Heh, charge/discharge efficiency of nickel-iron battery is only 65% / 85%. Pumped hydro does better with its full cycle efficiency of 70% - 80%.
Pumped hydro is geographically restricted and thus not a useful comparison for many/most places. Where I live it is literally impossible to use on any sort of meaningful scale because we don't have large dams anywhere nearby. If you live somewhere near a large dam then yeah, you might find pumped hydro to be a good idea. For most of us it isn't so helpful. Hydro is great except where you cannot get it. (oh and that pesky little problem of screwing up local ecosystems too)
The batteries are also expensive. They cost around $4.5 - $20 per one litre. I guess you can build pumped storage cheaper per 1 litre.
"Per litre"? What does a volume measurement have to do with a static chemical battery? Anyway pumped hydro is only cheap in places where hydro power is already available. In places like where I live it is FAR more expensive because we'd have to build a massive man-made reservoir first which would be immediately uneconomical.
It does not look good for batteries. Looks like the only good thing about them is the response time.
Bullshit. Chemical batteries have a lot of good features besides response time. 1) Not geographically restricted 2) Can be placed at or near point of use 3) Can be consolidated for grid power or distributed for off-grid use 4) Are economical compared to alternatives not blessed with special local geography. 5) Are (relatively) easy to maintain 6) Can be recycled and reused and relocated 7) Steady improvement in technology and chemistry 8) Easy to expand battery banks as needed 9) Relatively high efficiencies for certain battery types
That is true but technology for scrubbers that prevent CO2 emissions from processes like that is also improving... you would think any such process would be greatly interesting in re-capturing carbon for further industrial use.
"Recapture carbon for further industrial use"? We dump the stuff by the megaton right now and we can literally dig carbon it out of the ground for WAY less money than it costs to capture and reuse carbon. There simply isn't that much demand for carbon even if we had a way to process it economically.
Over time other materials will take the place of steel though, I'm not sure how much longer steel has as a primary material but I'm thinking less than 20 years.
Based on what? Steel is going to remain a vital and first choice metal for the foreseeable future. Certainly for the lifetime of anyone reading this. I don't see any circumstances where this would change. It's simply too useful and cost effective and there is no plausible material or group of materials that could plausibly displace it.
"When set to mimic the actual fishing rate over the two decades spanning the dataset, the model outcomes were consistent with both the new and old fish data. When fishing mortality rates were increased in the model, larger fish moved progressively deeper.
I think this falls under confirming the obvious. Our fishing creates an evolutionary pressure. Fish that survive our hunting will tend to be the ones that prefer places where our nets don't reach as often. As long as we don't hunt them to the point where the population collapses it's perfectly obvious that we would see them evolve in response to our fishing tactics over time.
You do realize that this disclosure means he loses money if TSLA succeeds. Its equivalent to saying 75% of my net worth is invested in TSLA shorts.
I have neither a long nor short position on the company. I have posted numerous times here on slashdot that I think TSLA is good company but a terrible stock. It's ludicrously overvalued but it isn't a good short candidate either because the pricing isn't even vaguely rational so it's difficult to predict when it might come back down to earth. I wouldn't touch that stock with a barge pole, long or short.
Its manufacturing, not rocket science (that's SpaceX).
Amusing that you think manufacturing isn't the difficult part of rocket science. Your condescension towards manufacturing pretty clearly shows you know nothing about the subject. Manufacturing a device like an automobile at scale is actually one of the most challenging activities known to mankind.
I'm sure they will figure it out, what the GP hasn't figured out is that ICE car companies can't make EV batteries and haven't even bought the land to make a battery factory yet.
Apparently you are unaware that Tesla is partnered with Panasonic which is the company actually doing the heavy lifting on Tesla's vaunted gigafactory. You know, Panasonic aka the largest battery manufacturer in the world. Please note that Tesla is not on the list of largest battery makers. Panasonic provided most of the funding and operational expertise on the project. If you think companies like GM cannot find a similar partner you are mistaken. (GM gets their batteries from LG in case you wondered)
that the only way to make a car at an attractive price point is to own your own battery factories and invest heavily in battery R&D.
Or to just buy a company already doing that. There are LOTS of companies making batteries and investing it battery R&D. It's not clear that Tesla has any insurmountable advantage here though I agree that their strategy is a sensible one.
You can merge all you want so long as customers have a reasonable option to use a competitor
A reasonable perspective though remember that oligopolies are a thing and can be just as bad as a monopoly. It's not clear that going from 4 major wireless providers to 3 provides any benefit to consumers but it's pretty obvious how it might hurt them.
In some cases a monopoly is actually the most economically efficient. Having multiple companies run power lines to your house is actually more expensive than having a single well regulated monopoly for example. Same with water lines and other utilities. Typically these are natural monopolies. But these sorts of situations are exceptions and don't seem applicable for wireless services if they are being properly regulated.
What makes Tesla struggle is they thought they could design a much more automated assembly line.
That's an institutional knowledge problem. They just don't have the collective experience to know what won't work yet or where the boundaries of the technology lie. You can do a lot with automation but there are limits which a more seasoned company would understand. Experience can be a double edged sword because it can keep you from trying something new but it also can keep you from making mistakes.
The idea was to apply software agility to the assembly line, iterating rapidly and developing something better than everyone else.
That's not a new concept. You think nobody at Ford or Toyota or GM has ever had that thought? The difference is that they've already tried and figured out where it works and where it doesn't. Tesla is just reinventing the wheel here and learning lessons the hard way. To be honest they got a bit cocky and it bit them in the ass.
But like many agile projects, the end is hard to see and harder to get to by simply tweaking and tweaking. At least in a short time frame.
The software mentality can get you into trouble when you are making hardware. The economic and technical constrains are different as is the pace of iteration. It's relatively inexpensive to iterate in software and you can do it quickly. This is a MUCH harder trick to pull off when you are making physical goods.
I'd love to see their QC stats as well. New line, new workers, new robots, new procedures, new process. I'm pretty sure they're not hitting Six Sigma
You can get general stats for free with just a short search on the internet. You can pay for detailed ones. It's not hard to get that information. NOBODY is hitting six sigma quality in auto assembly. Even the best suppliers don't reach that level of quality except in rare cases. Too many products with too many stacking tolerances for that to be possible. But the big auto makers are all really quite good, even the worse ones. Companies like Toyota and Honda have a well deserved legendary reputation for their quality systems. I've been in their plants myself and can confirm this first hand. They are REALLY good at quality.
But your mistake is thinking that they do it all from scratch. That's the thing is that once you have a part of a production system that works you don't redesign it all from scratch. The big automakers have proven technology and production systems which they just have to reconfigure and reorganize. They make incremental improvements which accumulate over time. Tesla just hasn't had the benefit of years and decades of iteration. In time they'll get there (hopefully) but you can't accelerate the process beyond a certain point. Tesla doesn't get any bonus points for trying to do it all from scratch. That just means they have a lot of places where things can (and will) go wrong.
Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer (and an accountant) and my day job is running a company that makes auto parts. I literally build assembly lines for a living so I'm actually talking about something I know pretty well here.
Yeah that's kind of my point. We have a pretty good idea what sort of power density is theoretically possible with the chemistries we are working with and the possible improvement simply isn't big enough. There could always be some sort of unexpected breakthrough but we can't depend on that. I think we'll see some progress and it wouldn't shock me to see electrification of some aspects of commercial aircraft but I don't think we are going to see a commercially viable electric aircraft with significant cargo capacity any time soon. The physics is well understood and pretty inflexible.
Tesla can't meet demand at the moment, where as Ford is cutting models due to lack of it.
Wow is that a false equivalency if I've ever heard one. Tesla sells a few tens of thousands of cars each year. Ford sells millions. These are not equivalent situations. It's easy to exceed production capacity when you barely have any capacity and you only sell to a niche segment. Ford makes and sells nearly as many F150s every month (50-80K) as all of Tesla's models combined per year. That's with just one vehicle model.
It's hard to say how big Tesla's market share will end up being once they can get production up to speed and fulfil all the pre-orders.
In the short run it isn't hard at all. Their market share will be slightly bigger than it currently is which is to say tiny. In the long run (talking 10+ years) it's hard to predict because it's not even clear yet if Tesla will survive. If they do their future looks bright but they aren't going to overtake GM anytime soon if that is what you are implying. But I could see them being a steadily growing and influential automaker over the next decade if they can survive the next 2 years.
But it seems certain that Tesla will become a major player in the market now.
"Certain"? No. The odds are good they will become a significant automaker by marketshare IF they can survive the next 24 months and come to profitability. That is anything but certain right now. There is reason for optimism but to pretend they are out of danger is to ignore reality. Tesla needs to become profitable soon or their financing is going to dry up. If that happens they are screwed.
I must have missed where VAG built a factory capable of producing 5k EVs per week in 15 months from the start of tooling, on a brand new line with a newly hired workforce. Literally, the first 467 Kuka robots arrived, were placed, and workers were hired, in April-June 2017.
Hate to break it to you but the big auto makers build assembly lines with FAR larger production rates in shorter time periods than that routinely. It's normal for companies like Toyota to go from start of DESIGN to production in 20-30 months. Not start of tooling, start of design. They do tooling in far less than 15 months. And the process of assembling an EV isn't wildly different from a car with an internal combustion engine. A chassis is still a chassis. A suspension is still a suspension. I've seen them tool up an entire factory in under 10 months. (I work in the industry)
What makes Tesla struggle is that they don't have the institutional knowledge of a company like VW or Toyota and they are still building their production system procedures. They're having to learn it as they go and develop their production system from scratch which is genuinely hard to do. What Tesla has done is very impressive but let's not pretend they have mastered assembly better than companies that have been doing it for decades. Tesla is bringing a lot of awesome innovation to the party on the design and product engineering but to date they are still behind the curve when it comes to manufacturing prowess. If they survive I think they'll be fine in the long run but they have a bumpy road ahead of them for a little while. People tend to think manufacturing assembly is easy and it's actually one of the hardest things to do well you can imagine. I think Musk gets it and his job is just to keep the cash flowing until Tesla can get their production system scaled up and stable.
LI-Ion/LI Polymer batteries don't have quite the power/weight of conventional fuel, but it's perfectly acceptable for low-performance airplanes even now.
Not if you plan to carry any cargo they are not. And since cargo cost per unit distance traveled is by far the most important metric for their success we aren't anywhere close to commercial viability right now. Current battery tech is just too heavy for economic viability right now and that doesn't look likely to change in the near future. Battery power density will have to increase substantially.
The issues are more economic - the initial cost, the cost of time on the ground charnging, and safety - like the tendency to burst into flames for no adequately-explained reason.
While those are all important things to consider, THE primary metric that matters is cost per distance traveled of a kg of cargo. Everything else is secondary.
Sure batteries are heavy, but if you can physically fly an electric plane from point A to point B on batteries, then the only important remaining question is whether it's cost effective.
It's not whether you can fly a plane. It's how much CARGO that plane can carry between points. Right now batteries are too heavy to permit any meaningful amount of cargo to be carried and therefore they are economically noncompetitive.
Since short haul flights are particularly carbon intensive per distance traveled, an electric plane would generate a lot of valuable carbon credits.
Before you worry about carbon output you need to get the cost per kg of cargo (including human cargo) to rough parity. Right now we can make electric planes that can get themselves aloft but they are useless because they cannot carry any meaningful amount of cargo. Once the cost per unit of cargo is somewhere vaguely close fossil fuel powered options THEN we can start bringing carbon credits into the discussion.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for electric planes but the physics and economics involved aren't forgiving on this point.
Obviously there will need to be improvements in battery technology, just like there were for cars.
That understates things quite a lot. Batteries will have to have a HUGE increase in power density to make them feasible for commercial aviation. Sure we can make some really light research vehicles but one doesn't have to be an aviation engineer to do the math on how much lighter batteries will have to get to make electric planes feasible for anything practical.
It's worth working on the problem but until batteries become a LOT lighter than they are it's going to be a dead end.
Manned missions are a deadend and a huge waste of money.
I could not disagree more. You can never declare any form of exploration a dead end before you have actually done the exploration. There are literally entire worlds to explore and things to discover that cannot be learned unless we actually send people there to learn them.
Robots/rovers can do everything humans can at 1/10 of the cost
They demonstrably cannot do everything humans can do nor can they do it anywhere near as fast or with similar flexibility. We don't have robots that capable here on Earth so your argument is dead before it even starts. A geologist dropped on the surface of the Moon or Mars can accomplish FAR more in a vastly shorter time than any robot we are in danger of developing. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude increases in productivity. Spirit and Opportunity took 8 years to cover the distance the Apollo astronauts covered in 3 days. There is a huge amount of technology relating to manned spaceflight that you literally cannot hope to develop unless you actually plan to send people into space. Not the least of these is discoveries relating to human physiology - good luck studying the effects of space travel on humans just using robots. We are still benefiting from the advances of the Apollo missions which have paid for NASA's budget since its inception as well as every robotic mission we've ever done many times over.
Mining asteroids is one of those stupid ideas that sounds great until you actually think through the economics of it and the practical realities of actually doing it. It requires technology substantially more advanced than any we have or are in danger of developing any time soon. It requires an economically sustainable space based economy and infrastructure. And even if we solve that problem by pretending such technology is within our grasp, the economics of asteroid mining still don't make any sense. Not to mention that the ONLY way to make use of such materials (given our lack of any space manufacturing infrastructure) is to drop them on Earth from orbit thereby creating a de-facto WMD. (hint: large hunks of metal dropped from space have a LOT of kinetic energy)
Talk about "security issues," like placing tariffs on imported cars because what if there's hostilities and we have all these foreign vehicles, how about our national dependency on those same foreigners for metals and minerals?
That's one of the bizarre arguments one hears for tariffs by those who favor them - that somehow they tariffs are addressing a national security concern. It's complete nonsense of course. As if every country in the world that makes steel (for example) would somehow simultaneously be unwilling to sell it to us and we somehow would be unable to make any of it ourselves. Even a global (non nuclear) war isn't going to somehow make global trade somehow stop.
Had we not lost our goddam minds, we would have hospitable habitats for launching miners and for refining the ores before shipping to Earth or even manufacturing on the Moon and then using Amazon Prime, taking advantage of its free shipping.
No we would not. We might be further along than we are but we wouldn't be anywhere close to the science fiction scenario you propose even had we devoted substantial portions of global GDP to the purpose. Maybe it will happen someday in the distant future but we're likely talking hundreds of years unless there is substantial political will to fund development of a space economy. Heck the last moon mission was around the time I was born and even if NASA was off on a wild goose chase that doesn't explain the behavior of the other 95% of the world's population. Asteroid mining isn't going to happen on an industrial scale in your lifetime. Get over it.
He said plane makers such as Boeing and Airbus were developing electric aircraft and that battery prices were tumbling, making it feasible to reach a government goal of making all domestic flights in Norway electric by 2040.
Battery prices aren't the big problem. Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation. Even the best battery tech we have today has a rather poor power to weight ratio. I see no evidence in this article that they have solved that problem since that would require a breakthrough in power density for batteries.
Note that the plane they show has a takeoff weight of 570kg which allows for basically no cargo or passengers. For comparison the EMPTY weight of a Cessna 170 is an almost identical 573kg and it has a takeoff weight of 864-1000kg.
NASA deserves to be embarrassed. They wasted all the years between Apollo and now.
NASA takes their marching orders and gets their budget from Congress and the President. The fault lies with the owner of the purse strings if it lies with anyone. The Space Shuttle was a reasonable idea that failed because it had to satisfy too many groups and it sucked all the oxygen out of the room for decades. Then each President tries to give NASA a new priority but never pursues the funding to make it happen during their administration. Basically they make it impossible for NASA to do their job properly.
NASA has their faults to be sure but they are quite competent at many things. Cutting edge research, scientific exploration, technology development and transfer, and more. Though the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle it also was an amazing piece of technology that shows how capable NASA is. The problem for the last 30 years is that NASA has basically been stuck being a bus service to space instead of being tasked with pushing the boundaries of exploration and technology.
And now I am a parent... and I wonder what I am going to say to my daughter when she gets a C in a class she doesn't like in school.
My take on it generally is that I don't care so much what the grade is but I care very much how much effort was put forth. Sometimes you work really hard for a C and other times you get an A with barely any effort. I also plan to point out that grades don't define her but they do matter for some things. They matter for college admissions. They sometimes matter to employers. I can be very pleased with a C in a hard class where she put in a lot of effort especially if she doesn't like the class.
I hope I can keep it cool and tell her with a straight face that school performance doesn't matter, and all the useful learning she is ever going to do is going to be self led.
School performance does matter, just not in the way they pretend it does. Good grades tend to mean you worked hard. I would argue despite my previous comments that grades in subjects like math and science and writing and a few others really do matter even in the real world. If my child gets a C in a music class I'm only upset if they obviously didn't really try. If they get a C in math though I'm not going to be as forgiving though again effort matters most. They don't have to like it but not liking something isn't an excuse for not doing your best. I know I didn't have that reinforced adequately by my parents and I don't plan to make that mistake. (I'm sure I'll make plenty of my own mistakes...)
That is entirely incorrect. I can memorize things all day long and regurgitate them back at you for weeks and sometimes months. I could ace every test in every subject and still almost failed out of high school because I refused to do homework.
I'm afraid it's quite correct. Schools test memorization ability far more than they test analytical ability in general. Yes if you never do homework you still can fail classes. Nobody claimed otherwise. I was lazy about the homework too which is why my grades generally were poor. But the fact remains that someone who can memorize well (and can be bothered to do so) will generally outperform someone who doesn't memorize well even if they are good at figuring out problems.
I eventually found a place in an OK state school, but I didn't lose the C+ habit. I graduated the the minimum acceptable grade to achieve a diploma:/
There is an old joke that applies. "What do they call the person who graduates last in their class from medical school? Doctor." Unless you plan to go into academia the only time your grades really matter is if you are trying to get a competitive job right out of college with limited work experience. After that nobody gives a shit if you had mediocre grades. I haven't had anyone ask in a job interview what my grades were for 20 years across numerous jobs.
Not everyone who's made for college is made for a standardized test.
True but for some of us (like me) the standardized test gave us a way to prove we were smarter than our grades would otherwise indicate. I wasn't a great student. Partly because I'm easily bored especially by subjects I don't care about. But mostly because primary school tends to heavily reward the ability to memorize and regurgitate random facts and my brain isn't optimally wired for doing that. But I could do rather well (generally 90-95th percentile) on standardized tests so even though my grades were mediocre I was still able to get into a very good college.
So some people who are college material don't have good test scores but conversely some people without exceptional grades actually are rather bright and do fine in college. I was the later.
My point is that is really hasn't. My laptop already does all the things I need to do with it.
That does not matter for purposes of buying a new one. All that means is that you aren't going to upgrade until you either get a new use case requirement or it breaks. And when you do replace it you almost certainly are not going to buy the same model even if it worked just fine. You are going to buy something that most likely is technologically superior to whatever you are currently and likely for the same or less money. Because why wouldn't you? It's like buying a new car that gets notably better gas mileage and goes faster for the same money as what you bought 3 years prior. Nobody is going to buy old inferior technology unless they absolutely have to. And companies that don't keep up with the state of the art are going to lose sales to companies that do keep up. Right now Apple is not keeping up in their Macintosh division.
When my 20 year old toaster died, I want another one just like it, not some shiny contraption with electronic doodads that add no value to what I want to do, which is toast bread.
Poor analogy. Toaster technology is fully mature and hasn't advanced meaningfully in the last 20 years. PC technology has advanced more in the last 6 months than toasters have in the last 50 years. Sure PCs are a more mature technology than they were 10 or 20 years ago but compared to most other products they still are improving at a breathtaking pace. A PC you buy today will for the same price point be notably better for most use cases than one you bought just 3 years ago.
Nobody is saying you have to upgrade for no purpose but if you are in the market for a computer you simply aren't going to buy a 3 year old model unless you have a very specific reason to do so. The reason is because the state of the art has moved significantly in that relatively short time span.
My washer uses tech from 20 years ago. It cost $250 delivered. The latest washers cost nearly $1,000.
You can buy a washer for considerably less than $1000. $1000 gets you a top of the line unit. Most of them cost $400-700 and adjusted for inflation that is roughly the same as your price from 20 years ago. Price competition on appliances like these is incredibly intense so no, prices have not gone up at all on an inflation adjusted basis and the products actually have gotten modestly better too.
My clothes still come out clean. And the Dryer dries them.
And they almost certainly consume more energy and more water doing it. Just because it works well enough for your purposes doesn't mean you'd buy the same unit today if you were in the market.
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Heh, charge/discharge efficiency of nickel-iron battery is only 65% / 85%. Pumped hydro does better with its full cycle efficiency of 70% - 80%.
Pumped hydro is geographically restricted and thus not a useful comparison for many/most places. Where I live it is literally impossible to use on any sort of meaningful scale because we don't have large dams anywhere nearby. If you live somewhere near a large dam then yeah, you might find pumped hydro to be a good idea. For most of us it isn't so helpful. Hydro is great except where you cannot get it. (oh and that pesky little problem of screwing up local ecosystems too)
The batteries are also expensive. They cost around $4.5 - $20 per one litre. I guess you can build pumped storage cheaper per 1 litre.
"Per litre"? What does a volume measurement have to do with a static chemical battery? Anyway pumped hydro is only cheap in places where hydro power is already available. In places like where I live it is FAR more expensive because we'd have to build a massive man-made reservoir first which would be immediately uneconomical.
It does not look good for batteries. Looks like the only good thing about them is the response time.
Bullshit. Chemical batteries have a lot of good features besides response time.
1) Not geographically restricted
2) Can be placed at or near point of use
3) Can be consolidated for grid power or distributed for off-grid use
4) Are economical compared to alternatives not blessed with special local geography.
5) Are (relatively) easy to maintain
6) Can be recycled and reused and relocated
7) Steady improvement in technology and chemistry
8) Easy to expand battery banks as needed
9) Relatively high efficiencies for certain battery types
That is true but technology for scrubbers that prevent CO2 emissions from processes like that is also improving... you would think any such process would be greatly interesting in re-capturing carbon for further industrial use.
"Recapture carbon for further industrial use"? We dump the stuff by the megaton right now and we can literally dig carbon it out of the ground for WAY less money than it costs to capture and reuse carbon. There simply isn't that much demand for carbon even if we had a way to process it economically.
Over time other materials will take the place of steel though, I'm not sure how much longer steel has as a primary material but I'm thinking less than 20 years.
Based on what? Steel is going to remain a vital and first choice metal for the foreseeable future. Certainly for the lifetime of anyone reading this. I don't see any circumstances where this would change. It's simply too useful and cost effective and there is no plausible material or group of materials that could plausibly displace it.
"When set to mimic the actual fishing rate over the two decades spanning the dataset, the model outcomes were consistent with both the new and old fish data. When fishing mortality rates were increased in the model, larger fish moved progressively deeper.
I think this falls under confirming the obvious. Our fishing creates an evolutionary pressure. Fish that survive our hunting will tend to be the ones that prefer places where our nets don't reach as often. As long as we don't hunt them to the point where the population collapses it's perfectly obvious that we would see them evolve in response to our fishing tactics over time.
You do realize that this disclosure means he loses money if TSLA succeeds. Its equivalent to saying 75% of my net worth is invested in TSLA shorts.
I have neither a long nor short position on the company. I have posted numerous times here on slashdot that I think TSLA is good company but a terrible stock. It's ludicrously overvalued but it isn't a good short candidate either because the pricing isn't even vaguely rational so it's difficult to predict when it might come back down to earth. I wouldn't touch that stock with a barge pole, long or short.
Its manufacturing, not rocket science (that's SpaceX).
Amusing that you think manufacturing isn't the difficult part of rocket science. Your condescension towards manufacturing pretty clearly shows you know nothing about the subject. Manufacturing a device like an automobile at scale is actually one of the most challenging activities known to mankind.
I'm sure they will figure it out, what the GP hasn't figured out is that ICE car companies can't make EV batteries and haven't even bought the land to make a battery factory yet.
Apparently you are unaware that Tesla is partnered with Panasonic which is the company actually doing the heavy lifting on Tesla's vaunted gigafactory. You know, Panasonic aka the largest battery manufacturer in the world. Please note that Tesla is not on the list of largest battery makers. Panasonic provided most of the funding and operational expertise on the project. If you think companies like GM cannot find a similar partner you are mistaken. (GM gets their batteries from LG in case you wondered)
that the only way to make a car at an attractive price point is to own your own battery factories and invest heavily in battery R&D.
Or to just buy a company already doing that. There are LOTS of companies making batteries and investing it battery R&D. It's not clear that Tesla has any insurmountable advantage here though I agree that their strategy is a sensible one.
You can merge all you want so long as customers have a reasonable option to use a competitor
A reasonable perspective though remember that oligopolies are a thing and can be just as bad as a monopoly. It's not clear that going from 4 major wireless providers to 3 provides any benefit to consumers but it's pretty obvious how it might hurt them.
In some cases a monopoly is actually the most economically efficient. Having multiple companies run power lines to your house is actually more expensive than having a single well regulated monopoly for example. Same with water lines and other utilities. Typically these are natural monopolies. But these sorts of situations are exceptions and don't seem applicable for wireless services if they are being properly regulated.
What makes Tesla struggle is they thought they could design a much more automated assembly line.
That's an institutional knowledge problem. They just don't have the collective experience to know what won't work yet or where the boundaries of the technology lie. You can do a lot with automation but there are limits which a more seasoned company would understand. Experience can be a double edged sword because it can keep you from trying something new but it also can keep you from making mistakes.
The idea was to apply software agility to the assembly line, iterating rapidly and developing something better than everyone else.
That's not a new concept. You think nobody at Ford or Toyota or GM has ever had that thought? The difference is that they've already tried and figured out where it works and where it doesn't. Tesla is just reinventing the wheel here and learning lessons the hard way. To be honest they got a bit cocky and it bit them in the ass.
But like many agile projects, the end is hard to see and harder to get to by simply tweaking and tweaking. At least in a short time frame.
The software mentality can get you into trouble when you are making hardware. The economic and technical constrains are different as is the pace of iteration. It's relatively inexpensive to iterate in software and you can do it quickly. This is a MUCH harder trick to pull off when you are making physical goods.
I'd love to see their QC stats as well. New line, new workers, new robots, new procedures, new process. I'm pretty sure they're not hitting Six Sigma
You can get general stats for free with just a short search on the internet. You can pay for detailed ones. It's not hard to get that information. NOBODY is hitting six sigma quality in auto assembly. Even the best suppliers don't reach that level of quality except in rare cases. Too many products with too many stacking tolerances for that to be possible. But the big auto makers are all really quite good, even the worse ones. Companies like Toyota and Honda have a well deserved legendary reputation for their quality systems. I've been in their plants myself and can confirm this first hand. They are REALLY good at quality.
But your mistake is thinking that they do it all from scratch. That's the thing is that once you have a part of a production system that works you don't redesign it all from scratch. The big automakers have proven technology and production systems which they just have to reconfigure and reorganize. They make incremental improvements which accumulate over time. Tesla just hasn't had the benefit of years and decades of iteration. In time they'll get there (hopefully) but you can't accelerate the process beyond a certain point. Tesla doesn't get any bonus points for trying to do it all from scratch. That just means they have a lot of places where things can (and will) go wrong.
Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer (and an accountant) and my day job is running a company that makes auto parts. I literally build assembly lines for a living so I'm actually talking about something I know pretty well here.
Power density won't improve much.
Yeah that's kind of my point. We have a pretty good idea what sort of power density is theoretically possible with the chemistries we are working with and the possible improvement simply isn't big enough. There could always be some sort of unexpected breakthrough but we can't depend on that. I think we'll see some progress and it wouldn't shock me to see electrification of some aspects of commercial aircraft but I don't think we are going to see a commercially viable electric aircraft with significant cargo capacity any time soon. The physics is well understood and pretty inflexible.
Tesla can't meet demand at the moment, where as Ford is cutting models due to lack of it.
Wow is that a false equivalency if I've ever heard one. Tesla sells a few tens of thousands of cars each year. Ford sells millions. These are not equivalent situations. It's easy to exceed production capacity when you barely have any capacity and you only sell to a niche segment. Ford makes and sells nearly as many F150s every month (50-80K) as all of Tesla's models combined per year. That's with just one vehicle model.
It's hard to say how big Tesla's market share will end up being once they can get production up to speed and fulfil all the pre-orders.
In the short run it isn't hard at all. Their market share will be slightly bigger than it currently is which is to say tiny. In the long run (talking 10+ years) it's hard to predict because it's not even clear yet if Tesla will survive. If they do their future looks bright but they aren't going to overtake GM anytime soon if that is what you are implying. But I could see them being a steadily growing and influential automaker over the next decade if they can survive the next 2 years.
But it seems certain that Tesla will become a major player in the market now.
"Certain"? No. The odds are good they will become a significant automaker by marketshare IF they can survive the next 24 months and come to profitability. That is anything but certain right now. There is reason for optimism but to pretend they are out of danger is to ignore reality. Tesla needs to become profitable soon or their financing is going to dry up. If that happens they are screwed.
I must have missed where VAG built a factory capable of producing 5k EVs per week in 15 months from the start of tooling, on a brand new line with a newly hired workforce. Literally, the first 467 Kuka robots arrived, were placed, and workers were hired, in April-June 2017.
Hate to break it to you but the big auto makers build assembly lines with FAR larger production rates in shorter time periods than that routinely. It's normal for companies like Toyota to go from start of DESIGN to production in 20-30 months. Not start of tooling, start of design. They do tooling in far less than 15 months. And the process of assembling an EV isn't wildly different from a car with an internal combustion engine. A chassis is still a chassis. A suspension is still a suspension. I've seen them tool up an entire factory in under 10 months. (I work in the industry)
What makes Tesla struggle is that they don't have the institutional knowledge of a company like VW or Toyota and they are still building their production system procedures. They're having to learn it as they go and develop their production system from scratch which is genuinely hard to do. What Tesla has done is very impressive but let's not pretend they have mastered assembly better than companies that have been doing it for decades. Tesla is bringing a lot of awesome innovation to the party on the design and product engineering but to date they are still behind the curve when it comes to manufacturing prowess. If they survive I think they'll be fine in the long run but they have a bumpy road ahead of them for a little while. People tend to think manufacturing assembly is easy and it's actually one of the hardest things to do well you can imagine. I think Musk gets it and his job is just to keep the cash flowing until Tesla can get their production system scaled up and stable.
LI-Ion/LI Polymer batteries don't have quite the power/weight of conventional fuel, but it's perfectly acceptable for low-performance airplanes even now.
Not if you plan to carry any cargo they are not. And since cargo cost per unit distance traveled is by far the most important metric for their success we aren't anywhere close to commercial viability right now. Current battery tech is just too heavy for economic viability right now and that doesn't look likely to change in the near future. Battery power density will have to increase substantially.
The issues are more economic - the initial cost, the cost of time on the ground charnging, and safety - like the tendency to burst into flames for no adequately-explained reason.
While those are all important things to consider, THE primary metric that matters is cost per distance traveled of a kg of cargo. Everything else is secondary.
Sure batteries are heavy, but if you can physically fly an electric plane from point A to point B on batteries, then the only important remaining question is whether it's cost effective.
It's not whether you can fly a plane. It's how much CARGO that plane can carry between points. Right now batteries are too heavy to permit any meaningful amount of cargo to be carried and therefore they are economically noncompetitive.
Since short haul flights are particularly carbon intensive per distance traveled, an electric plane would generate a lot of valuable carbon credits.
Before you worry about carbon output you need to get the cost per kg of cargo (including human cargo) to rough parity. Right now we can make electric planes that can get themselves aloft but they are useless because they cannot carry any meaningful amount of cargo. Once the cost per unit of cargo is somewhere vaguely close fossil fuel powered options THEN we can start bringing carbon credits into the discussion.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for electric planes but the physics and economics involved aren't forgiving on this point.
Obviously there will need to be improvements in battery technology, just like there were for cars.
That understates things quite a lot. Batteries will have to have a HUGE increase in power density to make them feasible for commercial aviation. Sure we can make some really light research vehicles but one doesn't have to be an aviation engineer to do the math on how much lighter batteries will have to get to make electric planes feasible for anything practical.
It's worth working on the problem but until batteries become a LOT lighter than they are it's going to be a dead end.
Manned missions are a deadend and a huge waste of money.
I could not disagree more. You can never declare any form of exploration a dead end before you have actually done the exploration. There are literally entire worlds to explore and things to discover that cannot be learned unless we actually send people there to learn them.
Robots/rovers can do everything humans can at 1/10 of the cost
They demonstrably cannot do everything humans can do nor can they do it anywhere near as fast or with similar flexibility. We don't have robots that capable here on Earth so your argument is dead before it even starts. A geologist dropped on the surface of the Moon or Mars can accomplish FAR more in a vastly shorter time than any robot we are in danger of developing. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude increases in productivity. Spirit and Opportunity took 8 years to cover the distance the Apollo astronauts covered in 3 days. There is a huge amount of technology relating to manned spaceflight that you literally cannot hope to develop unless you actually plan to send people into space. Not the least of these is discoveries relating to human physiology - good luck studying the effects of space travel on humans just using robots. We are still benefiting from the advances of the Apollo missions which have paid for NASA's budget since its inception as well as every robotic mission we've ever done many times over.
... should be to mine asteroids.
Mining asteroids is one of those stupid ideas that sounds great until you actually think through the economics of it and the practical realities of actually doing it. It requires technology substantially more advanced than any we have or are in danger of developing any time soon. It requires an economically sustainable space based economy and infrastructure. And even if we solve that problem by pretending such technology is within our grasp, the economics of asteroid mining still don't make any sense. Not to mention that the ONLY way to make use of such materials (given our lack of any space manufacturing infrastructure) is to drop them on Earth from orbit thereby creating a de-facto WMD. (hint: large hunks of metal dropped from space have a LOT of kinetic energy)
Talk about "security issues," like placing tariffs on imported cars because what if there's hostilities and we have all these foreign vehicles, how about our national dependency on those same foreigners for metals and minerals?
That's one of the bizarre arguments one hears for tariffs by those who favor them - that somehow they tariffs are addressing a national security concern. It's complete nonsense of course. As if every country in the world that makes steel (for example) would somehow simultaneously be unwilling to sell it to us and we somehow would be unable to make any of it ourselves. Even a global (non nuclear) war isn't going to somehow make global trade somehow stop.
Had we not lost our goddam minds, we would have hospitable habitats for launching miners and for refining the ores before shipping to Earth or even manufacturing on the Moon and then using Amazon Prime, taking advantage of its free shipping.
No we would not. We might be further along than we are but we wouldn't be anywhere close to the science fiction scenario you propose even had we devoted substantial portions of global GDP to the purpose. Maybe it will happen someday in the distant future but we're likely talking hundreds of years unless there is substantial political will to fund development of a space economy. Heck the last moon mission was around the time I was born and even if NASA was off on a wild goose chase that doesn't explain the behavior of the other 95% of the world's population. Asteroid mining isn't going to happen on an industrial scale in your lifetime. Get over it.
He said plane makers such as Boeing and Airbus were developing electric aircraft and that battery prices were tumbling, making it feasible to reach a government goal of making all domestic flights in Norway electric by 2040.
Battery prices aren't the big problem. Battery weight is the problem when it comes to aviation. Even the best battery tech we have today has a rather poor power to weight ratio. I see no evidence in this article that they have solved that problem since that would require a breakthrough in power density for batteries.
Note that the plane they show has a takeoff weight of 570kg which allows for basically no cargo or passengers. For comparison the EMPTY weight of a Cessna 170 is an almost identical 573kg and it has a takeoff weight of 864-1000kg.
NASA deserves to be embarrassed. They wasted all the years between Apollo and now.
NASA takes their marching orders and gets their budget from Congress and the President. The fault lies with the owner of the purse strings if it lies with anyone. The Space Shuttle was a reasonable idea that failed because it had to satisfy too many groups and it sucked all the oxygen out of the room for decades. Then each President tries to give NASA a new priority but never pursues the funding to make it happen during their administration. Basically they make it impossible for NASA to do their job properly.
NASA has their faults to be sure but they are quite competent at many things. Cutting edge research, scientific exploration, technology development and transfer, and more. Though the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle it also was an amazing piece of technology that shows how capable NASA is. The problem for the last 30 years is that NASA has basically been stuck being a bus service to space instead of being tasked with pushing the boundaries of exploration and technology.
And now I am a parent... and I wonder what I am going to say to my daughter when she gets a C in a class she doesn't like in school.
My take on it generally is that I don't care so much what the grade is but I care very much how much effort was put forth. Sometimes you work really hard for a C and other times you get an A with barely any effort. I also plan to point out that grades don't define her but they do matter for some things. They matter for college admissions. They sometimes matter to employers. I can be very pleased with a C in a hard class where she put in a lot of effort especially if she doesn't like the class.
I hope I can keep it cool and tell her with a straight face that school performance doesn't matter, and all the useful learning she is ever going to do is going to be self led.
School performance does matter, just not in the way they pretend it does. Good grades tend to mean you worked hard. I would argue despite my previous comments that grades in subjects like math and science and writing and a few others really do matter even in the real world. If my child gets a C in a music class I'm only upset if they obviously didn't really try. If they get a C in math though I'm not going to be as forgiving though again effort matters most. They don't have to like it but not liking something isn't an excuse for not doing your best. I know I didn't have that reinforced adequately by my parents and I don't plan to make that mistake. (I'm sure I'll make plenty of my own mistakes...)
That is entirely incorrect. I can memorize things all day long and regurgitate them back at you for weeks and sometimes months. I could ace every test in every subject and still almost failed out of high school because I refused to do homework.
I'm afraid it's quite correct. Schools test memorization ability far more than they test analytical ability in general. Yes if you never do homework you still can fail classes. Nobody claimed otherwise. I was lazy about the homework too which is why my grades generally were poor. But the fact remains that someone who can memorize well (and can be bothered to do so) will generally outperform someone who doesn't memorize well even if they are good at figuring out problems.
99% means there are at least 3,000,000 people who may have tested better than you just in the US.
One of them obviously wasn't you since 300 million people don't take the SAT each year.
I eventually found a place in an OK state school, but I didn't lose the C+ habit. I graduated the the minimum acceptable grade to achieve a diploma :/
There is an old joke that applies. "What do they call the person who graduates last in their class from medical school? Doctor." Unless you plan to go into academia the only time your grades really matter is if you are trying to get a competitive job right out of college with limited work experience. After that nobody gives a shit if you had mediocre grades. I haven't had anyone ask in a job interview what my grades were for 20 years across numerous jobs.
Not everyone who's made for college is made for a standardized test.
True but for some of us (like me) the standardized test gave us a way to prove we were smarter than our grades would otherwise indicate. I wasn't a great student. Partly because I'm easily bored especially by subjects I don't care about. But mostly because primary school tends to heavily reward the ability to memorize and regurgitate random facts and my brain isn't optimally wired for doing that. But I could do rather well (generally 90-95th percentile) on standardized tests so even though my grades were mediocre I was still able to get into a very good college.
So some people who are college material don't have good test scores but conversely some people without exceptional grades actually are rather bright and do fine in college. I was the later.
My point is that is really hasn't. My laptop already does all the things I need to do with it.
That does not matter for purposes of buying a new one. All that means is that you aren't going to upgrade until you either get a new use case requirement or it breaks. And when you do replace it you almost certainly are not going to buy the same model even if it worked just fine. You are going to buy something that most likely is technologically superior to whatever you are currently and likely for the same or less money. Because why wouldn't you? It's like buying a new car that gets notably better gas mileage and goes faster for the same money as what you bought 3 years prior. Nobody is going to buy old inferior technology unless they absolutely have to. And companies that don't keep up with the state of the art are going to lose sales to companies that do keep up. Right now Apple is not keeping up in their Macintosh division.
When my 20 year old toaster died, I want another one just like it, not some shiny contraption with electronic doodads that add no value to what I want to do, which is toast bread.
Poor analogy. Toaster technology is fully mature and hasn't advanced meaningfully in the last 20 years. PC technology has advanced more in the last 6 months than toasters have in the last 50 years. Sure PCs are a more mature technology than they were 10 or 20 years ago but compared to most other products they still are improving at a breathtaking pace. A PC you buy today will for the same price point be notably better for most use cases than one you bought just 3 years ago.
Nobody is saying you have to upgrade for no purpose but if you are in the market for a computer you simply aren't going to buy a 3 year old model unless you have a very specific reason to do so. The reason is because the state of the art has moved significantly in that relatively short time span.
My washer uses tech from 20 years ago. It cost $250 delivered. The latest washers cost nearly $1,000.
You can buy a washer for considerably less than $1000. $1000 gets you a top of the line unit. Most of them cost $400-700 and adjusted for inflation that is roughly the same as your price from 20 years ago. Price competition on appliances like these is incredibly intense so no, prices have not gone up at all on an inflation adjusted basis and the products actually have gotten modestly better too.
My clothes still come out clean. And the Dryer dries them.
And they almost certainly consume more energy and more water doing it. Just because it works well enough for your purposes doesn't mean you'd buy the same unit today if you were in the market.