When did it become clear EVs would take over light ground transportation?
When Tesla started outselling BMW and Mercedes in the luxury sedan market. There is a lot of demand for EVs and they have some pretty compelling advantages. Lower fuel costs, (potentially) greater reliability, fewer moving parts, diversity of energy sources, existing infrastructure, falling battery prices, superior torque characteristics, efficiency, etc. While there are some issues to work out, many of the biggest hurdles are already behind us.
I see some convincing use cases for EV (basically to get around a city) but prices have not come down enough for the mainstream to buy them 'just to get around a city'
So your argument is that because EVs haven't yet become cheap yet that the never will? I think your crystal ball has a crack in it. Every new technology starts off expensive and falls in price over time and with scale. EVs won't be any different. It's going to take them several decades to start taking huge market share but EVs have way too many advantages to dismiss them out of hand.
They're going to have to be financially and logistically reasonable before they become mainstream.
Already done for big parts of the population. My brother-in-law drives a Nissan Leaf as his daily driver. Tesla is selling hundreds of thousands of cars.
People won't buy EVs unless they are economically superior to ICE for the function they need it to perform. Companies won't make EVs with decent towing capacity unless people are going to buy them.
A Tesla Model X can tow the same 5000 lbs my current gas powered pickup can tow. It is trivial to build an EV with substantial towing capacity. You are right that there is a chicken and egg problem with EVs but there is clear evidence that the popularity of EVs is growing. I think in the long term (40+ years out) EVs will come to dominate the car market with hybrids and gas powered vehicles becoming specialty vehicles. But there are a lot of infrastructure and technical issues to work out before that happens.
people who are against supply side economics, really need supply side economics to get EVs to become a thing.
That's a weird and backward argument. Supply side economics is the theory that growth can be induced by lowering taxes and reducing regulation. Reasonable enough as a principle as long as you don't take it too far. Given that we subsidize oil and fossil fuels to the tune of $5 Trillion per year globally, what you are de-facto arguing is that we need MORE taxes and regulation on fossil fuels for EVs to succeed. EVs don't need supply side economics to work - they need us to stop supply side economics for the smog belching competing technologies.
Electrically-powered aircraft, at first small single-engine types, are not far off at all given the rates of advancement we've seen regarding electric battery storage technology combined with new materials like carbon-fiber.
"New materials like carbon fiber"? Carbon fiber has been around for decades. It's not even close to new. And as for the rate of advancement of battery tech, storage improves by a few percent per year. It's slow steady incremental progress. The volumetric energy density of Li-Ion batteries has doubled since 1995. Good but hardly mind blowing rate of improvement. Doubling every 25 years isn't exactly speedy.
We have a few prototype small electric planes. Commercial airliners are in no danger of being displaced any time soon. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see all electric planes but it's going to be a few decades at minimum before they become commercially viable even under the most optimistic assumptions.
Not many years ago the majority of RC model airplanes of any size were powered by ICEs. Now ICE-powered models, especially aircraft and quad-rotors, are becoming the exception rather than the rule..
Irrelevant because the forces and thermodynamics involved do not scale linearly. You can't simply take an RC plane and make it 10 or 100 times bigger with everything working the same. Aircraft big enough to carry people have to be able to travel a LOT faster than your typical RC toy and wind resistance scales up exponentially. Doubling your speed requires far more than double the power. And I'm not even getting into the economics of building a real plane that costs millions versus your several hundred dollar toy.
Electrically powered cars and freight trucks are now beginning to become a reality as our ability to store electricity densely steadily improves. Aircraft cannot be far behind.
Actually electric powered aircraft are quite a bit behind because the physics involved are very different. Power to weigh matters a LOT more for aircraft than it does for automobiles. While we might one day see commercially viable electric aircraft it is going to be decades later than for cars because of the power to weight requirements.
I actually rather liked the Ford Focus EV aside from its annoyingly limited range. I also drove an eGolf and thought it compared favorably to the gas powered Golf's I've owned. (I've owned both a GTI and a regular Golf GL) I also got a chance to hop in a Honda Fit EV once and it wasn't bad. I drove a Chevy Spark EV which was kind of meh and got replaced by the vastly superior Bolt which is actually a pretty terrific little car.
I've also driven a variety of hybrids. Some ground up designs (like the Volt and Prius) and a few conversions like the Fusion. Most were decent to good.
Oh, well the Kia Soul EV isn't bad actually, assuming you don't mind the Kia Soul in general.
I haven't driven that one myself yet. Haven't driven Mercedes offerings or the one from Hyundai.
One would think that the diesel-electric designs that have existed for many decades on locomotives would be easily transferred to road truck designs.
I don't think it would be a direct application but the general concept would be very similar. I think the main obstacles are mostly economic ones. For it to become economical the hybrid system has to be manufactured at scale but until it is, it isn't cost competitive. My guess is that you'll probably first see it in some form of work truck like a pickup marketed towards construction workers. That's the biggest market I think so it's kind of the logical place to start. But right now we have a sort of chicken vs egg problem. It's too expensive right now because it isn't at scale and it isn't at scale because it's too expensive.
Is the I.P. all tied up in the companies that make locomotives?
I doubt that is a serious obstacle. Possibly some but I'm sure companies like Ford could negotiate an appropriate licensing agreement. If anything the holders of such IP should be drooling at the chance to get licensing fees from a product that brings in as many billions as pickups and semis do.
Diesel electirc isn't used in road going vehicles because they currently are expensive to make. Their potential efficiency is not actually in question. There are already diesel hybrids that have been developed and some are already in use and they are more fuel efficient and less polluting than their diesel only counterparts. The obstacle to them is price and to a lesser extend emissions restrictions on diesels in general in comparison to gasoline-hybrids.
You seem to have missed the point. I'm not suggesting scaling down locomotive engines. I merely used that as an example to explain the concept of using a diesel engine to power electric motors rather than to drive wheels directly. The technology in such a hybrid for a truck would obviously be quite different in actual practice.
Diesel electric locomotives (and very large mining trucks) are this way because a conventional transmission would be far too large and heavy and would require the engine to be used in a large range of engine speeds.
Apples to oranges. That says nothing about why diesel-electric would or would not work in road going vehicles. The economics are a limitation but there is clear evidence that efficiency is not the limitation. They don't use it on larger more powerful locomotives because the cost and difficulty of scaling a mechanical transmission does not scale linearly making the designs that have been tried uneconomical. In smaller applications mechanical drive is sometimes more competitive BUT that does not mean that a diesel-electric cannot surpass them in efficiency and/or cost depending on the application.
Smaller diesel trains do use a conventional transmission because the fuel consumption is lower.
Diesel mechanical get used for cost reasons because of the application. Mechanical transmissions are often simpler than and generally less expensive so for certain corner case applications they can make sense. They are used mostly in switchers where fuel efficiency is not the paramount concern. Switchers are analogous to tug boats - tractive effort and repairability are paramount concerns over fuel economy. But again this does not necessarily translate to the requirements of road going trucks.
Now imagine what would happen if enough people say "Fuck this, I am not voting for any shitty candidate."
What happens it you get Trump or someone similarly repugnant in the White House with a fraction of the people voting. Someone is going to win and some people are always going to vote. If you don't vote then you are just letting someone else vote for you and you might not like what they decide.
The problem is towing long distances, the batteries are just too expensive to do that at this point.
A problem neatly solved by designing a power train that resembles that of a locomotive. Diesel engine runs and provides the power to turn the electric motors. Batteries are present to facilitate short haul movement and acceleration and allow the diesel to run at a constant speed where it is optimized but they don't have to be massive batteries like in the Tesla semi.
Hybrids are a waste of time at this point. Pure electric is the way forward, with a rapid charger network and a few ICE models for edge cases.
Not true at all. The "rapid" charge networks aren't rapid enough yet to displace gasoline in widespread use. I can refuel my car in under 5 minutes at any gas with enough fuel to travel >350 miles. Fully charging a Tesla Model S on a supercharger takes 75 minutes and even ~170 miles of range takes 30 minutes. Definitely good but not good enough, even allowing for the fact that EVs will be charged at home/work most of the time. Not to mention that these "rapid" chargers are no where near ubiquitous.
Don't make perfect the enemy of good. I share your enthusiasm for EVs and I think they probably will dominate like you suggest in the long run. But hybrids will play an important role in getting us there. Our fueling infrastructure like it or not is optimized for gasoline and recharge times for EVs still have to be improved to make them practical for long haul transport. We also would need a LOT more charging stations in a lot more places. Furthermore the electric grid is going to need to see MASSIVE upgrades for EVs to really take over significant market share. That will take time which hybrids do not require. I can see all of these upgrades and technological improvements happening but it's going to take a few decades to really come to fruition. In the mean time hybrids are a useful bridge.
Every EV that is just an ICE with an electric drive train fitted is crap.
I've driven plenty of those vehicles and could not disagree more.
Diesels depend on being hot. They are utterly unsuited to a hybrid duty cycle.
The term "hybrid duty cycle" is extremely vague in your usage. No you wouldn't use a diesel like an Atkinson Cycle engine on a Prius. You would use a diesel like you would on a locomotive. The diesel is running continuously and acts as the power source for a generator for the electric motors that actually turn the wheels. No direct drive from the diesel to the wheels. It should be an excellent way for large trucks (particularly long haul versions) to hybridize. You could have battery banks to power the electric motors without the diesel for shorter trips or to get up to speed periods. Batteries would also allow plug in hybrids in some use cases.
Honestly I have no idea why diesel electric hybrids are not a thing with large trucks aside from the fact that economics of scale aren't in play for them yet. I would think a hybrid electric pickup with a battery bank for running tools and the huge torque of electric motors would be an ideal work truck. Similarly a hybrid semi with a diesel engine driving electric motors for long haul transport seems hugely logical to me. I understand that the early versions would be expensive but the upside seems to be pretty clear.
This means you need a separate receiver box and power cable going into the box, but cables are what you're trying to get away from with wireless video!
So you want to go from two cables down to one? That's fine though a litlle silly for a wall mounted TV.
So the answer to this would seem to be USB-C. It supports HDMI video as well as power, so in theory you could create a receiver dongle that just plugged into a TV (or monitor with speakers) and required no external power cable. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything like this on the market.
There are some cables being worked on. Unclear if this solves the problem you are working on.
What I'd like is to be able to wall-mount a new TV and just plug in a wireless dongle to stream the video with no extra setup required on the receiver end.
If you are wall mounting the TV already, why the need to worry about having a separate power cable? I don't understand why you can't just use a receiver with wires since you'll need them anyway. Sounds to me like you are making perfect the enemy of good. I'm not aware of any TV that can be powered by USB-C so it's kind of a moot issue anyway.
I know we're wandering off topic a little here but- I prefer a tax on purchased goods and services.
Which is inherently regressive. Plus you don't want to put all your eggs in a single taxation scheme. Doing that causes all sorts of problems when the economy inevitably has a downturn. You want a mixture of taxation mechanisms and whenever possible you want them as closely related to what they are funding as possible. I understand the appeal of what you are proposing but it's fatally flawed.
The rich have always found ways of circumventing income taxes. Most of the mega-rich end up paying a lower % of their earning on taxes than the average person (despite theoretically being in a high tax bracket).
Only because we as the voting public allow it. Until we collectively stop screwing ourselves it is a problem that will continue. Many of the problem can be solved by taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. You also could solve a lot of problems by taxing businesses on revenue rather than profits. Profits are a LOT easier to fiddle with than revenue is. (yes I'm aware of the challenges this causes too)
Goods and services (exclude non hospitality food items) is a better idea because you pay more based on the more you consume.
The flaw in that reasoning is that there is a limit on how much an individual can consume. Once your basic needs are met your consumption of goods and services does not go up linearly with income. That means that poor people end up paying a MUCH higher percentage of their income in taxes than wealthy people. A modest level of taxation on purchased goods and services is fine and useful but relying on it too much would eventually result in huge revenue problems for governments during every recession. Like for most businesses diversity of income streams is a good thing for governments if you want them to be able to function in both good and bad times. There are multiple ways to make it all work but in every case it is a bad idea to rely too heavily on a single means of taxation.
. I would also suggest a progressive tax-bracket for items too to tax luxuries higher than necessities.
Then you get into a messy situation where the government is de-facto setting prices for goods. (they already do it to some degree and it doesn't work well) Where do you draw the line on what constitutes a luxury? Is a camera a luxury good? If not at what price point does it become one? You would have to do this for every product made and tracking that would be an administrative nightmare. You also are effectively subsidizing some products over others based on an arbitrarily chosen price point. I happen to be an accountant and I assure you that you are hugely underestimating the mess this would be. I know it sounds simple but in reality it very much is not.
Most of us around the world pay taxes on every liter or gallon of petroleum our cars consume. In some countries it's a pretty high tax.
But not as high as it should be. The current taxes do not cover the full cost of mitigating the pollution that results from burning gasoline and diesel. Furthermore globally we subsidize fossil fuels to somewhere around $5 Trillion per year. The taxes on it aren't even close to being as high as they should be.
If electric vehicles start making up a larger and larger % of vehicles on the road will there come an end where to be fair you need to drop the tax on fuel and instead tax electricity
As I said before the tax on oil based fuels needs to go up before it comes down. It's been a free ride for FAR too long. Your point is a fair one that there should be some usage based balance in how the taxes are assessed but particular how the funding is applied once the government receives it. The easy way to do it is to calculate the cost of infrastructure maintenance in total and then divide by the expected number of kWh used by vehicles with a given fuel source. (the amount of energy per gallon of gasoline/diesel is known) Apply a rate from there to each vehicle regardless of how it is powered. Then it doesn't matter if they use gas or electric plus it has the benefit of automatically forcing inefficient vehicles to pay a higher share of the costs. Pretty easy to do mathematically but probably difficult politically.
Well, if you were smart enough to mine a few hundred Bitcoin back in 2010 and held onto them, you would be a millionaire now.
Lucky is the word you are looking for. There was no logic that would have lead you to believe that mining bitcoin would result in vast riches. Therefore smart doesn't play into it. It was a gamble that paid off for a lucky few, barely different than having a winning lottery ticket.
As an actual currency, though, it kind of sucks.
You don't need the "kind of" qualifier. It sucks. It's expensive, volatile, risky, awkward, not accepted many places, slow, and did I mention expensive? Transaction costs for bitcoin are WAY higher than for dollar transactions in almost all cases. (except those where jail time is a concern)
Or Slashdotters can tell us: Anyone know of any benefit related to cryptocurrencies?
No. Next question.
Seriously, most of them are rather transparent pyramid schemes or similar scams designed to separate the gullible from their "real" money. The few that aren't are just an answer to a problem nobody has except criminals.
Paleontology could make a statement to the effect of: "We will find a fossil with such and such features".
I think that nicely shows that you have no idea what paleontologists do or how they do it.
Your argument regarding Economists is an "Appeal to Authority" fallacy
Not at all. Go read their papers because you clearly haven't. I have a graduate degree in finance and I've worked with many of the economic models you question. The models stand on their own and make perfectly valid and provable predictions. No appeal to authority needed. If you want to disprove them go right ahead. There is a Nobel prize waiting for you if you do.
Like that distinguished bunch, Climate Scientists too can explain anything, but are able to predict nothing.
Again you make fairly sweeping claims about a field of study you pretty clearly know nothing about. The climate scientists make predictions routinely and are proven to be accurate within the limitations of the model. If you think otherwise then you haven't actually examined any papers on the subject. Sure there is a lot they still don't know but that's true of every field of science. You also have to understand that it takes years for most predictions of climate models to be proven. But the evidence is there. Your failure to examine it does not make it less valid.
Being able to explain, what already happened does not make you a scientist.
Are you seriously claiming that paleontology is not a science? You might want to revisit that nice little straw man definition you have there. Just because something happened in the past does not mean it cannot be studied scientifically. Remember that the past is where we get literally ALL of our data for our scientific models.
To qualify, you have to be able to reliably predict, what will happen... And there, despite several decades of trying, the Climate Scientists have been no more successful than the Economists.
You may have meant that as an insult but it isn't. Economics does make testable predictions that routinely turn out to be true. They don't award Nobel Prizes in economics for lucky guesses. Just because a field is complicated and messy doesn't mean that they haven't had any success. I'm guessing you don't actually know any climate scientists nor are you actually familiar with any of their work that you so glibly disparage.
We don't care. It's a small data point in a MUCH larger problem.
Back in 1996 we had extreme snowstorms
So what? Weather != Climate. The point is that "extreme" events become MORE COMMON, not that they didn't happen before. The point is that the the average is moving.
Really, this "global " scaremongering is getting tiresome.
Right because New Jersey = all of Earth. (Insert eyeroll here)
I agree conventional addresses are a lot more useful to the pedestrian or even the driver without a GPS unit of some kind in hand.
Only because we've built up our infrastructure with conventional addresses in mind. It would be an expensive but straightforward proposition to change that to something more universal. Every system will have its flaws but I'd be supportive of a system that didn't require an intimate knowledge of local geography to navigate and that was consistent no matter where you went.
Not only this, as smart as he may have been at Physics, he was a fucking moron about AI.
Which is not something the Nobel committee cares about at all. Linus Pauling won two Nobel prizes and he had some pretty lunatic ideas regarding Vitamin C. Just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean they are right about everything. I find it curious that the first thing you go to is to try to tear the guy down. I'm pretty sure you aren't perfect either.
His life was remarkable in many ways - one of which was surviving with ALS for so bloody long.
My mother died from ALS recently. Her course took about a decade which is WAY too long with that awful disease though I'm grateful I got to have her alive as long as I did. Stephen Hawking is someone I admire probably more for what he accomplished in the face of that disease than for his scientific accomplishments. And in saying that I am in no way minimizing his contributions to science. I've seen what that disease does to a person up close and even if you aren't religious (I'm not) you should pray that you never have to experience ALS. To do even a fraction of what Hawking did with that malady makes him to my mind one of the most remarkable people to have ever lived.
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When did it become clear EVs would take over light ground transportation?
When Tesla started outselling BMW and Mercedes in the luxury sedan market. There is a lot of demand for EVs and they have some pretty compelling advantages. Lower fuel costs, (potentially) greater reliability, fewer moving parts, diversity of energy sources, existing infrastructure, falling battery prices, superior torque characteristics, efficiency, etc. While there are some issues to work out, many of the biggest hurdles are already behind us.
I see some convincing use cases for EV (basically to get around a city) but prices have not come down enough for the mainstream to buy them 'just to get around a city'
So your argument is that because EVs haven't yet become cheap yet that the never will? I think your crystal ball has a crack in it. Every new technology starts off expensive and falls in price over time and with scale. EVs won't be any different. It's going to take them several decades to start taking huge market share but EVs have way too many advantages to dismiss them out of hand.
They're going to have to be financially and logistically reasonable before they become mainstream.
Already done for big parts of the population. My brother-in-law drives a Nissan Leaf as his daily driver. Tesla is selling hundreds of thousands of cars.
People won't buy EVs unless they are economically superior to ICE for the function they need it to perform. Companies won't make EVs with decent towing capacity unless people are going to buy them.
A Tesla Model X can tow the same 5000 lbs my current gas powered pickup can tow. It is trivial to build an EV with substantial towing capacity. You are right that there is a chicken and egg problem with EVs but there is clear evidence that the popularity of EVs is growing. I think in the long term (40+ years out) EVs will come to dominate the car market with hybrids and gas powered vehicles becoming specialty vehicles. But there are a lot of infrastructure and technical issues to work out before that happens.
people who are against supply side economics, really need supply side economics to get EVs to become a thing.
That's a weird and backward argument. Supply side economics is the theory that growth can be induced by lowering taxes and reducing regulation. Reasonable enough as a principle as long as you don't take it too far. Given that we subsidize oil and fossil fuels to the tune of $5 Trillion per year globally, what you are de-facto arguing is that we need MORE taxes and regulation on fossil fuels for EVs to succeed. EVs don't need supply side economics to work - they need us to stop supply side economics for the smog belching competing technologies.
Bad example, the Koch brothers hate Trump
Not enough to actually do anything against him that matters.
Electrically-powered aircraft, at first small single-engine types, are not far off at all given the rates of advancement we've seen regarding electric battery storage technology combined with new materials like carbon-fiber.
"New materials like carbon fiber"? Carbon fiber has been around for decades. It's not even close to new. And as for the rate of advancement of battery tech, storage improves by a few percent per year. It's slow steady incremental progress. The volumetric energy density of Li-Ion batteries has doubled since 1995. Good but hardly mind blowing rate of improvement. Doubling every 25 years isn't exactly speedy.
We have a few prototype small electric planes. Commercial airliners are in no danger of being displaced any time soon. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see all electric planes but it's going to be a few decades at minimum before they become commercially viable even under the most optimistic assumptions.
Not many years ago the majority of RC model airplanes of any size were powered by ICEs. Now ICE-powered models, especially aircraft and quad-rotors, are becoming the exception rather than the rule..
Irrelevant because the forces and thermodynamics involved do not scale linearly. You can't simply take an RC plane and make it 10 or 100 times bigger with everything working the same. Aircraft big enough to carry people have to be able to travel a LOT faster than your typical RC toy and wind resistance scales up exponentially. Doubling your speed requires far more than double the power. And I'm not even getting into the economics of building a real plane that costs millions versus your several hundred dollar toy.
Electrically powered cars and freight trucks are now beginning to become a reality as our ability to store electricity densely steadily improves. Aircraft cannot be far behind.
Actually electric powered aircraft are quite a bit behind because the physics involved are very different. Power to weigh matters a LOT more for aircraft than it does for automobiles. While we might one day see commercially viable electric aircraft it is going to be decades later than for cars because of the power to weight requirements.
Can you name one?
I actually rather liked the Ford Focus EV aside from its annoyingly limited range. I also drove an eGolf and thought it compared favorably to the gas powered Golf's I've owned. (I've owned both a GTI and a regular Golf GL) I also got a chance to hop in a Honda Fit EV once and it wasn't bad. I drove a Chevy Spark EV which was kind of meh and got replaced by the vastly superior Bolt which is actually a pretty terrific little car.
I've also driven a variety of hybrids. Some ground up designs (like the Volt and Prius) and a few conversions like the Fusion. Most were decent to good.
Oh, well the Kia Soul EV isn't bad actually, assuming you don't mind the Kia Soul in general.
I haven't driven that one myself yet. Haven't driven Mercedes offerings or the one from Hyundai.
One would think that the diesel-electric designs that have existed for many decades on locomotives would be easily transferred to road truck designs.
I don't think it would be a direct application but the general concept would be very similar. I think the main obstacles are mostly economic ones. For it to become economical the hybrid system has to be manufactured at scale but until it is, it isn't cost competitive. My guess is that you'll probably first see it in some form of work truck like a pickup marketed towards construction workers. That's the biggest market I think so it's kind of the logical place to start. But right now we have a sort of chicken vs egg problem. It's too expensive right now because it isn't at scale and it isn't at scale because it's too expensive.
Is the I.P. all tied up in the companies that make locomotives?
I doubt that is a serious obstacle. Possibly some but I'm sure companies like Ford could negotiate an appropriate licensing agreement. If anything the holders of such IP should be drooling at the chance to get licensing fees from a product that brings in as many billions as pickups and semis do.
It is not used because it is inefficient.
Diesel electirc isn't used in road going vehicles because they currently are expensive to make. Their potential efficiency is not actually in question. There are already diesel hybrids that have been developed and some are already in use and they are more fuel efficient and less polluting than their diesel only counterparts. The obstacle to them is price and to a lesser extend emissions restrictions on diesels in general in comparison to gasoline-hybrids.
You seem to have missed the point. I'm not suggesting scaling down locomotive engines. I merely used that as an example to explain the concept of using a diesel engine to power electric motors rather than to drive wheels directly. The technology in such a hybrid for a truck would obviously be quite different in actual practice.
Diesel electric locomotives (and very large mining trucks) are this way because a conventional transmission would be far too large and heavy and would require the engine to be used in a large range of engine speeds.
Apples to oranges. That says nothing about why diesel-electric would or would not work in road going vehicles. The economics are a limitation but there is clear evidence that efficiency is not the limitation. They don't use it on larger more powerful locomotives because the cost and difficulty of scaling a mechanical transmission does not scale linearly making the designs that have been tried uneconomical. In smaller applications mechanical drive is sometimes more competitive BUT that does not mean that a diesel-electric cannot surpass them in efficiency and/or cost depending on the application.
Smaller diesel trains do use a conventional transmission because the fuel consumption is lower.
Diesel mechanical get used for cost reasons because of the application. Mechanical transmissions are often simpler than and generally less expensive so for certain corner case applications they can make sense. They are used mostly in switchers where fuel efficiency is not the paramount concern. Switchers are analogous to tug boats - tractive effort and repairability are paramount concerns over fuel economy. But again this does not necessarily translate to the requirements of road going trucks.
Now imagine what would happen if enough people say "Fuck this, I am not voting for any shitty candidate."
What happens it you get Trump or someone similarly repugnant in the White House with a fraction of the people voting. Someone is going to win and some people are always going to vote. If you don't vote then you are just letting someone else vote for you and you might not like what they decide.
The problem is towing long distances, the batteries are just too expensive to do that at this point.
A problem neatly solved by designing a power train that resembles that of a locomotive. Diesel engine runs and provides the power to turn the electric motors. Batteries are present to facilitate short haul movement and acceleration and allow the diesel to run at a constant speed where it is optimized but they don't have to be massive batteries like in the Tesla semi.
Hybrids are a waste of time at this point. Pure electric is the way forward, with a rapid charger network and a few ICE models for edge cases.
Not true at all. The "rapid" charge networks aren't rapid enough yet to displace gasoline in widespread use. I can refuel my car in under 5 minutes at any gas with enough fuel to travel >350 miles. Fully charging a Tesla Model S on a supercharger takes 75 minutes and even ~170 miles of range takes 30 minutes. Definitely good but not good enough, even allowing for the fact that EVs will be charged at home/work most of the time. Not to mention that these "rapid" chargers are no where near ubiquitous.
Don't make perfect the enemy of good. I share your enthusiasm for EVs and I think they probably will dominate like you suggest in the long run. But hybrids will play an important role in getting us there. Our fueling infrastructure like it or not is optimized for gasoline and recharge times for EVs still have to be improved to make them practical for long haul transport. We also would need a LOT more charging stations in a lot more places. Furthermore the electric grid is going to need to see MASSIVE upgrades for EVs to really take over significant market share. That will take time which hybrids do not require. I can see all of these upgrades and technological improvements happening but it's going to take a few decades to really come to fruition. In the mean time hybrids are a useful bridge.
Every EV that is just an ICE with an electric drive train fitted is crap.
I've driven plenty of those vehicles and could not disagree more.
Diesels depend on being hot. They are utterly unsuited to a hybrid duty cycle.
The term "hybrid duty cycle" is extremely vague in your usage. No you wouldn't use a diesel like an Atkinson Cycle engine on a Prius. You would use a diesel like you would on a locomotive. The diesel is running continuously and acts as the power source for a generator for the electric motors that actually turn the wheels. No direct drive from the diesel to the wheels. It should be an excellent way for large trucks (particularly long haul versions) to hybridize. You could have battery banks to power the electric motors without the diesel for shorter trips or to get up to speed periods. Batteries would also allow plug in hybrids in some use cases.
Honestly I have no idea why diesel electric hybrids are not a thing with large trucks aside from the fact that economics of scale aren't in play for them yet. I would think a hybrid electric pickup with a battery bank for running tools and the huge torque of electric motors would be an ideal work truck. Similarly a hybrid semi with a diesel engine driving electric motors for long haul transport seems hugely logical to me. I understand that the early versions would be expensive but the upside seems to be pretty clear.
This means you need a separate receiver box and power cable going into the box, but cables are what you're trying to get away from with wireless video!
So you want to go from two cables down to one? That's fine though a litlle silly for a wall mounted TV.
So the answer to this would seem to be USB-C. It supports HDMI video as well as power, so in theory you could create a receiver dongle that just plugged into a TV (or monitor with speakers) and required no external power cable. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find anything like this on the market.
There are some cables being worked on. Unclear if this solves the problem you are working on.
What I'd like is to be able to wall-mount a new TV and just plug in a wireless dongle to stream the video with no extra setup required on the receiver end.
If you are wall mounting the TV already, why the need to worry about having a separate power cable? I don't understand why you can't just use a receiver with wires since you'll need them anyway. Sounds to me like you are making perfect the enemy of good. I'm not aware of any TV that can be powered by USB-C so it's kind of a moot issue anyway.
I know we're wandering off topic a little here but- I prefer a tax on purchased goods and services.
Which is inherently regressive. Plus you don't want to put all your eggs in a single taxation scheme. Doing that causes all sorts of problems when the economy inevitably has a downturn. You want a mixture of taxation mechanisms and whenever possible you want them as closely related to what they are funding as possible. I understand the appeal of what you are proposing but it's fatally flawed.
The rich have always found ways of circumventing income taxes. Most of the mega-rich end up paying a lower % of their earning on taxes than the average person (despite theoretically being in a high tax bracket).
Only because we as the voting public allow it. Until we collectively stop screwing ourselves it is a problem that will continue. Many of the problem can be solved by taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income. You also could solve a lot of problems by taxing businesses on revenue rather than profits. Profits are a LOT easier to fiddle with than revenue is. (yes I'm aware of the challenges this causes too)
Goods and services (exclude non hospitality food items) is a better idea because you pay more based on the more you consume.
The flaw in that reasoning is that there is a limit on how much an individual can consume. Once your basic needs are met your consumption of goods and services does not go up linearly with income. That means that poor people end up paying a MUCH higher percentage of their income in taxes than wealthy people. A modest level of taxation on purchased goods and services is fine and useful but relying on it too much would eventually result in huge revenue problems for governments during every recession. Like for most businesses diversity of income streams is a good thing for governments if you want them to be able to function in both good and bad times. There are multiple ways to make it all work but in every case it is a bad idea to rely too heavily on a single means of taxation.
. I would also suggest a progressive tax-bracket for items too to tax luxuries higher than necessities.
Then you get into a messy situation where the government is de-facto setting prices for goods. (they already do it to some degree and it doesn't work well) Where do you draw the line on what constitutes a luxury? Is a camera a luxury good? If not at what price point does it become one? You would have to do this for every product made and tracking that would be an administrative nightmare. You also are effectively subsidizing some products over others based on an arbitrarily chosen price point. I happen to be an accountant and I assure you that you are hugely underestimating the mess this would be. I know it sounds simple but in reality it very much is not.
Most of us around the world pay taxes on every liter or gallon of petroleum our cars consume. In some countries it's a pretty high tax.
But not as high as it should be. The current taxes do not cover the full cost of mitigating the pollution that results from burning gasoline and diesel. Furthermore globally we subsidize fossil fuels to somewhere around $5 Trillion per year. The taxes on it aren't even close to being as high as they should be.
If electric vehicles start making up a larger and larger % of vehicles on the road will there come an end where to be fair you need to drop the tax on fuel and instead tax electricity
As I said before the tax on oil based fuels needs to go up before it comes down. It's been a free ride for FAR too long. Your point is a fair one that there should be some usage based balance in how the taxes are assessed but particular how the funding is applied once the government receives it. The easy way to do it is to calculate the cost of infrastructure maintenance in total and then divide by the expected number of kWh used by vehicles with a given fuel source. (the amount of energy per gallon of gasoline/diesel is known) Apply a rate from there to each vehicle regardless of how it is powered. Then it doesn't matter if they use gas or electric plus it has the benefit of automatically forcing inefficient vehicles to pay a higher share of the costs. Pretty easy to do mathematically but probably difficult politically.
Well, if you were smart enough to mine a few hundred Bitcoin back in 2010 and held onto them, you would be a millionaire now.
Lucky is the word you are looking for. There was no logic that would have lead you to believe that mining bitcoin would result in vast riches. Therefore smart doesn't play into it. It was a gamble that paid off for a lucky few, barely different than having a winning lottery ticket.
As an actual currency, though, it kind of sucks.
You don't need the "kind of" qualifier. It sucks. It's expensive, volatile, risky, awkward, not accepted many places, slow, and did I mention expensive? Transaction costs for bitcoin are WAY higher than for dollar transactions in almost all cases. (except those where jail time is a concern)
Or Slashdotters can tell us: Anyone know of any benefit related to cryptocurrencies?
No. Next question.
Seriously, most of them are rather transparent pyramid schemes or similar scams designed to separate the gullible from their "real" money. The few that aren't are just an answer to a problem nobody has except criminals.
Paleontology could make a statement to the effect of: "We will find a fossil with such and such features".
I think that nicely shows that you have no idea what paleontologists do or how they do it.
Your argument regarding Economists is an "Appeal to Authority" fallacy
Not at all. Go read their papers because you clearly haven't. I have a graduate degree in finance and I've worked with many of the economic models you question. The models stand on their own and make perfectly valid and provable predictions. No appeal to authority needed. If you want to disprove them go right ahead. There is a Nobel prize waiting for you if you do.
Like that distinguished bunch, Climate Scientists too can explain anything, but are able to predict nothing.
Again you make fairly sweeping claims about a field of study you pretty clearly know nothing about. The climate scientists make predictions routinely and are proven to be accurate within the limitations of the model. If you think otherwise then you haven't actually examined any papers on the subject. Sure there is a lot they still don't know but that's true of every field of science. You also have to understand that it takes years for most predictions of climate models to be proven. But the evidence is there. Your failure to examine it does not make it less valid.
A comment like this is the reason I still come to this site. May your mother rest in peace.
Thank you. That is very kind of you.
Being able to explain, what already happened does not make you a scientist.
Are you seriously claiming that paleontology is not a science? You might want to revisit that nice little straw man definition you have there. Just because something happened in the past does not mean it cannot be studied scientifically. Remember that the past is where we get literally ALL of our data for our scientific models.
To qualify, you have to be able to reliably predict, what will happen... And there, despite several decades of trying, the Climate Scientists have been no more successful than the Economists.
You may have meant that as an insult but it isn't. Economics does make testable predictions that routinely turn out to be true. They don't award Nobel Prizes in economics for lucky guesses. Just because a field is complicated and messy doesn't mean that they haven't had any success. I'm guessing you don't actually know any climate scientists nor are you actually familiar with any of their work that you so glibly disparage.
Here in NJ we had temperature-wise....
We don't care. It's a small data point in a MUCH larger problem.
Back in 1996 we had extreme snowstorms
So what? Weather != Climate. The point is that "extreme" events become MORE COMMON, not that they didn't happen before. The point is that the the average is moving.
Really, this "global " scaremongering is getting tiresome.
Right because New Jersey = all of Earth. (Insert eyeroll here)
I agree conventional addresses are a lot more useful to the pedestrian or even the driver without a GPS unit of some kind in hand.
Only because we've built up our infrastructure with conventional addresses in mind. It would be an expensive but straightforward proposition to change that to something more universal. Every system will have its flaws but I'd be supportive of a system that didn't require an intimate knowledge of local geography to navigate and that was consistent no matter where you went.
I do not want to speak ill of anyone (least of all the dead), but amen to that!
So don't. That's like starting off a sentence with "I'm not a racist but..." Whatever follows is unlikely to be very kind.
Not only this, as smart as he may have been at Physics, he was a fucking moron about AI.
Which is not something the Nobel committee cares about at all. Linus Pauling won two Nobel prizes and he had some pretty lunatic ideas regarding Vitamin C. Just because someone is brilliant doesn't mean they are right about everything. I find it curious that the first thing you go to is to try to tear the guy down. I'm pretty sure you aren't perfect either.
His life was remarkable in many ways - one of which was surviving with ALS for so bloody long.
My mother died from ALS recently. Her course took about a decade which is WAY too long with that awful disease though I'm grateful I got to have her alive as long as I did. Stephen Hawking is someone I admire probably more for what he accomplished in the face of that disease than for his scientific accomplishments. And in saying that I am in no way minimizing his contributions to science. I've seen what that disease does to a person up close and even if you aren't religious (I'm not) you should pray that you never have to experience ALS. To do even a fraction of what Hawking did with that malady makes him to my mind one of the most remarkable people to have ever lived.
Actually, it rose.
By definition if cannot rise. But it might be a few standard deviations tighter.