Batteries are getting cheaper and better every day, while oil will - despite a recent temporary drop in price - continue to inevitably get more and more expensive each day.
If you want hard numbers, electric cars are already looking pretty attractive. Tesla's model S gets a MPGe of 138, while a typical modern gas car might get 40-50 MPG. If you crunch the numbers, it turn out it costs about $0.08/mile extra to drive a gas car than it does to drive an electric. Over the lifetime of the car, this translates to something like $15,000-$20,000 extra to run a gas car compared to running an electric car - more than the cost of a typical large car battery. And that's just for fuel costs. Maintenance costs for gas cars are also higher, and they are also less safe - any reasonable price on your own life would dwarf the cost of a car.
The perception that "electric cars are expensive" is artificial. Gas cars are more expensive. You just don't realize it because you pay over a longer period of time.
And all of this is not even getting to the benefits to the environment.
Gas cars seem like they really are doomed to going the way of the horse and buggy. Ultimately we're going to have to have a bunch of different electric car manufacturers otherwise Tesla would be a monopoly, and despite the geek's adoration for Elon Musk's dick, a monopoly is generally a bad thing, even if it's headed by a saint (which Musk is not).
The big car manufacturers are already hilariously slow moving and behind the curve, and are basically following Tesla's technology and lead. It seems pretty obvious to me that they aren't going to exist in the future except in severely shrunken form. So we urgently need new electric car manufacturers before it's Tesla that's the big clunky traditionalist car manufacturer.
In other words, this is a good thing and everyone should be happy about it. Except maybe Musk.
Yes, because over here in the west we have the radical and outrageous notion that power generation plants should make money, not lose money. The west had a boom in nuclear power production in the 60's and 70's too - before the real costs of nuclear power became apparent.
> And when you decommission a reactor it's only a big deal because people are afraid for no reason
Not really. I agree that people have an irrational and overblown fear of radiation. But after a nuclear reactor has been operating for a number of years, a large fraction of the systems really do become radioactive to genuinely dangerous levels - and I'm not talking a few percent increase in risk of cancer, I'm talking instant radiation poisoning levels. If decommissioned properly, no one gets hurt, but you have to deal with a large amount of high-level waste and an even larger amount of low-level waste.
> Bundle it up and store it.
Where? The only option for dealing with nuclear waste that is both cost-effective and safe is deep geological storage, and even that is too expensive to be cost-effective.
LFTR doesn't solve any problems that actually need solving, even assuming it would work. Conventional power plants don't produce weapons-grade fissile material either. No nuclear weapon in the USA - not a single one - has been built from reprocessed nuclear fuel. They have specialized reactors for producing weapons-grade plutonium that aren't really useful for generating electricity.
The main problem with nuclear energy is cost. LFTR people never even talk about cost. Based on the requirements of the technology, it's fair to assume that LFTR would be far more expensive than existing PWRs.
LFTR is a step backward in technology, not a step forward.
Actually the biggest problem with nuclear energy isn't even the risk of accidents. It's something you never hear pro-nuke people talk about: cost. Nuclear power is the most expensive form of power production in common use, sometimes by a wide margin. You never see pro-nuke people talking about waste handling or decommissioning costs, which are obscenely expensive for nuclear, and are often paid by taxpayers, not the electricity companies.
> we'd STILL need about 50% of existing demand just to continue the rest of our lives like we do now.
I'm curious where you got this figure from. Let me check your rectum.
> No modern electronics at all. No plastics. No fertilizers on a global scale. Far fewer pesticides, none that actually work. The medical industry too would cease to exist as we know it today.
Nonsense. We already know how to synthetically produce petroleum-like substances. These things would just get a bit more expensive, that's all.
The only reason the petrochemical industry is as large as it is, is because of the glut of cheap oil available during the 20th century when the industry was expanding. If there's a lot of something, people are going to find ways of using it. In a lot of cases the pathway from petroleum to a useful product is actually really complex and only makes sense if petroleum is cheap. If not, there are other, cheaper ways.
> Thats right, without oil you wouldn't be able to eat, get medicine or talk on the phone. No Internet.
Yeah, it's common knowledge that eating was invented in the 20th century.
Then expose it in public! A university is not a public forum! Can you people not understand this simple concept?
Just because some universities sometimes choose to provide a public forum for debate doesn't mean that that's what a university is, or what a university should do.
By now the Moon is basically a dead horse. That ship has sailed. Even though it makes sense in many more ways to have a permanent presence on the moon, moon advocates have been shouted down and marginalized and it's never going to happen.
Sane and rational people should put their focus now on permanent orbital and L5 bases, via private space launch companies like SpaceX.
While I agree that the fetishization of Mars is bizarre, I don't think it's that simple. Ultimately, NASA killed itself. The shuttle was a disaster from day one. The plans for a permanent presence on the Moon were incoherent and impractical. Actually, I use the term 'plans' loosely, because it's clear that after Apollo, NASA never had any real plans except jobs and pork.
No, it's just NASA's mission to Mars that would cost a trillion dollars (and it's why it's not going to happen). By now it's become pretty clear that NASA is never going to Mars. Anyone who wants humans on mars now has to pin their hopes on either foreign countries or private companies.
Universities exist for the purpose of educating people and advancing the arts. If 'spreading controversial ideas' fits into this purpose, it only fits in in a very indirect and tangential way. A lot of universities don't even have any humanities departments, where these types of events would usually be held.
If I'm learning about advanced aerospace engineering, for instance, why should space and time be given to someone who wants to talk about killing all the jews? It's not only ill-suited for the venue, it's also completely irrelevant to the university's mission. For every person who has something valuable to say, there are a million wackos. You ALWAYS have to prioritize, it's just a question of whom you prioritize for. There's a time and place for controversial ideas, but you can't expect every controversial idea to be given equal latitude.
People - especially people who never went to university - seem to have this bizarre idea that a university is some kind of ancient greek forum where people debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while eating grapes.
Huh? Where do you live? Universities get a mix of government and private funds. In the USA, the fraction of private funding has grown significantly over the past decades. A large fraction of government funding of universities comes in the form of grants and so on which are solely for research purposes and usually cannot be used for public events.
- Teach math and logic. (Real math like set theory and abstract algebra, not the pointless arithmetic number crunching you learn in high school).
- Teach them how to interpret statistics.
- Teach them about common biases in human reasoning. Let them read Kahneman and others.
etc.
'showing the irrational elements in different ideas' is a pretty indirect and inefficient way of teaching people how to think... akin to teaching medicine by going through all medieval healer remedies and explaining why they didn't work. That kind of stuff may be valuable after you've got them on the road to being rational, but before that it's just a waste of time.
You aren't entitled to a university spending time and money to give you a platform to spread your message.
If they do so, it's a privilege, and you should be thankful.
If they do not, you don't get to whine because something has been 'taken away from you'.
Ironically, people like you are the ones who seem to do the most whining.... grow up and start a youtube channel or something like the rest of the insane idiots who no one takes seriously.
People always say that university should be places where people get 'exposed to different ideas' but I never really understood why. Universities should be places where people learn HOW TO THINK RATIONALLY. That's the most important goal. The secondary goal is learning some science or craft or trade. Being exposed to different viewpoints is only of tertiary importance here. There are countless millions of ideas out there. The most important thing is learning how to separate reality from fantasy. If you just expose people randomly to a bunch of different ideas without teaching them how to think for themselves, what do you get? You get a bunch of people who believe in random shit and can't think for themselves i.e. the American public.
But you often find that people who want everyone to be 'exposed to their ideas' are precisely the ones who's ideas make no sense.
I see nothing indicating an 'anti free speech' trend, or even really any difference from the way it used to be. It's just that politics has become insanely polarized, vitriolic, and militant, and I understand if universities don't want to get carried away in that political torrent.
If anything, I see a moving away from the naivete of previous times (remember when everyone believed in astrology and auras and spoon-bending?) and a realization that people are inherently stupid, the human brain is incredibly easy to rewire and manipulate at will, and universities want to remain places where people can have sane and rational discussions without everyone throwing shit at each other.
What's amazing to me is that the people who stand in contempt against rationality and use things like appeal to emotion, appeals to authority/tradition, and other psychological tricks instead of rational argument are the ones who think themselves to be on the side of logic and reason! You can find people like this on both sides of the political spectrum, it makes no difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Honda buying out Tesla? Ain't gonna happen. Tesla already has a market cap of $30 bn. That's over half of GM's market cap.
And it doesn't look like this new company wants to get bought out either.
Hilarious! Why post as an AC?
Batteries are getting cheaper and better every day, while oil will - despite a recent temporary drop in price - continue to inevitably get more and more expensive each day.
If you want hard numbers, electric cars are already looking pretty attractive. Tesla's model S gets a MPGe of 138, while a typical modern gas car might get 40-50 MPG. If you crunch the numbers, it turn out it costs about $0.08/mile extra to drive a gas car than it does to drive an electric. Over the lifetime of the car, this translates to something like $15,000-$20,000 extra to run a gas car compared to running an electric car - more than the cost of a typical large car battery. And that's just for fuel costs. Maintenance costs for gas cars are also higher, and they are also less safe - any reasonable price on your own life would dwarf the cost of a car.
The perception that "electric cars are expensive" is artificial. Gas cars are more expensive. You just don't realize it because you pay over a longer period of time.
And all of this is not even getting to the benefits to the environment.
Gas cars seem like they really are doomed to going the way of the horse and buggy. Ultimately we're going to have to have a bunch of different electric car manufacturers otherwise Tesla would be a monopoly, and despite the geek's adoration for Elon Musk's dick, a monopoly is generally a bad thing, even if it's headed by a saint (which Musk is not).
The big car manufacturers are already hilariously slow moving and behind the curve, and are basically following Tesla's technology and lead. It seems pretty obvious to me that they aren't going to exist in the future except in severely shrunken form. So we urgently need new electric car manufacturers before it's Tesla that's the big clunky traditionalist car manufacturer.
In other words, this is a good thing and everyone should be happy about it. Except maybe Musk.
If you're trying to 'misdirect', it seems the last thing you'd do is 'style yourself after Steve Jobs'.
If it's misdirection, it's terrible misdirection.
You don't have to quote the entire comment when you reply to someone.
Yes, because over here in the west we have the radical and outrageous notion that power generation plants should make money, not lose money. The west had a boom in nuclear power production in the 60's and 70's too - before the real costs of nuclear power became apparent.
Great advance, but we're going to need many, many more breakthroughs to make nuclear waste even remotely cost-effective to process.
What's slowed down nuclear power is economics, not the 'anti-nuke crowd.'
> And when you decommission a reactor it's only a big deal because people are afraid for no reason
Not really. I agree that people have an irrational and overblown fear of radiation. But after a nuclear reactor has been operating for a number of years, a large fraction of the systems really do become radioactive to genuinely dangerous levels - and I'm not talking a few percent increase in risk of cancer, I'm talking instant radiation poisoning levels. If decommissioned properly, no one gets hurt, but you have to deal with a large amount of high-level waste and an even larger amount of low-level waste.
> Bundle it up and store it.
Where? The only option for dealing with nuclear waste that is both cost-effective and safe is deep geological storage, and even that is too expensive to be cost-effective.
Minor correction: No nuke in the USA has been built from reprocessed _civilian_ nuclear fuel.
LFTR doesn't solve any problems that actually need solving, even assuming it would work. Conventional power plants don't produce weapons-grade fissile material either. No nuclear weapon in the USA - not a single one - has been built from reprocessed nuclear fuel. They have specialized reactors for producing weapons-grade plutonium that aren't really useful for generating electricity.
The main problem with nuclear energy is cost. LFTR people never even talk about cost. Based on the requirements of the technology, it's fair to assume that LFTR would be far more expensive than existing PWRs.
LFTR is a step backward in technology, not a step forward.
Actually the biggest problem with nuclear energy isn't even the risk of accidents. It's something you never hear pro-nuke people talk about: cost. Nuclear power is the most expensive form of power production in common use, sometimes by a wide margin. You never see pro-nuke people talking about waste handling or decommissioning costs, which are obscenely expensive for nuclear, and are often paid by taxpayers, not the electricity companies.
Poe's law?
I'm hesitant to reply to a troll, but here goes.
> we'd STILL need about 50% of existing demand just to continue the rest of our lives like we do now.
I'm curious where you got this figure from. Let me check your rectum.
> No modern electronics at all. No plastics. No fertilizers on a global scale. Far fewer pesticides, none that actually work. The medical industry too would cease to exist as we know it today.
Nonsense. We already know how to synthetically produce petroleum-like substances. These things would just get a bit more expensive, that's all.
The only reason the petrochemical industry is as large as it is, is because of the glut of cheap oil available during the 20th century when the industry was expanding. If there's a lot of something, people are going to find ways of using it. In a lot of cases the pathway from petroleum to a useful product is actually really complex and only makes sense if petroleum is cheap. If not, there are other, cheaper ways.
> Thats right, without oil you wouldn't be able to eat, get medicine or talk on the phone. No Internet.
Yeah, it's common knowledge that eating was invented in the 20th century.
Then expose it in public! A university is not a public forum! Can you people not understand this simple concept?
Just because some universities sometimes choose to provide a public forum for debate doesn't mean that that's what a university is, or what a university should do.
By now the Moon is basically a dead horse. That ship has sailed. Even though it makes sense in many more ways to have a permanent presence on the moon, moon advocates have been shouted down and marginalized and it's never going to happen.
Sane and rational people should put their focus now on permanent orbital and L5 bases, via private space launch companies like SpaceX.
While I agree that the fetishization of Mars is bizarre, I don't think it's that simple. Ultimately, NASA killed itself. The shuttle was a disaster from day one. The plans for a permanent presence on the Moon were incoherent and impractical. Actually, I use the term 'plans' loosely, because it's clear that after Apollo, NASA never had any real plans except jobs and pork.
No, it's just NASA's mission to Mars that would cost a trillion dollars (and it's why it's not going to happen). By now it's become pretty clear that NASA is never going to Mars. Anyone who wants humans on mars now has to pin their hopes on either foreign countries or private companies.
Universities exist for the purpose of educating people and advancing the arts. If 'spreading controversial ideas' fits into this purpose, it only fits in in a very indirect and tangential way. A lot of universities don't even have any humanities departments, where these types of events would usually be held.
If I'm learning about advanced aerospace engineering, for instance, why should space and time be given to someone who wants to talk about killing all the jews? It's not only ill-suited for the venue, it's also completely irrelevant to the university's mission. For every person who has something valuable to say, there are a million wackos. You ALWAYS have to prioritize, it's just a question of whom you prioritize for. There's a time and place for controversial ideas, but you can't expect every controversial idea to be given equal latitude.
People - especially people who never went to university - seem to have this bizarre idea that a university is some kind of ancient greek forum where people debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while eating grapes.
> Most universities are government entities.
Huh? Where do you live? Universities get a mix of government and private funds. In the USA, the fraction of private funding has grown significantly over the past decades. A large fraction of government funding of universities comes in the form of grants and so on which are solely for research purposes and usually cannot be used for public events.
I don't agree with it, but on the other hand providing internet access and dorms costs a lot of money... I'm not sure what stance I'd take on that.
I can think of a thousand better ways.
- Teach math and logic. (Real math like set theory and abstract algebra, not the pointless arithmetic number crunching you learn in high school).
- Teach them how to interpret statistics.
- Teach them about common biases in human reasoning. Let them read Kahneman and others.
etc.
'showing the irrational elements in different ideas' is a pretty indirect and inefficient way of teaching people how to think... akin to teaching medicine by going through all medieval healer remedies and explaining why they didn't work. That kind of stuff may be valuable after you've got them on the road to being rational, but before that it's just a waste of time.
You aren't entitled to a university spending time and money to give you a platform to spread your message.
If they do so, it's a privilege, and you should be thankful.
If they do not, you don't get to whine because something has been 'taken away from you'.
Ironically, people like you are the ones who seem to do the most whining.... grow up and start a youtube channel or something like the rest of the insane idiots who no one takes seriously.
People always say that university should be places where people get 'exposed to different ideas' but I never really understood why. Universities should be places where people learn HOW TO THINK RATIONALLY. That's the most important goal. The secondary goal is learning some science or craft or trade. Being exposed to different viewpoints is only of tertiary importance here. There are countless millions of ideas out there. The most important thing is learning how to separate reality from fantasy. If you just expose people randomly to a bunch of different ideas without teaching them how to think for themselves, what do you get? You get a bunch of people who believe in random shit and can't think for themselves i.e. the American public.
But you often find that people who want everyone to be 'exposed to their ideas' are precisely the ones who's ideas make no sense.
I see nothing indicating an 'anti free speech' trend, or even really any difference from the way it used to be. It's just that politics has become insanely polarized, vitriolic, and militant, and I understand if universities don't want to get carried away in that political torrent.
If anything, I see a moving away from the naivete of previous times (remember when everyone believed in astrology and auras and spoon-bending?) and a realization that people are inherently stupid, the human brain is incredibly easy to rewire and manipulate at will, and universities want to remain places where people can have sane and rational discussions without everyone throwing shit at each other.
What's amazing to me is that the people who stand in contempt against rationality and use things like appeal to emotion, appeals to authority/tradition, and other psychological tricks instead of rational argument are the ones who think themselves to be on the side of logic and reason! You can find people like this on both sides of the political spectrum, it makes no difference.