umm NO. sound travels in both directions, a bike does not move at sufficient speed for sound to only be behind them.
Apparently you are unfamiliar with the Doppler effect. Even on a Harley making a huge obnoxious racket it is easy to get dangerously close to someone before they hear you.
The benefit of hearing a bike is not for cars on the interstate, it is for pedestrians that will step out in front of you, people that are doing slow speed manoeuvres that may fail to see you in the mirrors but still might hear you coming 20-50 yards behind them.
Safety does not depend on others hearing you. Safety results from proper and responsible bike handling. YOU need to be aware of what is around you. YOU need to ride cautiously and defensively. Ride like a bicycle rider does and presume everyone around you is an idiot unaware of your existence.
I sincerely hope they add some sort of noise generator, bikes are dangerous enough already.
Bullshit. I ride a bicycle which makes no noise and somehow I manage to never cause accidents. Noise does not make a bike safe. Good riding habits make a bike (relatively) safe.
They uniformly tell me that they see loud pipes as a critical safety measure to make drivers aware that they're there.
Which is a load of crap. I ride a bicycle which makes basically no noise whatsoever and I've managed to never get hit by a car. My safety is primarily dependent on my riding habits. I don't do stupid things and then expect others to compensate for me. Nobody rides a motorcycle because they are deeply concerned about their safety. Furthermore the loud noise is primarily behind you so it does little for safety anyway. People like loud Harley's because they think it is badass and they want to show off.
Ever heard those crazy bastards claim "loud pipes save lives"?
Which is BS argument. There is NO excuse for most Harley's being as loud as they are. It's just noise pollution. Nobody buys a Harley because they are concerned about their safety.
And if we all get electrics, the guy with a Ferrari can pay for all the roads by himself right?
When electric vehicles account for more than 1% of vehicles sold we can start to have this discussion. There is nothing preventing us from taxing electricity the same way we do gas for road repairs if that becomes necessary. Right now gasoline and diesel is what powers well over 99% of the vehicles on the road. When that changes then we will probably have to rethink how we fund road repairs. I think electric vehicles are the future but we aren't there just yet.
A 4600 lb luxury car gets its road use subsidized by the people in old civics? Sorry that just doesn't fly as fair.
Any tax scheme you come up with is going to burden some groups more than others. A gas tax inherently reflects vehicle weight and distance driven. Yes some vehicles are more efficient than others and we should reward that, not punish it. It's not just road maintenance we are accomplishing here. There are also environmental considerations. Higher gas prices tends to drive people towards more fuel efficient vehicles. If you want to drive your Ferrari I have no problem with that but then you need to pay for the extra CO2 and other pollutants you are emitting in the process. If you want to offset the regressive nature of the taxation then I have no problem with giving a tax credit to lower income folks to help them with getting to work. We should not be subsidizing vehicles that pollute more by not taxing the environmental damage they do. CAFE fuel standards help but a big bump in fuel prices would move people towards more fuel efficient vehicles faster than anything else would.
Odometer readings and vehicle weight is a much better proxy for road usage than gasoline is.
It's not better because it is less practical. Who is going to read the odometer and how often? Gas tax receipts vary in real time with use of the roads and the systems are already in place to collect the money without anyone having to do anything. To read odometers on a a realtime basis you need to install all sorts of Big Brother equipment which I very frankly do not favor. Otherwise you have to have everyone get their odometer checked and have a new bureaucratic body to handle that which we really don't need. Is a gas tax perfectly fair? No. But like I said, perfect is the enemy of good here. I do NOT want some complicated tax scheme that at best marginally improves the fairness of how we fund road maintenance.
I'll believe it if they ever really sell any. I'm tired of listening to d-bags on Harley's violating every noise ordinance without consequence or consideration.
And if its going to scale to anything it should be correlated to vehicle weight.
And what good is that if the vehicle rarely gets driven? Gas is a reasonable proxy on average for vehicle weight. Bigger cars generally consume more fuel. Yes there are some gas guzzlers that consume more than their share but there also are some fuel sippers that consume less. There are environmental benefits to taxing those who needlessly consume more of a resource than necessary.
A Ferrari may drink 4x as much gas as a Honda Civic, but it causes the same wear on the infrastructure.
You're looking for a perfect proxy for road usage. Stop. There isn't any perfect measure you could use that is practically feasible. Gas usage is about as good as it gets. Bigger cars generally consume more gas and cars that drive more consume more gas. You price for the average and adjust for inflation. Perfect is the enemy of good here.
Gas is too cheap so the government must artificially raise the price.
No, infrastructure is too expensive for the funding we have in place. Gas is the best proxy we have for usage of that infrastructure so it's reasonable to tax that. More gas used means more infrastructure repairs needed and less gas used means less use of said infrastructure.
We have set aside funds for infrastructure. 18.4 cents of every single gallon of gas sold in the US! Where does that money actually go?
To maintain the infrastructure - duh. That's pretty much a matter of public record. It's a big country and we have a lot of crumbling roads. Furthermore 18.4 cents doesn't go as far as it did 20 years ago. In fact it is roughly equivalent to $0.11 cents in 1993 dollars once you adjust for inflation. Much of this infrastructure is paid for with federal dollars so it makes sense to tax it at the federal level.
Well over 25% of gas tax funds go to side walks and bike trails and shit like that.
Citation needed. That number smells like you just pulled it out from where the sun don't shine.
You forget that SpaceX has brought launch costs down by a significant factor already...
I haven't forgotten that at all. However you seem to have forgotten that quite a bit of SpaceX's funding comes from NASA these days. They aren't doing what they are doing as a charity. There is no direct profit motive or compelling business case to be made for a Mars trip. It's pure research and expensive research at that. It's not at all inconceivable that the price tag for a Mars mission might be well over $1 Trillion. Even if you drop that by an order of magnitude or more it's still a ludicrous amount of money. You are NOT going to crowd source a project with a price tag that big. There either has to be a profit motive or there has to be one or more motivated nation states involved when you get to that sort of expense. We're not talking about a Kickstarter campaign here.
Considering as well that LEO is half way to anywhere (in terms of delta v) and the costs that are working out, I don't think it is at all unrealistic.
LEO is nowhere close to halfway to Mars, literally or figuratively. Thinking that just getting to LEO means you're mostly there is naive. There are enormous engineering challenges regarding that sort of long distance space flight we have barely begun to address. If something goes wrong in LEO you can either send up a resupply or evacuate. Not possible on a Mars mission. The level of radiation hardening and reliability required is significantly higher. We have no way to shield passengers from radiation once they leave the Earth's magnetic field. We do not have the sort of artificial gravity systems necessary to keep explorers from breaking every bone in their body on arrival. We do not have the food, fuel, or water systems developed for a trip of that duration and magnitude. We don't have a human rated lander or return system. Etc, etc. The cost to address those issues will be in the many, many billions of dollars.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely think we should be working on getting humans on Mars. But I think claims that we are going to do it in 12 years without a crash government program to fund it is naive wishing.
What I don't get is: who cares about hedge fund managers?
Because they are the ones that have the money. I'm not saying that to be snide, I just don't think you truly appreciate how cash flows on that sort of scale work. If the project isn't going to be government funded then you are going to have to get the money from large investors. Hedge fund investors would be a significant part of any such discussion since they own big stakes in most of the companies that would be involved in the engineering and financing of such a project.
Just do an IPO for the general public, small investors all over the world are more than eager to pour their money into SpaceX, they are literally asking him for it!
I appreciate your optimism but I think it is misplaced. Such a mission would cost at minimum, many billions of dollars. Probably hundreds of billions if not trillions. For comparison, the International Space Station which is barely out of the Earth's atmosphere has thus far cost $150 billion and that is FAR less complicated than getting a man to Mars. (that's roughly $500 for every person in America or ~$20 for every person on Earth) The chances of successfully crowd funding that via small investors is remote at best. I think you are greatly overestimating people's willingness and ability to fund such a risky endeavor, especially given that it is quite unclear whether a human could even survive the trip. With all due respect to Mr Musk I think the notion that we will have boots on Mars within 10-15 years is absurd unless one or more large nation states are enthusiastically behind the project and willing to fund it.
Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?
Fossil fuel plants are not required to pay for or clean up substantial amounts of pollution they generate. They dump vast quantities of CO2 and other pollutants, both gaseous and particulate, and never are required to pay for the full impact they have. Sure, there are some emissions controls and cleanup they are required to consider but they do not and never have been required to pay for the full cost of their pollution. Good luck getting them to pay to "clean up" their toxic byproducts too. This is called an externality.
Right now, if one considers the TCO of solar, they come up way short of other options.
Hard to compete with a competitor that not only doesn't have to pay the full cost of their pollution but gets (unnecessary) subsidies to generate said pollution.
Environmentally they fail too, but you have to open up your aperture to the total life cycle of the system to be totally fair.
I'll discuss the total life cycle of solar if you account for all the externalities of coal and natural gas and oil. I think if you do that you'll find that the cost of solar isn't nearly as different as you think it is.
Not likely. Though the link was interesting so I do appreciate that. I've been saying for years that trucks should be built like diesel locomotives. Electric drive with an onboard generator. Preferably a diesel since they are optimized for running at a constant speed. This would make tremendous sense for semis, box trucks and pickups.
OK this is a niche adaption of a production vehicle. And it's no doubt very expensive. But it shows that you are not highlighting any fundamental problems.
So you are saying that there is no economically viable electric or electric hybrid that meets my needs and yet there are no problems? I'm a HUGE fan of electric vehicles. I think hybrids and electric vehicles are the future but the key word there is *future*. Battery and battery charging technology is not where it need to be. Electric-only vehicles will not be practical for most people until they can get recharge times down below 15 minutes. Hybrids have a fundamental economic disadvantage in that they have two power sources and thus are inherently more complicated and expensive. Hybrids and electric vehicles are still priced too high to be competitive without subsidies due to the state and scale of the technology. There are relatively few electric/hybrid options and most of the ones that do exist are mostly tuned for fuel economy above all else (i.e. Prius).
So no, the fundamental engineering and economic problems have not all been worked out. I'm optimistic that they will be solved in due time but there is still a ways to go. I do not however think the Nissan Leaf is a viable option for more than a tiny niche of people. Small capacity, short range, long recharge times, limited (though improving) dedicated charging infrastructure and it costs significantly more than competing cars in a similar form factor.
They could have worked with the guy to come to some sort of satisfactory middle ground. Hell, they could have even worked with the site owners. (heaven forbid) The site owner(s) obviously like(s) the Ikea products, at least from a certain perspective. But instead IKEA seems to have led off with a C&D letter which is universal the Not Nice way of doing things. Appropriate maybe but not nice.
Not when it makes it look like they speak for the company. Presenting a professional image does not require using someone else's trademarks and copyrights. There is nothing prohibiting them from taking appropriate steps to make it clear they are in no way, shape or form associated with IKEA.
That said, it sounds like IKEA decided to go the douchebag route instead of cooperating with these guys who are clearly superfans. Kind of a pity they couldn't be cooler about the whole thing.
But it is a car that fits the usage patterns for a huge number of households, vastly more than its market penetration.
Consider why that is. People don't buy a car based on what might fit their typical usage 90% of the time. They buy a car that will fit what they think they need/want 99.9% of the time. And most of us who own cars do on occasion drive farther than the range of the Leaf. You also are making the mistake of thinking that car purchases are rational. The number one selling vehicle of any type in the US is the Ford F150 pickup. You think they sell that many based on a rational needs analysis? The majority of SUVs and pickups that are marketed for their "off road" capability are never taken off the pavement. Ever.
For example, a large chunk of US households are multi-vehicle households, where one is used primarily as an in-town/commuting vehicle. Why, exactly, isn't a car like the Leaf appropriate for that?
Because for less money I can get a much larger and more capable car for local driving that doesn't have such limited range, cargo capacity and is a lot more fun to drive. Fuel efficiency is nowhere near the top of the list of requirements for most car purchases. Some people care a lot but most do not worry about it much. Furthermore the Leaf is a compact car with limited range trying to sell in the US market which STRONGLY favors big cars without range limits. Honestly I'm impressed they've sold as many as they have given the range limit.
A vehicle that can be used to carry a load of gravel isn't going to be an ideal daily commuter.
I drive a pickup daily. Could I get a more fuel efficient car better optimized for commuting? Sure. But I do more than just commute. I genuinely need the pickup bed with some regularity (at least once a week) and I have the budget for one car. I'm going to pick the one that fits the largest number of my needs, not one that is optimized for commuting over everything else. Don't get me wrong, I'd buy an electric car in a heartbeat if there was one available that fit my needs and budget. But I'm not about to drop tens of thousands of dollars on second a car I don't actually need with severely limited range, slow refueling, limited cargo capacity and that isn't particularly fun to drive. (yes I've driven a Leaf) The cost/benefit analysis for most of us isn't going to favor the Leaf. Too many tradeoffs.
Anyone who hasn't figured out how a regular nuclear weapon works is an idiot. Its surprisingly crude.
Knowing how one works and actually being able to build a functioning one are hugely different things. Any second year physics student understands in principle how they work but that doesn't mean they have the expertise to build a functional one. (thank $diety) I understand in principle how the CPU in my PC was built. In principle it is pretty crude. But that doesn't mean I understand the technology required to actually produce a functional replica. Never underestimate the difficulty of actually creating things and never underestimate the knowledge base required.
College Board materials indicate that the average 11th grader's...
The "average" 11th grader isn't going to be taking AP classes. There is a reason they call it ADVANCED placement. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be for the top end of the bell curve.
Now I'll be sure to remember how impractical my LEAF is as I drive to a morning meeting...
Just because you have a lifestyle that works well with a Leaf doesn't mean the rest of us do. On a typical day I drive close to the range limit of the Leaf. One extra visit to a customer and I could easily exceed it. I'm also going to visit my in-law's this weekend who live approximately 200 miles away. Unless I want to make it a 2-3 day trip, a Leaf is useless to me as primary transportation.
The Leaf is a decent little car if you live in a densely packed urban area and never need to drive more than about 100 miles in a single go. For anyone who doesn't fit that description it is either a second car or it is impossibly impractical. The problem would be significantly mitigated if the range were 200-300 miles but only Tesla has done that so far. The Leaf and vehicles like it simply have too many engineering tradeoffs to ever make a serious dent in the market. Yes it is true that most people don't drive all that far in a typical day. It is also true that a key part of the purchase decision is what people MIGHT want to do with their car and for most of us that includes the occasional long trip. Cars are not bought based on a purely rational analysis of a typical day's commute. Cars are aspirational, emotional purchases that reflect not only who we are but what we think we might want to be.
But the founding and initial success of Apple would not have happened without Wozniak.
The founding and initial success of Apple wouldn't have happened without a lot of people, Woz not the least among them. Any claim however that Jobs was not critical to the success of Apple simply is not looking at the facts. As much as the initial Apple computer hardware was Woz's creation, the company of Apple was Job's creation. Building a company or an organization is every bit the creative engineering feat that building a computer is. It's no disrespect to Wozniak to say that without Jobs none of us would likely have had the chance to recognize Woz's genius. However given the repeated successes Jobs had (Apple, Next (sorta), Pixar, Apple again), it seems more likely we might have heard of Steve Jobs if Apple had never happened. After the initial Apple and Apple ][, Woz never really repeated his success again. He seems to have been the right guy in the right place at the right time.
Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
Apple. As in the company. It is very much the creative brainchild of Steve Jobs. He founded it, led it, it foundered without him and he rebuilt it. If you think that didn't require immense creativity and invention then I think you don't understand the meaning of the words. Furthermore many of the important details of Apple products have been shown to be directly attributable to Steve Jobs. No, he didn't do it all himself, but then nobody does in business.
Indeed, in the grand scheme, you are suggesting that we take guns out of the hands of the individual, and put them solely in the hands of the State; that sounds like a transfer of power from the Weak to the Strong...
Are you really under the delusion that your little rifle is in any way going to be a deterrent against the US military or police forces? You think your pea shooter is going to be much use against a tank or a drone? I'm actually generally a supporter of gun rights but I think this argument that we are somehow fending off the state is absurd. It has no meaningful deterrence effect against our political leaders. If you actually get to the point where you need to use a firearm in anger against the State then there effectively is no state because you are in a civil war. Is that really the world you want to live in?
Washington State has B&O tax, which is basically a gross receipts tax. Microsoft still managed to dodge it for 12 years.
Not saying it's impossible to dodge a gross receipts tax. Merely pointing out that any accountant will tell you that doing so is more difficult than dodging taxes based on profits, particularly if it is a federal gross receipts tax. The hoops to jump through to dodge a gross receipts tax are a significantly bigger pain in the @$$. Microsoft did what you describe by recording software sales in Nevada through a shell company - and it's not entirely clear that what they did was actually legal in this case. For similar reasons Microsoft is incorporated (like lots of other companies) in Delaware even though they have minimal operations there. It's a fiction that allows them to legally claim all sorts of things that aren't really true in the real world. Companies love to play state entities off against each other and big companies have elevated it to an art form. Even if you close one loophole it's a bit like a game of whack-a-mole unless you have a coordinated inter-state/federal approach to tax law.
Trouble is, they just set up shell companies that are subsidiaries and say we made no money to pay tax on, because of all that IP we had to buy from shell-company-x, woe is us.
The solution is basically a gross receipts tax, which does have its drawbacks but is a lot harder to dodge. I'm an accountant and take it from me that it is a LOT harder to fudge the top line than the bottom line. If you just tax profits then it is fairly trivial to shuffle money around such that you show "no profit". It's called Hollywood accounting. All these schemes that Apple and others are engaging in are variations on Hollywood accounting.
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Bikers such as myself appreciate the engine noise their bikes make. It's a marvelous thing.
"Marvelous"? It's obnoxious, wasteful and noise pollution. I think people with loud bike are self indulgent a-holes.
As you can expect, none of these things are present in an electric bike
If you think there aren't thrills to be had on a fast electric bike then you are Doing It Wrong.
umm NO. sound travels in both directions, a bike does not move at sufficient speed for sound to only be behind them.
Apparently you are unfamiliar with the Doppler effect. Even on a Harley making a huge obnoxious racket it is easy to get dangerously close to someone before they hear you.
The benefit of hearing a bike is not for cars on the interstate, it is for pedestrians that will step out in front of you, people that are doing slow speed manoeuvres that may fail to see you in the mirrors but still might hear you coming 20-50 yards behind them.
Safety does not depend on others hearing you. Safety results from proper and responsible bike handling. YOU need to be aware of what is around you. YOU need to ride cautiously and defensively. Ride like a bicycle rider does and presume everyone around you is an idiot unaware of your existence.
I sincerely hope they add some sort of noise generator, bikes are dangerous enough already.
Bullshit. I ride a bicycle which makes no noise and somehow I manage to never cause accidents. Noise does not make a bike safe. Good riding habits make a bike (relatively) safe.
They uniformly tell me that they see loud pipes as a critical safety measure to make drivers aware that they're there.
Which is a load of crap. I ride a bicycle which makes basically no noise whatsoever and I've managed to never get hit by a car. My safety is primarily dependent on my riding habits. I don't do stupid things and then expect others to compensate for me. Nobody rides a motorcycle because they are deeply concerned about their safety. Furthermore the loud noise is primarily behind you so it does little for safety anyway. People like loud Harley's because they think it is badass and they want to show off.
Ever heard those crazy bastards claim "loud pipes save lives"?
Which is BS argument. There is NO excuse for most Harley's being as loud as they are. It's just noise pollution. Nobody buys a Harley because they are concerned about their safety.
And if we all get electrics, the guy with a Ferrari can pay for all the roads by himself right?
When electric vehicles account for more than 1% of vehicles sold we can start to have this discussion. There is nothing preventing us from taxing electricity the same way we do gas for road repairs if that becomes necessary. Right now gasoline and diesel is what powers well over 99% of the vehicles on the road. When that changes then we will probably have to rethink how we fund road repairs. I think electric vehicles are the future but we aren't there just yet.
A 4600 lb luxury car gets its road use subsidized by the people in old civics? Sorry that just doesn't fly as fair.
Any tax scheme you come up with is going to burden some groups more than others. A gas tax inherently reflects vehicle weight and distance driven. Yes some vehicles are more efficient than others and we should reward that, not punish it. It's not just road maintenance we are accomplishing here. There are also environmental considerations. Higher gas prices tends to drive people towards more fuel efficient vehicles. If you want to drive your Ferrari I have no problem with that but then you need to pay for the extra CO2 and other pollutants you are emitting in the process. If you want to offset the regressive nature of the taxation then I have no problem with giving a tax credit to lower income folks to help them with getting to work. We should not be subsidizing vehicles that pollute more by not taxing the environmental damage they do. CAFE fuel standards help but a big bump in fuel prices would move people towards more fuel efficient vehicles faster than anything else would.
Odometer readings and vehicle weight is a much better proxy for road usage than gasoline is.
It's not better because it is less practical. Who is going to read the odometer and how often? Gas tax receipts vary in real time with use of the roads and the systems are already in place to collect the money without anyone having to do anything. To read odometers on a a realtime basis you need to install all sorts of Big Brother equipment which I very frankly do not favor. Otherwise you have to have everyone get their odometer checked and have a new bureaucratic body to handle that which we really don't need. Is a gas tax perfectly fair? No. But like I said, perfect is the enemy of good here. I do NOT want some complicated tax scheme that at best marginally improves the fairness of how we fund road maintenance.
I'll believe it if they ever really sell any. I'm tired of listening to d-bags on Harley's violating every noise ordinance without consequence or consideration.
And if its going to scale to anything it should be correlated to vehicle weight.
And what good is that if the vehicle rarely gets driven? Gas is a reasonable proxy on average for vehicle weight. Bigger cars generally consume more fuel. Yes there are some gas guzzlers that consume more than their share but there also are some fuel sippers that consume less. There are environmental benefits to taxing those who needlessly consume more of a resource than necessary.
A Ferrari may drink 4x as much gas as a Honda Civic, but it causes the same wear on the infrastructure.
You're looking for a perfect proxy for road usage. Stop. There isn't any perfect measure you could use that is practically feasible. Gas usage is about as good as it gets. Bigger cars generally consume more gas and cars that drive more consume more gas. You price for the average and adjust for inflation. Perfect is the enemy of good here.
Gas is too cheap so the government must artificially raise the price.
No, infrastructure is too expensive for the funding we have in place. Gas is the best proxy we have for usage of that infrastructure so it's reasonable to tax that. More gas used means more infrastructure repairs needed and less gas used means less use of said infrastructure.
We have set aside funds for infrastructure. 18.4 cents of every single gallon of gas sold in the US! Where does that money actually go?
To maintain the infrastructure - duh. That's pretty much a matter of public record. It's a big country and we have a lot of crumbling roads. Furthermore 18.4 cents doesn't go as far as it did 20 years ago. In fact it is roughly equivalent to $0.11 cents in 1993 dollars once you adjust for inflation. Much of this infrastructure is paid for with federal dollars so it makes sense to tax it at the federal level.
Well over 25% of gas tax funds go to side walks and bike trails and shit like that.
Citation needed. That number smells like you just pulled it out from where the sun don't shine.
You forget that SpaceX has brought launch costs down by a significant factor already...
I haven't forgotten that at all. However you seem to have forgotten that quite a bit of SpaceX's funding comes from NASA these days. They aren't doing what they are doing as a charity. There is no direct profit motive or compelling business case to be made for a Mars trip. It's pure research and expensive research at that. It's not at all inconceivable that the price tag for a Mars mission might be well over $1 Trillion. Even if you drop that by an order of magnitude or more it's still a ludicrous amount of money. You are NOT going to crowd source a project with a price tag that big. There either has to be a profit motive or there has to be one or more motivated nation states involved when you get to that sort of expense. We're not talking about a Kickstarter campaign here.
Considering as well that LEO is half way to anywhere (in terms of delta v) and the costs that are working out, I don't think it is at all unrealistic.
LEO is nowhere close to halfway to Mars, literally or figuratively. Thinking that just getting to LEO means you're mostly there is naive. There are enormous engineering challenges regarding that sort of long distance space flight we have barely begun to address. If something goes wrong in LEO you can either send up a resupply or evacuate. Not possible on a Mars mission. The level of radiation hardening and reliability required is significantly higher. We have no way to shield passengers from radiation once they leave the Earth's magnetic field. We do not have the sort of artificial gravity systems necessary to keep explorers from breaking every bone in their body on arrival. We do not have the food, fuel, or water systems developed for a trip of that duration and magnitude. We don't have a human rated lander or return system. Etc, etc. The cost to address those issues will be in the many, many billions of dollars.
Don't get me wrong. I absolutely think we should be working on getting humans on Mars. But I think claims that we are going to do it in 12 years without a crash government program to fund it is naive wishing.
What I don't get is: who cares about hedge fund managers?
Because they are the ones that have the money. I'm not saying that to be snide, I just don't think you truly appreciate how cash flows on that sort of scale work. If the project isn't going to be government funded then you are going to have to get the money from large investors. Hedge fund investors would be a significant part of any such discussion since they own big stakes in most of the companies that would be involved in the engineering and financing of such a project.
Just do an IPO for the general public, small investors all over the world are more than eager to pour their money into SpaceX, they are literally asking him for it!
I appreciate your optimism but I think it is misplaced. Such a mission would cost at minimum, many billions of dollars. Probably hundreds of billions if not trillions. For comparison, the International Space Station which is barely out of the Earth's atmosphere has thus far cost $150 billion and that is FAR less complicated than getting a man to Mars. (that's roughly $500 for every person in America or ~$20 for every person on Earth) The chances of successfully crowd funding that via small investors is remote at best. I think you are greatly overestimating people's willingness and ability to fund such a risky endeavor, especially given that it is quite unclear whether a human could even survive the trip. With all due respect to Mr Musk I think the notion that we will have boots on Mars within 10-15 years is absurd unless one or more large nation states are enthusiastically behind the project and willing to fund it.
Handwaved away? On that issue I disagree with you. Such costs are routinely considered when a company goes though the decision cycle of "should we build a new plant?
Fossil fuel plants are not required to pay for or clean up substantial amounts of pollution they generate. They dump vast quantities of CO2 and other pollutants, both gaseous and particulate, and never are required to pay for the full impact they have. Sure, there are some emissions controls and cleanup they are required to consider but they do not and never have been required to pay for the full cost of their pollution. Good luck getting them to pay to "clean up" their toxic byproducts too. This is called an externality.
Right now, if one considers the TCO of solar, they come up way short of other options.
Hard to compete with a competitor that not only doesn't have to pay the full cost of their pollution but gets (unnecessary) subsidies to generate said pollution.
Environmentally they fail too, but you have to open up your aperture to the total life cycle of the system to be totally fair.
I'll discuss the total life cycle of solar if you account for all the externalities of coal and natural gas and oil. I think if you do that you'll find that the cost of solar isn't nearly as different as you think it is.
All your issues are solved.
Not likely. Though the link was interesting so I do appreciate that. I've been saying for years that trucks should be built like diesel locomotives. Electric drive with an onboard generator. Preferably a diesel since they are optimized for running at a constant speed. This would make tremendous sense for semis, box trucks and pickups.
OK this is a niche adaption of a production vehicle. And it's no doubt very expensive. But it shows that you are not highlighting any fundamental problems.
So you are saying that there is no economically viable electric or electric hybrid that meets my needs and yet there are no problems? I'm a HUGE fan of electric vehicles. I think hybrids and electric vehicles are the future but the key word there is *future*. Battery and battery charging technology is not where it need to be. Electric-only vehicles will not be practical for most people until they can get recharge times down below 15 minutes. Hybrids have a fundamental economic disadvantage in that they have two power sources and thus are inherently more complicated and expensive. Hybrids and electric vehicles are still priced too high to be competitive without subsidies due to the state and scale of the technology. There are relatively few electric/hybrid options and most of the ones that do exist are mostly tuned for fuel economy above all else (i.e. Prius).
So no, the fundamental engineering and economic problems have not all been worked out. I'm optimistic that they will be solved in due time but there is still a ways to go. I do not however think the Nissan Leaf is a viable option for more than a tiny niche of people. Small capacity, short range, long recharge times, limited (though improving) dedicated charging infrastructure and it costs significantly more than competing cars in a similar form factor.
What was douchebag about it?
They could have worked with the guy to come to some sort of satisfactory middle ground. Hell, they could have even worked with the site owners. (heaven forbid) The site owner(s) obviously like(s) the Ikea products, at least from a certain perspective. But instead IKEA seems to have led off with a C&D letter which is universal the Not Nice way of doing things. Appropriate maybe but not nice.
So they are not allowed to do a professional job?
Not when it makes it look like they speak for the company. Presenting a professional image does not require using someone else's trademarks and copyrights. There is nothing prohibiting them from taking appropriate steps to make it clear they are in no way, shape or form associated with IKEA.
That said, it sounds like IKEA decided to go the douchebag route instead of cooperating with these guys who are clearly superfans. Kind of a pity they couldn't be cooler about the whole thing.
But it is a car that fits the usage patterns for a huge number of households, vastly more than its market penetration.
Consider why that is. People don't buy a car based on what might fit their typical usage 90% of the time. They buy a car that will fit what they think they need/want 99.9% of the time. And most of us who own cars do on occasion drive farther than the range of the Leaf. You also are making the mistake of thinking that car purchases are rational. The number one selling vehicle of any type in the US is the Ford F150 pickup. You think they sell that many based on a rational needs analysis? The majority of SUVs and pickups that are marketed for their "off road" capability are never taken off the pavement. Ever.
For example, a large chunk of US households are multi-vehicle households, where one is used primarily as an in-town/commuting vehicle. Why, exactly, isn't a car like the Leaf appropriate for that?
Because for less money I can get a much larger and more capable car for local driving that doesn't have such limited range, cargo capacity and is a lot more fun to drive. Fuel efficiency is nowhere near the top of the list of requirements for most car purchases. Some people care a lot but most do not worry about it much. Furthermore the Leaf is a compact car with limited range trying to sell in the US market which STRONGLY favors big cars without range limits. Honestly I'm impressed they've sold as many as they have given the range limit.
A vehicle that can be used to carry a load of gravel isn't going to be an ideal daily commuter.
I drive a pickup daily. Could I get a more fuel efficient car better optimized for commuting? Sure. But I do more than just commute. I genuinely need the pickup bed with some regularity (at least once a week) and I have the budget for one car. I'm going to pick the one that fits the largest number of my needs, not one that is optimized for commuting over everything else. Don't get me wrong, I'd buy an electric car in a heartbeat if there was one available that fit my needs and budget. But I'm not about to drop tens of thousands of dollars on second a car I don't actually need with severely limited range, slow refueling, limited cargo capacity and that isn't particularly fun to drive. (yes I've driven a Leaf) The cost/benefit analysis for most of us isn't going to favor the Leaf. Too many tradeoffs.
You don't understand: in America everyone is above average.
Only in Lake Wobegon.
Anyone who hasn't figured out how a regular nuclear weapon works is an idiot. Its surprisingly crude.
Knowing how one works and actually being able to build a functioning one are hugely different things. Any second year physics student understands in principle how they work but that doesn't mean they have the expertise to build a functional one. (thank $diety) I understand in principle how the CPU in my PC was built. In principle it is pretty crude. But that doesn't mean I understand the technology required to actually produce a functional replica. Never underestimate the difficulty of actually creating things and never underestimate the knowledge base required.
College Board materials indicate that the average 11th grader's...
The "average" 11th grader isn't going to be taking AP classes. There is a reason they call it ADVANCED placement. It's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be for the top end of the bell curve.
Now I'll be sure to remember how impractical my LEAF is as I drive to a morning meeting...
Just because you have a lifestyle that works well with a Leaf doesn't mean the rest of us do. On a typical day I drive close to the range limit of the Leaf. One extra visit to a customer and I could easily exceed it. I'm also going to visit my in-law's this weekend who live approximately 200 miles away. Unless I want to make it a 2-3 day trip, a Leaf is useless to me as primary transportation.
The Leaf is a decent little car if you live in a densely packed urban area and never need to drive more than about 100 miles in a single go. For anyone who doesn't fit that description it is either a second car or it is impossibly impractical. The problem would be significantly mitigated if the range were 200-300 miles but only Tesla has done that so far. The Leaf and vehicles like it simply have too many engineering tradeoffs to ever make a serious dent in the market. Yes it is true that most people don't drive all that far in a typical day. It is also true that a key part of the purchase decision is what people MIGHT want to do with their car and for most of us that includes the occasional long trip. Cars are not bought based on a purely rational analysis of a typical day's commute. Cars are aspirational, emotional purchases that reflect not only who we are but what we think we might want to be.
But the founding and initial success of Apple would not have happened without Wozniak.
The founding and initial success of Apple wouldn't have happened without a lot of people, Woz not the least among them. Any claim however that Jobs was not critical to the success of Apple simply is not looking at the facts. As much as the initial Apple computer hardware was Woz's creation, the company of Apple was Job's creation. Building a company or an organization is every bit the creative engineering feat that building a computer is. It's no disrespect to Wozniak to say that without Jobs none of us would likely have had the chance to recognize Woz's genius. However given the repeated successes Jobs had (Apple, Next (sorta), Pixar, Apple again), it seems more likely we might have heard of Steve Jobs if Apple had never happened. After the initial Apple and Apple ][, Woz never really repeated his success again. He seems to have been the right guy in the right place at the right time.
Steve Jobs was not creative. At all. Name one thing he ever invented.
Apple. As in the company. It is very much the creative brainchild of Steve Jobs. He founded it, led it, it foundered without him and he rebuilt it. If you think that didn't require immense creativity and invention then I think you don't understand the meaning of the words. Furthermore many of the important details of Apple products have been shown to be directly attributable to Steve Jobs. No, he didn't do it all himself, but then nobody does in business.
Indeed, in the grand scheme, you are suggesting that we take guns out of the hands of the individual, and put them solely in the hands of the State; that sounds like a transfer of power from the Weak to the Strong...
Are you really under the delusion that your little rifle is in any way going to be a deterrent against the US military or police forces? You think your pea shooter is going to be much use against a tank or a drone? I'm actually generally a supporter of gun rights but I think this argument that we are somehow fending off the state is absurd. It has no meaningful deterrence effect against our political leaders. If you actually get to the point where you need to use a firearm in anger against the State then there effectively is no state because you are in a civil war. Is that really the world you want to live in?
Washington State has B&O tax, which is basically a gross receipts tax. Microsoft still managed to dodge it for 12 years.
Not saying it's impossible to dodge a gross receipts tax. Merely pointing out that any accountant will tell you that doing so is more difficult than dodging taxes based on profits, particularly if it is a federal gross receipts tax. The hoops to jump through to dodge a gross receipts tax are a significantly bigger pain in the @$$. Microsoft did what you describe by recording software sales in Nevada through a shell company - and it's not entirely clear that what they did was actually legal in this case. For similar reasons Microsoft is incorporated (like lots of other companies) in Delaware even though they have minimal operations there. It's a fiction that allows them to legally claim all sorts of things that aren't really true in the real world. Companies love to play state entities off against each other and big companies have elevated it to an art form. Even if you close one loophole it's a bit like a game of whack-a-mole unless you have a coordinated inter-state/federal approach to tax law.
Trouble is, they just set up shell companies that are subsidiaries and say we made no money to pay tax on, because of all that IP we had to buy from shell-company-x, woe is us.
The solution is basically a gross receipts tax, which does have its drawbacks but is a lot harder to dodge. I'm an accountant and take it from me that it is a LOT harder to fudge the top line than the bottom line. If you just tax profits then it is fairly trivial to shuffle money around such that you show "no profit". It's called Hollywood accounting. All these schemes that Apple and others are engaging in are variations on Hollywood accounting.