Evolution. All the idiots who won't get their kids vaccinated will see their genetic line die off. Those with vaccinations will be OK.
Might work if these diseases were always fatal. Problem is that they aren't. They are only sometimes fatal. Sometimes carriers aren't even symptomatic. And they also can infect people who cannot get vaccinated for valid medical reasons.
I wouldn't have a philosophical problem with parents of children who choose not to vaccinate without a valid medical reason to have to live in quarantine. Separate them from the rest of the herd. Basically they are deciding to join a voluntary leper colony. This would keep them and their DNA from infecting the rest of us.
Just make sure *your* children have their vaccinations. The kids of all the dumbasses will be weeded out due to genetic stupidity. It is as it always was... thank you Mr. Darwin.
If only it were that simple. Problem is that the asshats who don't vaccinate by choice cause illness in those who cannot get vaccinated for valid medical reasons. If it was simply people competing for darwin awards along with their spawn I could almost not give a damn. But unfortunately I do actually care about the kids of these dumbass parents. You don't get to pick your parents and just because they are idiots doesn't mean the kid necessarily is.
Personally I think anyone who doesn't vaccinate without a valid medical excuse should have to live in quarantine.
Yes, but it doesn't give accurate percentages of those affected.
That's kind of an academic point of interest. Once they develop an in-situ test on a live brain then we'll get accurate counts of percent of players affected but that's not particularly important data. The important fact is that playing american football unambiguously and substantially increases the risk of CTE particularly among professionals. The exact percentage of affected players is academically interesting but not clinically important to those affected. The important fact is that the rate of affected patients is substantially higher than in the general population. The only people that might care about the exact percentages are probably lawyers.
Near 100% in those donating their body to science, but that might account for only a small percentage of those involved in the sport (also, what about other sports with high-speed impact, such as hockey)
What about them? It's already known that hockey players get CTE as well and similarly the exact percentages aren't the important fact. Again, whether most football players or just some have CTE the important fact is that substantial percentages of these athletes (well above the general population) are affected. The cause of their injury is no more a mystery than the cause of a torn ACL.
the "one plug for everything" trend that began with USB Type C is a step in the wrong direction.
Could not disagree more. There are HUGE advantages to having common connectors. These advantages vastly outweigh the drawbacks. Connectors should be commonized as much as possible. The fewer number of cables types I have to deal with the better. I basically want to be able to hook up nearly everything with 1 or at most 2 types of cables.
having "unique" plug types for particular purposes is a *feature*, not a bug - simply by looking at the plug, we know what the cable and the port does.
Except you don't and you never did in a great many cases. Having to carry around and deal with 20 different types of cables is wasteful and unnecessary.
So you see a Type C plug - is it Thunderbolt or not? Is it a DisplayPort? What voltages/amps can it provide?
All good quality USB-C cables will work for Thunderbolt. Same with Displayport. As long as you are using good quality cables it is a non-issue. Sourcing good quality cables is not a difficult problem.
this is made even worse considering that there's active circuitry involved, where you need to worry about whether the cable itself is built right (see e.g. Benson Leung's long list of cables that can fry your hardware)
If you buy a crap cable from a crap vendor be prepared to get crap results. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with whether or not common connectors are a good idea or not. While I do generally agree with the principle that cables should be dumb and the smarts should be in the devices it's not something I'm going to make a holy war over if it gets the job done.
In terms of number of battery units produced, Tesla and GM are roundoff error compared to Toyota.
Several issues with your "analysis". 1) The Tesla Model S is a $70-100K car so not exactly and apples to apples comparison 2) The cars you are comparing have been on the market for 6 years or less versus 20 years for the Prius. Of course cumulative sales will be bigger for the Prius. Do you know how many Prius were sold in the first 5 years on the market worldwide? 81,700. That means that both the Volt and the Model S outsold the Prius over the first several years of their availability. 3) The Bolt has been on the market for a year. Are you seriously going to compare cumulative sales of a vehicle that has been on the market for a year to one that has been on the market for 20?
That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production.
Not even remotely. I design manufacturing production systems for a living. Tesla scaling production to deliver cars more quickly would be a substantial cost with no obvious benefit to Tesla either short or long term. The reason they haven't done it isn't that they cannot do it but because they have chosen not to do it. As long as customers are willing to wait for delivery it would be enormously stupid of Tesla to devote that much capital to upgrading assembly lines and supply chains. There is no evidence to suggest that faster production would result in enough marginal extra sales to be worth the expense. They need to produce cars fast enough to keep their customers happy but any faster is wasting money. So far Tesla customers clearly are ok with waiting a bit.
(If you want to know what the problem is, Tesla relies on selling ZEV credits to other automakers to keep from going bankrupt. But other automakers only need a certain number of ZEV credits each year to comply with CARB regulations. So Tesla has to be careful not to produce too many ZEVs lest they cause the price of ZEV credits to plummet due to oversupply.
Wrong again. Tesla is not throttling production for that reason and they certainly aren't calibrating it to demand for emissions credits. That would not be a sustainable business model and Elon Musk certainly knows that. The reason Tesla isn't profitable and why they produce at the rate they do is much simpler. They simply lack the economies of scale enjoyed by major auto firms. That fact alone is why you haven't seen a major new car company in decades. It's hard to achieve minimum efficient scale in the auto industry, particularly with a wildly non-traditional product offering. They have to reinvest all their capital (and then some) into building the company. Production lines to make cars are enormously expensive. Companies like Ford and GM and Toyota have had years to develop the scale and balance sheets necessary to bankroll such investments. Tesla is still a small young company with a weak balance sheet and it will take time to get to where the major auto makers are now.
Pretty much all small companies have the same problem including mine. My company makes auto parts and we could easily bring in enough people and machines to deliver products to our customers in a few days. But the expense would be enormous and we would immediately become uncompetitive on price. We also could produce products ahead of time and inventory them but that means we tie up vast amounts of capital in inventory and storage. Producing products faster than your customers demand them is wasteful, expensive, and stupid.
Why would someone donate their brain if they didn't think they had damage?
Plenty of people donate their brains for research who do not have CTE or other brain damage. This has been studied among the general population quite thoroughly. There is no need for every football player to donate his brain to avoid sample bias. We have a control group in everyone who doesn't play that sport.
Getting hit in the head is a proven cause of CTE. Professional football players get hit in the head commonly. Professional football players have CTE commonly. There is no other known cause of CTE aside from getting hit in the head. QED playing professional football is a common cause of CTE. The causal chain is quite intact here. The fact that some players manage to avoid brain injury while playing football does not change that causal chain.
It's a distinction without a difference in this case. CTE comes from being hit in the head which demonstrably happens a lot in football. CTE is relatively rare among the general population who do not engage in contact sports or who haven't been violently assaulted. It is quite safe to say that playing football is a common cause of CTE. Causation is not really a question in this instance and the causal chain is well understood. Some players manage to avoid being concussed but that doesn't mean that playing football was not the cause in those who do get CTE. There is no other reasonable explanation for their condition aside from head blows received while playing a violent professional sport.
Because CTE has a well known and understood cause - namely getting hit in the head. Getting hit in the head happens a LOT in american football. There is no known case in medical science of anyone getting CTE from drug use.
Correlation does not equal causation. Just because all professional NFL players appear to have brain damage, it does not mean that football causes brain damage.
Snark all you want but in this case this isn't mere correlation. The condition in question Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Key word there is traumatic. You get that by being hit in the head and receiving brain damage as a result of being concussed. It's the exact same condition seen in boxers and MMA fighters and hockey players and rugby players and soldiers who get concussed repeatedly. So yes it absolutely does mean that playing football in the NFL is a cause for many players of serious brain injury. The fact that some players manage to avoid such injury does not mean that a cause/effect relationship is not in play. It simply means that some managed to avoid getting concussed during their playing career. Your claim is similar to saying smoking doesn't cause cancer because not every smoker gets cancer.
Ugh, I hate the continued comparison of nuclear and "green" energy. It is *not* an apples to apples comparison.
Nuclear is "green" in the sense that it doesn't have the emissions problems of fossil fuels. It's definitely not without pollution however - the stuff it generates is quite nasty. Furthermore when there is a serious catastrophe with a nuclear plant it can render a large are effectively uninhabitable. So whether or not fission is green kind of depends on the context. Nuclear fission is also not a renewable source of energy.
That leaves nuclear as really still the best option for base load generation. Which is what frustrates me in regards to so many "environmentalists" condemning them and stagnating development.
If you buy the argument that base load can only be met by generation that works in a manner similar to fossil fuels or nuclear then your argument is correct. But I don't agree with the premise of that argument because it isn't true. Base load is simply a way of saying the minimum demand. You can meet this in many cases even with power systems that are not constant sources of production. You are correct that for the next several decades at minimum it's not reasonable to think we will get rid of nuclear or fossil fuels until we can get a distributed solar/wind+batteries system to sufficient scale. But the notion that base load power could not be supplied at least in part today by wind and/or solar simply isn't true provided you have a connected grid - which we do. The sun and/or wind is always on somewhere - we just have to have a sophisticated enough grid to take advantage of it.
Even in states where you would expect rolling coal to be popular, there is a crackdown on that. State troopers where I live have the authority to do on the spot ODB2 checks, and it it doesn't jive with what comes out of the exhaust pipe, they scrape the registration sticker off the windshield, and the vehicle gets towed to the nearest shop.
I live in Michigan not far from Detroit and I see asshats in my town weekly with their ridiculous big-rig converted smoke stacks belching massive amounts of black smoke. No evidence that the authorities are doing anything about it.
But engine companies are actually not able to meet the emission targets, certainly not by keeping their clients happy
Baloney. They can meet the emissions targets today and the technology is being sold as I type this in large numbers. It will mean that they will have to change the vehicle mix but to that I say so what? Same rules apply to every one and they have the technology to achieve it. If that means that you and I have to live with less horsepower so be it. But Tesla is showing that you can meet emissions targets and have a vehicle worth driving too. Even among gasoline powered vehicles there are plenty that are being sold right now that meet any reasonably near term emissions requirement and are perfectly fine vehicles to drive.
It is also true that most of emission targets are determined by political interests with low-to-no realistic technical knowledge.
The emissions targets have been reviewed plenty by interested parties with technical knowledge and there is no evidence that it is technically impossible to meet them as a general proposition. There are vehicles available TODAY that can meet the emissions targets. Yes they will have to sell a different mix of vehicles. The fact that car makers want to have their cake and eat it too is not my problem nor yours. They have the technology and they need to get busy applying it.
I worked on this field some years ago and the fact that the upcoming targets, the ones being applied now and in the near future, were almost impossible to be met was a quite common belief in the industry.
I work in the auto industry today and while I agree that some "believe" it impossible, that's only true if you assume no change to the product mix. Despite what they might tell you, very few people "need" a 500HP Corvette or a 400HP pickup truck.
Diesel engines do not normally produce any odours.
I have no idea where you got that idea but it's total BS. Diesel exhaust definitely has odors and is rather well known for having them. They've gotten cleaner but they are hardly without smell.
I haven't seen any car emit black smoke in years. I doubt one that does would pass periodic safety and emissions tests.
I've seen at least three this week alone. Rolling Coal is disturbingly popular. And no they wouldn't pass any reasonable emissions test not to mention the practice being explicitly illegal.
Is this just the natural result of unrealistic or even impossible regulations devised by leftist bureaucrats being forced on companies?
No. They've been perfectly capable of meeting the emissions regulations for a long time. They chose instead to break the law and cheat their customers and pollute the air to pad their profit margins. Arguing that clean air and following the same rules that apply to everyone in the industry is somehow a "leftist" plot just makes you sound like a right wing nut job that lost his tinfoil hat.
I'm just a little bit skeptical about the price and....well. in the blurb it uses sneaky word tactics. see how it says that a price drop is expected. and that would make it cheaper than nuclear.
It's not that hard to be cheaper than nuclear when you consider ALL the costs and the amount of regulation needed to ensure safety. The full cost of insuring nuclear tends to get overlooked. I'm not aware of any fission plant that does not require a nation state to provide insurance guarantees in order to get built. While they are relatively safe in general, no private insurance company is going to write a policy against something like Chernobyl. Nuclear is cost competitive with subsidies (insurance and otherwise) but it's not so cheap that you cannot imagine solar or wind being cheaper in the right circumstances. Not to mention that the cost of solar and wind generation are falling MUCH faster than the cost of nuclear fission generation. I don't have any principled objections to fission generation (and I prefer it to fossil fuels) but let's not pretend it's "too cheap to meter".
(presumably nuclear with nuclear plant profits though calculated in, making it kinda like "cheaper than oil" when oil has plenty of profit built into it, making the price flexible downwards as soon as someone has a better energy source)
Well, oil and other fossil fuels get subsidies amounting to about $5 Trillion globally every year (that's about 6% of global GDP in case you wondered) and I'm not even counting the cost of the environmental problems they cause. And yes, the profits are part of the equation too but if a new energy source (say solar) gets cheap enough to eat into the profit margins of oil then it is by definition competitive and that's a good thing. And frankly if I have my choice between a relatively clean renewable energy source and fossil fuels for about the same cost then it is a no brainer.
I oppose them because plans for and the cost of decommissioning them is not part of the budget planning.
Translation: You don't have a real evidence based objection so you are trying to make perfect the enemy of good. Coal plants don't have decommissioning costs as a part of their budget planning either. I can't decide if you are a troll or an idiot so I'm going to go with both.
Also, there are environmental concerns not well researched and understood yet, like underseas power cables and their impact on oceanic marine life with electrical sensory organs
So we should keep pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere instead since we already know that impact on marine (and non-marine) life? Here's a little top tip for you. We've had underseas cable including power cables for over a century. Your assertion that we don't understand much about their impact is unsupported by evidence and what we do know is CLEARLY not a significant threat to marine life.
Sharks have displayed problems from low voltage underseas cables, even when quite thickly insulated. It may well be ok, but I still want a bit more research before jumping on something because ooh windcraft!
If you care so much about sharks maybe you should concentrate first on the 100 million sharks we kill every year to put in soup and for bogus "remedies" and as bycatch and for other stupid reasons. A few undersea cables are quite simply not significant in the face of that.
National origin doesn't matter, people simply can't have full faith in closed source.
People can't have full faith in open source either unless they are either capable of reviewing all the code themselves or can somehow establish a trusted chain of custody for all the code and tools to compile it. Most people cannot do the former and only large organizations realistically have the resources to do the later. There are undeniably huge advantages to open source but code security doesn't stand up to strict scrutiny in real world use for non-trivial use cases. I don't compile my software like most people and I'm not remotely qualified to review the code. So from that standpoint there is essentially no difference to me between open and closed source as an end user. There are great advantages to open source but this isn't one of them.
You tend to think of the loss of manufacturing as not a big thing.
I have worked in manufacturing for nearly 30 years and my day job is running a manufacturing company. Sorry to disappoint you but American manufacturing is alive and well and doing better than ever and that is unlikely to change any time soon. What has changed is the composition of the sorts of things made in America. America has a manufacturing economy that is worth somewhere around $3 Trillion/year and growing. Our manufacturing sector by itself is about the same size as the GDP of Great Britain and larger than the entire economy of India and over double the GDP of Russia. It would be one of the 5 or 6 largest economies in the world. And yet people foolishly think that US manufacturing is on the decline because their Happy Meal toy was made in China. The difference is that we make stuff like jet engines and medical devices and mining equipment instead of plastic toys and beach towels.
You need to understand the difference between labor intensive and capital intensive. Labor intensive products are those whose cost includes a high percentage of labor, particularly unskilled labor. These sorts of products (think stuff you buy at Walmart or clothing) left America for good because our labor costs are simply too high. Some went to China some went elsewhere. As China's labor costs rise those products will go where labor is cheaper. The stuff made in america is capital intensive where automation and technology play a larger role. It's very much akin to what has happened in farming over the last century and a half. American agriculture produces more than ever but the percent of the population who work directly in agriculture has fallen to single digit percentages. The same thing is happening in American manufacturing. The percent of the workforce that builds things will be smaller but those that remain are and will continue to be far more capable and productive. The days of being able to make a large salary working an assembly line with nothing more than a high school diploma are dead and gone. Now if you want to work in manufacturing you had better bring something extra to the table.
China and other parts of Asia are undergoing a great rennisuance driven by the incredible wealth derived from manufacturing.
You say this as if it is something new. This has been going on for decades and it's fine. Read about the Asian Tigers and their success and growth since the 1950s. Read about the development of Japan since WWII and the panic in the US over Japan during the 1980s. China is the latest and given that they have 20%+ of the world population we should reasonably expect them to play a big role in the world's manufacturing economy. It's not going to kill us. None of this is anything new and all it means is that the US is going to have to compete to continue to thrive and we're certainly capable of doing that. China isn't going to put the US out of manufacturing any more than the US put Germany out of manufacturing. New players just change the mix is all based on their comparative advantages. China will become more technologically sophisticated and the US will have to work hard and invest smartly to deal with that. It's one of the reasons our idiotic policies on immigration (particularly those on the political right but some of the left too) are so foolish. We've got 1/5 the population of China so to compete we should be doing everything we can to encourage the smartest and hardest working people around the world to immigrate to the US.
The production of tangible goods really still is king. By and large the west is running massive trade deficits with the east. In effect, this means that wealth is continually being siphoned out of the country.
As I said before, it is WAY more complicated than y
China's leadership thinks ahead for longer than the next election or the next quarter. AI, green energy, you name it.
Pretty much anything you can say about China is more complicated than a one sentence summary including this one. Sometimes their leadership is indeed forward thinking but they aren't really the brilliant strategists you seem to be implying. They have huge problems and just like us they have smart people (and more of them) working on solutions to those problems. I assure you they have plenty of folks in leadership and elsewhere who are very happy with the status quo and are just as afraid of change as some Americans are.
Now we the USA, are looking to go back. Bring back coal, mundane factory jobs,
No, just the more ignorant and selfish and loud among us. Most of us are too busy working on the future to worry that much about trying to recreate a long gone past.
and then when - not if - we fall behind, we'll have to blame some other boogeyman or the same: immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, liberals and their Librul ways....
Only some of us. We've been like that for the entire existence of America. We're a nation of immigrants, many of whom seem to forget that fact routinely. We're both immensely fair minded and brutally bigoted. We are the land of opportunity but make it needlessly hard for many to realize that opportunity. We're still conflicted about race and gender issues though our constitutional ideals on the topic are clear. In short we're a complicated and not always logical bunch but we've done pretty well overall. Watching America is like watching sausage being made - not a pretty thing to observe but the end result is often pretty great.
eah, this is one of the more baffling aspects of modern American culture, especially on the right. They distrust every single thing about the government, but are happy to believe every single thing out of the mouths of large corporations and throw all their trust behind them.
Depends on which American you are talking to. If it's someone on the political left they tend to believe the government and not the companies. Political right is the reverse. Many exceptions of course on both sides of the aisle. Americans often like simple sound bite ideology that doesn't require them to think too hard especially when there is a chance they are wrong.
What makes this even less understandable is that one of those entities has a clear motive for lying to you quite a lot of the time, and the other doesn't... and many people will still put their trust behind the party that has clear motive to be dishonest every time.
That's because they tend to put their faith in whichever party best services their pre-existing confirmation bias. Whether what the party says is true or logical or sensible seems to play little role in their decision making. If they think government = evil then they will probably vote reliably republican even if that actually goes against their own self interest. Basically about 40% of the population will vote democrat no matter what and 40% will vote republican no matter what. It's not logical but that's what happens.
A quick google and a couple minutes with a calculator comes up with ~$1.5T for the solar panels, assuming sunny days all year round.
Fossil fuel subsidies cost the globe $5 Trillion each year. So by that standard your number seems downright reasonable and cost effective.
So, doable? Yeah, could be done. Cheap and easy? Not hardly.....
Nobody said it would be cheap but it might easily be cheaper than all of the alternatives. Certainly will be cheaper than fossil fuels and the baggage they bring.
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Evolution. All the idiots who won't get their kids vaccinated will see their genetic line die off. Those with vaccinations will be OK.
Might work if these diseases were always fatal. Problem is that they aren't. They are only sometimes fatal. Sometimes carriers aren't even symptomatic. And they also can infect people who cannot get vaccinated for valid medical reasons.
I wouldn't have a philosophical problem with parents of children who choose not to vaccinate without a valid medical reason to have to live in quarantine. Separate them from the rest of the herd. Basically they are deciding to join a voluntary leper colony. This would keep them and their DNA from infecting the rest of us.
Just make sure *your* children have their vaccinations. The kids of all the dumbasses will be weeded out due to genetic stupidity. It is as it always was... thank you Mr. Darwin.
If only it were that simple. Problem is that the asshats who don't vaccinate by choice cause illness in those who cannot get vaccinated for valid medical reasons. If it was simply people competing for darwin awards along with their spawn I could almost not give a damn. But unfortunately I do actually care about the kids of these dumbass parents. You don't get to pick your parents and just because they are idiots doesn't mean the kid necessarily is.
Personally I think anyone who doesn't vaccinate without a valid medical excuse should have to live in quarantine.
Yes, but it doesn't give accurate percentages of those affected.
That's kind of an academic point of interest. Once they develop an in-situ test on a live brain then we'll get accurate counts of percent of players affected but that's not particularly important data. The important fact is that playing american football unambiguously and substantially increases the risk of CTE particularly among professionals. The exact percentage of affected players is academically interesting but not clinically important to those affected. The important fact is that the rate of affected patients is substantially higher than in the general population. The only people that might care about the exact percentages are probably lawyers.
Near 100% in those donating their body to science, but that might account for only a small percentage of those involved in the sport (also, what about other sports with high-speed impact, such as hockey)
What about them? It's already known that hockey players get CTE as well and similarly the exact percentages aren't the important fact. Again, whether most football players or just some have CTE the important fact is that substantial percentages of these athletes (well above the general population) are affected. The cause of their injury is no more a mystery than the cause of a torn ACL.
the "one plug for everything" trend that began with USB Type C is a step in the wrong direction.
Could not disagree more. There are HUGE advantages to having common connectors. These advantages vastly outweigh the drawbacks. Connectors should be commonized as much as possible. The fewer number of cables types I have to deal with the better. I basically want to be able to hook up nearly everything with 1 or at most 2 types of cables.
having "unique" plug types for particular purposes is a *feature*, not a bug - simply by looking at the plug, we know what the cable and the port does.
Except you don't and you never did in a great many cases. Having to carry around and deal with 20 different types of cables is wasteful and unnecessary.
So you see a Type C plug - is it Thunderbolt or not? Is it a DisplayPort? What voltages/amps can it provide?
All good quality USB-C cables will work for Thunderbolt. Same with Displayport. As long as you are using good quality cables it is a non-issue. Sourcing good quality cables is not a difficult problem.
this is made even worse considering that there's active circuitry involved, where you need to worry about whether the cable itself is built right (see e.g. Benson Leung's long list of cables that can fry your hardware)
If you buy a crap cable from a crap vendor be prepared to get crap results. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with whether or not common connectors are a good idea or not. While I do generally agree with the principle that cables should be dumb and the smarts should be in the devices it's not something I'm going to make a holy war over if it gets the job done.
In terms of number of battery units produced, Tesla and GM are roundoff error compared to Toyota.
Several issues with your "analysis". 1) The Tesla Model S is a $70-100K car so not exactly and apples to apples comparison 2) The cars you are comparing have been on the market for 6 years or less versus 20 years for the Prius. Of course cumulative sales will be bigger for the Prius. Do you know how many Prius were sold in the first 5 years on the market worldwide? 81,700. That means that both the Volt and the Model S outsold the Prius over the first several years of their availability. 3) The Bolt has been on the market for a year. Are you seriously going to compare cumulative sales of a vehicle that has been on the market for a year to one that has been on the market for 20?
That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production.
Not even remotely. I design manufacturing production systems for a living. Tesla scaling production to deliver cars more quickly would be a substantial cost with no obvious benefit to Tesla either short or long term. The reason they haven't done it isn't that they cannot do it but because they have chosen not to do it. As long as customers are willing to wait for delivery it would be enormously stupid of Tesla to devote that much capital to upgrading assembly lines and supply chains. There is no evidence to suggest that faster production would result in enough marginal extra sales to be worth the expense. They need to produce cars fast enough to keep their customers happy but any faster is wasting money. So far Tesla customers clearly are ok with waiting a bit.
(If you want to know what the problem is, Tesla relies on selling ZEV credits to other automakers to keep from going bankrupt. But other automakers only need a certain number of ZEV credits each year to comply with CARB regulations. So Tesla has to be careful not to produce too many ZEVs lest they cause the price of ZEV credits to plummet due to oversupply.
Wrong again. Tesla is not throttling production for that reason and they certainly aren't calibrating it to demand for emissions credits. That would not be a sustainable business model and Elon Musk certainly knows that. The reason Tesla isn't profitable and why they produce at the rate they do is much simpler. They simply lack the economies of scale enjoyed by major auto firms. That fact alone is why you haven't seen a major new car company in decades. It's hard to achieve minimum efficient scale in the auto industry, particularly with a wildly non-traditional product offering. They have to reinvest all their capital (and then some) into building the company. Production lines to make cars are enormously expensive. Companies like Ford and GM and Toyota have had years to develop the scale and balance sheets necessary to bankroll such investments. Tesla is still a small young company with a weak balance sheet and it will take time to get to where the major auto makers are now.
Pretty much all small companies have the same problem including mine. My company makes auto parts and we could easily bring in enough people and machines to deliver products to our customers in a few days. But the expense would be enormous and we would immediately become uncompetitive on price. We also could produce products ahead of time and inventory them but that means we tie up vast amounts of capital in inventory and storage. Producing products faster than your customers demand them is wasteful, expensive, and stupid.
Why would someone donate their brain if they didn't think they had damage?
Plenty of people donate their brains for research who do not have CTE or other brain damage. This has been studied among the general population quite thoroughly. There is no need for every football player to donate his brain to avoid sample bias. We have a control group in everyone who doesn't play that sport.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Getting hit in the head is a proven cause of CTE. Professional football players get hit in the head commonly. Professional football players have CTE commonly. There is no other known cause of CTE aside from getting hit in the head. QED playing professional football is a common cause of CTE. The causal chain is quite intact here. The fact that some players manage to avoid brain injury while playing football does not change that causal chain.
Correlation does not PROVE causation.
It's a distinction without a difference in this case. CTE comes from being hit in the head which demonstrably happens a lot in football. CTE is relatively rare among the general population who do not engage in contact sports or who haven't been violently assaulted. It is quite safe to say that playing football is a common cause of CTE. Causation is not really a question in this instance and the causal chain is well understood. Some players manage to avoid being concussed but that doesn't mean that playing football was not the cause in those who do get CTE. There is no other reasonable explanation for their condition aside from head blows received while playing a violent professional sport.
What about soccer and baseball players?
What about them?
How can we tell drugs were not a cause?
Because CTE has a well known and understood cause - namely getting hit in the head. Getting hit in the head happens a LOT in american football. There is no known case in medical science of anyone getting CTE from drug use.
Correlation does not equal causation. Just because all professional NFL players appear to have brain damage, it does not mean that football causes brain damage.
Snark all you want but in this case this isn't mere correlation. The condition in question Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Key word there is traumatic. You get that by being hit in the head and receiving brain damage as a result of being concussed. It's the exact same condition seen in boxers and MMA fighters and hockey players and rugby players and soldiers who get concussed repeatedly. So yes it absolutely does mean that playing football in the NFL is a cause for many players of serious brain injury. The fact that some players manage to avoid such injury does not mean that a cause/effect relationship is not in play. It simply means that some managed to avoid getting concussed during their playing career. Your claim is similar to saying smoking doesn't cause cancer because not every smoker gets cancer.
Ugh, I hate the continued comparison of nuclear and "green" energy. It is *not* an apples to apples comparison.
Nuclear is "green" in the sense that it doesn't have the emissions problems of fossil fuels. It's definitely not without pollution however - the stuff it generates is quite nasty. Furthermore when there is a serious catastrophe with a nuclear plant it can render a large are effectively uninhabitable. So whether or not fission is green kind of depends on the context. Nuclear fission is also not a renewable source of energy.
That leaves nuclear as really still the best option for base load generation. Which is what frustrates me in regards to so many "environmentalists" condemning them and stagnating development.
If you buy the argument that base load can only be met by generation that works in a manner similar to fossil fuels or nuclear then your argument is correct. But I don't agree with the premise of that argument because it isn't true. Base load is simply a way of saying the minimum demand. You can meet this in many cases even with power systems that are not constant sources of production. You are correct that for the next several decades at minimum it's not reasonable to think we will get rid of nuclear or fossil fuels until we can get a distributed solar/wind+batteries system to sufficient scale. But the notion that base load power could not be supplied at least in part today by wind and/or solar simply isn't true provided you have a connected grid - which we do. The sun and/or wind is always on somewhere - we just have to have a sophisticated enough grid to take advantage of it.
Even in states where you would expect rolling coal to be popular, there is a crackdown on that. State troopers where I live have the authority to do on the spot ODB2 checks, and it it doesn't jive with what comes out of the exhaust pipe, they scrape the registration sticker off the windshield, and the vehicle gets towed to the nearest shop.
I live in Michigan not far from Detroit and I see asshats in my town weekly with their ridiculous big-rig converted smoke stacks belching massive amounts of black smoke. No evidence that the authorities are doing anything about it.
But engine companies are actually not able to meet the emission targets, certainly not by keeping their clients happy
Baloney. They can meet the emissions targets today and the technology is being sold as I type this in large numbers. It will mean that they will have to change the vehicle mix but to that I say so what? Same rules apply to every one and they have the technology to achieve it. If that means that you and I have to live with less horsepower so be it. But Tesla is showing that you can meet emissions targets and have a vehicle worth driving too. Even among gasoline powered vehicles there are plenty that are being sold right now that meet any reasonably near term emissions requirement and are perfectly fine vehicles to drive.
It is also true that most of emission targets are determined by political interests with low-to-no realistic technical knowledge.
The emissions targets have been reviewed plenty by interested parties with technical knowledge and there is no evidence that it is technically impossible to meet them as a general proposition. There are vehicles available TODAY that can meet the emissions targets. Yes they will have to sell a different mix of vehicles. The fact that car makers want to have their cake and eat it too is not my problem nor yours. They have the technology and they need to get busy applying it.
I worked on this field some years ago and the fact that the upcoming targets, the ones being applied now and in the near future, were almost impossible to be met was a quite common belief in the industry.
I work in the auto industry today and while I agree that some "believe" it impossible, that's only true if you assume no change to the product mix. Despite what they might tell you, very few people "need" a 500HP Corvette or a 400HP pickup truck.
Diesel engines do not normally produce any odours.
I have no idea where you got that idea but it's total BS. Diesel exhaust definitely has odors and is rather well known for having them. They've gotten cleaner but they are hardly without smell.
I haven't seen any car emit black smoke in years. I doubt one that does would pass periodic safety and emissions tests.
I've seen at least three this week alone. Rolling Coal is disturbingly popular. And no they wouldn't pass any reasonable emissions test not to mention the practice being explicitly illegal.
Is this just the natural result of unrealistic or even impossible regulations devised by leftist bureaucrats being forced on companies?
No. They've been perfectly capable of meeting the emissions regulations for a long time. They chose instead to break the law and cheat their customers and pollute the air to pad their profit margins. Arguing that clean air and following the same rules that apply to everyone in the industry is somehow a "leftist" plot just makes you sound like a right wing nut job that lost his tinfoil hat.
Can't you just piss in the tank? It's the same + a few organics that would be burned off
Go ahead and try it with your car. Let us know how well it works.
AdBlue is a liquid solution used to counteract a vehicle's emissions.
AdBlue is a solution of urea and water generically referred to as diesel exhaust fluid. It lowers NOx emissions in diesel vehicles.
I'm just a little bit skeptical about the price and.. ..well. in the blurb it uses sneaky word tactics. see how it says that a price drop is expected. and that would make it cheaper than nuclear.
It's not that hard to be cheaper than nuclear when you consider ALL the costs and the amount of regulation needed to ensure safety. The full cost of insuring nuclear tends to get overlooked. I'm not aware of any fission plant that does not require a nation state to provide insurance guarantees in order to get built. While they are relatively safe in general, no private insurance company is going to write a policy against something like Chernobyl. Nuclear is cost competitive with subsidies (insurance and otherwise) but it's not so cheap that you cannot imagine solar or wind being cheaper in the right circumstances. Not to mention that the cost of solar and wind generation are falling MUCH faster than the cost of nuclear fission generation. I don't have any principled objections to fission generation (and I prefer it to fossil fuels) but let's not pretend it's "too cheap to meter".
(presumably nuclear with nuclear plant profits though calculated in, making it kinda like "cheaper than oil" when oil has plenty of profit built into it, making the price flexible downwards as soon as someone has a better energy source)
Well, oil and other fossil fuels get subsidies amounting to about $5 Trillion globally every year (that's about 6% of global GDP in case you wondered) and I'm not even counting the cost of the environmental problems they cause. And yes, the profits are part of the equation too but if a new energy source (say solar) gets cheap enough to eat into the profit margins of oil then it is by definition competitive and that's a good thing. And frankly if I have my choice between a relatively clean renewable energy source and fossil fuels for about the same cost then it is a no brainer.
I oppose them because plans for and the cost of decommissioning them is not part of the budget planning.
Translation: You don't have a real evidence based objection so you are trying to make perfect the enemy of good. Coal plants don't have decommissioning costs as a part of their budget planning either. I can't decide if you are a troll or an idiot so I'm going to go with both.
Also, there are environmental concerns not well researched and understood yet, like underseas power cables and their impact on oceanic marine life with electrical sensory organs
So we should keep pumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere instead since we already know that impact on marine (and non-marine) life? Here's a little top tip for you. We've had underseas cable including power cables for over a century. Your assertion that we don't understand much about their impact is unsupported by evidence and what we do know is CLEARLY not a significant threat to marine life.
Sharks have displayed problems from low voltage underseas cables, even when quite thickly insulated. It may well be ok, but I still want a bit more research before jumping on something because ooh windcraft!
If you care so much about sharks maybe you should concentrate first on the 100 million sharks we kill every year to put in soup and for bogus "remedies" and as bycatch and for other stupid reasons. A few undersea cables are quite simply not significant in the face of that.
National origin doesn't matter, people simply can't have full faith in closed source.
People can't have full faith in open source either unless they are either capable of reviewing all the code themselves or can somehow establish a trusted chain of custody for all the code and tools to compile it. Most people cannot do the former and only large organizations realistically have the resources to do the later. There are undeniably huge advantages to open source but code security doesn't stand up to strict scrutiny in real world use for non-trivial use cases. I don't compile my software like most people and I'm not remotely qualified to review the code. So from that standpoint there is essentially no difference to me between open and closed source as an end user. There are great advantages to open source but this isn't one of them.
You tend to think of the loss of manufacturing as not a big thing.
I have worked in manufacturing for nearly 30 years and my day job is running a manufacturing company. Sorry to disappoint you but American manufacturing is alive and well and doing better than ever and that is unlikely to change any time soon. What has changed is the composition of the sorts of things made in America. America has a manufacturing economy that is worth somewhere around $3 Trillion/year and growing. Our manufacturing sector by itself is about the same size as the GDP of Great Britain and larger than the entire economy of India and over double the GDP of Russia. It would be one of the 5 or 6 largest economies in the world. And yet people foolishly think that US manufacturing is on the decline because their Happy Meal toy was made in China. The difference is that we make stuff like jet engines and medical devices and mining equipment instead of plastic toys and beach towels.
You need to understand the difference between labor intensive and capital intensive. Labor intensive products are those whose cost includes a high percentage of labor, particularly unskilled labor. These sorts of products (think stuff you buy at Walmart or clothing) left America for good because our labor costs are simply too high. Some went to China some went elsewhere. As China's labor costs rise those products will go where labor is cheaper. The stuff made in america is capital intensive where automation and technology play a larger role. It's very much akin to what has happened in farming over the last century and a half. American agriculture produces more than ever but the percent of the population who work directly in agriculture has fallen to single digit percentages. The same thing is happening in American manufacturing. The percent of the workforce that builds things will be smaller but those that remain are and will continue to be far more capable and productive. The days of being able to make a large salary working an assembly line with nothing more than a high school diploma are dead and gone. Now if you want to work in manufacturing you had better bring something extra to the table.
China and other parts of Asia are undergoing a great rennisuance driven by the incredible wealth derived from manufacturing.
You say this as if it is something new. This has been going on for decades and it's fine. Read about the Asian Tigers and their success and growth since the 1950s. Read about the development of Japan since WWII and the panic in the US over Japan during the 1980s. China is the latest and given that they have 20%+ of the world population we should reasonably expect them to play a big role in the world's manufacturing economy. It's not going to kill us. None of this is anything new and all it means is that the US is going to have to compete to continue to thrive and we're certainly capable of doing that. China isn't going to put the US out of manufacturing any more than the US put Germany out of manufacturing. New players just change the mix is all based on their comparative advantages. China will become more technologically sophisticated and the US will have to work hard and invest smartly to deal with that. It's one of the reasons our idiotic policies on immigration (particularly those on the political right but some of the left too) are so foolish. We've got 1/5 the population of China so to compete we should be doing everything we can to encourage the smartest and hardest working people around the world to immigrate to the US.
The production of tangible goods really still is king. By and large the west is running massive trade deficits with the east. In effect, this means that wealth is continually being siphoned out of the country.
As I said before, it is WAY more complicated than y
China's leadership thinks ahead for longer than the next election or the next quarter. AI, green energy, you name it.
Pretty much anything you can say about China is more complicated than a one sentence summary including this one. Sometimes their leadership is indeed forward thinking but they aren't really the brilliant strategists you seem to be implying. They have huge problems and just like us they have smart people (and more of them) working on solutions to those problems. I assure you they have plenty of folks in leadership and elsewhere who are very happy with the status quo and are just as afraid of change as some Americans are.
Now we the USA, are looking to go back. Bring back coal, mundane factory jobs,
No, just the more ignorant and selfish and loud among us. Most of us are too busy working on the future to worry that much about trying to recreate a long gone past.
and then when - not if - we fall behind, we'll have to blame some other boogeyman or the same: immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, liberals and their Librul ways....
Only some of us. We've been like that for the entire existence of America. We're a nation of immigrants, many of whom seem to forget that fact routinely. We're both immensely fair minded and brutally bigoted. We are the land of opportunity but make it needlessly hard for many to realize that opportunity. We're still conflicted about race and gender issues though our constitutional ideals on the topic are clear. In short we're a complicated and not always logical bunch but we've done pretty well overall. Watching America is like watching sausage being made - not a pretty thing to observe but the end result is often pretty great.
eah, this is one of the more baffling aspects of modern American culture, especially on the right. They distrust every single thing about the government, but are happy to believe every single thing out of the mouths of large corporations and throw all their trust behind them.
Depends on which American you are talking to. If it's someone on the political left they tend to believe the government and not the companies. Political right is the reverse. Many exceptions of course on both sides of the aisle. Americans often like simple sound bite ideology that doesn't require them to think too hard especially when there is a chance they are wrong.
What makes this even less understandable is that one of those entities has a clear motive for lying to you quite a lot of the time, and the other doesn't... and many people will still put their trust behind the party that has clear motive to be dishonest every time.
That's because they tend to put their faith in whichever party best services their pre-existing confirmation bias. Whether what the party says is true or logical or sensible seems to play little role in their decision making. If they think government = evil then they will probably vote reliably republican even if that actually goes against their own self interest. Basically about 40% of the population will vote democrat no matter what and 40% will vote republican no matter what. It's not logical but that's what happens.
The goal, they said, is to give U.S. Cyber Command more autonomy, freeing it from any constraints that stem from working alongside the NSA...
[sarcasm] Great... A government agency with less accountability than the NSA. Just what we all needed more of. [/sarcasm]
A quick google and a couple minutes with a calculator comes up with ~$1.5T for the solar panels, assuming sunny days all year round.
Fossil fuel subsidies cost the globe $5 Trillion each year. So by that standard your number seems downright reasonable and cost effective.
So, doable? Yeah, could be done. Cheap and easy? Not hardly.....
Nobody said it would be cheap but it might easily be cheaper than all of the alternatives. Certainly will be cheaper than fossil fuels and the baggage they bring.