You're asking way too much. Remember, this is Chrysler/Jeep we're talking about here.... This company survives purely because of 1) fleet sales to rental car companies and idiotic local governments, and 2) cultist morons who buy Jeeps because "it's a Jeep thing, you wouldn't understand". Even the Apple cultists are a lot smarter than the Jeep cultists.
It's not just that. Modern automatic transmissions, both the traditional kind and the CVTs, beat manual transmissions in fuel economy in every test. Remember, modern automatics (non-CVT) now have 6-8 speeds; it's not like the 80s and 90s where they only had 3 or 4. They also beat them in performance; autos can simply shift far faster than a human driver with a stick. As you noted, they're not like the crappy old ones that took forever to shift.
These days, manuals get crappy fuel economy; autos beat them every time. Autos also beat them in performance: they can shift much faster than you can.
Face it, technology has improved and rendered manual transmissions obsolete.
And they're getting better still: pretty soon, we can expect CVTs to mostly replace traditional automatics. That is, until electric cars render transmissions completely obsolete.
Yep, I used to be a manual transmission lover too. (Note, they're not "standard transmissions"; you must be over 65 years old if you're using that terminology still.) I drove a stick for 20 years. But my new car that I just got is an auto, because they finally fixed all the problems with autos: the fuel economy is noticeably better than manuals, they shift nicely now (both in smoothness and in responsiveness), and they're reliable now. I still *always* set my parking brake; I never broke that habit, and don't intend to. (It helps that my car is designed to be "sporty" and has the parking brake lever right next to the driver's seat just like a real sports car, rather than replacing it with a button or foot pedal like some cars do now.)
Also, I think your wild-ass guess is wrong: I'd estimate it closer to 85-90% of US drivers can't drive a stick.
Also, as far as fuel economy is concerned, I think one big factor is that I believe they're making manual transmissions less efficient intentionally, because stick drivers don't seem to care much about fuel economy, so they've selected the gearing for performance over economy, and one big factor is the top gears are lower than in an equivalent auto trans, so at highway speeds you're buzzing around at higher engine rpm. In a modern auto, it's no big deal to be close to lugging the engine, because as soon as the engine speed gets too low or there's a bit of extra throttle, the transmission will downshift in milliseconds. But in a stick, they make it so you don't have to downshift so much, which means keeping your rpms higher in cruising, which means crappier highway fuel economy.
He was definitely implying that this new design was progressive. It was not, it's an utterly stupid gimmick, as others have said here. It looks too much like a traditional AT shift lever, but functions completely different, and worse, for no good reason. There's a good reason that most cars these days have standardized on a particular control layout: it works well, people are used to it, and standardization is valuable when people change vehicles. People do rent cars from time to time, or drive other peoples' cars, and making confusing differences just to be "cool" and "edgy" is just going to cause problems like this. This doesn't mean you should avoid change that's actually beneficial, but this shift lever is not an example of this, it's an example of a really stupid change that makes things worse.
Also, if you are going to make a change to commonly-accepted controls, this is a prime example of why you shouldn't try to make it resemble an existing method too much. Make it noticeably different, and people will pay attention, rather than assuming it works the same as what they're used to.
Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in the world and its official stance is that the Big Bang theory is just fine with them.
That's irrelevant here in America, we don't care about what the rest of the world thinks. Just look at our measurement system.
The fact is, here in America, most Christians are fundamentalist or close to it ("evangelical"), and are very much anti-science any time science conflicts with their religious beliefs.
I think the perception of Christians as anti-science is largely an American thing.
Probably so, since here in the US the anti-science Christians are the mainstream (among Christians). But considering how large this country is population-wise and how much power it has both militarily and economically, our anti-science Christians count a lot more than pro-science Christians in other countries.
she accepts the Big Bang theory along with natural selection and pretty much every other established scientific theory.
"pretty much"? Which ones do they not? You can't be "pro-science" and then pick and choose what theories you believe, it's all or nothing. If you reject one theory, you're rejecting all of science and returning to irrationality. This doesn't mean you have to believe every theory is absolutely 100% true, in fact this is wrong too, and it's possible to opine that a theory is not well-supported by the evidence (but that wouldn't be an "established scientific theory" like the theory of gravitation), and science also requires you to be willing to change your belief as soon as evidence proves something wrong or forces a theory to be revised, but you can't just say "I believe in science" and then say "but I believe that [some well-established theory] is complete bunk even though I have no evidence to disprove it other than some vague fantastical stories by bronze-age sheep herders that were passed around as oral tradition for generations before finally being written down".
Um, I'm pretty sure any decent ad-blocker (like uBlock Origin) makes it pretty easy to click on the ad-blocker icon and then add that site to your whitelist. It shouldn't be hard. What crappy extension are you using anyway? If it isn't uBlock Origin, get rid of it and switch to UO.
There's no way for a blocked site to add a button on their site which whitelists their site in your ad-blocker. If they had that ability, they'd just automatically unblock themselves for everyone; it wouldn't make any sense to design an ad-blocker to allow that.
Oh bullshit, they didn't sell any ads, they signed up to an abusive tracking filled ad network that did all of the work for them.
If I start a convenience store and can figure out a way to stay afloat selling Snickers and M&Ms, then hooray for me, but please don't call me a confectioner.
I'm sorry, that's a totally lousy analogy. Here's a better analogy for you:
I have a convenience store, and in order to make a healthy profit, I find a company that makes candy and *pays me* to give it away at my store. Unfortunately, a certain percentage of this free candy is laced with arsenic or cyanide or ricin. I know about this, but I don't care because I'm getting money from the candy-maker to give away this poisoned candy to my customers.
It has nothing to do with losses in charging batteries, I can tell you that, and that's what this discussion is about, not about absolute efficiency.
Jets are popular because they're big, and that gives them economies of scale in moving people. Go look up the burn rates of small corporate/private jets and calculate the per-passenger fuel efficiency of those things: it's absolutely atrocious. Big commercial jets do much better because they cram so many people in and use much larger planes. Efficiencies of scale change everything.
Now you're moving the goalposts. Your original post was only about charging and discharging losses, which have nothing at all to do with where the energy is acquired from in the first place, and is an argument concerning the viability of using batteries as a power source on a plane rather than burning hydrocarbons. And you're making conversion losses out to be something major, when in fact they're extremely minor. Losses in the batteries are relatively small, and losses in the motors are nearly negligible. ICEs have huge losses because of the thermal cycle, so it doesn't matter that hydrocarbons have so much more energy since much of it is wasted.
As for acquiring the energy, because electric propulsion doesn't have a thermal cycle, you don't need to generate as much energy to charge them to do the same amount of work. Due to the significantly higher efficiencies of large-scale power plants, you end up saving energy that way, and that's ignoring the fact that you can easily switch your generation to something else like solar or nuclear which doesn't cause global warming.
That doesn't explain why they're used for larger helicopters. Those don't need thrust at all, only torque (to spin the rotors). Power-to-weight ratio is that standard reason given for using turboshaft engines in helicopters, but I can't find anyplace that explains why they aren't similarly advantageous in small helicopters, where flat-4 piston engines are dominant.
Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.
Isn't this why Reddit has "Reddit gold"? People pay extra money for special perks. It's how a lot of things work now. OKCupid is free (but has ads, easily blocked), but then has a premium "A-list" subscription service where you get extra perks, like being able to hide your visits to people's profiles, being able to message people whose mailboxes are full, etc. Tinder is free too (with no ads), but offers "Tinder Plus" with extra perks like being able to "super-like" anyone you want instead of one person per day, being able to undo swipes, etc.
Honestly, I think this is the way a lot of places are going to go: offer free content, and then paid extras. The people who don't mind spending money will get the extras, everyone else will stick with the free version, and the service will fund itself that way. If you think about it, this isn't very different from the way a shopping mall works. Lots of people (esp. kids) go to malls and just walk around and don't buy anything, or maybe just buy some very small things, not enough for stores to keep their doors open. Other people spend a bunch of money there. So the spenders are subsidizing all the "lookey-loos". The stores don't mind as long as they get enough sales, since the lookey-loos still make the place look busy which helps sales too.
No, Tesla doesn't advertise much here in the US either. If you sign up for their emailing list, they'll email you once in a blue moon to come in and try their newest model or something like that, but that's about it. A company with product so highly in-demand doesn't need to waste money advertising.
Are you willing to fork over $5/month/site to access Slashdot?
Hell no, this site sucks. If they start charging money, I'll find something else to do with my free time. Reddit doesn't charge anything and doesn't seem to have any ads.
Just off the top of my head, lots of Linux distributions, the BSDs, the GNU Project, the FSF, and so on have ad-free pages. If you don't consider at least some of those things useful, you might be on the wrong site.
Actually, I think you're on the wrong site, because much of the readership here does not consider those things valuable. Most of the real nerds have left this dried-up husk of a website for greener pastures, and it's full of Microsoft fans and shills now.
I'm sorry, I think you're full of it. I see very little useful content on the internet that really needs to be funded by ads.
You mention websites for products: in a completely ad-blocked, ad-free internet, these would still be around. They're "advertising" technically, but that's not what we're talking about here with ad-blocking. If I want to learn about some new car, I can go to the carmaker's website and see their glitzy pictures and specs and such. As long as they're not running tracking scripts, no sane person has a problem with that: I went there to learn about the car. That's not ad-supported content, that's paid for by people buying the car.
There's also internet sellers like Amazon. They don't need advertising either: you go to the site to buy stuff there. They have no need to advertise to you (except to get you to buy other stuff on that same site, which isn't the same; we're talking about 3rd-party ads here).
Then there's content sellers like Netflix and Amazon Video. They don't need advertising either, you happily pay a monthly fee to watch their streaming video.
Sites like SoylentNews.com prove that forums can survive on donations instead of ads. Dating sites like OKCupid have both ads and subscriptions; I don't know the actual numbers, but I imagine they do pretty well with the subscriptions.
I do a fair amount of stuff with Meetup.com groups. AFAICT, there's no ads there (of course, I use UO so I'm not sure), but they seem to make all their money by charging groups an annual fee for hosting their group page there. The group organizers either pay this personally (it's only $100-200/year), or charge membership fees (either monthly or per-event) to the group members to cover it.
Small sites can easily be self-funded or funded by donations. When it's only $5/month for a small site, it doesn't take a rich person to have their own website.
It's entirely possible to have an internet without third-party ads. The biggest casualty would be the "journalism" sites.
I was there too, and you're full of shit. Yes, lots of stuff was on university-hosted websites, and it was just fine, even if it wasn't pretty by today's standards. The content is what's valuable anyway. Most of the ad-supported media we have now is garbage: just look at how extremely-biased "journalism" sites like Breitbart.com have polarized politics so much in the past 15 years. The things that are different now, and actually valuable, are 1) forums like this one (well, not this particular one so much any more, it's really gone down the tubes) where people can talk about things pertaining to particular topics. With today's cheap hosting and easily-available forum software, it's not that hard or expensive to set up. SoylentNews.com works just fine with donations and no ads. 2) Internet retailers like Amazon.com: these sites don't need advertising, they're selling you stuff on their own pages which you've sought out willingly, frequently using a search engine. And of course there's the search engines; Google used to support itself just fine with small, text-based ads next to the search results, which bothered only really anal people. We'd all be better off if we went back to those days.
The advertisers had their chance, and they completely blew it. In fact, they've been blowing it for almost two decades now! So no, there are no "acceptable ads" as far as I'm concerned, except maybe Google's little text-only targeted ads that they used to do to the right of their search results.
These days, the only sane answer is to block ALL ads. If the advertisers don't like that, then they only have themselves to blame.
Whether you love or hate them, it'd be really nice if Chrome on Android supported AdBlock Plus.
Why? ABP is garbage, I don't want it on my phone. We already have ad-blocking on phones anyway: install Firefox for Android, and then install uBlock Origin. Works great. No ads at all, including so-called "acceptable ads".
Um, how many really tall mountains in the northern hemisphere do you think there are among those countries? Ignore any in the US because it'll probably have this same problem.
Oh please. It's the left that wants to build the telescope. When was the last time you heard about right-wingers giving a shit about astronomy or basic science unless there's profit involved? There's no profit in astronomy.
As someone above stated, this is a fight between the pro-science left and the SJW wacky-left. And unfortunately it looks like the wacky-left is winning.
Slashdot Mirror
You're asking way too much. Remember, this is Chrysler/Jeep we're talking about here.... This company survives purely because of 1) fleet sales to rental car companies and idiotic local governments, and 2) cultist morons who buy Jeeps because "it's a Jeep thing, you wouldn't understand". Even the Apple cultists are a lot smarter than the Jeep cultists.
It's not just that. Modern automatic transmissions, both the traditional kind and the CVTs, beat manual transmissions in fuel economy in every test. Remember, modern automatics (non-CVT) now have 6-8 speeds; it's not like the 80s and 90s where they only had 3 or 4. They also beat them in performance; autos can simply shift far faster than a human driver with a stick. As you noted, they're not like the crappy old ones that took forever to shift.
Christ america, what is wrong with manual?
1995 is calling, and wants you back.
These days, manuals get crappy fuel economy; autos beat them every time. Autos also beat them in performance: they can shift much faster than you can.
Face it, technology has improved and rendered manual transmissions obsolete.
And they're getting better still: pretty soon, we can expect CVTs to mostly replace traditional automatics. That is, until electric cars render transmissions completely obsolete.
Yep, I used to be a manual transmission lover too. (Note, they're not "standard transmissions"; you must be over 65 years old if you're using that terminology still.) I drove a stick for 20 years. But my new car that I just got is an auto, because they finally fixed all the problems with autos: the fuel economy is noticeably better than manuals, they shift nicely now (both in smoothness and in responsiveness), and they're reliable now. I still *always* set my parking brake; I never broke that habit, and don't intend to. (It helps that my car is designed to be "sporty" and has the parking brake lever right next to the driver's seat just like a real sports car, rather than replacing it with a button or foot pedal like some cars do now.)
Also, I think your wild-ass guess is wrong: I'd estimate it closer to 85-90% of US drivers can't drive a stick.
Also, as far as fuel economy is concerned, I think one big factor is that I believe they're making manual transmissions less efficient intentionally, because stick drivers don't seem to care much about fuel economy, so they've selected the gearing for performance over economy, and one big factor is the top gears are lower than in an equivalent auto trans, so at highway speeds you're buzzing around at higher engine rpm. In a modern auto, it's no big deal to be close to lugging the engine, because as soon as the engine speed gets too low or there's a bit of extra throttle, the transmission will downshift in milliseconds. But in a stick, they make it so you don't have to downshift so much, which means keeping your rpms higher in cruising, which means crappier highway fuel economy.
He was definitely implying that this new design was progressive. It was not, it's an utterly stupid gimmick, as others have said here. It looks too much like a traditional AT shift lever, but functions completely different, and worse, for no good reason. There's a good reason that most cars these days have standardized on a particular control layout: it works well, people are used to it, and standardization is valuable when people change vehicles. People do rent cars from time to time, or drive other peoples' cars, and making confusing differences just to be "cool" and "edgy" is just going to cause problems like this. This doesn't mean you should avoid change that's actually beneficial, but this shift lever is not an example of this, it's an example of a really stupid change that makes things worse.
Also, if you are going to make a change to commonly-accepted controls, this is a prime example of why you shouldn't try to make it resemble an existing method too much. Make it noticeably different, and people will pay attention, rather than assuming it works the same as what they're used to.
Most modern American Christians would say he wasn't a true Christian and that he was working for the devil.
In fact, a lot of American Christians don't believe Catholics to be Christians at all.
Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in the world and its official stance is that the Big Bang theory is just fine with them.
That's irrelevant here in America, we don't care about what the rest of the world thinks. Just look at our measurement system.
The fact is, here in America, most Christians are fundamentalist or close to it ("evangelical"), and are very much anti-science any time science conflicts with their religious beliefs.
I think the perception of Christians as anti-science is largely an American thing.
Probably so, since here in the US the anti-science Christians are the mainstream (among Christians). But considering how large this country is population-wise and how much power it has both militarily and economically, our anti-science Christians count a lot more than pro-science Christians in other countries.
she accepts the Big Bang theory along with natural selection and pretty much every other established scientific theory.
"pretty much"? Which ones do they not? You can't be "pro-science" and then pick and choose what theories you believe, it's all or nothing. If you reject one theory, you're rejecting all of science and returning to irrationality. This doesn't mean you have to believe every theory is absolutely 100% true, in fact this is wrong too, and it's possible to opine that a theory is not well-supported by the evidence (but that wouldn't be an "established scientific theory" like the theory of gravitation), and science also requires you to be willing to change your belief as soon as evidence proves something wrong or forces a theory to be revised, but you can't just say "I believe in science" and then say "but I believe that [some well-established theory] is complete bunk even though I have no evidence to disprove it other than some vague fantastical stories by bronze-age sheep herders that were passed around as oral tradition for generations before finally being written down".
Um, I'm pretty sure any decent ad-blocker (like uBlock Origin) makes it pretty easy to click on the ad-blocker icon and then add that site to your whitelist. It shouldn't be hard. What crappy extension are you using anyway? If it isn't uBlock Origin, get rid of it and switch to UO.
There's no way for a blocked site to add a button on their site which whitelists their site in your ad-blocker. If they had that ability, they'd just automatically unblock themselves for everyone; it wouldn't make any sense to design an ad-blocker to allow that.
If you think pop-ups, pop-unders, and malware don't count as "abuse", then you're either a moron or a shill for the ad industry.
Nothing is stopping them from self-hosting their own ads. It's the sure-fire way of getting around any ad-blocker.
Oh bullshit, they didn't sell any ads, they signed up to an abusive tracking filled ad network that did all of the work for them.
If I start a convenience store and can figure out a way to stay afloat selling Snickers and M&Ms, then hooray for me, but please don't call me a confectioner.
I'm sorry, that's a totally lousy analogy. Here's a better analogy for you:
I have a convenience store, and in order to make a healthy profit, I find a company that makes candy and *pays me* to give it away at my store. Unfortunately, a certain percentage of this free candy is laced with arsenic or cyanide or ricin. I know about this, but I don't care because I'm getting money from the candy-maker to give away this poisoned candy to my customers.
It has nothing to do with losses in charging batteries, I can tell you that, and that's what this discussion is about, not about absolute efficiency.
Jets are popular because they're big, and that gives them economies of scale in moving people. Go look up the burn rates of small corporate/private jets and calculate the per-passenger fuel efficiency of those things: it's absolutely atrocious. Big commercial jets do much better because they cram so many people in and use much larger planes. Efficiencies of scale change everything.
Now you're moving the goalposts. Your original post was only about charging and discharging losses, which have nothing at all to do with where the energy is acquired from in the first place, and is an argument concerning the viability of using batteries as a power source on a plane rather than burning hydrocarbons. And you're making conversion losses out to be something major, when in fact they're extremely minor. Losses in the batteries are relatively small, and losses in the motors are nearly negligible. ICEs have huge losses because of the thermal cycle, so it doesn't matter that hydrocarbons have so much more energy since much of it is wasted.
As for acquiring the energy, because electric propulsion doesn't have a thermal cycle, you don't need to generate as much energy to charge them to do the same amount of work. Due to the significantly higher efficiencies of large-scale power plants, you end up saving energy that way, and that's ignoring the fact that you can easily switch your generation to something else like solar or nuclear which doesn't cause global warming.
That doesn't explain why they're used for larger helicopters. Those don't need thrust at all, only torque (to spin the rotors). Power-to-weight ratio is that standard reason given for using turboshaft engines in helicopters, but I can't find anyplace that explains why they aren't similarly advantageous in small helicopters, where flat-4 piston engines are dominant.
Good luck getting Reddit users to pay a fee to post, especially when many of them are intentional throwaway accounts.
Isn't this why Reddit has "Reddit gold"? People pay extra money for special perks. It's how a lot of things work now. OKCupid is free (but has ads, easily blocked), but then has a premium "A-list" subscription service where you get extra perks, like being able to hide your visits to people's profiles, being able to message people whose mailboxes are full, etc. Tinder is free too (with no ads), but offers "Tinder Plus" with extra perks like being able to "super-like" anyone you want instead of one person per day, being able to undo swipes, etc.
Honestly, I think this is the way a lot of places are going to go: offer free content, and then paid extras. The people who don't mind spending money will get the extras, everyone else will stick with the free version, and the service will fund itself that way. If you think about it, this isn't very different from the way a shopping mall works. Lots of people (esp. kids) go to malls and just walk around and don't buy anything, or maybe just buy some very small things, not enough for stores to keep their doors open. Other people spend a bunch of money there. So the spenders are subsidizing all the "lookey-loos". The stores don't mind as long as they get enough sales, since the lookey-loos still make the place look busy which helps sales too.
No, Tesla doesn't advertise much here in the US either. If you sign up for their emailing list, they'll email you once in a blue moon to come in and try their newest model or something like that, but that's about it. A company with product so highly in-demand doesn't need to waste money advertising.
Are you willing to fork over $5/month/site to access Slashdot?
Hell no, this site sucks. If they start charging money, I'll find something else to do with my free time. Reddit doesn't charge anything and doesn't seem to have any ads.
Just off the top of my head, lots of Linux distributions, the BSDs, the GNU Project, the FSF, and so on have ad-free pages. If you don't consider at least some of those things useful, you might be on the wrong site.
Actually, I think you're on the wrong site, because much of the readership here does not consider those things valuable. Most of the real nerds have left this dried-up husk of a website for greener pastures, and it's full of Microsoft fans and shills now.
I'm sorry, I think you're full of it. I see very little useful content on the internet that really needs to be funded by ads.
You mention websites for products: in a completely ad-blocked, ad-free internet, these would still be around. They're "advertising" technically, but that's not what we're talking about here with ad-blocking. If I want to learn about some new car, I can go to the carmaker's website and see their glitzy pictures and specs and such. As long as they're not running tracking scripts, no sane person has a problem with that: I went there to learn about the car. That's not ad-supported content, that's paid for by people buying the car.
There's also internet sellers like Amazon. They don't need advertising either: you go to the site to buy stuff there. They have no need to advertise to you (except to get you to buy other stuff on that same site, which isn't the same; we're talking about 3rd-party ads here).
Then there's content sellers like Netflix and Amazon Video. They don't need advertising either, you happily pay a monthly fee to watch their streaming video.
Sites like SoylentNews.com prove that forums can survive on donations instead of ads. Dating sites like OKCupid have both ads and subscriptions; I don't know the actual numbers, but I imagine they do pretty well with the subscriptions.
I do a fair amount of stuff with Meetup.com groups. AFAICT, there's no ads there (of course, I use UO so I'm not sure), but they seem to make all their money by charging groups an annual fee for hosting their group page there. The group organizers either pay this personally (it's only $100-200/year), or charge membership fees (either monthly or per-event) to the group members to cover it.
Small sites can easily be self-funded or funded by donations. When it's only $5/month for a small site, it doesn't take a rich person to have their own website.
It's entirely possible to have an internet without third-party ads. The biggest casualty would be the "journalism" sites.
I was there too, and you're full of shit. Yes, lots of stuff was on university-hosted websites, and it was just fine, even if it wasn't pretty by today's standards. The content is what's valuable anyway. Most of the ad-supported media we have now is garbage: just look at how extremely-biased "journalism" sites like Breitbart.com have polarized politics so much in the past 15 years. The things that are different now, and actually valuable, are 1) forums like this one (well, not this particular one so much any more, it's really gone down the tubes) where people can talk about things pertaining to particular topics. With today's cheap hosting and easily-available forum software, it's not that hard or expensive to set up. SoylentNews.com works just fine with donations and no ads. 2) Internet retailers like Amazon.com: these sites don't need advertising, they're selling you stuff on their own pages which you've sought out willingly, frequently using a search engine. And of course there's the search engines; Google used to support itself just fine with small, text-based ads next to the search results, which bothered only really anal people. We'd all be better off if we went back to those days.
No, there's no solution.
The advertisers had their chance, and they completely blew it. In fact, they've been blowing it for almost two decades now! So no, there are no "acceptable ads" as far as I'm concerned, except maybe Google's little text-only targeted ads that they used to do to the right of their search results.
These days, the only sane answer is to block ALL ads. If the advertisers don't like that, then they only have themselves to blame.
Whether you love or hate them, it'd be really nice if Chrome on Android supported AdBlock Plus.
Why? ABP is garbage, I don't want it on my phone. We already have ad-blocking on phones anyway: install Firefox for Android, and then install uBlock Origin. Works great. No ads at all, including so-called "acceptable ads".
Um, how many really tall mountains in the northern hemisphere do you think there are among those countries? Ignore any in the US because it'll probably have this same problem.
Oh please. It's the left that wants to build the telescope. When was the last time you heard about right-wingers giving a shit about astronomy or basic science unless there's profit involved? There's no profit in astronomy.
As someone above stated, this is a fight between the pro-science left and the SJW wacky-left. And unfortunately it looks like the wacky-left is winning.
If you're going to quibble, the base model Tesla starts at $75k. That's not much more than a pick-up truck these days.