Back in my day, we learned how to run a business in Algebra class, by playing Drug Wars on our TI-85 calculators. Supply, demand, buy low, sell high, managing inventory... it's got everything you need to know.
Tesla isn't really competing with the Nissans and Kias of the world - they are competing in the luxury segment. Cars in that market are never going to be competitive economically with the mass manufacturers, but that's not why people buy them. If you do a more relevant comparison between the BMW 3 series ($35k for a barebones model) and the Model 3 (starting at... $35k), you'll see that the Model 3 offers better performance at every single price point. The volume of sales that they've got forecast would make them completely dominant in that entry-level-luxury segment.
If you are trying to save money, get a Bolt or, better yet, a gas-powered, used econobox. If you want a futuristic performance vehicle, and/or something to impress your friends, you will be looking at $35k+, and Tesla looks set to take over that entire market. BMW and Audi should be deeply worried.
All that said, I find automobiles (and luxury vehicles in particular) to be about the dumbest place to put your money. On the other hand, while it isn't economically rational to spend that much of your take-home pay on these vehicles, it is economically brilliant to sell cars to people willing to part with that much cash.
I very much like having a viewfinder, thank you. It's much easier and faster to see it the focus is correct than on a back screen (big pixels) or, god forbid, the horrible digital viewfinders that some cameras have.
It has a viewfinder, but if it follows a similar design to existing mirrorless cameras, it will be electronic. Like you, I can't stand those things - in every camera I've tried with one, there's a latency in the display, so what you are seeing lags behind what is actually happening, and the resolution is limited since it's really just a minuscule LCD they are cramming into the body in front of the eyepiece. Optical viewfinders are the only way to go for me.
I'd assume the 48MP one will produce the best image -- because we haven't pre-emptively thrown away information at the sensor stage, and so we've left it to the encoder to decide which information to throw away to achieve that filesize, and the software can make a better decision about what to throw away.
That's a very questionable assumption, because if you are encoding a 48MP JPEG rather than a 24MP JPEG, you are still forcing the format to store information for twice as many pixels, whether or not there is meaningful detail in those pixels. Yes, it's compressed, but just go ahead and do this experiment for yourself - an aggressively compressed, high-resolution image will probably display noticeable compression artifacts, while a barely compressed image at half the resolution will probably look just as good as the original, for realistic viewing conditions.
The only case where that kind of resolution is required is for absolutely enormous prints (think billboard) or if you want to crop the hell out of an image for some reason. And, in any case, cellphone lenses are probably only capable of resolving ~10MP. Many DSLR lenses aren't sharp enough to fully utilize a 24MP sensor, much less the tiny elements on a cellphone feeding a miniscule 48MP sensor.
Or maybe we should keep learning what we can about everything, near and far? There are two kinds of ignorance: the things you KNOW you don't know, and the things you DON'T KNOW you don't know. The researchers went to work trying to answer a question of the first type (some orbital observations of bodies in the solar system suggest a planet or something else odd floating about in distant space) and ended up answering a question of the second type. Nobody suspected additional moons around Jupiter or had suggested looking for them.
I know a better way: owning a Ferrari is definitely even more precise!
No, it isn't. There are a lot of people in the top quartile who don't own a luxury car, jet, or yacht. You would get a lot of false negatives from your suggestion.
The misinterpretation of this article is rampant in this discussion. Yeah, I know, I must be new here.
AC: "I saw this guy buy a 6 pack after using food stamps one time."
Also AC: "Therefore, the poor are shiftless, lazy alcoholics who deserve to starve."
Personal observation is not the same as data. A huge number of people are just barely scraping by and will be homeless the moment that a layoff, car accident, or medical condition happens.
It's notable because humans mathematicians struggled with the notion of zero. Roman numerals have the notable deficiency of having no way to represent zero, which caused huge problems and slowed down mathematical progress significantly.
A lot of concepts that seem obvious to us are really just ways of thinking that were introduced at a young age. The idea that the sky is blue isn't even universal: https://www.dunnedwards.com/co...
It's easy to mistake familiar concepts for obvious ones. But they aren't the same.
You're ignoring other risks like early failure and damage due to weather events.
No, I'm not. Those risks are lower than they are for regular home ownership (considering that solar panels are more durable than shingles). They are also lower risks than for the stock market. The panel degradation is more than offset by the projected increase in energy costs.
No, you are assuming that your solar panel return is equivalent to the rate of growth in electricity costs. Not true.
I invest $10K into a stock fund, and I get $800-$1000 per year in actual money back.
Unless the market goes pear-shaped. There are several 20-year periods in history with a NEGATIVE return. Every investment has risks, and stocks are among the riskiest investments you can make.
This solar requirement assumes you'll save $50 per month in electricity costs, thus breaking even in about 27-28 years, meaning the last few years of your mortgage will be "cash ahead".
No it doesn't. First of all, the $50 return is more like $150 - meaning that if you finance the system with a loan, you are cash flow positive from day one. If you pay out of pocket, you hit breakeven in about 5 years. That means that every year thereafter, it's gravy. The historical increase in energy rates just makes it more lucrative.
The panels have gotten so cheap that solar now has a lower risk than most other investments out there, at a similar or higher return. It's a no-brainer.
The reality is that the better your economy, the LESS polluted you are.
That's not true at all - no-holds-barred economic growth is often directly at odds with environmental cleanliness - look at China, which is posting enviable growth numbers, but where the air pollution level has blown right past dangerous into extra-chunky.
What IS true is that efficiency improvements often end up being economically advantageous. Getting cheap electricity from solar is a smart business move, or running a more fuel-efficient truck fleet.
A mortgage tool would work; not sure why you need to inflate your payments? Just take $10K, 4% rate, and 30 years - that's $48 per month to cover the cost. So unless you get an average of $48 per month in electric savings and maintenance costs are zero - the solar system costs you more than if you never got it. And that's assuming a $10K cost; a lot of the numbers I've seen tossed around are $20-$25K, which would put that break-even dollar value to $119 per month.
Your analysis is totally correct with your absurdly low claim for output. That $10k system will produce more like $100-$150/month in an area that is favorable to solar (like California, Arizona, Colorado). You also need to inflate your payments because historically, electricity costs have increased about 8%/yr on average. So the analysis isn't honest if you assume that the value of that energy stays flat.
How can you possibly claim that hail will be a deal-breaker for solar when it is totally manageable for the less-durable shingles sitting right next to the panel? You're just being willfully obtuse at this point. A roof replacement cost (around $10k-$20k) is similar in cost to a solar panel install, at least in my area. And a more accurate description of the hail issue is that every hail storm poses some risk of hail damage - and the risk is lower for panels than it is for your shingles. I've never claimed otherwise.
If you're trolling, you need to step up your game. Right now, you're just throwing out silly arguments.
So they grow about the same as the DJIA, historically. Meaning it's a push like it is today.
No, that's not how it works.
Assuming 0% growth in electricity costs, the return from solar panels is still 6-7%. You are investing a fixed quantity of money ($10k or whatever) to get $1800/yr (YMMV) of a valuable commodity, forever. If electricity costs grow instead, as they have historically done, your ROI gets even better because the value of each watt increases - so a conservative 4% increase in energy prices makes solar a 8-9% ROI. If the historical growth in energy prices of 8% ends up holding for the future, then your ROI with solar becomes 11%. Your biggest risk in this case is that electricity prices stay flat, and even then your return is better than you'll do with bonds, or with the market in most cases. The only real downside is that there's a limit to how much you can invest - in most areas, the utility only pays you for power at a wholesale rate, so the main benefit is limited to replacing your own electricity usage.
By all means though - ignore the math and the easy money laying on the ground. It keeps prices lower for the rest of us.
No, you don't really need that mandate. You were making the original claim that solar panels would be unworkable because of hail damage. That's an uninformed and absurd claim - first of all, the track record shows that panels survive hail just fine, and secondly, we don't institute building codes that require hail-proof shingles, so why would solar panels be any different? We've got a well-established mechanism for handling property damage risk, and it's called homeowner's insurance.
Your energy calculations are out of date. Geothermal has always been pretty expensive, aerogel windows don't exist yet on the mass market (from what I can tell), and solar energy has gotten CHEAP. Right now, in a house with average insulation, solar panels are a cost-effective investment and your ROI will likely be better than investing in bonds and depending on the specifics of your install could even beat the stock market.
There's frankly no need for residential geothermal when solar has become that good of an investment.
There's a great argument from research that people are terrible at being rational economic actors. There's a whole field studying this: behavioral economics.
As an example - everybody knows that they should save for retirement, but very few people actually save as much as they need to, despite the very straightforward math and the gobs of financial incentives in tax law, etc. Very few initiatives have been successful in motivating people to save more, except one that was discovered in a study: make retirement withholding from your paycheck opt-out, rather than opt-in.
When companies make this change, employee retirement savings go up dramatically. This solar panel thing is essentially an application of the same logic - from an individual perspective it's a great financial move, and will save money. Making it the default option helps everyone... it's basically just a logical update of building codes.
Hail damage happens continually in my area - roofs are getting replaced every few years because of bad summer storms. Solar panels don't even get a scratch from these storms, and so in a real sense you would actually REDUCE the hail damage by covering your roof with durable solar panels.
An opportunity cost analysis still favors solar panels. Consider that electricity rates since the 60's have grown 8% per year, on average. And consider that there's quite a bit less downside risk with solar than the stock market.
If you install a kit yourself and take advantage of the federal tax credit (starts tapering off in 2020), and assume a conservative 4% growth in electricity rates, you will get around an 8.78% ROI on solar panels, which already matches the average return of the market. If we get the same 8% growth in electricity rates as we've historically seen over long periods, that becomes an 11.25% return which will likely beat the market, and will certainly be less risky. A good investment by any measure.
Also, that's without counting the fact that you'll recoup a good amount of that investment when you sell the home - which in effect, reduces risk even further and increases your return. Solar is among the best investments you can make right now.
Really? Which ones specially (names) were selected partially based on their sex? It should be easy for you to answer because you said "almost all of them". You can just tell us three.
Really? Which ones specially (names) were selected partially based on their sex? It should be easy for you to answer because you said "almost all of them". You can just tell us three.
Logical fail. This is the same as asking "which lung cancers were caused by smoking?" Knowing that a large trend exists (smoking increases risk of lung cancer) doesn't give you information about individual cases (did smoking cause Mary's lung cancer, or would she have gotten it anyway?). We can look at the stats to know that maleness increases chances of being hired to direct a movie, without having any knowledge about specific cases. Similarly, we know the half-life of radioactive elements very precisely while being completely unable to predict the decay of any individual atom.
The market considers Tesla to be the "largest" U.S. automaker based on the valuation of the stock. So it looks a bit unreasonable for their stock to be so highly valued when comparing their actual manufacturing volume with that of the established companies.
Have you ever contributed to a non-trivial paper? I've contributed to a few, and for an experiment of any complexity (at least in my field, which was testing the effects of radiation on electronics) there will be thousands of lines of control and data collection software, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of instrumentation with very consequential configuration options which would take thousands of lines to describe completely, spreadsheets and/or scripts for the data analysis, schematics for the many involved circuits, and test logs with hundreds or thousands of lines. Don't forget the MB of dosimetry data or the complete traceability information and specifications on the experimental parts (which basically amounts to the entire datasheet, or for a complex part the entire application guide). Oh, and maybe you should actually leave some room to describe your test procedure, which can involve stupid amounts of detail if you are actually being thorough (have to describe the custom power-up procedure you're using to run a modern DRAM in a highly custom configuration that diverges wildly from what the mfg ever intended, for starters).
We would include as much of this information as possible in test reports which would sometimes total 100 pages or more, but even then it's a challenge to include truly all the information required to replicate results. So, if you want to publish, you then need to distill all of that information, every piece of which has a potentially dramatic impact on experimental results, into less then 10 pages, but more commonly 2 or 3.
To be honest, it would make a ton of sense for science publication to start moving towards something more like a git project or some other publishing paradigm that could support the truly heinous amount of detail required to describe any modern experiment unambiguously. When you think about it, an experiment isn't so different from code - you need to execute a set of incredibly detailed steps in an absolutely consistent manner. But supposing that science hasn't gotten insanely complex is absolutely ignorant and shows that you've never had any direct experience with publishing or even given the matter serious thought.
Both activities (especially mowing the lawn) involve loud, annoying noises, that's not what I consider peaceful time outdoors.
Use a reel mower. No noise, no maintenance, cheaper, and better exercise.
Whether you loathe the time or not is up to you - but there are things you have to do in life whether you want to or not - the piece that is up to you is whether you find a way to enjoy those things.
We've been over this a hundred times, dad. It only works in theory, or if you're really good at kidding yourself.
It only works if you're better at kidding yourself than you are at being kidded by the consumerist narrative. Seriously - somebody's messaging is going to prevail at driving your values and determining how you enjoy spending your time and what you aim for in life. Are you going to by in to the corporate propaganda and stay on the treadmill of hedonism that says productive work is torture and that you have to pay cold hard cash to get any momentary happiness in life? Or are you going to be a rational, self-directed human being and experience life on terms that you dictate for yourself?
Although you're right about the parenting thing - I had an attitude very similar to yours when I was young, but since having kids and real responsibility I've found that a life spent getting things done (even mundane things that will have to be done again soon) is infinitely more satisfying than a life of passive consumption. Just trying to save you some time here... I sure wish I'd figured it out sooner.
No. I'm not a teen anymore, but not/that/ far away from it; you're simply mistaken. There is no fun in, say, doing the dishes, laundry, sweeping the sidewalk, etc. Specifically there isn't even a way to do those things "right" in the sense that it starts being fun.
Housework isn't fun in the sense that you would pay somebody for the chance to have the experience, but it can be rewarding if you don't approach it with a juvenile mentality. One of the great lies sold by consumerist culture is that only entertainment experiences are enjoyable... but properly caring for your belongings, keeping things cleaned and organized, and making a nice environment for people you care about can be a very satisfying pursuit. Entertainment gives you an endorphin shot, but it's an empty experience and if that's all you live for you will never have the discipline to accomplish anything that matters. Accomplishing even mundane things is rewarding, if you allow it to be. It's all in your attitude.
As an example - shoveling the walk or mowing the yard can be pretty satisfying if you consider all the things you're accomplishing - getting a bit of peaceful time in the outdoors, getting some decent exercise, improving the appearance and functionality of your environment. Whether you loathe the time or not is up to you - but there are things you have to do in life whether you want to or not - the piece that is up to you is whether you find a way to enjoy those things.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in my day, we learned how to run a business in Algebra class, by playing Drug Wars on our TI-85 calculators. Supply, demand, buy low, sell high, managing inventory... it's got everything you need to know.
Tesla isn't really competing with the Nissans and Kias of the world - they are competing in the luxury segment. Cars in that market are never going to be competitive economically with the mass manufacturers, but that's not why people buy them. If you do a more relevant comparison between the BMW 3 series ($35k for a barebones model) and the Model 3 (starting at... $35k), you'll see that the Model 3 offers better performance at every single price point. The volume of sales that they've got forecast would make them completely dominant in that entry-level-luxury segment.
If you are trying to save money, get a Bolt or, better yet, a gas-powered, used econobox. If you want a futuristic performance vehicle, and/or something to impress your friends, you will be looking at $35k+, and Tesla looks set to take over that entire market. BMW and Audi should be deeply worried.
All that said, I find automobiles (and luxury vehicles in particular) to be about the dumbest place to put your money. On the other hand, while it isn't economically rational to spend that much of your take-home pay on these vehicles, it is economically brilliant to sell cars to people willing to part with that much cash.
I very much like having a viewfinder, thank you. It's much easier and faster to see it the focus is correct than on a back screen (big pixels) or, god forbid, the horrible digital viewfinders that some cameras have.
It has a viewfinder, but if it follows a similar design to existing mirrorless cameras, it will be electronic. Like you, I can't stand those things - in every camera I've tried with one, there's a latency in the display, so what you are seeing lags behind what is actually happening, and the resolution is limited since it's really just a minuscule LCD they are cramming into the body in front of the eyepiece. Optical viewfinders are the only way to go for me.
I'd assume the 48MP one will produce the best image -- because we haven't pre-emptively thrown away information at the sensor stage, and so we've left it to the encoder to decide which information to throw away to achieve that filesize, and the software can make a better decision about what to throw away.
That's a very questionable assumption, because if you are encoding a 48MP JPEG rather than a 24MP JPEG, you are still forcing the format to store information for twice as many pixels, whether or not there is meaningful detail in those pixels. Yes, it's compressed, but just go ahead and do this experiment for yourself - an aggressively compressed, high-resolution image will probably display noticeable compression artifacts, while a barely compressed image at half the resolution will probably look just as good as the original, for realistic viewing conditions.
The only case where that kind of resolution is required is for absolutely enormous prints (think billboard) or if you want to crop the hell out of an image for some reason. And, in any case, cellphone lenses are probably only capable of resolving ~10MP. Many DSLR lenses aren't sharp enough to fully utilize a 24MP sensor, much less the tiny elements on a cellphone feeding a miniscule 48MP sensor.
Or maybe we should keep learning what we can about everything, near and far? There are two kinds of ignorance: the things you KNOW you don't know, and the things you DON'T KNOW you don't know. The researchers went to work trying to answer a question of the first type (some orbital observations of bodies in the solar system suggest a planet or something else odd floating about in distant space) and ended up answering a question of the second type. Nobody suspected additional moons around Jupiter or had suggested looking for them.
I know a better way: owning a Ferrari is definitely even more precise!
No, it isn't. There are a lot of people in the top quartile who don't own a luxury car, jet, or yacht. You would get a lot of false negatives from your suggestion.
The misinterpretation of this article is rampant in this discussion. Yeah, I know, I must be new here.
AC: "I saw this guy buy a 6 pack after using food stamps one time."
Also AC: "Therefore, the poor are shiftless, lazy alcoholics who deserve to starve."
Personal observation is not the same as data. A huge number of people are just barely scraping by and will be homeless the moment that a layoff, car accident, or medical condition happens.
It's notable because humans mathematicians struggled with the notion of zero. Roman numerals have the notable deficiency of having no way to represent zero, which caused huge problems and slowed down mathematical progress significantly.
A lot of concepts that seem obvious to us are really just ways of thinking that were introduced at a young age. The idea that the sky is blue isn't even universal: https://www.dunnedwards.com/co...
It's easy to mistake familiar concepts for obvious ones. But they aren't the same.
You're ignoring other risks like early failure and damage due to weather events.
No, I'm not. Those risks are lower than they are for regular home ownership (considering that solar panels are more durable than shingles). They are also lower risks than for the stock market. The panel degradation is more than offset by the projected increase in energy costs.
No, that is exactly how it works.
No, you are assuming that your solar panel return is equivalent to the rate of growth in electricity costs. Not true.
I invest $10K into a stock fund, and I get $800-$1000 per year in actual money back.
Unless the market goes pear-shaped. There are several 20-year periods in history with a NEGATIVE return. Every investment has risks, and stocks are among the riskiest investments you can make.
This solar requirement assumes you'll save $50 per month in electricity costs, thus breaking even in about 27-28 years, meaning the last few years of your mortgage will be "cash ahead".
No it doesn't. First of all, the $50 return is more like $150 - meaning that if you finance the system with a loan, you are cash flow positive from day one. If you pay out of pocket, you hit breakeven in about 5 years. That means that every year thereafter, it's gravy. The historical increase in energy rates just makes it more lucrative.
The panels have gotten so cheap that solar now has a lower risk than most other investments out there, at a similar or higher return. It's a no-brainer.
The reality is that the better your economy, the LESS polluted you are.
That's not true at all - no-holds-barred economic growth is often directly at odds with environmental cleanliness - look at China, which is posting enviable growth numbers, but where the air pollution level has blown right past dangerous into extra-chunky.
What IS true is that efficiency improvements often end up being economically advantageous. Getting cheap electricity from solar is a smart business move, or running a more fuel-efficient truck fleet.
A mortgage tool would work; not sure why you need to inflate your payments? Just take $10K, 4% rate, and 30 years - that's $48 per month to cover the cost. So unless you get an average of $48 per month in electric savings and maintenance costs are zero - the solar system costs you more than if you never got it. And that's assuming a $10K cost; a lot of the numbers I've seen tossed around are $20-$25K, which would put that break-even dollar value to $119 per month.
Your analysis is totally correct with your absurdly low claim for output. That $10k system will produce more like $100-$150/month in an area that is favorable to solar (like California, Arizona, Colorado). You also need to inflate your payments because historically, electricity costs have increased about 8%/yr on average. So the analysis isn't honest if you assume that the value of that energy stays flat.
I just spreadsheeted the thing, although it could probably be done cleaner in a short script.
How can you possibly claim that hail will be a deal-breaker for solar when it is totally manageable for the less-durable shingles sitting right next to the panel? You're just being willfully obtuse at this point. A roof replacement cost (around $10k-$20k) is similar in cost to a solar panel install, at least in my area. And a more accurate description of the hail issue is that every hail storm poses some risk of hail damage - and the risk is lower for panels than it is for your shingles. I've never claimed otherwise.
If you're trolling, you need to step up your game. Right now, you're just throwing out silly arguments.
So they grow about the same as the DJIA, historically. Meaning it's a push like it is today.
No, that's not how it works.
Assuming 0% growth in electricity costs, the return from solar panels is still 6-7%. You are investing a fixed quantity of money ($10k or whatever) to get $1800/yr (YMMV) of a valuable commodity, forever. If electricity costs grow instead, as they have historically done, your ROI gets even better because the value of each watt increases - so a conservative 4% increase in energy prices makes solar a 8-9% ROI. If the historical growth in energy prices of 8% ends up holding for the future, then your ROI with solar becomes 11%. Your biggest risk in this case is that electricity prices stay flat, and even then your return is better than you'll do with bonds, or with the market in most cases. The only real downside is that there's a limit to how much you can invest - in most areas, the utility only pays you for power at a wholesale rate, so the main benefit is limited to replacing your own electricity usage.
By all means though - ignore the math and the easy money laying on the ground. It keeps prices lower for the rest of us.
No, you don't really need that mandate. You were making the original claim that solar panels would be unworkable because of hail damage. That's an uninformed and absurd claim - first of all, the track record shows that panels survive hail just fine, and secondly, we don't institute building codes that require hail-proof shingles, so why would solar panels be any different? We've got a well-established mechanism for handling property damage risk, and it's called homeowner's insurance.
Your energy calculations are out of date. Geothermal has always been pretty expensive, aerogel windows don't exist yet on the mass market (from what I can tell), and solar energy has gotten CHEAP. Right now, in a house with average insulation, solar panels are a cost-effective investment and your ROI will likely be better than investing in bonds and depending on the specifics of your install could even beat the stock market.
There's frankly no need for residential geothermal when solar has become that good of an investment.
There's a great argument from research that people are terrible at being rational economic actors. There's a whole field studying this: behavioral economics.
As an example - everybody knows that they should save for retirement, but very few people actually save as much as they need to, despite the very straightforward math and the gobs of financial incentives in tax law, etc. Very few initiatives have been successful in motivating people to save more, except one that was discovered in a study: make retirement withholding from your paycheck opt-out, rather than opt-in.
When companies make this change, employee retirement savings go up dramatically. This solar panel thing is essentially an application of the same logic - from an individual perspective it's a great financial move, and will save money. Making it the default option helps everyone... it's basically just a logical update of building codes.
Hail damage happens continually in my area - roofs are getting replaced every few years because of bad summer storms. Solar panels don't even get a scratch from these storms, and so in a real sense you would actually REDUCE the hail damage by covering your roof with durable solar panels.
An opportunity cost analysis still favors solar panels. Consider that electricity rates since the 60's have grown 8% per year, on average. And consider that there's quite a bit less downside risk with solar than the stock market.
If you install a kit yourself and take advantage of the federal tax credit (starts tapering off in 2020), and assume a conservative 4% growth in electricity rates, you will get around an 8.78% ROI on solar panels, which already matches the average return of the market. If we get the same 8% growth in electricity rates as we've historically seen over long periods, that becomes an 11.25% return which will likely beat the market, and will certainly be less risky. A good investment by any measure.
Also, that's without counting the fact that you'll recoup a good amount of that investment when you sell the home - which in effect, reduces risk even further and increases your return. Solar is among the best investments you can make right now.
Really? Which ones specially (names) were selected partially based on their sex? It should be easy for you to answer because you said "almost all of them". You can just tell us three.
Really? Which ones specially (names) were selected partially based on their sex? It should be easy for you to answer because you said "almost all of them". You can just tell us three.
Logical fail. This is the same as asking "which lung cancers were caused by smoking?" Knowing that a large trend exists (smoking increases risk of lung cancer) doesn't give you information about individual cases (did smoking cause Mary's lung cancer, or would she have gotten it anyway?). We can look at the stats to know that maleness increases chances of being hired to direct a movie, without having any knowledge about specific cases. Similarly, we know the half-life of radioactive elements very precisely while being completely unable to predict the decay of any individual atom.
The market considers Tesla to be the "largest" U.S. automaker based on the valuation of the stock. So it looks a bit unreasonable for their stock to be so highly valued when comparing their actual manufacturing volume with that of the established companies.
Have you ever contributed to a non-trivial paper? I've contributed to a few, and for an experiment of any complexity (at least in my field, which was testing the effects of radiation on electronics) there will be thousands of lines of control and data collection software, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of instrumentation with very consequential configuration options which would take thousands of lines to describe completely, spreadsheets and/or scripts for the data analysis, schematics for the many involved circuits, and test logs with hundreds or thousands of lines. Don't forget the MB of dosimetry data or the complete traceability information and specifications on the experimental parts (which basically amounts to the entire datasheet, or for a complex part the entire application guide). Oh, and maybe you should actually leave some room to describe your test procedure, which can involve stupid amounts of detail if you are actually being thorough (have to describe the custom power-up procedure you're using to run a modern DRAM in a highly custom configuration that diverges wildly from what the mfg ever intended, for starters).
We would include as much of this information as possible in test reports which would sometimes total 100 pages or more, but even then it's a challenge to include truly all the information required to replicate results. So, if you want to publish, you then need to distill all of that information, every piece of which has a potentially dramatic impact on experimental results, into less then 10 pages, but more commonly 2 or 3.
To be honest, it would make a ton of sense for science publication to start moving towards something more like a git project or some other publishing paradigm that could support the truly heinous amount of detail required to describe any modern experiment unambiguously. When you think about it, an experiment isn't so different from code - you need to execute a set of incredibly detailed steps in an absolutely consistent manner. But supposing that science hasn't gotten insanely complex is absolutely ignorant and shows that you've never had any direct experience with publishing or even given the matter serious thought.
Both activities (especially mowing the lawn) involve loud, annoying noises, that's not what I consider peaceful time outdoors.
Use a reel mower. No noise, no maintenance, cheaper, and better exercise.
Whether you loathe the time or not is up to you - but there are things you have to do in life whether you want to or not - the piece that is up to you is whether you find a way to enjoy those things.
We've been over this a hundred times, dad. It only works in theory, or if you're really good at kidding yourself.
It only works if you're better at kidding yourself than you are at being kidded by the consumerist narrative. Seriously - somebody's messaging is going to prevail at driving your values and determining how you enjoy spending your time and what you aim for in life. Are you going to by in to the corporate propaganda and stay on the treadmill of hedonism that says productive work is torture and that you have to pay cold hard cash to get any momentary happiness in life? Or are you going to be a rational, self-directed human being and experience life on terms that you dictate for yourself?
Although you're right about the parenting thing - I had an attitude very similar to yours when I was young, but since having kids and real responsibility I've found that a life spent getting things done (even mundane things that will have to be done again soon) is infinitely more satisfying than a life of passive consumption. Just trying to save you some time here... I sure wish I'd figured it out sooner.
No. I'm not a teen anymore, but not /that/ far away from it; you're simply mistaken. There is no fun in, say, doing the dishes, laundry, sweeping the sidewalk, etc. Specifically there isn't even a way to do those things "right" in the sense that it starts being fun.
Housework isn't fun in the sense that you would pay somebody for the chance to have the experience, but it can be rewarding if you don't approach it with a juvenile mentality. One of the great lies sold by consumerist culture is that only entertainment experiences are enjoyable... but properly caring for your belongings, keeping things cleaned and organized, and making a nice environment for people you care about can be a very satisfying pursuit. Entertainment gives you an endorphin shot, but it's an empty experience and if that's all you live for you will never have the discipline to accomplish anything that matters. Accomplishing even mundane things is rewarding, if you allow it to be. It's all in your attitude.
As an example - shoveling the walk or mowing the yard can be pretty satisfying if you consider all the things you're accomplishing - getting a bit of peaceful time in the outdoors, getting some decent exercise, improving the appearance and functionality of your environment. Whether you loathe the time or not is up to you - but there are things you have to do in life whether you want to or not - the piece that is up to you is whether you find a way to enjoy those things.