This approach should be applied uniformly: every vehicle, large and small, should be assessed an annual tax based on miles driven and a * (w/a)^4, where a is the number of axles and w is the vehicle weight.
Get ready for amazon prime to only be $50 for shipping per item instead of the plebian $100 with that tax policy.
You're exaggerating wildly, but let's assume you're accurate. What does that mean? It means that Amazon Prime is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. We're forcibly collecting money from hundreds of millions -- and collecting most of it from the non-wealthy -- then burying that money in long strips in the ground.
You're implicitly assuming that trucking is the only possible long-distance delivery mechanism. It's absolutely not. Rail is better and cheaper in virtually every way, including being easier to electrify. But rail is used only for the heaviest bulk cargos in the US because of the massive subsidy the trucking industry gets. This is economically wasteful, which hurts all of us.
It's much better to remove the subsidies, internalize the externalities and then let market forces work their optimization magic. We'll spend less of our GDP on shipping... and if shipping costs go up, they'll go up by less than the amount that Americans save on road maintenance, and those savings will be distributed among all vehicle owners.
That crazy world got 4 moderation points from people with greater capacity for ideals than critical thinking.
Actually, it got moderation points from people can do math and understand economics.
No, he can perform simple math, buying an electric vehicle at a premium price is like purchasing your fuel up front with interest.
Umm, first, either your reading comprehension or your basic logic skills are lousy. His claim was that the Jaguar i-Pace was the hottest-selling EV in Norway. It's not. The "simple math" required is being able to correctly orient the greater-than symbol, and he got it wrong.
However, addressing your comment, I did the math, and bought the EV, and am reaping the financial rewards. Actually, it has worked out so well that I've purchased three EVs.
Here are the high points of the math: My EV costs me $0.01 per mile in electricity. An ICEV that gets 40 mpg at a cost of $2.50 per gallon costs $0.0625 per mile in gasoline. Assuming both cars are driven for 200K miles, the electricity cost will be $2000 while the gasoline cost will be $12500. EVs also require far less maintenance than ICEVs because they're fundamentally simpler. That difference is harder to quantify, but 50 oil changes at $50 each is $2500, plus some extra brake pads and maybe rotors, call it another $500, so $3K. In practice my experience is it's bigger than that (I've been driving an EV for six years now). Assuming a 6% discount rate (which is generous) 10 years that means the EV can cost $7500 more up front and you'll break even. The EV will also be more fun to drive and generally less hassle, assuming you have a place to charge at home.
Pretty damn dumb if you ask me, for the privilege you cannot even drive the damn thing long distances.
Sure you can. For practical long-distance driving you need a battery that can take you about 200 miles, and you need a good fast-charging network. At present you have to have a Tesla because only Tesla has the Supercharger network. I've driven my Model S (60 kWh battery, 200-mile range, purchased used for $40K, w/35K miles on it) on several long trips and it works quite well. It also looks beautiful and drives like a dream. I am keeping my eye out for a good deal on one with a 85 or 90 kWh battery, mostly because a 200-mile range means increasing the journey time by about 25%, while a 300-mile range wouldn't generally increase travel time at all, at least for my style of long-distance driving (I prefer to stop and eat when hungry, etc.).
Nonsense. Unless they're eating fossil fuels, people are carbon neutral. Every gram of CO2 they emit is a gram of CO2 that was absorbed by the plants they ate (or the plants that were eaten by the animals they ate, etc.). The problem isn't CO2 emissions, the problem is the emission of CO2 that was dug out of the ground where it had been safely locked away.
Oh, I should also note that a proper carbon tax would not apply to fuels that are biological in origin. So biodiesel, the ethyl alcohol in ethanol, etc, would not be taxed. If subsidies on ethanol were dropped as these taxes were imposed, this would also allow market forces to rationalize ethanol production. Odds are that it would kill ethanol dead, since the farmers growing the corn to make the alcohol and the distillers running the alcohol production operations would have to pay pollution taxes on all of the fossil fuels they use.
But, whatever, if we just tax fossil fuels adequately to internalize the pollution externalities then let the markets work, all of that will be sorted out.
So as the percentage of EVs on the road increases, the amount of money available to build and maintain roads decreases. States are thus experimenting with an extra vehicle registration fee for EVs.
States should really take the opportunity to rationalize the road construction and maintenance cost allocation. According to the US GAO, road damage is proportional to the fourth power of per-axle weight, times the number of axles. They estimate that an 18-wheeler does 9,600 times as much damage as a passenger sedan, and that's on a per-mile basis. When you also factor in that many trucks cover 100K miles per year, vs, say, 15K for a car, that means the trucker's share is 64,000 times that of the car owner.
This approach should be applied uniformly: every vehicle, large and small, should be assessed an annual tax based on miles driven and a * (w/a)^4, where a is the number of axles and w is the vehicle weight. That's not quite accurate because weight isn't distributed evently, but it's close enough. EVs would end up paying more than their ICEV counterparts, because they tend to be heavier.
Oh, of course, with this system, all gasoline and diesel taxes that fund road maintenance should be dropped, and replaced with pollution taxes which attempt to compensate for the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. CO2, particulates, NOx, etc.
Also, forcing people to pay for every gram of CO2 they emit is a tax on breathing.
Nonsense. Unless they're eating fossil fuels, people are carbon neutral. Every gram of CO2 they emit is a gram of CO2 that was absorbed by the plants they ate (or the plants that were eaten by the animals they ate, etc.). The problem isn't CO2 emissions, the problem is the emission of CO2 that was dug out of the ground where it had been safely locked away.
Maybe. Yes, they got Tesla going, but the goal of the tax credits was to incentivize Americans to shift to EVs. By that measure, the job is far from finished
Maybe. Or maybe we're past the tipping point. Maybe enough people already want them that they'll get cheap and ubiquitous enough that they'll run down to their price floor sooner than later.
Given how weird average people think EVs are, I think we're still some way from that.
It never made sense to me that the credit phased out on a per-automaker basis. It seems to me that if it makes sense to use tax credits for this purpose, the credits should continue until a certain percentage of all new car sales are EVs.
Or at least until a certain number of cars are sold, based on the budget available for the program. Whoever sells them first "gets" the credit.
Sure, that works, too. Actually, my preferred alternative is to drop the EV subsidies and focus instead on removing the subsidies on fossil fuels, and then using taxation to internalize the externalities. For example, a carbon tax. It's quite difficult to accurately assess the full cost of fossil fuels, but I think we should take a stab at it. Honestly, whatever we come up with will probably be too low.
. It never made sense to me that the credit phased out on a per-automaker basis.
They want to encourage a healthy competition for e-Vehicles. The per-automaker basis encourages later entrants to get involved - it makes their cars cheaper and more affordable. So either they can price compete effectively with established players even if their initial costs of production are $7,500 more each, or lure customers away by offering a price competitive discount if it costs less than that.
Or, in summary, you have the goal wrong. It's not to incentivize Americans to shift to EVs. It's to incentivize EVs to exist to be shifted to
You really think that Ford and GM need help to compete with a tiny upstart like Tesla? A little price difference isn't what's holding them back, it's broader consumer interest. You want more EVs on the market, get more EVs on the street, regardless of who makes them, and then competition will build.
The FASTEST selling EV was the iPace. The idea that $60k+ cars are "saving the environment" borders on the insane, but is just simply basic stupidity. EVs aren't saving anything.
Okay, you're definitely either Donald J. Trump or his biggest fanboy. I quoted the article and gave you another link, both of which showed you were wrong, and you just repeated the error. Or lie.
What if instead of paying for that system, it's electric usage, and maintenance, you instead install the thermostat next to the door and hit a button on your way out to lower the temp by 15 degrees?
Because I'm incapable of remembering to do that. At 50 years old I know what I can and can't expect of myself, and while I can dream and create nifty things, remembering to do little things is simply not going to happen. So, my garage door closes automatically, my thermostat detects when no one is home and adjusts accordingly, my sprinklers run automatically and adjust the amount of water based on soil moisture, my lights automatically turn off at night, etc., etc.
Because I can't remember to open the windows at night in the summer to cool the house down, I'm building a system to automatically draw cold night air in and use the house HVAC system to pump it through the house. I'll spend many hours on this project before it's done -- installing ductwork, fans and dampers, designing electronic circuits and printed circuit boards, then soldering them together, writing software, testing and wiring and testing and tweaking... probably far more hours net than if I were simply to take 60 seconds each evening and morning to open and close the damned windows. But I've spent nearly 30 years trying to remember to open and close the damned windows, and at this point it's clear that's just never going to happen. So, I'll automate it. And then I'll automate something else, and so on. And all of these doohickeys will be Internet-connected so I can monitor and manage them remotely if I want to.
If that seems ridiculously complicated to you, and you think it would be much easier to open and close the windows, well, maybe that's true for you. Not for me.
The $35k will be cancelled or dropped fairly quickly. It's just not competitive in terms of performance and features, and actually quite expensive for what it is.
They want $35k for a 200 mile range car, when Hyundai and Kia have 260 mile range cars for closer to $30k, and Nissan are about to release their new Leaf with similar spec. Those two offer you a lot more in terms of features too - by the time you add options to the Tesla to bring it up to the same level it's added $10k to the price.
As has been discussed before, you're making a very slanted comparison, bumping the price of the Tesla to meet features of the others without doing the same in the other direction.
However, none of that has any bearing on my point, which is that if the goal is to use the tax credit to accelerate EV adoption, now is when it will really be effective.
The subsidies did the job they were designed for, got Tesla off the ground and to a place where they can sell the car on merits alone without any tax advantages.
Maybe. Yes, they got Tesla going, but the goal of the tax credits was to incentivize Americans to shift to EVs. By that measure, the job is far from finished. It never made sense to me that the credit phased out on a per-automaker basis. It seems to me that if it makes sense to use tax credits for this purpose, the credits should continue until a certain percentage of all new car sales are EVs. Tesla, in particular, is on the edge of being able to really increase the EV numbers in the US. A $7500 credit on an $80K model S is nice, but the car is still far too expensive for most people. A $7500 credit on a $35K Model 3, on the other hand, drops the price to $27.5K, which is in range of a relatively large set of the US population.
I'd like to see Congress restructure the credit to continue until, say, 10% of new passenger vehicles are zero-emissions.
It actually is relevant because if you live in a backwards shithole like West Virginia or Utah that gets a lot of coal power, it makes less sense because it is way more expensive and dirtier then the worst car.
Actually, coal-powered EVs are cheaper to power and cleaner than the best ICEVs, even hybrids. Coal is generally dirtier than gasoline or diesel, but the dramatically higher efficiencies available in a large, high-temperature power plant vs a small, low-temperature engine more than make up the difference.
I live in Utah, BTW. And drive an EV. Last month I drove 2024 miles, and spent $24.09 on charging (I have a meter on my home EV charger, which is the only place I charge). If I were driving a gasoline car that gets 35 mpg, at $2.50 per gallon that would cost me $142.50 in fuel. Tell me again which is more expensive?
The reason is tax-breaks, no tolls, free parking, no import/purchase tax, no road tax, driving in bus lanes. Saving the environment isn't one of those reasons.
Saving the environment is the reason for the tax breaks, etc.
The fastest selling EV there is the Jaguar iPace.
Trump, is that you?
From TFA:
Nissan’s upgraded Leaf electric car was the top-selling car in Norway last year, while other top-selling cars overall ranged from small BMWs and Volkswagens (VOWG_p.DE) to full-size sedans and electric sport utility vehicles by Tesla.
I can't find whole-year figures that include December, but up through November the Jaguar iPace was #20. The top three were the Leaf, the VW e-Golf and the BMW i3.
If you only use headphones every few months, how often do those uses coincide with needing to charge? If it's common, then it seems like your bigger problem is needing a larger (or swappable) battery.
Biggest problem is latency. Bluetooth adds around 200 milliseconds. Tolerable if you're listening to music. Horrible if playing a game or using a video player without audio delay adjustments.
I don't notice any latency when watching video or playing games, and I'm pretty sensitive to latency. I think you must have gotten really unlucky with your choice of headphones; I've used at least a couple dozen (mine and other peoples') over the years and never once seen that.
When I need headphones for the first time in three months, and I reach into my bag and pull them out, will the bluetooth ones still have any charge? I ask, because if I leave them on the charger, they won't be in my bag when I need them. And I certainly am not about to set a calendar reminder every week to charge the headphones I'm not using. That's stupid, given that my wired ones work every time even after a couple years of ignoring them.
OTOH, if you use headphones so rarely, just having a dongle in the bag with them (the one that came with the phone) will work fine.
Personally, I use mine for 20-30 hours per week, sometimes more.
In order for intelligence to develop, system needs motivation to do so.
Nice assertion. Can you support it?
I see no reason that this is necessarily true. Of course all intelligent life on Earth came about as a result of survival imperatives... so did all non-intelligent life on Earth. What you're describing is a characteristic of organisms created by evolutionary processes. There is no reason to believe that it's a requirement for intelligence, or even related to intelligence at all, any more than there's a reason to believe that DNA and RNA are requirements of intelligence, even though they also happen to be characteristics of all intelligent life we know.
And even if motivation is necessary for intelligence, there's no reason to believe that the survival imperative is the only one that will fit the bill.
In sum, you're just assuming without basis that because the intelligence you're familiar with fits a certain pattern, all intelligence must fit that pattern.
Put simply - most of the "Human Intelligence" you see is really fancy pattern matching as well.
That's a big part of it, but there's some "secret sauce" that lets organic brains combine patterns in new and different ways that AI researchers haven't been able to crack. Whatever it is, it's more than just matching patterns.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
The fact is that we don't know what we don't know about intelligence. We know a bunch of things that don't work, but we have no explanatory theory of intelligence. Perhaps next week some 21st century Newton will achieve an insight analogous to the inverse square law and we'll have a solid, predictive and testable theory that proves to be correct. If so, we could have the first human-level artificial intelligences within a few weeks after that, and the first super-human intelligences in days -- or hours -- after that.
Or maybe we're going to stumble around in the dark for another century before we hit on the crucial idea, and maybe the idea itself will be extraordinarily complex and nuanced. What is pretty clear is that deep learning by itself isn't going to get us there, or it already would have.
What's also clear is that we'll be much better off if it takes at least a few decades, because we need to solve the alignment problem first. That's the problem of figuring out how to make sure the super-human intelligences we create actually have their goals aligned with our long-term best interests. That's a particularly tricky problem since we don't know how to align our own goals with our long-term best interests. We don't even know what our long-term bests interests are. We can point to a lot of possible bad outcomes, but we're not sure what a good outcome will look like.
People who study this stuff seriously think that one of our best options might be to try to give the first superintelligences the goal of figuring out what the long-term best interests of humanity are. What would the ultimate flourishing of humankind look like? Of course, even if that is the right thing to do, and even if the AI superintelligence is willing to be directed, how do you state that question to it?
We don't know how to build an artificial general intelligence, but it seems extremely likely that we will figure it out. What's far less clear is whether we'll manage to solve the harder problem of building an artificial general intelligence that wishes us to continue existing, and developing.
I quit using wired headphones at least four or five years ago, maybe more. Wireless is better. Other people obviously have different preferences, but I don't get why. I have two sets of Bluetooth headphones, one on my head and one charging. If I were less scatterbrained I could get by with only one, because the ones I use have 8+ hours of battery life and charge in an hour or so, so if I just plugged them in when I took them off I'd be fine. But I don't, so I spend an extra $8 for a second pair, so that when the ones I'm wearing die, the others are always fully charged. Actually I own three pairs; I splurged and blew $8 on the third pair just so I'd have a backup if one of the first two pairs dies.
This is much less hassle than dealing with wires that get caught on stuff and rip the headphones out of my ears. Or have to be threaded somehow through my ski jacket to keep my phone safe inside while letting me listen. Or worse, that get caught in spinning machinery when I'm working in my shop or mowing the lawn or something, and get ripped out of my ears and wrapped around the piece of equipment. Or worse yet, pull my phone out of my pocket and throw it onto the ground -- or into a table saw blade (yes, that happened).
Nope, wires suck. I put my phone safely away in a pocket, or over on a shelf near my work area but safely out of the danger zone.
I don't mind having a headphone jack, mind you. It ends up packed full of pocket lint couldn't easily be used even if I wanted to, but it doesn't bother me. But I'll never actually use the thing.
Prime numbers are essential to modern cryptography
Not really. Prime numbers and the ability to generate them quickly and the difficulty of factoring products of large primes are essential to RSA, but that's on its way out anyway (too slow, too easy to implement incorrectly). Primes are relevant to ECC, but less so. Some ECC curves are in prime fields, others are not -- and the prime values used are all published, so prime distribution doesn't matter. The next, post-quantum, generation of asymmetric cipher and key agreement algorithms may or may not make use of primes at all, and none of the leading candidates depend on prime distribution. And, of course, few symmetric ciphers or message digests -- the real workhorses -- make any use of prime numbers.
I have no problem with the EFF managing this contest, but it really doesn't have much more to do with cryptography than any other sort of fundamental research into number theory.
About 2000 years ago, Euclid recorded a proof (which may or may not have been due to him) that every Mersenne prime allows you to construct an even perfect number.
I "rediscovered" that proof as a teenager, and thought I was breaking new ground. Then I found it was actually discovered 2000+ years ago. Mathematics has a special way of putting your hubris in perspective.
No need for the scare quotes. If you found it on your own then you legitimately rediscovered it.
There's so much confusion and error in your post that I don't even know where to begin. In fact, I'm just not going to bother. You are unable to see things through any lens other than class warfare, so there's no point in trying.
There are not many people I've met who trusted government less than I do. Tim and Hugh are the first two who spring to mind.
Tim did a lot of good for his friends, for our industry, and for our freedom. Very sad to see him go.
-jcr
+1. I got my start in security by reading sci.crypt and then the cypherpunks mailing list. As much as the technology fascinated me, the ideas about radical freedom, a freedom built by simply, peacefully constructing an alternative world that didn't want or need government force, really resonated with my young libertarian self. Tim May's mission wasn't to destroy Hobbes' Leviathan, but just to make it obsolete.
As it turns out, the real world is much messier and more complicated than we all though back then. But the ideas still have great value, and I still have considerable hope that a lot of what we discussed 25 years ago may still come to be, albeit probably not in the pure and simple form discussed then.
In the meantime, I still run an anonymous remailer, and now run a Tor node as well:-)
I don't think the remailer gets much traffic these days, though.
Land developers sure as hell aren't going to pay to get that land ready themselves
Utter nonsense. Land developers routinely do all of that prep themselves. They have to follow lots of government rules about how to lay out the streets, what access roads to build, how to build all of the wiring, plumbing and sewer infrastructure, etc., but it's the developers who foot the bill, not the city. As far as I can tell, it has always been that way, too.
Obviously I'm not saying you should feel sorry for the land developers; they make great profits on their investments. But government doesn't do any of this.
The result is massive housing shortages in a lot of places.
Government is the cause of the housing shortages in the bay area, but because of the restrictions it imposes, not because of the things it fails to do. Developers would love to build lots of high density, multi-story housing in the area, but the city councils won't allow it, because they're in the pockets of the long-time residents who love the fact that the house they paid $30K for decades ago is now worth $2M.
Slashdot Mirror
This approach should be applied uniformly: every vehicle, large and small, should be assessed an annual tax based on miles driven and a * (w/a)^4, where a is the number of axles and w is the vehicle weight.
Get ready for amazon prime to only be $50 for shipping per item instead of the plebian $100 with that tax policy.
You're exaggerating wildly, but let's assume you're accurate. What does that mean? It means that Amazon Prime is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. We're forcibly collecting money from hundreds of millions -- and collecting most of it from the non-wealthy -- then burying that money in long strips in the ground.
You're implicitly assuming that trucking is the only possible long-distance delivery mechanism. It's absolutely not. Rail is better and cheaper in virtually every way, including being easier to electrify. But rail is used only for the heaviest bulk cargos in the US because of the massive subsidy the trucking industry gets. This is economically wasteful, which hurts all of us.
It's much better to remove the subsidies, internalize the externalities and then let market forces work their optimization magic. We'll spend less of our GDP on shipping... and if shipping costs go up, they'll go up by less than the amount that Americans save on road maintenance, and those savings will be distributed among all vehicle owners.
That crazy world got 4 moderation points from people with greater capacity for ideals than critical thinking.
Actually, it got moderation points from people can do math and understand economics.
Do you know how rare a thing a successful automaker startup is?
Well it's precisely 1/N less common than you think it is.
This comment makes no sense to me. Perhaps I'm dense. Wouldn't be the first time.
No, he can perform simple math, buying an electric vehicle at a premium price is like purchasing your fuel up front with interest.
Umm, first, either your reading comprehension or your basic logic skills are lousy. His claim was that the Jaguar i-Pace was the hottest-selling EV in Norway. It's not. The "simple math" required is being able to correctly orient the greater-than symbol, and he got it wrong.
However, addressing your comment, I did the math, and bought the EV, and am reaping the financial rewards. Actually, it has worked out so well that I've purchased three EVs.
Here are the high points of the math: My EV costs me $0.01 per mile in electricity. An ICEV that gets 40 mpg at a cost of $2.50 per gallon costs $0.0625 per mile in gasoline. Assuming both cars are driven for 200K miles, the electricity cost will be $2000 while the gasoline cost will be $12500. EVs also require far less maintenance than ICEVs because they're fundamentally simpler. That difference is harder to quantify, but 50 oil changes at $50 each is $2500, plus some extra brake pads and maybe rotors, call it another $500, so $3K. In practice my experience is it's bigger than that (I've been driving an EV for six years now). Assuming a 6% discount rate (which is generous) 10 years that means the EV can cost $7500 more up front and you'll break even. The EV will also be more fun to drive and generally less hassle, assuming you have a place to charge at home.
Pretty damn dumb if you ask me, for the privilege you cannot even drive the damn thing long distances.
Sure you can. For practical long-distance driving you need a battery that can take you about 200 miles, and you need a good fast-charging network. At present you have to have a Tesla because only Tesla has the Supercharger network. I've driven my Model S (60 kWh battery, 200-mile range, purchased used for $40K, w/35K miles on it) on several long trips and it works quite well. It also looks beautiful and drives like a dream. I am keeping my eye out for a good deal on one with a 85 or 90 kWh battery, mostly because a 200-mile range means increasing the journey time by about 25%, while a 300-mile range wouldn't generally increase travel time at all, at least for my style of long-distance driving (I prefer to stop and eat when hungry, etc.).
Nonsense. Unless they're eating fossil fuels, people are carbon neutral. Every gram of CO2 they emit is a gram of CO2 that was absorbed by the plants they ate (or the plants that were eaten by the animals they ate, etc.). The problem isn't CO2 emissions, the problem is the emission of CO2 that was dug out of the ground where it had been safely locked away.
Oh, I should also note that a proper carbon tax would not apply to fuels that are biological in origin. So biodiesel, the ethyl alcohol in ethanol, etc, would not be taxed. If subsidies on ethanol were dropped as these taxes were imposed, this would also allow market forces to rationalize ethanol production. Odds are that it would kill ethanol dead, since the farmers growing the corn to make the alcohol and the distillers running the alcohol production operations would have to pay pollution taxes on all of the fossil fuels they use.
But, whatever, if we just tax fossil fuels adequately to internalize the pollution externalities then let the markets work, all of that will be sorted out.
So as the percentage of EVs on the road increases, the amount of money available to build and maintain roads decreases. States are thus experimenting with an extra vehicle registration fee for EVs.
States should really take the opportunity to rationalize the road construction and maintenance cost allocation. According to the US GAO, road damage is proportional to the fourth power of per-axle weight, times the number of axles. They estimate that an 18-wheeler does 9,600 times as much damage as a passenger sedan, and that's on a per-mile basis. When you also factor in that many trucks cover 100K miles per year, vs, say, 15K for a car, that means the trucker's share is 64,000 times that of the car owner.
This approach should be applied uniformly: every vehicle, large and small, should be assessed an annual tax based on miles driven and a * (w/a)^4, where a is the number of axles and w is the vehicle weight. That's not quite accurate because weight isn't distributed evently, but it's close enough. EVs would end up paying more than their ICEV counterparts, because they tend to be heavier.
Oh, of course, with this system, all gasoline and diesel taxes that fund road maintenance should be dropped, and replaced with pollution taxes which attempt to compensate for the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. CO2, particulates, NOx, etc.
Also, forcing people to pay for every gram of CO2 they emit is a tax on breathing.
Nonsense. Unless they're eating fossil fuels, people are carbon neutral. Every gram of CO2 they emit is a gram of CO2 that was absorbed by the plants they ate (or the plants that were eaten by the animals they ate, etc.). The problem isn't CO2 emissions, the problem is the emission of CO2 that was dug out of the ground where it had been safely locked away.
Maybe. Yes, they got Tesla going, but the goal of the tax credits was to incentivize Americans to shift to EVs. By that measure, the job is far from finished
Maybe. Or maybe we're past the tipping point. Maybe enough people already want them that they'll get cheap and ubiquitous enough that they'll run down to their price floor sooner than later.
Given how weird average people think EVs are, I think we're still some way from that.
It never made sense to me that the credit phased out on a per-automaker basis. It seems to me that if it makes sense to use tax credits for this purpose, the credits should continue until a certain percentage of all new car sales are EVs.
Or at least until a certain number of cars are sold, based on the budget available for the program. Whoever sells them first "gets" the credit.
Sure, that works, too. Actually, my preferred alternative is to drop the EV subsidies and focus instead on removing the subsidies on fossil fuels, and then using taxation to internalize the externalities. For example, a carbon tax. It's quite difficult to accurately assess the full cost of fossil fuels, but I think we should take a stab at it. Honestly, whatever we come up with will probably be too low.
Ford and GM don't. When another small upstart (that will probably eventually be purchased by Ford or GM) starts up, it'll need the help.
There won't be any more upstarts. Do you know how rare a thing a successful automaker startup is?
They want to encourage a healthy competition for e-Vehicles. The per-automaker basis encourages later entrants to get involved - it makes their cars cheaper and more affordable. So either they can price compete effectively with established players even if their initial costs of production are $7,500 more each, or lure customers away by offering a price competitive discount if it costs less than that.
Or, in summary, you have the goal wrong. It's not to incentivize Americans to shift to EVs. It's to incentivize EVs to exist to be shifted to
You really think that Ford and GM need help to compete with a tiny upstart like Tesla? A little price difference isn't what's holding them back, it's broader consumer interest. You want more EVs on the market, get more EVs on the street, regardless of who makes them, and then competition will build.
The FASTEST selling EV was the iPace. The idea that $60k+ cars are "saving the environment" borders on the insane, but is just simply basic stupidity. EVs aren't saving anything.
Okay, you're definitely either Donald J. Trump or his biggest fanboy. I quoted the article and gave you another link, both of which showed you were wrong, and you just repeated the error. Or lie.
What if instead of paying for that system, it's electric usage, and maintenance, you instead install the thermostat next to the door and hit a button on your way out to lower the temp by 15 degrees?
Because I'm incapable of remembering to do that. At 50 years old I know what I can and can't expect of myself, and while I can dream and create nifty things, remembering to do little things is simply not going to happen. So, my garage door closes automatically, my thermostat detects when no one is home and adjusts accordingly, my sprinklers run automatically and adjust the amount of water based on soil moisture, my lights automatically turn off at night, etc., etc.
Because I can't remember to open the windows at night in the summer to cool the house down, I'm building a system to automatically draw cold night air in and use the house HVAC system to pump it through the house. I'll spend many hours on this project before it's done -- installing ductwork, fans and dampers, designing electronic circuits and printed circuit boards, then soldering them together, writing software, testing and wiring and testing and tweaking... probably far more hours net than if I were simply to take 60 seconds each evening and morning to open and close the damned windows. But I've spent nearly 30 years trying to remember to open and close the damned windows, and at this point it's clear that's just never going to happen. So, I'll automate it. And then I'll automate something else, and so on. And all of these doohickeys will be Internet-connected so I can monitor and manage them remotely if I want to.
If that seems ridiculously complicated to you, and you think it would be much easier to open and close the windows, well, maybe that's true for you. Not for me.
The $35k will be cancelled or dropped fairly quickly. It's just not competitive in terms of performance and features, and actually quite expensive for what it is.
They want $35k for a 200 mile range car, when Hyundai and Kia have 260 mile range cars for closer to $30k, and Nissan are about to release their new Leaf with similar spec. Those two offer you a lot more in terms of features too - by the time you add options to the Tesla to bring it up to the same level it's added $10k to the price.
As has been discussed before, you're making a very slanted comparison, bumping the price of the Tesla to meet features of the others without doing the same in the other direction.
However, none of that has any bearing on my point, which is that if the goal is to use the tax credit to accelerate EV adoption, now is when it will really be effective.
The subsidies did the job they were designed for, got Tesla off the ground and to a place where they can sell the car on merits alone without any tax advantages.
Maybe. Yes, they got Tesla going, but the goal of the tax credits was to incentivize Americans to shift to EVs. By that measure, the job is far from finished. It never made sense to me that the credit phased out on a per-automaker basis. It seems to me that if it makes sense to use tax credits for this purpose, the credits should continue until a certain percentage of all new car sales are EVs. Tesla, in particular, is on the edge of being able to really increase the EV numbers in the US. A $7500 credit on an $80K model S is nice, but the car is still far too expensive for most people. A $7500 credit on a $35K Model 3, on the other hand, drops the price to $27.5K, which is in range of a relatively large set of the US population.
I'd like to see Congress restructure the credit to continue until, say, 10% of new passenger vehicles are zero-emissions.
It actually is relevant because if you live in a backwards shithole like West Virginia or Utah that gets a lot of coal power, it makes less sense because it is way more expensive and dirtier then the worst car.
Actually, coal-powered EVs are cheaper to power and cleaner than the best ICEVs, even hybrids. Coal is generally dirtier than gasoline or diesel, but the dramatically higher efficiencies available in a large, high-temperature power plant vs a small, low-temperature engine more than make up the difference.
I live in Utah, BTW. And drive an EV. Last month I drove 2024 miles, and spent $24.09 on charging (I have a meter on my home EV charger, which is the only place I charge). If I were driving a gasoline car that gets 35 mpg, at $2.50 per gallon that would cost me $142.50 in fuel. Tell me again which is more expensive?
The reason is tax-breaks, no tolls, free parking, no import/purchase tax, no road tax, driving in bus lanes. Saving the environment isn't one of those reasons.
Saving the environment is the reason for the tax breaks, etc.
The fastest selling EV there is the Jaguar iPace.
Trump, is that you?
From TFA:
I can't find whole-year figures that include December, but up through November the Jaguar iPace was #20. The top three were the Leaf, the VW e-Golf and the BMW i3.
If you only use headphones every few months, how often do those uses coincide with needing to charge? If it's common, then it seems like your bigger problem is needing a larger (or swappable) battery.
Biggest problem is latency. Bluetooth adds around 200 milliseconds. Tolerable if you're listening to music. Horrible if playing a game or using a video player without audio delay adjustments.
I don't notice any latency when watching video or playing games, and I'm pretty sensitive to latency. I think you must have gotten really unlucky with your choice of headphones; I've used at least a couple dozen (mine and other peoples') over the years and never once seen that.
When I need headphones for the first time in three months, and I reach into my bag and pull them out, will the bluetooth ones still have any charge? I ask, because if I leave them on the charger, they won't be in my bag when I need them. And I certainly am not about to set a calendar reminder every week to charge the headphones I'm not using. That's stupid, given that my wired ones work every time even after a couple years of ignoring them.
OTOH, if you use headphones so rarely, just having a dongle in the bag with them (the one that came with the phone) will work fine.
Personally, I use mine for 20-30 hours per week, sometimes more.
In order for intelligence to develop, system needs motivation to do so.
Nice assertion. Can you support it?
I see no reason that this is necessarily true. Of course all intelligent life on Earth came about as a result of survival imperatives... so did all non-intelligent life on Earth. What you're describing is a characteristic of organisms created by evolutionary processes. There is no reason to believe that it's a requirement for intelligence, or even related to intelligence at all, any more than there's a reason to believe that DNA and RNA are requirements of intelligence, even though they also happen to be characteristics of all intelligent life we know.
And even if motivation is necessary for intelligence, there's no reason to believe that the survival imperative is the only one that will fit the bill.
In sum, you're just assuming without basis that because the intelligence you're familiar with fits a certain pattern, all intelligence must fit that pattern.
Put simply - most of the "Human Intelligence" you see is really fancy pattern matching as well.
That's a big part of it, but there's some "secret sauce" that lets organic brains combine patterns in new and different ways that AI researchers haven't been able to crack. Whatever it is, it's more than just matching patterns.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
The fact is that we don't know what we don't know about intelligence. We know a bunch of things that don't work, but we have no explanatory theory of intelligence. Perhaps next week some 21st century Newton will achieve an insight analogous to the inverse square law and we'll have a solid, predictive and testable theory that proves to be correct. If so, we could have the first human-level artificial intelligences within a few weeks after that, and the first super-human intelligences in days -- or hours -- after that.
Or maybe we're going to stumble around in the dark for another century before we hit on the crucial idea, and maybe the idea itself will be extraordinarily complex and nuanced. What is pretty clear is that deep learning by itself isn't going to get us there, or it already would have.
What's also clear is that we'll be much better off if it takes at least a few decades, because we need to solve the alignment problem first. That's the problem of figuring out how to make sure the super-human intelligences we create actually have their goals aligned with our long-term best interests. That's a particularly tricky problem since we don't know how to align our own goals with our long-term best interests. We don't even know what our long-term bests interests are. We can point to a lot of possible bad outcomes, but we're not sure what a good outcome will look like.
People who study this stuff seriously think that one of our best options might be to try to give the first superintelligences the goal of figuring out what the long-term best interests of humanity are. What would the ultimate flourishing of humankind look like? Of course, even if that is the right thing to do, and even if the AI superintelligence is willing to be directed, how do you state that question to it?
We don't know how to build an artificial general intelligence, but it seems extremely likely that we will figure it out. What's far less clear is whether we'll manage to solve the harder problem of building an artificial general intelligence that wishes us to continue existing, and developing.
I quit using wired headphones at least four or five years ago, maybe more. Wireless is better. Other people obviously have different preferences, but I don't get why. I have two sets of Bluetooth headphones, one on my head and one charging. If I were less scatterbrained I could get by with only one, because the ones I use have 8+ hours of battery life and charge in an hour or so, so if I just plugged them in when I took them off I'd be fine. But I don't, so I spend an extra $8 for a second pair, so that when the ones I'm wearing die, the others are always fully charged. Actually I own three pairs; I splurged and blew $8 on the third pair just so I'd have a backup if one of the first two pairs dies.
This is much less hassle than dealing with wires that get caught on stuff and rip the headphones out of my ears. Or have to be threaded somehow through my ski jacket to keep my phone safe inside while letting me listen. Or worse, that get caught in spinning machinery when I'm working in my shop or mowing the lawn or something, and get ripped out of my ears and wrapped around the piece of equipment. Or worse yet, pull my phone out of my pocket and throw it onto the ground -- or into a table saw blade (yes, that happened).
Nope, wires suck. I put my phone safely away in a pocket, or over on a shelf near my work area but safely out of the danger zone.
I don't mind having a headphone jack, mind you. It ends up packed full of pocket lint couldn't easily be used even if I wanted to, but it doesn't bother me. But I'll never actually use the thing.
Prime numbers are essential to modern cryptography
Not really. Prime numbers and the ability to generate them quickly and the difficulty of factoring products of large primes are essential to RSA, but that's on its way out anyway (too slow, too easy to implement incorrectly). Primes are relevant to ECC, but less so. Some ECC curves are in prime fields, others are not -- and the prime values used are all published, so prime distribution doesn't matter. The next, post-quantum, generation of asymmetric cipher and key agreement algorithms may or may not make use of primes at all, and none of the leading candidates depend on prime distribution. And, of course, few symmetric ciphers or message digests -- the real workhorses -- make any use of prime numbers.
I have no problem with the EFF managing this contest, but it really doesn't have much more to do with cryptography than any other sort of fundamental research into number theory.
About 2000 years ago, Euclid recorded a proof (which may or may not have been due to him) that every Mersenne prime allows you to construct an even perfect number.
I "rediscovered" that proof as a teenager, and thought I was breaking new ground. Then I found it was actually discovered 2000+ years ago. Mathematics has a special way of putting your hubris in perspective.
No need for the scare quotes. If you found it on your own then you legitimately rediscovered it.
There's so much confusion and error in your post that I don't even know where to begin. In fact, I'm just not going to bother. You are unable to see things through any lens other than class warfare, so there's no point in trying.
There are not many people I've met who trusted government less than I do. Tim and Hugh are the first two who spring to mind.
Tim did a lot of good for his friends, for our industry, and for our freedom. Very sad to see him go.
-jcr
+1. I got my start in security by reading sci.crypt and then the cypherpunks mailing list. As much as the technology fascinated me, the ideas about radical freedom, a freedom built by simply, peacefully constructing an alternative world that didn't want or need government force, really resonated with my young libertarian self. Tim May's mission wasn't to destroy Hobbes' Leviathan, but just to make it obsolete.
As it turns out, the real world is much messier and more complicated than we all though back then. But the ideas still have great value, and I still have considerable hope that a lot of what we discussed 25 years ago may still come to be, albeit probably not in the pure and simple form discussed then.
In the meantime, I still run an anonymous remailer, and now run a Tor node as well :-)
I don't think the remailer gets much traffic these days, though.
Land developers sure as hell aren't going to pay to get that land ready themselves
Utter nonsense. Land developers routinely do all of that prep themselves. They have to follow lots of government rules about how to lay out the streets, what access roads to build, how to build all of the wiring, plumbing and sewer infrastructure, etc., but it's the developers who foot the bill, not the city. As far as I can tell, it has always been that way, too.
Obviously I'm not saying you should feel sorry for the land developers; they make great profits on their investments. But government doesn't do any of this.
The result is massive housing shortages in a lot of places.
Government is the cause of the housing shortages in the bay area, but because of the restrictions it imposes, not because of the things it fails to do. Developers would love to build lots of high density, multi-story housing in the area, but the city councils won't allow it, because they're in the pockets of the long-time residents who love the fact that the house they paid $30K for decades ago is now worth $2M.