You could be right, but I don't get this whole 'everything bad is because of money laundering' argument.
That's because you probably are a nice person who doesn't really spend much time thinking about how to screw your fellow human beings for monetary gain. Unfortunately enough people do spend time doing this that it's a VERY serious problem.
I have no doubt money laundering is widespread, but has it become any more widespread now compared to the days when drug dealers were hiding suitcases of cash around the place?
Accountant speaking here. TLDR version is yes it has become more common because technology has made it easier that ever. Why do you think technology like bitcoin is so popular for illegal goods transactions? Money laundering is nothing more than any series of transactions that makes it difficult to trace the origin of the cash. Think of it a bit like encryption - you can often crack it with enough time and resources but the point is to make it so much work that it isn't worth the bother in most cases. Cryptocurrencies are almost a wet dream for people wanting to launder money. You don't have to have untraceable transactions to launder money - you just need enough transactions of the right type to make tracing cash flows challenging.
The world did not fall apart then, as it will apparently do now if we don't crack down on all these money launderers.
I think you don't really understand the scope of the problems money laundering facilitates. Money laundering is critical to financing, among other things drug dealers, terrorist organizations, dictatorships, illegal trade, circumvention of sanctions, human trafficking (slavery), theft, fraud, extortion, racketeering, and the list goes on for some time. The drug dealers you use as an example are merely one case among many. It's quite clear that lack of controls for money laundering would result in substantially worse world to live in.
If they have made the money from a legitimate business trade, then since when did the west care about enforcing domestic CCP capital control laws?
Those statements have nothing to do with each other. First, there is a LOT of trade that looks like legitimate honest trade on the surface but really isn't. Ever heard of a front organization? Those are super common and they rarely exist for reasons positive to society as a whole. No the west doesn't care about Chinese capital controls except insofar as they affect the west but they don't need to to have a legitimate interest in combating money laundering. You can't stop money laundering completely but like many things it's not a good idea to just sit back and ignore it altogether either.
It has become ridiculously hard to deal with even smallish (10's thousand) sums of money internationally these days. I run an international business and have to regularly justify to my bank what I'm doing. Every time I deal with a professional or financial service I have to prove where my funds have come from.
Assuming for the sake of argument that that is true, then you are probably doing it wrong. Yes banks are required by law under know your customers laws to understand the nature of the transactions banking customers are conducting and this is entirely reasonable. That said, I'm among other things a certified accountant and I do a lot of international trade for the manufacturing company I work for today. It's not nearly as challenging as you are making it out to be. If you are being asked a lot about your business then you need to get a better relationship with your bank and learn how to actually do things properly. When I hear people complaining about it, it's almost always because they don't understand what they are doing adequately.
Our country (USA) is responsible for almost none of the plastic in the ocean.
"Almost none"? Not even remotely true. Not the majority but we certainly contribute plenty. We are in the top 20 as far as plastic polluting countries go so, let's not get too proud of ourselves for not being the worst of the worst.
We do lead by example by generally not littering, by reusing bags, by recycling them, and by disposing of them properly.
Are you shitting me? We litter plenty - just spend a little time cleaning up along a highway if you don't believe me. I have. In 2014 the US produced approximately 100 billion plastic bottles and an estimated 14% of those ended up as litter. We litter a huge amount. Just because you don't see it where you live doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Literally almost every grocery store in the US uses tens of thousands of disposable plastic one use bags every day and we certainly don't dispose of an awful lot of them properly. (protip - a landfill is not proper disposal of a plastic bag in most cases) Reportedly we use about 1 million of them per minute on average. 91% of plastic we use isn't recycled and plastic bags are certainly a non-trivial piece of that 91%. About 40% of plastic is used for packaging of one sort or another.
Banning plastic bags (and straws) here would change very, very little in waste except make it more inconvenient for most people.
We already have paper bags and people can bring their own and we already have paper straws and people can bring their own of those too. Exactly who is being inconvenienced here? Now paper to be fair has its own pollution problems, but let's not pretend we're putting some huge burden on anyone. Nobody is claiming banning plastic straws is some cure-all but it's a low hanging fruit that does solve a measurable part of the problem. Your argument is that we shouldn't solve a small part of the problem just because we haven't solved the bigger parts of the problem yet. That's idiotic.
I imagine styrofoam is more of a problem, anyway.
What you imagine is irrelevant and in this case wrong as well. You appear to lack the data to really understand the problem.
Reasonable to you maybe. Not very reasonable to Apple. See below for why.
Now that we have the government looking hard at all this data collection
Which government are you talking about because it sure as hell isn't the US government. Maybe they are in Europe somewhere.
now is the time for Apple to step up and do something like this to help out the end user.
A nice sentiment but I strongly doubt Apple will actually do anything useful in this regard. Google derives the vast majority of their revenue from advertising so if Apple really wanted to stick it to Google, hurting their advertising revenue would be the way to do it. Thing is though that Apple and Google are sort of partners and Google pays Apple a reported $9 billion to be the default search engine so it's unlikely Apple cut off that revenue stream except as some sort of nuclear option.
You may think an i3 is ugly. I may think an i3 is ugly. But they're pretty successful cars -- a slow burn but it's now selling in reasonable numbers in Europe.
BMW sold 24,432 units last year across all of Europe and 34,829 units globally. For reference Tesla sold 139,782 Model 3s in the same period. But that isn't really the point. The point is that BMW and other companies making these EV hatchbacks probably are leaving money on the table by making their cars needlessly ugly. Yes that matters. Make no mistake that a significant part of Tesla's success has been that the cars they make are attractive to look at. It makes NO sense to design a car that is unattractive unless the point is intentionally to dampen sales because the car is nothing but a compliance car.
You missed my point about range anxiety and the difference between the US and European markets.
No I did not. I'm saying you (and others) are wrong about that point. Sure there are some EV enthusiasts who don't actually care (we have them here too) and are rational about their driving habits, but most people simply won't buy a vehicle with limited range. Not gas nor electric. It's not just range anxiety, it's value for money. Would you spend more money for a car with less range even if you weren't sure you really needed it? Most won't. If it really wasn't a problem you would see gasoline powered cars with sub-200 mile ranges too and you don't. (yes I understand the economic differences in what I'm saying) After all, if they really only drive 20 miles per day that means they would only need to visit the fuel station occasionally which shouldn't be much of an imposition. Most people are clearly not EV enthusiasts like (presumably) you and (definitely) me. The argument that people "don't really need longer range" is objectively mostly true but buying cars is not an entirely rational decision for most people.
I know you're an automotive engineer, which is why your statement about "marketing bullshit" comes across as just weirdly naive. Surely you understand that building a new platform takes multiple years?
Of course it takes years - and VW has HAD years to build an EV platform and they have failed to do so. They were busy lying about their diesel emissions until 2014-15. They could have even adapted an existing platform into a passably decent EV if they needed a stopgap. The Chevy Bolt design was started in 2012 and went on sale by 2017 and it runs down the same assembly line as the Chevy Sonic at the Lake Orion assembly plant (about 20 miles from where I sit).
They only did their pivot to high-volume EV in 2015, and only started designing the MEB in 2016. So it's pretty fast for a legacy automaker.
I'm aware of this. A ground up platform can be designed in 3-5 years depending on how motivated they are. The Chevy Volt was shown as a concept car in January 2007 and the first factory built Volt rolled off the assembly line in March 2010. The Chevy Bolt EV platform started design in 2012 and the first units started production in late 2016. VW should be rolling out new vehicles this year and the news seems to corroborate that as likely. But until they do I'm reserving any judgement. Furthermore if they weren't working on EVs seriously prior to 2015 then I have very little sympathy. It wasn't like EVs were some tightly kept secret so they should have been working on them looooong before 2015. (and realistically they probably were but how much is unclear)
I mean: do you believe they haven't spent billions?
They have PROMISED to spend billions. While they undoubtedly have spent significant sums already (see Audi and Porsche for evidence of that), their promises so far are manifestly mostly just that - promises. The distinction is important. Until they actually spend the money and it re
This reads like someone who doesn't understand just how different the European and US car markets are. The European market sells gazillions of hatchbacks, and while US consumers may find them ugly, European consumers love them.
I'm well aware of the differences and I make car parts for both markets. However there are attractive hatchbacks and there are ugly ones. Most EVs made so far fall into the ugly category. Have you actually seen the BMW i3 or the first gen Nissan Leaf? Wow are they ugly. If you think otherwise then I think you need new glasses.
Ranges of under 200 miles work particularly well in Europe, where hatchbacks are often used almost exclusively as city runabouts, driven for well under 20 miles a day.
Ranges under 200 miles work fine in the US too but nobody wants a car with less range that that anyway. People in Europe buy cars that go quite a lot further than 100 miles too. Good luck finding a gas powered car with that sort of range. Trying to convince people that they really only need 80 miles of range is just companies trying to find a way to pretend it isn't actually a problem so they can sell a second rate vehicle.
You also come across as naive about car platforms.
Well my day job is as an automotive engineer so I'm pretty confident I know more about them than most people reading this.
VW has been investing billions in MEB. It's routinely discussed in the professional press.
Yes I've seen the press. And guess what? They don't have any products I can buy today so until they do then it is nothing more than marketing bullshit. They can spend all the money they want but until it results in a real product that you or I can buy it is meaningless. Tesla made popular EVs years ago on a much smaller budget so VW really has no excuse.
Indeed, it happens only by redefining 'luxury' to equal 'expensive to buy' and by only looking at the country where Tesla happens to be from and where it is much more popular than elsewhere.
I didn't define the term luxury car and Tesla's sell well around the world, not just in the US. If you think Tesla's aren't luxury cars then you have no idea what the term means. Luxury comes in many forms but only two factors are universal. Cost and brand. Tesla has both - ergo it is a luxury brand. Your personal opinion of the products is irrelevant. Quality, reliability, comfort, and other factors can contribute but do not necessarily define luxury. A Lamborghini is obviously a luxury car but if you had ever been in one you would know that the quality sucks, the reliability is abysmal, the fit and finish aren't great, and the comfort is non-existent. They are flashy, expensive, fast and fun. Tesla obviously focuses their cars on good looks, fast acceleration, and tech. If you prefer a sort of luxury that comes in the form of overpriced moving leather furniture (think Cadillac) that is fine but it's not what defines the category.
Ultimately what defines a luxury car or any luxury good is exclusivity. It is the fact that it is priced out of the reach of most buyers. Hence it is a luxury instead of a necessity. Any other definition is bullshit.
Nobody with the faintest knowledge about cars would call a Tesla a luxury car.
Oh really? You are aware that pretty much every automotive magazine and every major media outlet that deals with cars considers Tesla to be a competitor in the luxury car market. Gotta love the snob argument. It's such a great way to move the goal posts to make "luxury" mean whatever you want it to mean.
Riddle me this. If Tesla isn't a luxury car then why are Audi, Porsche, Volvo, Lamborghini, and other luxury brands tripping over themselves to copy what Tesla is doing?
The interior and the fit and finish are apalling even to American standards.
Cute. So you think interior fit and finish is all that defines a luxury car? Evidently you've never examined a Lamborghini (or Alfa or almost any other Italian car) very closely if you think fit and finish are what defines luxury. Drive a supercar sometime. Clearly luxury and they are mostly made like shit. They only last because nobody drives them very much.
SUVs are an American niche market for the most part and as such they are uninteresting for the future of the EV.
I think Ford and GM will be VERY surprised to hear that. In 2015 worldwide SUV sales were approximately 20 million units. If you think that is a niche market, you have a very curious definition of the term niche.
Also, I don't think consumers are going to care much about self driving in the near term at least it's an option most of them will be willing to dispense with.
It's a moot discussion because any reasonable semblance of a fully autonomous self driving car that could be sold to the public in volume is still quite a few years off. (meaning a car that technically doesn't need a steering wheel or a human to touch any controls ever) At least 10-15 in my opinion and probably more in reality. That said, self driving tech is going to work its way piecemeal into regular cars driven by humans. This has already happened. Lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, self parking, and lots more are already technologies in day to day use today. More are coming and eventually they will push humans out of the drivers seat or at least mitigate some of the worst failures of human drivers.
VW makes cars, too. EV and ICE. By the millions. And they tend to have a much better track record of launching vehicles on-time, and in all promised configurations, unlike Tesla.
Name one EV that VW currently sells to the general public that is remotely competitive with anything Tesla sells. Or name one that sells in numbers competitive with Tesla. I'll wait....
...Crickets...
That's what I thought.
Yes VW makes cars. VW has made a handful of shitty, short range, compliance car EVs that almost nobody wants to buy. They've promised a lot and delivered approximately nothing to date. Maybe that will change but until it actually does I'll take Tesla's (admittedly spotty) record on EVs over VWs any day of the week.
What we really need are advances in battery energy storage.
They'll happen but it's going to take time. The good news is that batteries are already more than good enough that we could switch many/most cars from ICEs to EVs today with only modest changes to habits and infrastructure. Basically if you have a garage and don't need to routinely travel longer than 200 miles in a single trip, you can switch to an EV today.
No more IC engines, and cars can be redesigned from the ground up better using space that the engine, fuel delivery, and exhaust systems once took up.
I don't think ICEs will ever go away completely but I can see a day when they are a rarity or at least a minority. That's going to take a few decades to get to however. There are some use cases where ICEs just make more sense than pure EVs. But even the ICEs that remain I think will mostly be electrified because it will make economic sense to do so.
If we can get the energy per unit volume within an order of magnitude of gasoline, propane, or other fossil fuels, transportation would be radically changed.
You are measuring the wrong thing. What matters is usable energy/power per kilogram for the whole drivetrain. You are making the mistake of comparing the energy content of a volume of gasoline with the energy content volume of a battery but that's a flawed comparison. Gasoline is useless without a very large and very heavy engine to turn it into useful work. Just using the volumetric energy content of gasoline doesn't tell you anything really useful because the liquid does nothing by itself. You need to know how much the whole system weighs, how efficient it is at turning that energy into useful work, and how much it costs to do that. While there are some limitations and caveats, existing EVs today already have substantially better fuel economy for a given power and weight output for a wide variety of use cases. My Chevy Bolt EV has more torque than my pickup truck, vastly better fuel economy, comparable range (about 238 vs 275-320 miles) and only weighs about 300kg less. A Telsa Model X actually weighs more than my pickup and has more power, more torque, FAR better fuel economy, comparable range, etc.
And the good news is that battery technology is going to continue to get better. ICE technology is close to as good as it will ever get. An ICE produces more heat than it does useful work and there is no way to change that. Given that EVs are already matching or exceeding ICE performance in many cases and have lots of room to improve as battery tech improves, the future seems dim for ICEs in the long run.
That's simply not true. I live in an area where people routinely tow with SUVs of every description. Equipment trailers, horses, boats, etc. I see trailers hooked up to SUVs literally daily. Sure there are a lot of people that don't tow with SUVs but that doesn't mean nobody does. Close friend of mine works in skilled trades and has a trailer he tows behind an SUV to every job site.
Right. I'm apparently a Tesla fanatic despite buying an EV from a direct competitor. [/sarcasm] You are an idiot and missing the big picture. Evidently you have a raging hate boner for Elon Musk which is bizarre but ultimately unimportant.
I don't care if you like Tesla or not. I don't care if you like Musk or not. I don't own a Tesla and have no plans to get one. I don't own the stock either. Tesla is merely an example. The simple fact is that Tesla is the ONLY significant car company taking EVs truly seriously, selling actually good vehicles in big numbers. They have proven the demand is there for a good quality EV. All the announcements from the big auto companies to date are merely sound and fury signifying nothing. They have close to no products worth mentioning on the market despite their claims of investing billions in electrification.
Now that I own an EV (again, not a Tesla) I understand why they are better in so many ways than ICE vehicles. EVs have plenty of room to get better as battery tech progresses. ICE vehicles are about as good as they are ever going to get. That fact alone should be keeping any CEO of a company that makes their money primarily on ICE vehicles up at night because the future very clearly seems to be in EVs. EVs can get better. ICEs cannot. The EV technology is already just better. They accelerate better, have more torque, are quieter, are FAR more fuel efficient, require FAR less maintenance, they are cheaper and easier to refuel for most use cases. Given a choice I'm never going to buy a non electrified car again.
Cute. Of course I'm on record multiple times here on slashdot saying that I wouldn't touch TSLA with a barge pole. WAY overvalued. The company is a good company but the stock price lost any tether to reality some time ago. That has nothing at all to do with the quality, capabilities, and popularity of their cars. They are already the top selling luxury car maker in the US, outselling BMW, Mercedes, Lexus and Audi. In fact they sell as many cars as BMW and Mercedes combined in the US. That doesn't happen by accident.
stock that will nosedive with traditional automakers getting into the game, hardcore... with their massively larger manufacturing capacity and a century of automotive manufacturing experience over their upstart competition that's still operating like a 'start up' instead of a legitimate contender, and run by a buffoon that can't keep his fucking mouth shut.
I work in the auto industry making wiring for both ICE and EV automobiles. While the big auto companies are quite capable in many ways as you say, they also by and large have no idea what to do about EVs and they aren't taking them very seriously to date. We make parts for the Chevy Bolt EV and I've seen first hand their project management and it's not impressive. They are trying very hard not to cannibalize their current car sales and in the process they are failing to invest in the future of cars which increasingly appears to be EVs. They haven't invested seriously in battery tech, they aren't making big investments in EV infrastructure, most of the EVs they have made have been half-assed compliance cars with shitty range and poor features. Explain to me how you think they are going to suddenly magically figure out the formula for making a good EV without actually making any. How are they going to compete with Tesla or other companies that invested early when they have a substantial advantage in battery cost and supply and performance?
It's not too late yet for the big auto companies to get in the game but they had better do so fairly soon. (soon meaning serious products within the next 5-10 years with big investment starting NOW) If they wait much longer than that, they'll have basically ceded big market share to Tesla and any other car maker that does take EVs seriously. When EVs reach a tipping point there will be some big auto companies that take the train to bankruptcy-ville if they aren't working hard on EVs now.
the changes that happened in the fallout of the 'emissions scandal' is the best thing to happen to the industry since the assembly line.
I hope you are right but I doubt it. VW is run by some seriously ethically challenged people. They knew what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway. Same people who green-lit the diesel scandal are in charge today. No reason to believe they have suddenly learned how to be ethical or that they seriously care about EVs. I'd be happy to be wrong but there is little evidence to suggest I am to date.
For a smaller manufacturer focusing mainly on the cheaper half of the market, like Ford, it is hard to justify large investments in EVs not (yet) bought by their typical customer that won't be profitable for some years.
Are you seriously describing Ford as a small manufacturer? Ford is one of the 5 biggest automakers on the planet. They are huge by any reasonable description.
Ford make their money selling affordable B and C segment cars and margins are razor thin.
What are you talking about? Ford makes their money selling large pickups and SUVs. You clearly haven't looked at their financials statements. They lose money (and lots of it) on smaller passenger cars which is why they recently announced they were getting out of that market segment.
They have also lost a lot of market share because of uncompetitive products and questionable reliability and now Brexit is threatening the one market where they are reasonably successful, so I can imagine large investments in EVs are not the top priority at Ford.
The UK market is NOT a big market for Ford and Brexit only really matters to them insofar as it affects the global economy. Ford only sold about 375K vehicles in Britain in 2018 versus about 6 million vehicles sold worldwide. Any company that is not investing heavily in EVs already is playing a very dangerous game where they are basically hoping the technology will fail.
They will get to it when the EV market is more mature.
Any company that waits that long will almost certainly lose massive market share. They won't be able to get batteries at a competitive price and their technology will be one or more generations behind the curve. Playing wait and see is a huge risk when it comes to a technology shift like we are seeing with EVs.
Volkswagen is planning to release a fully-electric SUV in China which could compete with Tesla's Model X.
Let's see. No pictures, no specs, no prototypes, going to announce it and have it for sale within 18 months but not in any of the mature car markets against ICE competition. But we're supposed to believe it will be a direct competitor to the Model X. Riiiiight... Sounds like vaporware and marketing bullshit to me.
The German automaker said Sunday the ID. ROOMZZ will be unveiled at the upcoming Shanghai Auto Show and will be available in 2021.
Seriously? They named it "ROOMZZ"? That sounds like a cell phone from 15 years ago or a sound my daughter would make to imitate a car noise.
Volkswagen also claims it will have "level 4 autonomous driving," Reuters reports, adding that this electric SUV "is the latest move in Volkswagen's aggressive growth strategy in China, where electric cars are given preferential treatment by authorities...
Yeah yeah, talk is cheap. Tesla is selling very good EVs today. VW isn't - their current offerings are unimpressive. Their Audi and Porsche subsidiaries are promising cars with promising specs but I can't buy them today. All I'm hearing from the traditional automakers is a bunch of weasel word promises that rarely seem to result in a car I can buy. When they do make one it's almost always a pathetic compliance car which won't appeal to the general public.
I own a Chevy Bolt EV which is a good car but it came out 3 years ago and GM hasn't meaningfully updated it or come out with another EV of note since and that doesn't look likely to change any time soon. Ford hasn't sold an EV of any description. Toyota is busy with the delusion that hydrogen fuel cells are the future. Nissan has the Leaf which isn't as good as the Bolt EV much less any Tesla and nothing else. BMW has the remarkably ugly and overpriced i3. Most of the EVs you can buy are little ugly hatchbacks with pathetic range and poor performance. (see Nissan Leaf, Honda Fit EV, BMW i3, VW Golf EV, etc)
VW is talking a lot of shit about EVs after getting their hand slapped over lying about their diesel products. Two questions come to mind. 1) since they lied about the diesel products, why should I believe anything they claim about electric ones? 2) Where are the vehicles they keep promising? They say they are investing all these billions of dollars with no cars to sell and yet Telsa has been selling cars to the public for about a decade now. If I was a shareholder I'd be pissed. Say what you want about Tesla and all their faults, at least they are actually making cars that people want to buy and not just a marketing hand job to pretend like they care about EVs.
I have a better idea. Send the freight by train hauled by electric locos. Most of the main lines in Europe are already electrified (but obviously not in the USA which is decades behind in rail tech).
No the US is not decades behind in rail tech. The US has a very advanced FREIGHT rail network and it is used far more than in Europe. The US rail network for freight is arguably the best in the world. The US does a shit job in passenger rail for a variety of reasons. But electrifying the rails in the US for freight trains by and large doesn't make much sense given the distances and geography involved. Diesel electric works pretty well for the use cases here.
A lot of industry and distrubution depots in the UK are alongside railways already, because they were originally placed there with rail sidings, now closed.
Rail delivery makes sense if you are getting large and routine deliveries or if you are doing intermodal transport. LTL truck freight makes a LOT more sense economically for many companies. Remember that you have to stop the whole train to drop off goods or a car to a rail siding. Trucks can go point to point and don't depend so much on coordination with other deliveries. Believe me that lots of companies have done the math on rail delivery. Sometimes it makes sense but often it doesn't.
The difference between reusable and non-reusable rockets is physics and engineering. The difference between human drivers and self-driving cars is hundreds of millions of lines of code that all have to work perfectly. Trust me, physics is easier.
Umm, how many lines of code do you think go into a rocket launch? The space shuttle had about 2 BILLION lines of code that all had to work approximately perfectly. Any rocket launched today, especially one that plans to remain reusable, is going to have a LOT of code made to a very high standard of reliability.
And if you think physics and engineering don't play a big role in self driving cars you don't understand the problem adequately.
Now it might be fair to say that launching a rocket is easier but it certainly isn't because of the number of lines of code. The challenge with autonomous vehicles isn't doing reliable code but in figuring out exactly what the code should do. Provided a company is willing to spend the money to do it, we know how to make reliable code. (we're just not used to companies actually going to the trouble) We haven't figured out how to design software that can recognize and react sanely to all the various inputs that occur in real world driving situations. The algorithms are just super difficult to figure out. The progress that has been made has been remarkable but the corner cases still unsolved remain fairly intimidating.
Because Wall Street needs (and assumes) companies to have constant and continuous growth to keep the financial markets afloat.
When people say "Wall Street" they are usually talking vague generalizations that rarely hold up to strong scrutiny. No different here. Wall Street isn't any sort of coherent entity. It's like saying "hipsters" and it doesn't really describe things in a way that is very useful except as a political punching bag. What really is happening is that investors expect a return on their investment for a given amount of risk. If an investor is seeking a 10% return on their investment in a company and that company gets so big (or does so badly) that a 10% ROI isn't realistic anymore, then the investor will take their money to some other company growing faster. You do it, I do it, and so does every other investor. It's not some vague Other called Wall Street. It's perfectly rational expectations by every sane investor on the planet. I'm not arguing that there isn't a fair bit of fraudulent nonsense surrounding all this (there is) but it's not entirely irrational.
All these valuations assume companies will keep growing at 10, 15, 20% and, if they miss a target by even 1% (oh no, a company only made $990 million profit instead of $1 billion, the horror!) they all scream the company is failing and the stock price tanks.
Stock prices in secondary markets are based on expectations of future returns. When the data reveals those expectations were incorrect then the stock price adjusts accordingly. For the most part this happens fairly rationally most of the time, despite all the sturm and drang you hear. If you expect a certain ROI for a given company then there is a price level for that. If the ROI turns out to be less then the price should be less too. It only becomes a problem when the company management starts thinking their job is the stock price instead of the products the company makes.
In the US the most consistent roads are the interstates, but if you've driven in enough states, you know that the interstates aren't exactly uniform from place to place.
That's putting it mildly. I can tell when I cross the border from Ohio to Michigan with my eyes closed. Michigan's roads suck and are badly underfunded (only Georgia spends less per capita - they need to raise taxes but the republicans control the legislature and break out in hives when they hear the words "raise taxes".
We need to see how self-driving cars handle construction zones, rain, snow, and fog on interstates first.
I think they will figure it out but it's just going to take a lot longer than many people (including Elon Musk) are proposing that they will. I figure even best case we are at least 15 years away from a truly self driving car that could be sold to the public. And that is probably being wildly optimistic. I think the technology will make it's way in to use fairly steadily and already has but full autonomy is quite a ways off yet. I think it's a worthy goal but it's just going to take a while because it's not an easy problem to solve.
I said there is a chain of fusion. From hydrogen, over helium... all the way to iron.
You said "A star usually fuses its elements in a chain, and a fraction always ends up as iron, by the time it explodes." This only a true statement for a fraction of stars of sufficient size. Smaller stars like our Sun do not do this to any meaningful degree.
But in the end, even a dwarf star will end up wirh iron. In fact there will be a time, when everything will have become iron, and stay that way for a long time.
This is simply not true. You need to study the physics involved a bit further. You've got some of it right but your conflating some of the details.
Not true. Only stars above a certain mass (much larger than our Sun) get to the point where they can fuse larger elements up to iron. Iron comes from supernova explosions and small stars never do that.
as it's the lowest energy state that can neither be fused nor fissioned.
Again not true. Iron can be fused but the reaction loses energy in the process causing the temperature of the star to drop. In large stars this thermal pressure is what is keeping the star from collapsing and/or exploding. Stars that get to the point of trying to fuse iron will rapidly end of life, often violently. You can fuse and fission iron but not in a way that is a net energy gain.
A star usually fuses its elements in a chain, and a fraction always ends up as iron, by the time it explodes.
Stars have to be much larger than our sun to explode via the chain you describe. You have the basics process more or less right but it doesn't apply to all stars. Small stars have much different end of life processes.
A dog will eventually learn it's name. You can call your dog while it is playing with a pack of other dogs, and your dog will come. Cats do not replicate this behavior.
I think you need to be more careful with your definitions. Taking as given what you stated above as given for the sake of argument, that's does not prove they cannot learn their name. It just proves they do not respond to it in the same manner as dogs. Different species of animals learn in different ways and respond to instructions differently. You wouldn't expect a whale to learn or respond in the same manner as a sloth, so why would you expect a cat to behave like a dog? Not to mention that there can be considerable intra-species and inter-breed variation in ability. I own several border collies and they can learn FAR more commands and generally learn them faster than my whippet because they were bred for different purposes. There is similar variation within cat species and breeds.
So what do I mean? I mean I there's no evidence that they tie that name to *themselves*. The fact that they respond to a word that they can distinguish does not mean they consider it their identity.
A distinction without a difference. All a name is for any animal is a verbal cue that the animal has learned (including humans) which has been taught specific to that animal. Some animals can generalize this more than others but if I call my cat with its name (a unique command to that animal) and it responds in the manner taught to it, then it knows its name. Whether it can generalize that behavior is a separate question. I'm puzzled how you think a dog or any other mammal would be any different in that regard. You absolutely can teach a cat a verbal cue unique to it which to all practical purposes is a name. Maybe you are going deep into something about sentience or some other philosophical nit picking but I'm not seeing any arguments which clarify your position or invalidate mine.
While cats certainly recognize words, I have seen little evidence that they're aware of their name.
When you say "aware of their name", what do you mean exactly by that? Have you trained each of them that their name means something special in relation to them? They don't speak English or any other human language so expecting them to just figure it out without some work on the handler's part is absurdly naive. You can train a cat to respond to its name but it requires specificity and effort on the part of the handler to communicate this information.
A name to a cat is not anything special unless you tell them it should mean something specific. It's just a sound to them otherwise. They can recognize words (and other sounds), including their name, but they won't do anything unless a positive (or negative) association is drawn to that sound.
Plenty of cat owners will happily tell you their felines are capable of responding to their own names, but the scientific jury remains ambivalent on the matter.
No the "scientific jury" is not really in question here. You can train virtually any animal to come or do some actions on a cue. A name is just such a cue and pretty much any animal can be trained to recognize and perform an action in relation to their name. Animal handlers in zoos use this fact constantly. My wife took a graduate level training course at the Shedd Aquarium a few years ago. Some animals are easier to train than others but literally anyone who works with animals for a living will tell you that of course cats can be trained to perform an action in relation to their name and to recognize their name as a cue. The problem is that most people are very bad at training and give all sorts of confusing mixed messages about what the cue they are giving is supposed to mean. Think about how many people you see talking to their dogs or cats as if they actually speak human languages.
So yes, cats can recognize the sounds that we give them as a name and they can associate that with some actions we might ask them to perform. But its a mistake to think it should the same thing it does to a human. We as humans have been trained to respond to our names in certain ways and cats can be trained to have responses to their names too.
The new research, published today in Scientific Advances, doesn't mean cats understand the human conception of a name, but it does show that at least some cats can distinguish their names from other words.
If they think this is "new" or cutting edge research they are WAY behind the curve on animal training. Read some books like https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sh...">Don't Shoot The Dog or watch some videos by a guy like Ken Ramirez.
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You could be right, but I don't get this whole 'everything bad is because of money laundering' argument.
That's because you probably are a nice person who doesn't really spend much time thinking about how to screw your fellow human beings for monetary gain. Unfortunately enough people do spend time doing this that it's a VERY serious problem.
I have no doubt money laundering is widespread, but has it become any more widespread now compared to the days when drug dealers were hiding suitcases of cash around the place?
Accountant speaking here. TLDR version is yes it has become more common because technology has made it easier that ever. Why do you think technology like bitcoin is so popular for illegal goods transactions? Money laundering is nothing more than any series of transactions that makes it difficult to trace the origin of the cash. Think of it a bit like encryption - you can often crack it with enough time and resources but the point is to make it so much work that it isn't worth the bother in most cases. Cryptocurrencies are almost a wet dream for people wanting to launder money. You don't have to have untraceable transactions to launder money - you just need enough transactions of the right type to make tracing cash flows challenging.
The world did not fall apart then, as it will apparently do now if we don't crack down on all these money launderers.
I think you don't really understand the scope of the problems money laundering facilitates. Money laundering is critical to financing, among other things drug dealers, terrorist organizations, dictatorships, illegal trade, circumvention of sanctions, human trafficking (slavery), theft, fraud, extortion, racketeering, and the list goes on for some time. The drug dealers you use as an example are merely one case among many. It's quite clear that lack of controls for money laundering would result in substantially worse world to live in.
If they have made the money from a legitimate business trade, then since when did the west care about enforcing domestic CCP capital control laws?
Those statements have nothing to do with each other. First, there is a LOT of trade that looks like legitimate honest trade on the surface but really isn't. Ever heard of a front organization? Those are super common and they rarely exist for reasons positive to society as a whole. No the west doesn't care about Chinese capital controls except insofar as they affect the west but they don't need to to have a legitimate interest in combating money laundering. You can't stop money laundering completely but like many things it's not a good idea to just sit back and ignore it altogether either.
It has become ridiculously hard to deal with even smallish (10's thousand) sums of money internationally these days. I run an international business and have to regularly justify to my bank what I'm doing. Every time I deal with a professional or financial service I have to prove where my funds have come from.
Assuming for the sake of argument that that is true, then you are probably doing it wrong. Yes banks are required by law under know your customers laws to understand the nature of the transactions banking customers are conducting and this is entirely reasonable. That said, I'm among other things a certified accountant and I do a lot of international trade for the manufacturing company I work for today. It's not nearly as challenging as you are making it out to be. If you are being asked a lot about your business then you need to get a better relationship with your bank and learn how to actually do things properly. When I hear people complaining about it, it's almost always because they don't understand what they are doing adequately.
Our country (USA) is responsible for almost none of the plastic in the ocean.
"Almost none"? Not even remotely true. Not the majority but we certainly contribute plenty. We are in the top 20 as far as plastic polluting countries go so, let's not get too proud of ourselves for not being the worst of the worst.
We do lead by example by generally not littering, by reusing bags, by recycling them, and by disposing of them properly.
Are you shitting me? We litter plenty - just spend a little time cleaning up along a highway if you don't believe me. I have. In 2014 the US produced approximately 100 billion plastic bottles and an estimated 14% of those ended up as litter. We litter a huge amount. Just because you don't see it where you live doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Literally almost every grocery store in the US uses tens of thousands of disposable plastic one use bags every day and we certainly don't dispose of an awful lot of them properly. (protip - a landfill is not proper disposal of a plastic bag in most cases) Reportedly we use about 1 million of them per minute on average. 91% of plastic we use isn't recycled and plastic bags are certainly a non-trivial piece of that 91%. About 40% of plastic is used for packaging of one sort or another.
Banning plastic bags (and straws) here would change very, very little in waste except make it more inconvenient for most people.
We already have paper bags and people can bring their own and we already have paper straws and people can bring their own of those too. Exactly who is being inconvenienced here? Now paper to be fair has its own pollution problems, but let's not pretend we're putting some huge burden on anyone. Nobody is claiming banning plastic straws is some cure-all but it's a low hanging fruit that does solve a measurable part of the problem. Your argument is that we shouldn't solve a small part of the problem just because we haven't solved the bigger parts of the problem yet. That's idiotic.
I imagine styrofoam is more of a problem, anyway.
What you imagine is irrelevant and in this case wrong as well. You appear to lack the data to really understand the problem.
I think this is a very reasonable thing to do.
Reasonable to you maybe. Not very reasonable to Apple. See below for why.
Now that we have the government looking hard at all this data collection
Which government are you talking about because it sure as hell isn't the US government. Maybe they are in Europe somewhere.
now is the time for Apple to step up and do something like this to help out the end user.
A nice sentiment but I strongly doubt Apple will actually do anything useful in this regard. Google derives the vast majority of their revenue from advertising so if Apple really wanted to stick it to Google, hurting their advertising revenue would be the way to do it. Thing is though that Apple and Google are sort of partners and Google pays Apple a reported $9 billion to be the default search engine so it's unlikely Apple cut off that revenue stream except as some sort of nuclear option.
You may think an i3 is ugly. I may think an i3 is ugly. But they're pretty successful cars -- a slow burn but it's now selling in reasonable numbers in Europe.
BMW sold 24,432 units last year across all of Europe and 34,829 units globally. For reference Tesla sold 139,782 Model 3s in the same period. But that isn't really the point. The point is that BMW and other companies making these EV hatchbacks probably are leaving money on the table by making their cars needlessly ugly. Yes that matters. Make no mistake that a significant part of Tesla's success has been that the cars they make are attractive to look at. It makes NO sense to design a car that is unattractive unless the point is intentionally to dampen sales because the car is nothing but a compliance car.
You missed my point about range anxiety and the difference between the US and European markets.
No I did not. I'm saying you (and others) are wrong about that point. Sure there are some EV enthusiasts who don't actually care (we have them here too) and are rational about their driving habits, but most people simply won't buy a vehicle with limited range. Not gas nor electric. It's not just range anxiety, it's value for money. Would you spend more money for a car with less range even if you weren't sure you really needed it? Most won't. If it really wasn't a problem you would see gasoline powered cars with sub-200 mile ranges too and you don't. (yes I understand the economic differences in what I'm saying) After all, if they really only drive 20 miles per day that means they would only need to visit the fuel station occasionally which shouldn't be much of an imposition. Most people are clearly not EV enthusiasts like (presumably) you and (definitely) me. The argument that people "don't really need longer range" is objectively mostly true but buying cars is not an entirely rational decision for most people.
I know you're an automotive engineer, which is why your statement about "marketing bullshit" comes across as just weirdly naive. Surely you understand that building a new platform takes multiple years?
Of course it takes years - and VW has HAD years to build an EV platform and they have failed to do so. They were busy lying about their diesel emissions until 2014-15. They could have even adapted an existing platform into a passably decent EV if they needed a stopgap. The Chevy Bolt design was started in 2012 and went on sale by 2017 and it runs down the same assembly line as the Chevy Sonic at the Lake Orion assembly plant (about 20 miles from where I sit).
They only did their pivot to high-volume EV in 2015, and only started designing the MEB in 2016. So it's pretty fast for a legacy automaker.
I'm aware of this. A ground up platform can be designed in 3-5 years depending on how motivated they are. The Chevy Volt was shown as a concept car in January 2007 and the first factory built Volt rolled off the assembly line in March 2010. The Chevy Bolt EV platform started design in 2012 and the first units started production in late 2016. VW should be rolling out new vehicles this year and the news seems to corroborate that as likely. But until they do I'm reserving any judgement. Furthermore if they weren't working on EVs seriously prior to 2015 then I have very little sympathy. It wasn't like EVs were some tightly kept secret so they should have been working on them looooong before 2015. (and realistically they probably were but how much is unclear)
I mean: do you believe they haven't spent billions?
They have PROMISED to spend billions. While they undoubtedly have spent significant sums already (see Audi and Porsche for evidence of that), their promises so far are manifestly mostly just that - promises. The distinction is important. Until they actually spend the money and it re
This reads like someone who doesn't understand just how different the European and US car markets are. The European market sells gazillions of hatchbacks, and while US consumers may find them ugly, European consumers love them.
I'm well aware of the differences and I make car parts for both markets. However there are attractive hatchbacks and there are ugly ones. Most EVs made so far fall into the ugly category. Have you actually seen the BMW i3 or the first gen Nissan Leaf? Wow are they ugly. If you think otherwise then I think you need new glasses.
Ranges of under 200 miles work particularly well in Europe, where hatchbacks are often used almost exclusively as city runabouts, driven for well under 20 miles a day.
Ranges under 200 miles work fine in the US too but nobody wants a car with less range that that anyway. People in Europe buy cars that go quite a lot further than 100 miles too. Good luck finding a gas powered car with that sort of range. Trying to convince people that they really only need 80 miles of range is just companies trying to find a way to pretend it isn't actually a problem so they can sell a second rate vehicle.
You also come across as naive about car platforms.
Well my day job is as an automotive engineer so I'm pretty confident I know more about them than most people reading this.
VW has been investing billions in MEB. It's routinely discussed in the professional press.
Yes I've seen the press. And guess what? They don't have any products I can buy today so until they do then it is nothing more than marketing bullshit. They can spend all the money they want but until it results in a real product that you or I can buy it is meaningless. Tesla made popular EVs years ago on a much smaller budget so VW really has no excuse.
Indeed, it happens only by redefining 'luxury' to equal 'expensive to buy' and by only looking at the country where Tesla happens to be from and where it is much more popular than elsewhere.
I didn't define the term luxury car and Tesla's sell well around the world, not just in the US. If you think Tesla's aren't luxury cars then you have no idea what the term means. Luxury comes in many forms but only two factors are universal. Cost and brand. Tesla has both - ergo it is a luxury brand. Your personal opinion of the products is irrelevant. Quality, reliability, comfort, and other factors can contribute but do not necessarily define luxury. A Lamborghini is obviously a luxury car but if you had ever been in one you would know that the quality sucks, the reliability is abysmal, the fit and finish aren't great, and the comfort is non-existent. They are flashy, expensive, fast and fun. Tesla obviously focuses their cars on good looks, fast acceleration, and tech. If you prefer a sort of luxury that comes in the form of overpriced moving leather furniture (think Cadillac) that is fine but it's not what defines the category.
Ultimately what defines a luxury car or any luxury good is exclusivity. It is the fact that it is priced out of the reach of most buyers. Hence it is a luxury instead of a necessity. Any other definition is bullshit.
Nobody with the faintest knowledge about cars would call a Tesla a luxury car.
Oh really? You are aware that pretty much every automotive magazine and every major media outlet that deals with cars considers Tesla to be a competitor in the luxury car market. Gotta love the snob argument. It's such a great way to move the goal posts to make "luxury" mean whatever you want it to mean.
Riddle me this. If Tesla isn't a luxury car then why are Audi, Porsche, Volvo, Lamborghini, and other luxury brands tripping over themselves to copy what Tesla is doing?
The interior and the fit and finish are apalling even to American standards.
Cute. So you think interior fit and finish is all that defines a luxury car? Evidently you've never examined a Lamborghini (or Alfa or almost any other Italian car) very closely if you think fit and finish are what defines luxury. Drive a supercar sometime. Clearly luxury and they are mostly made like shit. They only last because nobody drives them very much.
SUVs are an American niche market for the most part and as such they are uninteresting for the future of the EV.
I think Ford and GM will be VERY surprised to hear that. In 2015 worldwide SUV sales were approximately 20 million units. If you think that is a niche market, you have a very curious definition of the term niche.
Also, I don't think consumers are going to care much about self driving in the near term at least it's an option most of them will be willing to dispense with.
It's a moot discussion because any reasonable semblance of a fully autonomous self driving car that could be sold to the public in volume is still quite a few years off. (meaning a car that technically doesn't need a steering wheel or a human to touch any controls ever) At least 10-15 in my opinion and probably more in reality. That said, self driving tech is going to work its way piecemeal into regular cars driven by humans. This has already happened. Lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, self parking, and lots more are already technologies in day to day use today. More are coming and eventually they will push humans out of the drivers seat or at least mitigate some of the worst failures of human drivers.
VW makes cars, too. EV and ICE. By the millions. And they tend to have a much better track record of launching vehicles on-time, and in all promised configurations, unlike Tesla.
Name one EV that VW currently sells to the general public that is remotely competitive with anything Tesla sells. Or name one that sells in numbers competitive with Tesla. I'll wait....
...Crickets...
That's what I thought.
Yes VW makes cars. VW has made a handful of shitty, short range, compliance car EVs that almost nobody wants to buy. They've promised a lot and delivered approximately nothing to date. Maybe that will change but until it actually does I'll take Tesla's (admittedly spotty) record on EVs over VWs any day of the week.
What we really need are advances in battery energy storage.
They'll happen but it's going to take time. The good news is that batteries are already more than good enough that we could switch many/most cars from ICEs to EVs today with only modest changes to habits and infrastructure. Basically if you have a garage and don't need to routinely travel longer than 200 miles in a single trip, you can switch to an EV today.
No more IC engines, and cars can be redesigned from the ground up better using space that the engine, fuel delivery, and exhaust systems once took up.
I don't think ICEs will ever go away completely but I can see a day when they are a rarity or at least a minority. That's going to take a few decades to get to however. There are some use cases where ICEs just make more sense than pure EVs. But even the ICEs that remain I think will mostly be electrified because it will make economic sense to do so.
If we can get the energy per unit volume within an order of magnitude of gasoline, propane, or other fossil fuels, transportation would be radically changed.
You are measuring the wrong thing. What matters is usable energy/power per kilogram for the whole drivetrain. You are making the mistake of comparing the energy content of a volume of gasoline with the energy content volume of a battery but that's a flawed comparison. Gasoline is useless without a very large and very heavy engine to turn it into useful work. Just using the volumetric energy content of gasoline doesn't tell you anything really useful because the liquid does nothing by itself. You need to know how much the whole system weighs, how efficient it is at turning that energy into useful work, and how much it costs to do that. While there are some limitations and caveats, existing EVs today already have substantially better fuel economy for a given power and weight output for a wide variety of use cases. My Chevy Bolt EV has more torque than my pickup truck, vastly better fuel economy, comparable range (about 238 vs 275-320 miles) and only weighs about 300kg less. A Telsa Model X actually weighs more than my pickup and has more power, more torque, FAR better fuel economy, comparable range, etc.
And the good news is that battery technology is going to continue to get better. ICE technology is close to as good as it will ever get. An ICE produces more heat than it does useful work and there is no way to change that. Given that EVs are already matching or exceeding ICE performance in many cases and have lots of room to improve as battery tech improves, the future seems dim for ICEs in the long run.
Nobody tows anything with an SUV
That's simply not true. I live in an area where people routinely tow with SUVs of every description. Equipment trailers, horses, boats, etc. I see trailers hooked up to SUVs literally daily. Sure there are a lot of people that don't tow with SUVs but that doesn't mean nobody does. Close friend of mine works in skilled trades and has a trailer he tows behind an SUV to every job site.
Right. I'm apparently a Tesla fanatic despite buying an EV from a direct competitor. [/sarcasm] You are an idiot and missing the big picture. Evidently you have a raging hate boner for Elon Musk which is bizarre but ultimately unimportant.
I don't care if you like Tesla or not. I don't care if you like Musk or not. I don't own a Tesla and have no plans to get one. I don't own the stock either. Tesla is merely an example. The simple fact is that Tesla is the ONLY significant car company taking EVs truly seriously, selling actually good vehicles in big numbers. They have proven the demand is there for a good quality EV. All the announcements from the big auto companies to date are merely sound and fury signifying nothing. They have close to no products worth mentioning on the market despite their claims of investing billions in electrification.
Now that I own an EV (again, not a Tesla) I understand why they are better in so many ways than ICE vehicles. EVs have plenty of room to get better as battery tech progresses. ICE vehicles are about as good as they are ever going to get. That fact alone should be keeping any CEO of a company that makes their money primarily on ICE vehicles up at night because the future very clearly seems to be in EVs. EVs can get better. ICEs cannot. The EV technology is already just better. They accelerate better, have more torque, are quieter, are FAR more fuel efficient, require FAR less maintenance, they are cheaper and easier to refuel for most use cases. Given a choice I'm never going to buy a non electrified car again.
found the guy that paid too much for tesla stock.
Cute. Of course I'm on record multiple times here on slashdot saying that I wouldn't touch TSLA with a barge pole. WAY overvalued. The company is a good company but the stock price lost any tether to reality some time ago. That has nothing at all to do with the quality, capabilities, and popularity of their cars. They are already the top selling luxury car maker in the US, outselling BMW, Mercedes, Lexus and Audi. In fact they sell as many cars as BMW and Mercedes combined in the US. That doesn't happen by accident.
stock that will nosedive with traditional automakers getting into the game, hardcore... with their massively larger manufacturing capacity and a century of automotive manufacturing experience over their upstart competition that's still operating like a 'start up' instead of a legitimate contender, and run by a buffoon that can't keep his fucking mouth shut.
I work in the auto industry making wiring for both ICE and EV automobiles. While the big auto companies are quite capable in many ways as you say, they also by and large have no idea what to do about EVs and they aren't taking them very seriously to date. We make parts for the Chevy Bolt EV and I've seen first hand their project management and it's not impressive. They are trying very hard not to cannibalize their current car sales and in the process they are failing to invest in the future of cars which increasingly appears to be EVs. They haven't invested seriously in battery tech, they aren't making big investments in EV infrastructure, most of the EVs they have made have been half-assed compliance cars with shitty range and poor features. Explain to me how you think they are going to suddenly magically figure out the formula for making a good EV without actually making any. How are they going to compete with Tesla or other companies that invested early when they have a substantial advantage in battery cost and supply and performance?
It's not too late yet for the big auto companies to get in the game but they had better do so fairly soon. (soon meaning serious products within the next 5-10 years with big investment starting NOW) If they wait much longer than that, they'll have basically ceded big market share to Tesla and any other car maker that does take EVs seriously. When EVs reach a tipping point there will be some big auto companies that take the train to bankruptcy-ville if they aren't working hard on EVs now.
the changes that happened in the fallout of the 'emissions scandal' is the best thing to happen to the industry since the assembly line.
I hope you are right but I doubt it. VW is run by some seriously ethically challenged people. They knew what they were doing was wrong and did it anyway. Same people who green-lit the diesel scandal are in charge today. No reason to believe they have suddenly learned how to be ethical or that they seriously care about EVs. I'd be happy to be wrong but there is little evidence to suggest I am to date.
For a smaller manufacturer focusing mainly on the cheaper half of the market, like Ford, it is hard to justify large investments in EVs not (yet) bought by their typical customer that won't be profitable for some years.
Are you seriously describing Ford as a small manufacturer? Ford is one of the 5 biggest automakers on the planet. They are huge by any reasonable description.
Ford make their money selling affordable B and C segment cars and margins are razor thin.
What are you talking about? Ford makes their money selling large pickups and SUVs. You clearly haven't looked at their financials statements. They lose money (and lots of it) on smaller passenger cars which is why they recently announced they were getting out of that market segment.
They have also lost a lot of market share because of uncompetitive products and questionable reliability and now Brexit is threatening the one market where they are reasonably successful, so I can imagine large investments in EVs are not the top priority at Ford.
The UK market is NOT a big market for Ford and Brexit only really matters to them insofar as it affects the global economy. Ford only sold about 375K vehicles in Britain in 2018 versus about 6 million vehicles sold worldwide. Any company that is not investing heavily in EVs already is playing a very dangerous game where they are basically hoping the technology will fail.
They will get to it when the EV market is more mature.
Any company that waits that long will almost certainly lose massive market share. They won't be able to get batteries at a competitive price and their technology will be one or more generations behind the curve. Playing wait and see is a huge risk when it comes to a technology shift like we are seeing with EVs.
Volkswagen is planning to release a fully-electric SUV in China which could compete with Tesla's Model X.
Let's see. No pictures, no specs, no prototypes, going to announce it and have it for sale within 18 months but not in any of the mature car markets against ICE competition. But we're supposed to believe it will be a direct competitor to the Model X. Riiiiight... Sounds like vaporware and marketing bullshit to me.
The German automaker said Sunday the ID. ROOMZZ will be unveiled at the upcoming Shanghai Auto Show and will be available in 2021.
Seriously? They named it "ROOMZZ"? That sounds like a cell phone from 15 years ago or a sound my daughter would make to imitate a car noise.
Volkswagen also claims it will have "level 4 autonomous driving," Reuters reports, adding that this electric SUV "is the latest move in Volkswagen's aggressive growth strategy in China, where electric cars are given preferential treatment by authorities...
Yeah yeah, talk is cheap. Tesla is selling very good EVs today. VW isn't - their current offerings are unimpressive. Their Audi and Porsche subsidiaries are promising cars with promising specs but I can't buy them today. All I'm hearing from the traditional automakers is a bunch of weasel word promises that rarely seem to result in a car I can buy. When they do make one it's almost always a pathetic compliance car which won't appeal to the general public.
I own a Chevy Bolt EV which is a good car but it came out 3 years ago and GM hasn't meaningfully updated it or come out with another EV of note since and that doesn't look likely to change any time soon. Ford hasn't sold an EV of any description. Toyota is busy with the delusion that hydrogen fuel cells are the future. Nissan has the Leaf which isn't as good as the Bolt EV much less any Tesla and nothing else. BMW has the remarkably ugly and overpriced i3. Most of the EVs you can buy are little ugly hatchbacks with pathetic range and poor performance. (see Nissan Leaf, Honda Fit EV, BMW i3, VW Golf EV, etc)
VW is talking a lot of shit about EVs after getting their hand slapped over lying about their diesel products. Two questions come to mind. 1) since they lied about the diesel products, why should I believe anything they claim about electric ones? 2) Where are the vehicles they keep promising? They say they are investing all these billions of dollars with no cars to sell and yet Telsa has been selling cars to the public for about a decade now. If I was a shareholder I'd be pissed. Say what you want about Tesla and all their faults, at least they are actually making cars that people want to buy and not just a marketing hand job to pretend like they care about EVs.
Ethanol may be "renewable" but it certainly is not sustainable. It's a very wasteful ineffcient way to create fuel.
Except it isn't actually renewable. In actual practice it is essentially converting diesel fuel into ethanol, often at a net energy loss.
I have a better idea. Send the freight by train hauled by electric locos. Most of the main lines in Europe are already electrified (but obviously not in the USA which is decades behind in rail tech).
No the US is not decades behind in rail tech. The US has a very advanced FREIGHT rail network and it is used far more than in Europe. The US rail network for freight is arguably the best in the world. The US does a shit job in passenger rail for a variety of reasons. But electrifying the rails in the US for freight trains by and large doesn't make much sense given the distances and geography involved. Diesel electric works pretty well for the use cases here.
A lot of industry and distrubution depots in the UK are alongside railways already, because they were originally placed there with rail sidings, now closed.
Rail delivery makes sense if you are getting large and routine deliveries or if you are doing intermodal transport. LTL truck freight makes a LOT more sense economically for many companies. Remember that you have to stop the whole train to drop off goods or a car to a rail siding. Trucks can go point to point and don't depend so much on coordination with other deliveries. Believe me that lots of companies have done the math on rail delivery. Sometimes it makes sense but often it doesn't.
The difference between reusable and non-reusable rockets is physics and engineering. The difference between human drivers and self-driving cars is hundreds of millions of lines of code that all have to work perfectly. Trust me, physics is easier.
Umm, how many lines of code do you think go into a rocket launch? The space shuttle had about 2 BILLION lines of code that all had to work approximately perfectly. Any rocket launched today, especially one that plans to remain reusable, is going to have a LOT of code made to a very high standard of reliability.
And if you think physics and engineering don't play a big role in self driving cars you don't understand the problem adequately.
Now it might be fair to say that launching a rocket is easier but it certainly isn't because of the number of lines of code. The challenge with autonomous vehicles isn't doing reliable code but in figuring out exactly what the code should do. Provided a company is willing to spend the money to do it, we know how to make reliable code. (we're just not used to companies actually going to the trouble) We haven't figured out how to design software that can recognize and react sanely to all the various inputs that occur in real world driving situations. The algorithms are just super difficult to figure out. The progress that has been made has been remarkable but the corner cases still unsolved remain fairly intimidating.
Because Wall Street needs (and assumes) companies to have constant and continuous growth to keep the financial markets afloat.
When people say "Wall Street" they are usually talking vague generalizations that rarely hold up to strong scrutiny. No different here. Wall Street isn't any sort of coherent entity. It's like saying "hipsters" and it doesn't really describe things in a way that is very useful except as a political punching bag. What really is happening is that investors expect a return on their investment for a given amount of risk. If an investor is seeking a 10% return on their investment in a company and that company gets so big (or does so badly) that a 10% ROI isn't realistic anymore, then the investor will take their money to some other company growing faster. You do it, I do it, and so does every other investor. It's not some vague Other called Wall Street. It's perfectly rational expectations by every sane investor on the planet. I'm not arguing that there isn't a fair bit of fraudulent nonsense surrounding all this (there is) but it's not entirely irrational.
All these valuations assume companies will keep growing at 10, 15, 20% and, if they miss a target by even 1% (oh no, a company only made $990 million profit instead of $1 billion, the horror!) they all scream the company is failing and the stock price tanks.
Stock prices in secondary markets are based on expectations of future returns. When the data reveals those expectations were incorrect then the stock price adjusts accordingly. For the most part this happens fairly rationally most of the time, despite all the sturm and drang you hear. If you expect a certain ROI for a given company then there is a price level for that. If the ROI turns out to be less then the price should be less too. It only becomes a problem when the company management starts thinking their job is the stock price instead of the products the company makes.
In the US the most consistent roads are the interstates, but if you've driven in enough states, you know that the interstates aren't exactly uniform from place to place.
That's putting it mildly. I can tell when I cross the border from Ohio to Michigan with my eyes closed. Michigan's roads suck and are badly underfunded (only Georgia spends less per capita - they need to raise taxes but the republicans control the legislature and break out in hives when they hear the words "raise taxes".
We need to see how self-driving cars handle construction zones, rain, snow, and fog on interstates first.
I think they will figure it out but it's just going to take a lot longer than many people (including Elon Musk) are proposing that they will. I figure even best case we are at least 15 years away from a truly self driving car that could be sold to the public. And that is probably being wildly optimistic. I think the technology will make it's way in to use fairly steadily and already has but full autonomy is quite a ways off yet. I think it's a worthy goal but it's just going to take a while because it's not an easy problem to solve.
I said there is a chain of fusion. From hydrogen, over helium ... all the way to iron.
You said "A star usually fuses its elements in a chain, and a fraction always ends up as iron, by the time it explodes." This only a true statement for a fraction of stars of sufficient size. Smaller stars like our Sun do not do this to any meaningful degree.
But in the end, even a dwarf star will end up wirh iron. In fact there will be a time, when everything will have become iron, and stay that way for a long time.
This is simply not true. You need to study the physics involved a bit further. You've got some of it right but your conflating some of the details.
Is it the solid core that spins differently to the earth, or is it the liquid layer only sloshing around?
A 20 second search on Wikipedia would answer your question...
All stars end up as iron
Not true. Only stars above a certain mass (much larger than our Sun) get to the point where they can fuse larger elements up to iron. Iron comes from supernova explosions and small stars never do that.
as it's the lowest energy state that can neither be fused nor fissioned.
Again not true. Iron can be fused but the reaction loses energy in the process causing the temperature of the star to drop. In large stars this thermal pressure is what is keeping the star from collapsing and/or exploding. Stars that get to the point of trying to fuse iron will rapidly end of life, often violently. You can fuse and fission iron but not in a way that is a net energy gain.
A star usually fuses its elements in a chain, and a fraction always ends up as iron, by the time it explodes.
Stars have to be much larger than our sun to explode via the chain you describe. You have the basics process more or less right but it doesn't apply to all stars. Small stars have much different end of life processes.
A dog will eventually learn it's name. You can call your dog while it is playing with a pack of other dogs, and your dog will come.
Cats do not replicate this behavior.
I think you need to be more careful with your definitions. Taking as given what you stated above as given for the sake of argument, that's does not prove they cannot learn their name. It just proves they do not respond to it in the same manner as dogs. Different species of animals learn in different ways and respond to instructions differently. You wouldn't expect a whale to learn or respond in the same manner as a sloth, so why would you expect a cat to behave like a dog? Not to mention that there can be considerable intra-species and inter-breed variation in ability. I own several border collies and they can learn FAR more commands and generally learn them faster than my whippet because they were bred for different purposes. There is similar variation within cat species and breeds.
So what do I mean? I mean I there's no evidence that they tie that name to *themselves*. The fact that they respond to a word that they can distinguish does not mean they consider it their identity.
A distinction without a difference. All a name is for any animal is a verbal cue that the animal has learned (including humans) which has been taught specific to that animal. Some animals can generalize this more than others but if I call my cat with its name (a unique command to that animal) and it responds in the manner taught to it, then it knows its name. Whether it can generalize that behavior is a separate question. I'm puzzled how you think a dog or any other mammal would be any different in that regard. You absolutely can teach a cat a verbal cue unique to it which to all practical purposes is a name. Maybe you are going deep into something about sentience or some other philosophical nit picking but I'm not seeing any arguments which clarify your position or invalidate mine.
While cats certainly recognize words, I have seen little evidence that they're aware of their name.
When you say "aware of their name", what do you mean exactly by that? Have you trained each of them that their name means something special in relation to them? They don't speak English or any other human language so expecting them to just figure it out without some work on the handler's part is absurdly naive. You can train a cat to respond to its name but it requires specificity and effort on the part of the handler to communicate this information.
A name to a cat is not anything special unless you tell them it should mean something specific. It's just a sound to them otherwise. They can recognize words (and other sounds), including their name, but they won't do anything unless a positive (or negative) association is drawn to that sound.
Plenty of cat owners will happily tell you their felines are capable of responding to their own names, but the scientific jury remains ambivalent on the matter.
No the "scientific jury" is not really in question here. You can train virtually any animal to come or do some actions on a cue. A name is just such a cue and pretty much any animal can be trained to recognize and perform an action in relation to their name. Animal handlers in zoos use this fact constantly. My wife took a graduate level training course at the Shedd Aquarium a few years ago. Some animals are easier to train than others but literally anyone who works with animals for a living will tell you that of course cats can be trained to perform an action in relation to their name and to recognize their name as a cue. The problem is that most people are very bad at training and give all sorts of confusing mixed messages about what the cue they are giving is supposed to mean. Think about how many people you see talking to their dogs or cats as if they actually speak human languages.
So yes, cats can recognize the sounds that we give them as a name and they can associate that with some actions we might ask them to perform. But its a mistake to think it should the same thing it does to a human. We as humans have been trained to respond to our names in certain ways and cats can be trained to have responses to their names too.
The new research, published today in Scientific Advances, doesn't mean cats understand the human conception of a name, but it does show that at least some cats can distinguish their names from other words.
If they think this is "new" or cutting edge research they are WAY behind the curve on animal training. Read some books like https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sh...">Don't Shoot The Dog or watch some videos by a guy like Ken Ramirez.