from new cobalt projects and from adding cobalt recovery to the tailings of existing mines.
It's nothing at all analogous to "cobalt on Venus". As was explicitly stated: "Cobalt, however, is found in significant consequence everywhere that nickel, copper, and many other commonly mined metals are."
Yes, I'm sure that all of the institutional investors, whose entire businesses depend on the accuracy of their due diligence, are wrong on the fact that Tesla is earning a 25% margin on S and X and is likely to earn a 25% margin on the 3 when in full production.
Ed: Or instead of the Model 3 SR we could compare the Model 3 LR. Starts at $44k and is as fast as the BMW 340i, same handling advantage, also $5k cheaper. And actually goes *farther* than the BMW in city driving.
Yeah, who would pay $35k for a vehicle that's faster than a BMW 330i, $5k lower MSRP, handles better (according to Motor Trend), and which every former BMW owner I've talked to who's sat in has said is more comfortable. Which can be preheated/precooled remotely (including melting ice off your windshield), no carbon monoxide concerns, with no idling wear, no idling noise, and without draining a tank that you have to go out to a chunk of concrete and stand outside in whatever weather you're wanting to avoid while paying out the nose to pump carcinogens into a tank. Which starts each day in your normal life with a full charge in exchange for ten seconds of your time (5 to plug in, 5 to unplug) in the comfort of your garage, rather than randomly hitting you up for 5 minutes of your time, regardless of what's going on. And which even on long trips - the exception to the rule - can charge enough during meal and rest stops to not slow you down at all.
No, I can't understand why anyone would buy such a thing.
When the very summary is wrong, where does one even start? "Most" cobalt is not in the Congo. The cheapest primary cobalt is found in the Congo, with the caveat that it's not been that heavily explored due to previous levels of demand (there's a new wave of exploration at present). Cobalt, however, is found in significant consequence everywhere that nickel, copper, and many other commonly mined metals are. Some places recover it in the tailings, but most don't bother because, again, historically demand hasn't justified it.
Cobalt isn't a rare metal. In the crust, it's 2-3 times as common as lead, 40% as common as copper, a third as common as zinc, etc. Nor is it "spread out"; as mentioned, it's associated with many commonly mined minerals.
As for mining in Congo itself: at least 80% is mined in big international mines with modern equipment and practices; how much "over 80%" is uncertain. The remaining percentage is so-called "artisinal mining" - improvised mines mined with manual labour and primitive equipment (aka, generally not very safe). Some are villages mining their own land, while others are outsiders exploiting locals. In the past year, there's been a big crackdown on artisinal cobalt, with major buyers taking steps to track the origin of their products better and keep it out of their product streams. Of course, one can always expect artisinal producers to try to do more to hide the origins of their cobalt, and/or sell to less scrupulous buyers (such as in China).
The environmental impact of shipping a tonne of batteries from east Asia is the same as the impact of shipping a tonne of steel from east Asia.
And for the record: Model 3 SR is pretty much the same weight as the similar-sized, similar-accelerating BMW 330i. Model 3 LR isn't much heavier (and is faster).
Lastly: life cycle assessments aren't conducted by guesswork and speculation. They're done in peer reviewed studies. For example.
As Electrec notes, it's almost impossible that this report is correct. Model 3 uses 2170 cells, not the standard 18650s, while Model X and Model S have always used imported cells, so nothing has changed there.