You would want good coverage, so wagging the sprayer should result in a wavy motion of the string, making ai.ING easier, and increasing chances of getting pulled into the rotors.
Will you stop posting on your damn phone? It's mangling the shit out of your text.
But perhaps the very ideal of communism is doomed to fail because something as intricately human as free trade and a market economy can only be abolished by means of suppression.
Marxism depends on the presence of super-abundance. Marx was anticipating the time when machines would take over essentially all human labor. He was well ahead of his time, and he's still somewhat ahead of his time even today, all discussions about UBI to the contrary.
Regardless, the necessary and sufficient conditions for Marxism have never existed. "Free trade" and a market economy are mechanisms that exist for the sole purpose of coping with scarcity, which they do with varying degrees of success. Marxism is a proposal for dealing with post-scarcity. We had better hope it gets adopted when post-scarcity actually materializes, or there will be trouble. (Though if any species could manage to impose artificial scarcity on a post-scarcity technological base, it would be humans.)
...he doesn't much like paying the going rate for western engineers when he can get them for ten-a-penny in the Far East.
And if 3000 Chinese engineers could have invented a better battery, they would have. American universities have graduated 3 million Chinese engineers, and they still haven't made a better battery. Asia in general and China in particular are conformist cultures. You don't get inventors from conformist societies. Chinese engineers come to the US to learn how do to engineering "properly". And they succeed. They go back to China knowing everything there is to know about how to repeat the engineering someone else has already done. And that's just what they do. The result is great refinement and no invention.
Japan and South Korea have shown glimmers of inventiveness, but their nonconformists are very hard on them. It remains to be seen if they'll be able to sustain what little inventiveness they have found. Judging by Sony, Japan's odds aren't good. Judging by Samsung, Korea has a chance.
But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war.
I'm pretty sure all you need to do to invade Canada is to walk across the border and ask the first person you see, "Where's the nearest Tim Hortons, eh?"
They'd fight us to the death defenting a Horton's! Probably send out coffee to us during fighting breaks as well.
Who said anything about fighting? I was suggesting getting into the queue.
Perhaps more interesting is the semi-detailed presentation about AMD's Zen. Other people have already pointed out that a paltry few hundred million transistors doesn't get you very far. What are the billions of transistors used for? The Zen presentation is quite informative. Loads of cache is a fair chunk of it. Überfancy predictive logic is another big chunk of it. The rest is absorbed by 4 completely parallel ALUs, two parallel AGUs, and a completely independent floating point section with two MUL and two ADD logics. And after all that, what you get is parity with Intel's Broadwell. Barely.
So for perspective, that took a decade of hard labor by quite well paid engineers, and there was no low-hanging fruit in the form of the register-starved x86 architecture for AMD to pluck this time. The difference between half a billion and two billion transistors is very very substantial.
But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war.
I'm pretty sure all you need to do to invade Canada is to walk across the border and ask the first person you see, "Where's the nearest Tim Hortons, eh?"
They won't. It's Japan. They're not overly litigious, because they don't suffer from an infestation of libertarians and their government actually works. This guy WILL do time, and it won't be short either. Japan takes an extremely dim view of traffic fatalities and they have a functioning government that will enforce the traffic laws.
One of the main reasons I LIKE email is that it gives the sender time to organize their thoughts. Much better than listening to some user or boss hem and haw and backtrack and contradict themselves wasting endless minutes of my life.
Worse, said boss will then claim that every self-contradictory thing said in among all the hemming and hawing is necessary and required. Such people don't actually listen to themselves speak, so they don't even notice when they contradict themselves and fail to clarify which contradictory instruction actually holds. They certainly don't clarify it to themselves.
There's a reason they're doing this. It's not just that the IOC is incredibly greedy. It's that their greed is fueled by NBC's money, and NBC is damn well going to get their pound of flesh for the $1.29 billion they paid for exclusive rights. If recent news reports are accurate, NBC is just barely breaking even, having sold $1.2 billion in advertising so far.
So sure, blame IOC's greed. But don't forget to blame NBC's greed too. They want every second of Olympic imagery to be surrounded by inescapable commercials, or they could be in serious trouble. If the interest of advertisers falls off even a tiny bit, they start losing money on the Games, and they have a contract out through 2032.
Maybe he didn't. I just assumed he did with all the press coverage he got.
Most lifetime Olympic gold medals won by any individual in history. Made possible mostly because all the swimming events have separate medals. The previous record holder was also a swimmer.
It is widely claimed that the subjects of pornography are typically vulnerable girls, and that the profits pass largely into the hands of powerful middle-men.
I have bad news for you. The powerful middle-man is a woman. Nor is this unusual today. Sure in the '70s the industry was financially dominated by men. Those days are over. The Internet was the great emancipator of porn stars. Nowadays, savvy girls are busy building their personal brand, complete with a personal website featuring live shows and special deals on recordings, taking 95% of the revenue for themselves.
It is also widely claimed that porn stars often struggle to maintain a happy family life off-screen...
Judging by the divorce rate, so does 60% of the population.
...and that their economic prospects are bleak once their breasts begin to sag or they suffer scarring from a caesarian section.
Sure. And if you're a software developer, your economic prospects are bleak at about the same age. Nobody said porn or software development is a lifetime career.
Some people claim that porn stars are discouraged from using condoms and are particularly likely to suffer unwanted pregnancies or life-threatening sexually transmitted disease.
Such people are idiots speaking from ignorance. The entire industry has heard of The Pill and uses it. The vast majority of the industry is also vociferous about STD testing since an AIDS outbreak in the '80s. Since 1998, the industry tests every actor every 30 days, initially at AIM Healthcare, now at Performer Availability Screening Services.
I once did the math on what it would take for me to live off the grid. I assumed I could have a solar panel the size of my roof, any bigger and I'd run into building code problems.
<snip>
The cost of the solar panels, battery chargers, etc. was more difficult to calculate since prices for such are rarely advertised outright.
Times, they are a-changin'. Costs of panels and inverters are now quite public. 7000 watts of panel capacity will cost you $7700 for a pallet of 25, delivered. Those are 17% efficient, made in America. An inverter to match runs around $1500 plus $70 per panel, give or take. Charge controllers run $1000 or so, often as an added feature on an inverter that includes the charge controller built in. Batteries are indeed a bit arbitrary. Giant sodium ion batteries run 60 cents per watt-hour. Large flooded lead acid run 27 cents per watt-hour. Sealed AGM lead acid run 15 cents per watt hour. And of course the Tesla Powerwall is 47 cents per watt-hour. $3000 for an overnight supply (somewhat arbitrarily), and on up from there depending on personal preference. An approximate minimum for an overnightable off-grid system that puts out an average 35 kWh per day in the Midwest is $15,000 in parts. With a couple of days additional storage, call it $20,000.
Installation prices have not yet faced the new reality of panel prices. Installation is absurdly expensive, running $35,000 for a 25 panel system. Installers were accustomed to that ridiculous labor markup being invisible against a much higher panel and battery price. Those days are over, but panel installers haven't noticed yet. Install it yourself and pay an electrician for the inverter installation and it's $500. Just don't fall off the roof.
35 kWh per day can be enough to go summer and winter without a drop of grid energy, depending on your house. It's certainly enough for the new mostly brick house with a heat pump that my parents occupy in Illinois. Such a system costs 1/8th as much as a house, not twice. Maybe one quarter as much, including the 15 cubic feet of battery you describe. About two fridges worth. If you live in Minnesota, it won't do, but then why the hell would you live in Minnesota? Leave it for the moose and move south. If I spent one quarter as much as my house is worth, I would be very comfortable going off grid with that system.
You have serious reading comprehension problems. I said it would cost a lot, twice. Twice I said it would cost a lot. See? I didn't say it would cost double.
And you're a bit confused about how electricity works too. No, not "at best the week before." It depends entirely on how over-provisioned the battery is and how over-provisioned the solar array is. In my area, the average is 4.8 full sun hours per day. A cloudy day cuts that to 15%, so the equivalent of 0.72 full sun hours. If I over-provision the solar array by a factor of 7, I don't have to use any battery power at all, even on a cloudy day. Of course that's a bit silly and takes a lot of space. Similarly, I could have stored the power to use on a cloudy day a month ago, if the battery bank is over-provisioned to the point of being capable of storing a full month of power and the solar array is over-provisioned just enough to provide my daily power plus some charge for the battery. That would actually physically fit in my basement. In fact, it would fit with room to spare. For my worst case month (which is in the summer, not the winter), it's only 20 fridges worth of batteries. That fits with room to spare. On the other hand, the factor of 7 over-provisioning of panels would not fit on my property.
But over-provisioning either one by such a huge amount is unnecessary. As I said, the average for my area is 4.8 full sun hours per day. The base system is provisioned with that in mind, and then over-provisioned by any arbitrary amount I care to hedge. If I fail to provision enough for a worst case number of consecutive cloudy days, then yes, I run out of power and the heat stops. In my region, that's only uncomfortable. Only the coldest of cold snaps make my house so cold that it even endangers the pipes. It certainly doesn't endanger life. I've gone two full winters with no heat but the waste heat from my computer, so a few hundred watts. Uncomfortable, but proven possible. So if I'm foolishly cheap, I can provision no storage at all and seriously under-provision the panels, and still my house is habitable. I don't propose to sacrifice one iota of comfort or convenience, and it is still possible.
Tours were given of the inside of the factory; and video was allowed. Not the most sensitive areas, though.
So I watched that whole tedious hour. I've had enough shaky cam to last me for another decade.
I see I was completely and totally correct. They didn't show one square centimeter of the second floor, where Panasonic is building their cell production line. The presses Panasonic will use on the first floor were covered in solid black tarpaulins, according to the tour guide specifically at Panasonic's demand. Literally under wraps, not just figuratively. Even Tesla is being cagey, insisting that people using cameras don't use zoom (how they can tell, I don't know), and herding people away from a robot control station, repeatedly.
And somebody at Tesla misspelled "flare" on the emergency handling sign on the door near the end. Tsk tsk.
They have detailed instructions what to do if one of the packs is dropped. Now we know why they insist on professional installation for Powerwalls. If it falls off the wall, bad things could happen.
Amusingly, the electric pallet jacks on the floor are powered with lead-acid batteries. I guess Elon can't design everything himself.
I have done the math. Why do you think I said it would cost little? I said no such thing, and explicitly said it would cost a lot, twice. You're not actually reading my text. Also, first you talk about one week, then you talk about multiple weeks. Since when was multiple weeks an issue? I said nothing about it. That's you. And I don't live in Germany, so their clouds and winter don't concern me. Yes, it requires a much larger battery than just an overnight battery. This is not a shock to any six year old, who can add numbers. Did I say it was going to be small or cheap? No. I said exactly the opposite. It's going to be big and expensive. But I was responding to someone claiming that electric transportation gives power to the state, and I think I've completely made the case that it does not. I'll even name a number. The photovoltaic panels and battery packs required to power personal transportation completely free of state-regulated grid power costs less than one supercar.
He got modded to -1 Flamebait. He should have been modded -1 Not Even Wrong.
Takes a lithium battery bank about the size of a refrigerator. Two, if the house is large or poorly insulated. Expensive, but physically possible, and it will only get cheaper. Photovoltaic panels still generate power on overcast days. Just not as much. Whereas the "hydrocarbon fuel" panels in the linked story probably generate nothing, since their efficiency is so terribly low in the first place. The battery bank gets charged with overcapacity on sunny days. Yes overcapacity costs more. I'm only making assertions about physical possibilities, not financial. And Slashdot keeps claiming that some of the losses from the middle class have moved into the upper class, so hey, it's more financially possible than it was, right?
Powering transportation solely on electricity gives the state the ability to decide when, where, and how much you can use because it's a public utility but under the legal control of the state.
Uh, what? Powering transportation solely with electricity is the only way an individual can become energy independent. I can install enough photovoltaic panels to power a Tesla for literally all of my driving needs (I fly when I travel long distances). Those panels are not only not a public utility, but quite specifically my private property. If I lived in the country, I could put up a windmill, either instead of or in addition to photovoltaic panels. Again, private property. Install enough of them, and a battery bank in the basement, and I can disconnect my house from that public utility too.
I certainly can't drill an oil well in my backyard and run an oil refinery in my basement. I can't strip mine my backyard for coal and run a steam-powered car. I can't cut enough trees to burn wood and run a steam-powered car either. I can't even plant enough switchgrass, harvest it, and make enough ethanol. Even if I could strip mine my backyard for coal, it would have to be half a mile thick to handle my transportation needs for the rest of my life, and coal just doesn't come that way.
Neither fossil fuels nor biofuels can fuel my transportation needs. Either I'm not allowed to utilize them (and wouldn't want to, because of the stench), or they literally aren't energy-dense enough, respectively. Biofuels depend on plants, which are lucky to convert even 3% of the sunlight falling on them, and they convert into biomolecules that I have to do something dramatic to in order to utilize their energy (usually at further loss). Commercial off the shelf photovoltaic panels convert sunlight at 22% efficiency, directly into electricity I can use, or can convert into something I can use with well-understood, cheap circuitry.
Powering transportation, and indeed everything else, solely on electricity is the one and only path to personal energy independence that can be pursued by more than a handful of farmers with massive amounts of acreage. And it's physically possible today. Right now. For everybody in the world who lives in low density housing. It's not financially possible for most just yet, but at least physics isn't preventing it.
Fifteen years later the CIA tried to recruit me again. It wasn't a long conversation. All they talked about was the immense money I would make as an international business operator. Nothing about helping the country.
I rarely watch video links, but as a Tesla investor, I thought I should. And that video was not a look inside the Gigafactory. That video was a look at the outside of the Gigafactory, plus a few seconds of the Panasonic CEO (chairman?/spokesman?) being funny. And Elon Musk saying the final production capacity may be three times higher than originally designed.
Mr. Musk likes to show off his factories to the world, for one reason or another. It appears that Panasonic believes in keeping trade secrets secret, and is getting their way on this joint venture. The only thing on display besides the outside of the factory and a Model 3 was a model of a section of the factory with various industrial robot models scattered through it. Probably irrelevant to real production, if not actively misleading. It looked maybe like where battery packs could be assembled. Anything involving cell assembly is being kept quite tightly under wraps.
Aren't we fortunate that we have our close Japanese allies available to teach US businesses how to build a highly efficient, high technology factory. (Anybody who lived through the 80s should have boggled at that statement, but here we are.)
I AM one of the productive. I produce. Why the fuck do you think I'm paying taxes? For fun? I don't particularly hate my station in life. I make over six figures. What grants me rights to other's hard work is the same thing that grants others rights to my hard work. Being part of a society.
You might try it sometime, instead of being a misanthropic dickhead.
Slashdot Mirror
Voting is no longer safe, we are obviously going to have to suspend elections until we are 100% sure the computers are trustworthy!
Thanks Obama!
You would want good coverage, so wagging the sprayer should result in a wavy motion of the string, making ai.ING easier, and increasing chances of getting pulled into the rotors.
Will you stop posting on your damn phone? It's mangling the shit out of your text.
But perhaps the very ideal of communism is doomed to fail because something as intricately human as free trade and a market economy can only be abolished by means of suppression.
Marxism depends on the presence of super-abundance. Marx was anticipating the time when machines would take over essentially all human labor. He was well ahead of his time, and he's still somewhat ahead of his time even today, all discussions about UBI to the contrary.
Regardless, the necessary and sufficient conditions for Marxism have never existed. "Free trade" and a market economy are mechanisms that exist for the sole purpose of coping with scarcity, which they do with varying degrees of success. Marxism is a proposal for dealing with post-scarcity. We had better hope it gets adopted when post-scarcity actually materializes, or there will be trouble. (Though if any species could manage to impose artificial scarcity on a post-scarcity technological base, it would be humans.)
...he doesn't much like paying the going rate for western engineers when he can get them for ten-a-penny in the Far East.
And if 3000 Chinese engineers could have invented a better battery, they would have. American universities have graduated 3 million Chinese engineers, and they still haven't made a better battery. Asia in general and China in particular are conformist cultures. You don't get inventors from conformist societies. Chinese engineers come to the US to learn how do to engineering "properly". And they succeed. They go back to China knowing everything there is to know about how to repeat the engineering someone else has already done. And that's just what they do. The result is great refinement and no invention.
Japan and South Korea have shown glimmers of inventiveness, but their nonconformists are very hard on them. It remains to be seen if they'll be able to sustain what little inventiveness they have found. Judging by Sony, Japan's odds aren't good. Judging by Samsung, Korea has a chance.
But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war.
I'm pretty sure all you need to do to invade Canada is to walk across the border and ask the first person you see, "Where's the nearest Tim Hortons, eh?"
They'd fight us to the death defenting a Horton's! Probably send out coffee to us during fighting breaks as well.
Who said anything about fighting? I was suggesting getting into the queue.
Perhaps more interesting is the semi-detailed presentation about AMD's Zen. Other people have already pointed out that a paltry few hundred million transistors doesn't get you very far. What are the billions of transistors used for? The Zen presentation is quite informative. Loads of cache is a fair chunk of it. Überfancy predictive logic is another big chunk of it. The rest is absorbed by 4 completely parallel ALUs, two parallel AGUs, and a completely independent floating point section with two MUL and two ADD logics. And after all that, what you get is parity with Intel's Broadwell. Barely.
So for perspective, that took a decade of hard labor by quite well paid engineers, and there was no low-hanging fruit in the form of the register-starved x86 architecture for AMD to pluck this time. The difference between half a billion and two billion transistors is very very substantial.
But we'd have a real problem trying to invade Canada without the resources to wage an extended war.
I'm pretty sure all you need to do to invade Canada is to walk across the border and ask the first person you see, "Where's the nearest Tim Hortons, eh?"
Strippers, hookers, and blow. Drugs and sex are the fastest way to burn money from what I have seen.
Don't have children, do you...
Do you think the injured/dead parties won't?!
They won't. It's Japan. They're not overly litigious, because they don't suffer from an infestation of libertarians and their government actually works. This guy WILL do time, and it won't be short either. Japan takes an extremely dim view of traffic fatalities and they have a functioning government that will enforce the traffic laws.
One of the main reasons I LIKE email is that it gives the sender time to organize their thoughts. Much better than listening to some user or boss hem and haw and backtrack and contradict themselves wasting endless minutes of my life.
Worse, said boss will then claim that every self-contradictory thing said in among all the hemming and hawing is necessary and required. Such people don't actually listen to themselves speak, so they don't even notice when they contradict themselves and fail to clarify which contradictory instruction actually holds. They certainly don't clarify it to themselves.
No, no voicemail.
For the truly paranoid there's always Zombies, AI and angry aliens thrown into the mix.
Why you always gotta bring up Trump in every story?
*ba-dum* *tsssh*
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week.
Both give the buyer several months to report a seller who refuses to correct issues with a product that is not as described.
Several months? In order to be useful, the right needs to last for life + 70 years.
There's a reason they're doing this. It's not just that the IOC is incredibly greedy. It's that their greed is fueled by NBC's money, and NBC is damn well going to get their pound of flesh for the $1.29 billion they paid for exclusive rights. If recent news reports are accurate, NBC is just barely breaking even, having sold $1.2 billion in advertising so far.
So sure, blame IOC's greed. But don't forget to blame NBC's greed too. They want every second of Olympic imagery to be surrounded by inescapable commercials, or they could be in serious trouble. If the interest of advertisers falls off even a tiny bit, they start losing money on the Games, and they have a contract out through 2032.
Maybe he didn't. I just assumed he did with all the press coverage he got.
Most lifetime Olympic gold medals won by any individual in history. Made possible mostly because all the swimming events have separate medals. The previous record holder was also a swimmer.
Free movement of labour and capital are the foundation of the EU.
And the free movement of labour is half fictional when 44% still speak only one language.
It is widely claimed that the subjects of pornography are typically vulnerable girls, and that the profits pass largely into the hands of powerful middle-men.
I have bad news for you. The powerful middle-man is a woman. Nor is this unusual today. Sure in the '70s the industry was financially dominated by men. Those days are over. The Internet was the great emancipator of porn stars. Nowadays, savvy girls are busy building their personal brand, complete with a personal website featuring live shows and special deals on recordings, taking 95% of the revenue for themselves.
It is also widely claimed that porn stars often struggle to maintain a happy family life off-screen...
Judging by the divorce rate, so does 60% of the population.
...and that their economic prospects are bleak once their breasts begin to sag or they suffer scarring from a caesarian section.
Sure. And if you're a software developer, your economic prospects are bleak at about the same age. Nobody said porn or software development is a lifetime career.
Some people claim that porn stars are discouraged from using condoms and are particularly likely to suffer unwanted pregnancies or life-threatening sexually transmitted disease.
Such people are idiots speaking from ignorance. The entire industry has heard of The Pill and uses it. The vast majority of the industry is also vociferous about STD testing since an AIDS outbreak in the '80s. Since 1998, the industry tests every actor every 30 days, initially at AIM Healthcare, now at Performer Availability Screening Services.
I once did the math on what it would take for me to live off the grid. I assumed I could have a solar panel the size of my roof, any bigger and I'd run into building code problems.
<snip>
The cost of the solar panels, battery chargers, etc. was more difficult to calculate since prices for such are rarely advertised outright.
Times, they are a-changin'. Costs of panels and inverters are now quite public. 7000 watts of panel capacity will cost you $7700 for a pallet of 25, delivered. Those are 17% efficient, made in America. An inverter to match runs around $1500 plus $70 per panel, give or take. Charge controllers run $1000 or so, often as an added feature on an inverter that includes the charge controller built in. Batteries are indeed a bit arbitrary. Giant sodium ion batteries run 60 cents per watt-hour. Large flooded lead acid run 27 cents per watt-hour. Sealed AGM lead acid run 15 cents per watt hour. And of course the Tesla Powerwall is 47 cents per watt-hour. $3000 for an overnight supply (somewhat arbitrarily), and on up from there depending on personal preference. An approximate minimum for an overnightable off-grid system that puts out an average 35 kWh per day in the Midwest is $15,000 in parts. With a couple of days additional storage, call it $20,000.
Installation prices have not yet faced the new reality of panel prices. Installation is absurdly expensive, running $35,000 for a 25 panel system. Installers were accustomed to that ridiculous labor markup being invisible against a much higher panel and battery price. Those days are over, but panel installers haven't noticed yet. Install it yourself and pay an electrician for the inverter installation and it's $500. Just don't fall off the roof.
35 kWh per day can be enough to go summer and winter without a drop of grid energy, depending on your house. It's certainly enough for the new mostly brick house with a heat pump that my parents occupy in Illinois. Such a system costs 1/8th as much as a house, not twice. Maybe one quarter as much, including the 15 cubic feet of battery you describe. About two fridges worth. If you live in Minnesota, it won't do, but then why the hell would you live in Minnesota? Leave it for the moose and move south. If I spent one quarter as much as my house is worth, I would be very comfortable going off grid with that system.
Cost twice of what?
You have serious reading comprehension problems. I said it would cost a lot, twice. Twice I said it would cost a lot. See? I didn't say it would cost double.
And you're a bit confused about how electricity works too. No, not "at best the week before." It depends entirely on how over-provisioned the battery is and how over-provisioned the solar array is. In my area, the average is 4.8 full sun hours per day. A cloudy day cuts that to 15%, so the equivalent of 0.72 full sun hours. If I over-provision the solar array by a factor of 7, I don't have to use any battery power at all, even on a cloudy day. Of course that's a bit silly and takes a lot of space. Similarly, I could have stored the power to use on a cloudy day a month ago, if the battery bank is over-provisioned to the point of being capable of storing a full month of power and the solar array is over-provisioned just enough to provide my daily power plus some charge for the battery. That would actually physically fit in my basement. In fact, it would fit with room to spare. For my worst case month (which is in the summer, not the winter), it's only 20 fridges worth of batteries. That fits with room to spare. On the other hand, the factor of 7 over-provisioning of panels would not fit on my property.
But over-provisioning either one by such a huge amount is unnecessary. As I said, the average for my area is 4.8 full sun hours per day. The base system is provisioned with that in mind, and then over-provisioned by any arbitrary amount I care to hedge. If I fail to provision enough for a worst case number of consecutive cloudy days, then yes, I run out of power and the heat stops. In my region, that's only uncomfortable. Only the coldest of cold snaps make my house so cold that it even endangers the pipes. It certainly doesn't endanger life. I've gone two full winters with no heat but the waste heat from my computer, so a few hundred watts. Uncomfortable, but proven possible. So if I'm foolishly cheap, I can provision no storage at all and seriously under-provision the panels, and still my house is habitable. I don't propose to sacrifice one iota of comfort or convenience, and it is still possible.
Expensive, but possible.
Tours were given of the inside of the factory; and video was allowed. Not the most sensitive areas, though.
So I watched that whole tedious hour. I've had enough shaky cam to last me for another decade.
I see I was completely and totally correct. They didn't show one square centimeter of the second floor, where Panasonic is building their cell production line. The presses Panasonic will use on the first floor were covered in solid black tarpaulins, according to the tour guide specifically at Panasonic's demand. Literally under wraps, not just figuratively. Even Tesla is being cagey, insisting that people using cameras don't use zoom (how they can tell, I don't know), and herding people away from a robot control station, repeatedly.
And somebody at Tesla misspelled "flare" on the emergency handling sign on the door near the end. Tsk tsk.
They have detailed instructions what to do if one of the packs is dropped. Now we know why they insist on professional installation for Powerwalls. If it falls off the wall, bad things could happen.
Amusingly, the electric pallet jacks on the floor are powered with lead-acid batteries. I guess Elon can't design everything himself.
I have done the math. Why do you think I said it would cost little? I said no such thing, and explicitly said it would cost a lot, twice. You're not actually reading my text. Also, first you talk about one week, then you talk about multiple weeks. Since when was multiple weeks an issue? I said nothing about it. That's you. And I don't live in Germany, so their clouds and winter don't concern me. Yes, it requires a much larger battery than just an overnight battery. This is not a shock to any six year old, who can add numbers. Did I say it was going to be small or cheap? No. I said exactly the opposite. It's going to be big and expensive. But I was responding to someone claiming that electric transportation gives power to the state, and I think I've completely made the case that it does not. I'll even name a number. The photovoltaic panels and battery packs required to power personal transportation completely free of state-regulated grid power costs less than one supercar.
He got modded to -1 Flamebait. He should have been modded -1 Not Even Wrong.
Good luck on an overcast week in mid winter.
Takes a lithium battery bank about the size of a refrigerator. Two, if the house is large or poorly insulated. Expensive, but physically possible, and it will only get cheaper. Photovoltaic panels still generate power on overcast days. Just not as much. Whereas the "hydrocarbon fuel" panels in the linked story probably generate nothing, since their efficiency is so terribly low in the first place. The battery bank gets charged with overcapacity on sunny days. Yes overcapacity costs more. I'm only making assertions about physical possibilities, not financial. And Slashdot keeps claiming that some of the losses from the middle class have moved into the upper class, so hey, it's more financially possible than it was, right?
Powering transportation solely on electricity gives the state the ability to decide when, where, and how much you can use because it's a public utility but under the legal control of the state.
Uh, what? Powering transportation solely with electricity is the only way an individual can become energy independent. I can install enough photovoltaic panels to power a Tesla for literally all of my driving needs (I fly when I travel long distances). Those panels are not only not a public utility, but quite specifically my private property. If I lived in the country, I could put up a windmill, either instead of or in addition to photovoltaic panels. Again, private property. Install enough of them, and a battery bank in the basement, and I can disconnect my house from that public utility too.
I certainly can't drill an oil well in my backyard and run an oil refinery in my basement. I can't strip mine my backyard for coal and run a steam-powered car. I can't cut enough trees to burn wood and run a steam-powered car either. I can't even plant enough switchgrass, harvest it, and make enough ethanol. Even if I could strip mine my backyard for coal, it would have to be half a mile thick to handle my transportation needs for the rest of my life, and coal just doesn't come that way.
Neither fossil fuels nor biofuels can fuel my transportation needs. Either I'm not allowed to utilize them (and wouldn't want to, because of the stench), or they literally aren't energy-dense enough, respectively. Biofuels depend on plants, which are lucky to convert even 3% of the sunlight falling on them, and they convert into biomolecules that I have to do something dramatic to in order to utilize their energy (usually at further loss). Commercial off the shelf photovoltaic panels convert sunlight at 22% efficiency, directly into electricity I can use, or can convert into something I can use with well-understood, cheap circuitry.
Powering transportation, and indeed everything else, solely on electricity is the one and only path to personal energy independence that can be pursued by more than a handful of farmers with massive amounts of acreage. And it's physically possible today. Right now. For everybody in the world who lives in low density housing. It's not financially possible for most just yet, but at least physics isn't preventing it.
Fifteen years later the CIA tried to recruit me again. It wasn't a long conversation. All they talked about was the immense money I would make as an international business operator. Nothing about helping the country.
John, is that you?
I rarely watch video links, but as a Tesla investor, I thought I should. And that video was not a look inside the Gigafactory. That video was a look at the outside of the Gigafactory, plus a few seconds of the Panasonic CEO (chairman?/spokesman?) being funny. And Elon Musk saying the final production capacity may be three times higher than originally designed.
Mr. Musk likes to show off his factories to the world, for one reason or another. It appears that Panasonic believes in keeping trade secrets secret, and is getting their way on this joint venture. The only thing on display besides the outside of the factory and a Model 3 was a model of a section of the factory with various industrial robot models scattered through it. Probably irrelevant to real production, if not actively misleading. It looked maybe like where battery packs could be assembled. Anything involving cell assembly is being kept quite tightly under wraps.
Aren't we fortunate that we have our close Japanese allies available to teach US businesses how to build a highly efficient, high technology factory. (Anybody who lived through the 80s should have boggled at that statement, but here we are.)
I AM one of the productive. I produce. Why the fuck do you think I'm paying taxes? For fun? I don't particularly hate my station in life. I make over six figures. What grants me rights to other's hard work is the same thing that grants others rights to my hard work. Being part of a society.
You might try it sometime, instead of being a misanthropic dickhead.