Oh yes of course. Anyone critical of apple is one of those dreaded apple haters. Revel in your ignorance.
Put the word 'critical' in front of the word 'thinking' and you have something more blind apple worshippers should start doing.
There's really not much to it. As insightful as it was, Apple's treasure trove of my personal data is a drop in the ocean to what social networks or search giants have on me, because Apple is primarily a hardware maker and not ad-driven, like Facebook and Google, which use your data to pitch you ads.
Dang... I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Apple hating conspiracy theorists suddenly cried out in righteous fury and fired up their flamethrowers..
Turn off all google services for india. wait a few weeks and when the citizens complain enough to their politicians they will likely beg google to come back under the current system.
Or competitors will move in gobble up Googles market share when Google goes back to California to sulk and then lobby for Google not to be let back on the market. After a while with a number of competitors, some of them probably local, who cater to the Indian market better than Google can nobody will miss Google. This is probably what Google is afraid of too because this is also one of the biggest reason why Google has trouble penetrating the few bastions of resistance like Russia where a local competitor (Yandex) simply does a better job. Google is a company that gained a dominant market share here in the west and many other places like India (where their search market share hovers between 95 and 100%) thanks to a set of fortuitous circumstances and it knows that losing market share is an awful lot easier than clawing it back. So I think it is pretty unlikely that Google will ever voluntarily exclude themselves from a market and leave their 95% plus market share to the competition since a 95% market share constitutes every businessman's nirvana, a monopoly, and Google ain't letting go of that without a fight.
California, for example, is likely fucking itself out of an agricultural future, if it keeps going the way it has been. Nobody wants to give them more water.
If nobody wants to eat fresh vegetables, that's fine, but this is where they are produced for a reason. Over 50% of the food we eat in the USA is produced in California. Those vast fields in the midwest mostly produce export crops, and corn for fuel ethanol which is grown continuously and with synthetic fertilizers that literally destroy topsoil and turn it into an inert hydroponic growth medium. California is the best place in the USA to produce vegetables, period, the end. Mexico is the next-best place nearby (it's actually too hot to grow a lot of things there) but then you have to pay more for shipping, and produce is picked even less ripe and gassed even more to ripen because it has to travel further. It also further restricts varieties, because some travel better than others.
But by all means, don't give California water. We'll give you back fifty dollar tomatoes.
That is only half the story, the other half of it is the stupidity of growing water intensive crops in places that get less then 5 inches of rain every year and irrigating these crops with ground water. Ground water is not an infinite resource, especially in relatively arid places like much of California is. There is a well known photo of Joseph Poland of the U.S. Geological Survey who used a telephone pole to demonstrate where a farmer would have been standing in 1925, 1955 and where Poland was then standing. By then the land in the San Joaquin Valley had sunk nearly 30 feet and this was in 1977. Since then much more water has been pumped out of the ground, apparently on the assumption that there is an infinite supply since California does not regulate ground water like surface water. All over the state people are finding themselves drilling hundreds and even thousands of feet for ground water and when they find it what they pump up are ground water deposits laid down 20.000 year ago when mastodons and sabre toothed cats still roamed the landscape. Land subsidence due to ground water depletion has caused sinking bridges, cracking canals and buckling highways, torn runways to name but a few problems and repairing them has cost the California taxpayer billions of dollars. This whole issue is about stupid water management and waste which is something that should be of particular interest to California farmers and it should be very much in their interest to support water management reform seeing as how their entire existence stands and falls with proper water management.
As long the service formerly known as YouTube Red is only available in the United States, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea I quite frankly don't care since my country is probably not one of the other 14 they countries Google has planned to bless with their new service.
Humans are very prone to magical thinking about even the most practical matters. For example, a small but meaningful fraction of the world population thinks that their fossil CO2 emissions magically don't contribute to climate change.
Excepting the 46.4% of the American electorate who thinks it's a Chinese hoax because their dear leader said so.
I considered getting a new MacBook last year and typed a little on the new keyboards. All in all I felt they were an improvement. I am also the type of person who keeps their devices relatively clean and tidy. Which has me wondering: Are these accusations grounded in facts? Are the new keyboards susceptible to failure due to dust and dirt? What are your experiences if you've got one of those?
Bought a MacBook about a bit over a year and a half ago. Soon after I got it some of the keys started 'collapsing', i.e. the butterfly structures under some of the the keys got caught under some kind of plastic structure the butterfly was attacked to. The keyboard still worked but the affected keys just didn't resist when you pressed them and then pop back up after you released them. Anyway, took it in for a keyboard replacement which they did free of charge and without a word of complaint. It has worked fine since then except a tiny amount of paint has started to peel from the inside of the 'A' and 'S' keys that is mildly irritating but then again I have a whole bunch of PC laptops at work which have the a similar problem of letters wearing off of the most used keys which is a problem easily fixed by simply replacing the keys which is a 60 second process. The whole keyboard replacement episode was a bit of an inconvenience but I won't be filing any class action lawsuits over it. The MacBook is the weight and size of a tablet but way more flexible, the keyboard feels different but then it has to in order to make the laptop that small, it's a trade-off. I'm not a militant fan of extremely springy mechanical keyboards so I'm generally happy with it, the compactness of the laptop matters more to me than the feel of the keyboard. As always your milage may vary.
Every time somebody has one of his cathartic purges here (irrespective of the topic) I imagine a guy who looks like this one: https://www.penny-arcade.com/c...
You mean the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The specific model of Samsung that had significant hardware issues. Unlike nearly every model of iPhone, which have had issues with bending, expanding, burning, exploding poor battery life, poor wifi, shitty antennas, cracking screens, unresponsive touch, throttling the CPU on old phones...
If you're going to shill for Apple, at least get your models right.
"Abused the legal system". I love it. If you idiots actually read the complaints it includes a complaint from the adjacent property where they were concerned about the local flooding such a site would cause. And Apple wasn't making it subterranean, did you even see the plan? Here it is:
http://www.cultofmac.com/43022...
But yeah, looks good, right? No problem there.
(A) Looks to me from that picture that the data centre is surrounded by trees to the point where you can't even see the thing until you are practically on the parking lot in front of it so no need to make it subterranean, but I suppose it would still offend your delicate sense of aesthetics when you fly over it in the hot air ballon you fill up with your Apple hate rants, and (B) How exactly does a datacenter cause flooding?
Believe it or not, individuals are allowed to challenge things in court. I know, hard to believe that is still allowed. It really should be banned and only the State and Corporations should have the power to decide what is best.
While tyranny is too strong a word, it's hard to get past the fact that in this case two cooks abused the legal system to block a project that has no detrimental effect on them and that includes the remote possibility of them getting leukaemia from all those magnetic fields since data centres are generally not located in the middle of residential neighbourhoods. Now if Apple had been fracking shale deposits in the area and poisoning their water supply I'd agree with you, but a data centre is just this big lump that sits there in an out-of-the-way place where it requires minimal public services while generating tax revenues for the local council. Hell, if the sight of a big white lump of a building offends your delicate sense of aesthetics a data centre can even be integrated into the landscape by making it subterranean. So please do explain to us how these people dragging a company through the legal system for three years over a data centre was a triumph for civil rights and public safety.
It adds about $10,000 to the cost of a new home, which is about 1-2% of the cost of new home construction in the bay area. It's tiny.
And cost will come down. As will the cost of installation.
Yeah, screw the rest of California.
Yeah but even there the added cost still isn't the end of the world and as he pointed out, prices of home solar installations and battery walls will be falling quite sharply for some time to come. Also, Ikea is currently selling a basic solar/battery package for something like USD 5000 and those are UK prices which are guaranteed to be between 15-30% higher than in the US.
California already has a housing cost issue. Lets make new housing MORE expensive!
But at least you'll be making your own energy practically for free after the initial investment. But, pray do explain to us, how exactly will you be better off buying your energy off the grid from a price gouging energy company that exists in a competition vacuum and that makes its energy with inefficient and sometimes decades old coal/oil/gas plants?
The environmental cost of producing solar cells virtually negates the green benefits for many years. Solar cell production is an energy intensive process that requires tight climate controls and clean rooms. This is actually a gift to the solar energy companies and a direct result of their aggressive lobbying efforts. If you follow the money, you'll see that Big Solar is going to make a killing. Now is the time to buy stocks in those companies.
Bonk, that only applies for the most part while you are making the panels using fossil fuels. As the fossil fuel power-plants are replaced by solar, wind, nuclear or something that causes much smaller emissions than fossil fuels the manufacturing CO2 footprint of solar panels diminishes correspondingly. Also, once you have manufactured the thing, a solar panel has a carbon footprint of 25-30 grams of CO2 in day to ay operations. Compare this to coal where the carbon footprint is around 1000 grams of CO2 per Kwh in day to day operations.
Millions upon millions of MS Windows admins 'stuck' with Linux systems? It's actually kind of funny to watch them work, they are so used to point-n-click snap-in GUI interfaces that most of them don't even know how to write a script. Recognise a Windows admin worth having a conversation with by the fact that he scripts most of his work using VB or C# rather than sitting there for hours pounding a mouse button working a GUI management tool to do stuff a script can do in 10 minutes.
I realize this is a complex issue but I always come back to: Pull out of the region and let them and Israel/Saudi settle their own disputes. Who cares? We can produce all the oil needed domestically now anyway thanks to fracking tech.
That last bit is an even as dumber idea as the first bit since both Iran and Israel have nuclear weapons, both are run by fanatical fascist lunatics and nuclear fallout does not respect national borders. Oh, and if you really think the future lies in oil, coal and gas I've got some shares in a buggy whip company you might be interested in.
Simple rule of thumb: Conservatives generally support law enforcement at the local level, but are often opposed to federal law enforcement agencies, such as the ATF, SEC, FTC, EEOC, etc. For liberals, it is the other way around.
Exceptions to this rule: DEA, ICE,...
Conservatives support federal law enforcement agencies too, but only as long as they are coming down like a ton of bricks on the liberal threat to christian conservative American civilisation.
Maybe I just don't understand the bail system, not living in the US, but from I gather it is a simple system: If you can get released on bail, you pay the bail and are released. When you show up as you're supposed to, you get the bail back - in full.
If this is correct, a bail bondsman just lends you the bail money for a short time. It really can't be that expensive as there's legislation against obscene interest rates and a bail bondsman is usually a lawful business.
So why are they a harmful business? They provide a service to those not wealthy enough to come up with the money themselves.
Just guessing here, but the US laws governing the various forms of lending services tend to have more holes in them than fishing net which gives various niche lenders like car financing companies, payday loan companies and bail bondsmen ample latitude to practice outrageous forms of usury.
As a EU resident, I don't mind if companies are choosing to block EU if they can't comply with privacy rules. I'd rather not do business with those companies.
Yeah, providing a GDPR Shield service is a bit like providing a shielding service that protects your business from customers in countries where there are regulations forbidding the sale of E. Coli infected food. The customer list would be a veritable consumer’s guide to where not to shop.
I'm sure that in 20 years there will still be a few niche markets where fossil fuels are still relevant but not much more.
Are the millions of 250cc (or smaller) motorcycles they use in Asia a large enough niche market? Today, something like the Honda PCX or Click 125 sells for the equivalent of USD1800-2200 in places like Thailand, Phillipines, Indonesia... Are those guys all going to spend extra for a battery version of these "work horses" and then have extension leads trailing from shops, rather than selling petrol in glass bottles?
Dunno about your corner of the world but in mine the scooter market is already dominated by Asian made electric scooters. I expect the 250-500 cc motorcycle market is next (take comfort in the fact that the part of the motorbike market that doesn't cater to the Copper and 1200-2000 cc racing bike niche markets will still use fossil fuels). It's precisely the Asian manufacturers who are leading the charge on electric bikes.
Does anyone really expect any manufacturer will still be selling vehicles for general use in twenty years that aren't at least mostly electric? That's not what the manufacturers themselves are saying. At the rate things are shifting, I doubt there will be many cars with tailpipes being sold new by 2030, let alone 2040 (but I'm an optimist).
Hell, no. Electric vehicles are the future and they will kill off fossil fuel powered cars just the PCs killed off the typewriter. I'm sure that in 20 years there will still be a few niche markets where fossil fuels are still relevant but not much more. The fossil fuel industry in the US is already lobbying hard for legislation against solar and wind energy as well as electric vehicles which is a sure sign of desperation. Any car company CEO who thinks they'll still be making fossil fuel cars with token electric hybrid drives 20-30 years from now should be fired because he'll run the company into bankruptcy.
A Google executive found a high-end Bluetooth headset selling at a steep discount on Google Shopping website earlier this year. He placed the order, but much to his surprise, the headset never arrived at his doorstep. He tried calling the seller, but it turned out that the number listed on the website was disconnected, and the merchant wasn't based in the US, as the website had indicated. Instead of kicking the seller off the website, Google launched an investigation and it soon realized the problem ran too deep.
Now, see... when that happens to me I start wondering whether this is a scam... I suppose Google executives are wired differently. I always get a bit of a kick out of greedy bargain hunters. This is not to say that all bargain hunters are greedy, in fact just a small minority of few of them fits that description, but that minority is a pretty reliable source of amusement. Years and years ago there was this case in Germany where people bought a mobile phones from a Swiss company by mail through a magazine ad for a ridiculously low price (this was before internet commerce took off). What they got was a toy phone although that was not necessarily obvious from the ad. Lawsuits ensued which ended with a very Swiss judgement where the judge basically told the plaintiff that: "...Yes this is an awfully expensive toy phone, but if you are dumb enough to expect to get a working mobile phone for that price you are dumber than a bag of hammers". If it looks to good to be true it probably is...
Slashdot Mirror
Your original comment make me think maybe you should lose the Star Wars Underoos and move out of your parents basement.
Is that really the best insult you could come up with?
Oh yes of course. Anyone critical of apple is one of those dreaded apple haters. Revel in your ignorance. Put the word 'critical' in front of the word 'thinking' and you have something more blind apple worshippers should start doing.
You need therapy.
There's really not much to it. As insightful as it was, Apple's treasure trove of my personal data is a drop in the ocean to what social networks or search giants have on me, because Apple is primarily a hardware maker and not ad-driven, like Facebook and Google, which use your data to pitch you ads.
Dang... I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Apple hating conspiracy theorists suddenly cried out in righteous fury and fired up their flamethrowers..
Turn off all google services for india. wait a few weeks and when the citizens complain enough to their politicians they will likely beg google to come back under the current system.
Or competitors will move in gobble up Googles market share when Google goes back to California to sulk and then lobby for Google not to be let back on the market. After a while with a number of competitors, some of them probably local, who cater to the Indian market better than Google can nobody will miss Google. This is probably what Google is afraid of too because this is also one of the biggest reason why Google has trouble penetrating the few bastions of resistance like Russia where a local competitor (Yandex) simply does a better job. Google is a company that gained a dominant market share here in the west and many other places like India (where their search market share hovers between 95 and 100%) thanks to a set of fortuitous circumstances and it knows that losing market share is an awful lot easier than clawing it back. So I think it is pretty unlikely that Google will ever voluntarily exclude themselves from a market and leave their 95% plus market share to the competition since a 95% market share constitutes every businessman's nirvana, a monopoly, and Google ain't letting go of that without a fight.
California, for example, is likely fucking itself out of an agricultural future, if it keeps going the way it has been. Nobody wants to give them more water.
If nobody wants to eat fresh vegetables, that's fine, but this is where they are produced for a reason. Over 50% of the food we eat in the USA is produced in California. Those vast fields in the midwest mostly produce export crops, and corn for fuel ethanol which is grown continuously and with synthetic fertilizers that literally destroy topsoil and turn it into an inert hydroponic growth medium. California is the best place in the USA to produce vegetables, period, the end. Mexico is the next-best place nearby (it's actually too hot to grow a lot of things there) but then you have to pay more for shipping, and produce is picked even less ripe and gassed even more to ripen because it has to travel further. It also further restricts varieties, because some travel better than others.
But by all means, don't give California water. We'll give you back fifty dollar tomatoes.
That is only half the story, the other half of it is the stupidity of growing water intensive crops in places that get less then 5 inches of rain every year and irrigating these crops with ground water. Ground water is not an infinite resource, especially in relatively arid places like much of California is. There is a well known photo of Joseph Poland of the U.S. Geological Survey who used a telephone pole to demonstrate where a farmer would have been standing in 1925, 1955 and where Poland was then standing. By then the land in the San Joaquin Valley had sunk nearly 30 feet and this was in 1977. Since then much more water has been pumped out of the ground, apparently on the assumption that there is an infinite supply since California does not regulate ground water like surface water. All over the state people are finding themselves drilling hundreds and even thousands of feet for ground water and when they find it what they pump up are ground water deposits laid down 20.000 year ago when mastodons and sabre toothed cats still roamed the landscape. Land subsidence due to ground water depletion has caused sinking bridges, cracking canals and buckling highways, torn runways to name but a few problems and repairing them has cost the California taxpayer billions of dollars. This whole issue is about stupid water management and waste which is something that should be of particular interest to California farmers and it should be very much in their interest to support water management reform seeing as how their entire existence stands and falls with proper water management.
As long the service formerly known as YouTube Red is only available in the United States, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea I quite frankly don't care since my country is probably not one of the other 14 they countries Google has planned to bless with their new service.
They're a foreign firm. Who cares?
Those of us who don't want them do it again.
Humans are very prone to magical thinking about even the most practical matters. For example, a small but meaningful fraction of the world population thinks that their fossil CO2 emissions magically don't contribute to climate change.
Excepting the 46.4% of the American electorate who thinks it's a Chinese hoax because their dear leader said so.
I considered getting a new MacBook last year and typed a little on the new keyboards. All in all I felt they were an improvement. I am also the type of person who keeps their devices relatively clean and tidy. Which has me wondering: Are these accusations grounded in facts? Are the new keyboards susceptible to failure due to dust and dirt? What are your experiences if you've got one of those?
Bought a MacBook about a bit over a year and a half ago. Soon after I got it some of the keys started 'collapsing', i.e. the butterfly structures under some of the the keys got caught under some kind of plastic structure the butterfly was attacked to. The keyboard still worked but the affected keys just didn't resist when you pressed them and then pop back up after you released them. Anyway, took it in for a keyboard replacement which they did free of charge and without a word of complaint. It has worked fine since then except a tiny amount of paint has started to peel from the inside of the 'A' and 'S' keys that is mildly irritating but then again I have a whole bunch of PC laptops at work which have the a similar problem of letters wearing off of the most used keys which is a problem easily fixed by simply replacing the keys which is a 60 second process. The whole keyboard replacement episode was a bit of an inconvenience but I won't be filing any class action lawsuits over it. The MacBook is the weight and size of a tablet but way more flexible, the keyboard feels different but then it has to in order to make the laptop that small, it's a trade-off. I'm not a militant fan of extremely springy mechanical keyboards so I'm generally happy with it, the compactness of the laptop matters more to me than the feel of the keyboard. As always your milage may vary.
That post looked pretty cathartic :-p
Every time somebody has one of his cathartic purges here (irrespective of the topic) I imagine a guy who looks like this one: https://www.penny-arcade.com/c...
You mean the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The specific model of Samsung that had significant hardware issues. Unlike nearly every model of iPhone, which have had issues with bending, expanding, burning, exploding poor battery life, poor wifi, shitty antennas, cracking screens, unresponsive touch, throttling the CPU on old phones... If you're going to shill for Apple, at least get your models right.
You need therapy.
...can it keep an iPhone X powered for 24 hours?
Dunno, but at that size it's a good thing it hasn't blow up like a Samsung Galaxy.
"Abused the legal system". I love it. If you idiots actually read the complaints it includes a complaint from the adjacent property where they were concerned about the local flooding such a site would cause. And Apple wasn't making it subterranean, did you even see the plan? Here it is: http://www.cultofmac.com/43022... But yeah, looks good, right? No problem there.
(A) Looks to me from that picture that the data centre is surrounded by trees to the point where you can't even see the thing until you are practically on the parking lot in front of it so no need to make it subterranean, but I suppose it would still offend your delicate sense of aesthetics when you fly over it in the hot air ballon you fill up with your Apple hate rants, and (B) How exactly does a datacenter cause flooding?
Believe it or not, individuals are allowed to challenge things in court. I know, hard to believe that is still allowed. It really should be banned and only the State and Corporations should have the power to decide what is best.
While tyranny is too strong a word, it's hard to get past the fact that in this case two cooks abused the legal system to block a project that has no detrimental effect on them and that includes the remote possibility of them getting leukaemia from all those magnetic fields since data centres are generally not located in the middle of residential neighbourhoods. Now if Apple had been fracking shale deposits in the area and poisoning their water supply I'd agree with you, but a data centre is just this big lump that sits there in an out-of-the-way place where it requires minimal public services while generating tax revenues for the local council. Hell, if the sight of a big white lump of a building offends your delicate sense of aesthetics a data centre can even be integrated into the landscape by making it subterranean. So please do explain to us how these people dragging a company through the legal system for three years over a data centre was a triumph for civil rights and public safety.
It adds about $10,000 to the cost of a new home, which is about 1-2% of the cost of new home construction in the bay area. It's tiny. And cost will come down. As will the cost of installation.
Yeah, screw the rest of California.
Yeah but even there the added cost still isn't the end of the world and as he pointed out, prices of home solar installations and battery walls will be falling quite sharply for some time to come. Also, Ikea is currently selling a basic solar/battery package for something like USD 5000 and those are UK prices which are guaranteed to be between 15-30% higher than in the US.
California already has a housing cost issue. Lets make new housing MORE expensive!
But at least you'll be making your own energy practically for free after the initial investment. But, pray do explain to us, how exactly will you be better off buying your energy off the grid from a price gouging energy company that exists in a competition vacuum and that makes its energy with inefficient and sometimes decades old coal/oil/gas plants?
The environmental cost of producing solar cells virtually negates the green benefits for many years. Solar cell production is an energy intensive process that requires tight climate controls and clean rooms. This is actually a gift to the solar energy companies and a direct result of their aggressive lobbying efforts. If you follow the money, you'll see that Big Solar is going to make a killing. Now is the time to buy stocks in those companies.
Bonk, that only applies for the most part while you are making the panels using fossil fuels. As the fossil fuel power-plants are replaced by solar, wind, nuclear or something that causes much smaller emissions than fossil fuels the manufacturing CO2 footprint of solar panels diminishes correspondingly. Also, once you have manufactured the thing, a solar panel has a carbon footprint of 25-30 grams of CO2 in day to ay operations. Compare this to coal where the carbon footprint is around 1000 grams of CO2 per Kwh in day to day operations.
who cares?
Millions upon millions of MS Windows admins 'stuck' with Linux systems? It's actually kind of funny to watch them work, they are so used to point-n-click snap-in GUI interfaces that most of them don't even know how to write a script. Recognise a Windows admin worth having a conversation with by the fact that he scripts most of his work using VB or C# rather than sitting there for hours pounding a mouse button working a GUI management tool to do stuff a script can do in 10 minutes.
I realize this is a complex issue but I always come back to: Pull out of the region and let them and Israel/Saudi settle their own disputes. Who cares? We can produce all the oil needed domestically now anyway thanks to fracking tech.
That last bit is an even as dumber idea as the first bit since both Iran and Israel have nuclear weapons, both are run by fanatical fascist lunatics and nuclear fallout does not respect national borders. Oh, and if you really think the future lies in oil, coal and gas I've got some shares in a buggy whip company you might be interested in.
Simple rule of thumb: Conservatives generally support law enforcement at the local level, but are often opposed to federal law enforcement agencies, such as the ATF, SEC, FTC, EEOC, etc. For liberals, it is the other way around.
Exceptions to this rule: DEA, ICE, ...
Conservatives support federal law enforcement agencies too, but only as long as they are coming down like a ton of bricks on the liberal threat to christian conservative American civilisation.
Maybe I just don't understand the bail system, not living in the US, but from I gather it is a simple system: If you can get released on bail, you pay the bail and are released. When you show up as you're supposed to, you get the bail back - in full.
If this is correct, a bail bondsman just lends you the bail money for a short time. It really can't be that expensive as there's legislation against obscene interest rates and a bail bondsman is usually a lawful business.
So why are they a harmful business? They provide a service to those not wealthy enough to come up with the money themselves.
Just guessing here, but the US laws governing the various forms of lending services tend to have more holes in them than fishing net which gives various niche lenders like car financing companies, payday loan companies and bail bondsmen ample latitude to practice outrageous forms of usury.
As a EU resident, I don't mind if companies are choosing to block EU if they can't comply with privacy rules. I'd rather not do business with those companies.
Yeah, providing a GDPR Shield service is a bit like providing a shielding service that protects your business from customers in countries where there are regulations forbidding the sale of E. Coli infected food. The customer list would be a veritable consumer’s guide to where not to shop.
I'm sure that in 20 years there will still be a few niche markets where fossil fuels are still relevant but not much more.
Are the millions of 250cc (or smaller) motorcycles they use in Asia a large enough niche market? Today, something like the Honda PCX or Click 125 sells for the equivalent of USD1800-2200 in places like Thailand, Phillipines, Indonesia... Are those guys all going to spend extra for a battery version of these "work horses" and then have extension leads trailing from shops, rather than selling petrol in glass bottles?
Dunno about your corner of the world but in mine the scooter market is already dominated by Asian made electric scooters. I expect the 250-500 cc motorcycle market is next (take comfort in the fact that the part of the motorbike market that doesn't cater to the Copper and 1200-2000 cc racing bike niche markets will still use fossil fuels). It's precisely the Asian manufacturers who are leading the charge on electric bikes.
Does anyone really expect any manufacturer will still be selling vehicles for general use in twenty years that aren't at least mostly electric? That's not what the manufacturers themselves are saying. At the rate things are shifting, I doubt there will be many cars with tailpipes being sold new by 2030, let alone 2040 (but I'm an optimist).
Hell, no. Electric vehicles are the future and they will kill off fossil fuel powered cars just the PCs killed off the typewriter. I'm sure that in 20 years there will still be a few niche markets where fossil fuels are still relevant but not much more. The fossil fuel industry in the US is already lobbying hard for legislation against solar and wind energy as well as electric vehicles which is a sure sign of desperation. Any car company CEO who thinks they'll still be making fossil fuel cars with token electric hybrid drives 20-30 years from now should be fired because he'll run the company into bankruptcy.
A Google executive found a high-end Bluetooth headset selling at a steep discount on Google Shopping website earlier this year. He placed the order, but much to his surprise, the headset never arrived at his doorstep. He tried calling the seller, but it turned out that the number listed on the website was disconnected, and the merchant wasn't based in the US, as the website had indicated. Instead of kicking the seller off the website, Google launched an investigation and it soon realized the problem ran too deep.
Now, see ... when that happens to me I start wondering whether this is a scam ... I suppose Google executives are wired differently. I always get a bit of a kick out of greedy bargain hunters. This is not to say that all bargain hunters are greedy, in fact just a small minority of few of them fits that description, but that minority is a pretty reliable source of amusement. Years and years ago there was this case in Germany where people bought a mobile phones from a Swiss company by mail through a magazine ad for a ridiculously low price (this was before internet commerce took off). What they got was a toy phone although that was not necessarily obvious from the ad. Lawsuits ensued which ended with a very Swiss judgement where the judge basically told the plaintiff that: "...Yes this is an awfully expensive toy phone, but if you are dumb enough to expect to get a working mobile phone for that price you are dumber than a bag of hammers". If it looks to good to be true it probably is...