Using race as a criteria for whether something should or should not be done is, by definition, racism. If you are saying that the Chinese are a race (I'd disagree, but race is certainly subjective anyhow), and you are saying that China should stay racially Chinese as a matter of policy - yeah, that's racism. If you think a majority-Caucasian country should stay majority-Caucasian as a matter of policy, yup - still racism.
Good luck making 1.4 billion Chinese people a minority in their own country, by the way. Sounds like a 200+ year project.
I'm just thrilled that these millionaires are doing the beta test for us. In a few years, they'll have most of the bugs worked out and the tech will be a commodity. They are true martyrs for the little man.
Yes, well, until I get to zero I'd still be making money. My point is that the system should feel free to make me a profit. If I'm capped at zero, it should stop trading when it gets there - or mine bitcoins with the "extra" power:)
The problem with this is that the raw material source can't be traced after the initial mining operation. If I make things out of recycled aluminum or steel, I have literally no idea where those elements came from. I could make the exact same widget out of recycled aluminum one day and "fresh" aluminum straight from America's finest bauxite mines the next and I'd need to use two different labels. I don't think that's a meaningful distinction.
I could see that concern if the battery behavior didn't seem to follow a gradual, linear decline. As it is, so long as you are making more money on power arbitrage than it costs to replace the battery, who cares? If you aren't making that kind of money, then you have a bad algorithm indeed!
By this I assume you mean have the car operate as a sort of ride-hailing service for the general public?
Well then let me stop you right there... no, that's not what I meant at all. Did you read the summary? This story has nothing to do with ride sharing, and everything to do with using the battery pack in your car to store cheap power and sell it back at a higher rate. I was saying that I could safely allocate 60% of my battery to this kind of arbitrage.
ask yourself why fellow members of your society are trying to kill you?
I don't know, but I know I'm not going to change it by being a martyr.
And of course then there is the winter, where it is dark when I leave work. And the mornings when I need to drop off kids at school for activities. And the afternoons when I need to take the kids to their sports practices and games. Not everyone lives the swinging single life.
Even if the US had large deposits of gold, the value added on a ring is the manual labor - not the cost of the raw materials.
Actually, I think I stumbled upon the solution. Measure the value added, just like the Europeans do to calculate their VAT. If the value-added to the consumer is greater than 50%, it's 'Murican.
You'd need to exempt raw materials from that. To take an extreme example, jewelry production cost is dominated by the price of the precious metals... I think most people would agree that a handmade ring from New York was made in the USA even if the gold ingot came from South Africa.
400v isn't dangerous though, it's the amperage that's behind the 400v that's dangerous.
That's a silly point to bring up, though. You only need a few milliamps at that voltage to kill you, so unless you are arguing that the battery cannot deliver a few milliamps this point is meaningless. Current is determined only by your body's resistance via I = V/R, and your body's resistance is a function of a number of things - one of them is voltage. Dry skin will be somewhere in the neighborhood of a kOhm or two. That's 200-400mA, so you are dead.
I don't have a powerwall, solar panels, or an electric car. But I could get on board if I had all of those things. Let's say I had a 200-mile range car. My commute is 10 miles. The vast majority of the time, I only need 20 miles of charge - let's double it for safety to 40 miles. That means I'm only using 20% of my battery's capacity. I could see telling the car to go ahead and try to make me some money with the remaining 60% most of the time, overriding this when I know I have a trip or something. The algorithm it uses to "trade" could factor in depreciation and whatnot before deciding to make the transaction.
Lexus probably figures that people plugging in for cost reasons will buy Toyotas, and luxury buyers who care for the environment (by purchasing a car ensconced in leather, but I digress...) will spring for the full-electric. I'm sure they are missing where the two Venn circles intersect, but that might not be a terribly large group.
Of course Russians want the Soviet Union back - they have a kleptocracy that has not appreciably improved their standard of living while simultaneously they have watched their world influence shrink. Venezuela's government proudly and openly nationalized the oil industry, so I have no idea what dark corner of the internet you are getting your news from. They also nationalized much of their agricultural infrastructure, have long owned their aluminum mining sector, nationalized their banking, nationalized their media, have long run their own weapons factories and built their own ships, nationalized the electric grid, nationalized gold and steel mining and production. They even make their own computers.... what in the heck are you referring to when you say it is "owned primarily by foreign multinational companies"?
that some regulation of a market based system is necessary for the general good.
Absolutely! The government needs to set up the playing field, and needs to be there to enforce the rules. But that does not mean that the government then has a free hand to intervene beyond enforcing those rules. Accepting money from large corporation, and then changing the rules mid-stream to favor large those large corporations is not "capitalism", and it is antithetical to free market capitalism.
It has nothing to do with health care or any of the other things people wrongly associate with socialism.
The problem is that people use it wrongly, and intentionally. The word now has multiple meanings. For instance, Bernie Sanders wore it as a badge, despite not being a socialist at all. None of his plans, save perhaps healthcare, involved any socialism at all. People now use it to mean that they support using the government to redistribute wealth - in the old days of 2 years ago we'd have called him a social democrat. Or, as you say "capitalist welfare".
The whole discussion is a huge mess at the moment, mostly driven by deliberately misleading arguments over semantics. People have substituted shaming, labeling and name-calling for sincere discussion.
Sanders amendment IS a good place to start. The right place to start. But still- attacking "government" in general because government has been infected, and can be infected is ridiculous. Inoculate it. Don't kill it.
It sounds like we mainly agree and were getting hung up on what essentially is a semantic argument. I see the problem stemming from a flaw in our government, whereas you see the problem stemming from the economic side of the equation... that's kind of a chicken-and-egg discussion since both of us recognize that now it's a vicious cycle that needs to be stopped, and we even agree on a potential remedy.
Governments, and bodies of humans are corruptible, period. Everyone has a price.
Agreed!
With governments, at least, you have the theoretical ability to vote in change until you make attempting that corruption punishable by fucking death.
Agreed!
The fact that the government is currently corrupt isn't an indictment against government, it's an indictment against THIS government. Replace it with one that is serious about fighting corruption.
So, you can't say that governments are corruptible and also say that isn't an indictment against government. We always have to be wary of the fact that when we put big groups of people in charge of stuff, we're going to have actions that are not necessarily in our collective best interests. We need an incentive structure where the best interest of the big group of people is mostly aligned with the best interest of society in general. Right now - in the US - there are too many incentives in place to help the wealthiest Americans, because that is where the real political power is derived. This 100% needs to change.
So where is capitalism implicated in this? Because that is where the money comes from? So what? You don't think there would be a different power concentration if the US government controlled the economy directly? The government is the problem, along with it's corporate extensions. The feedback cycle needs to be broken, and Bernie Sander's constitutional amendment is a good place to start.
I'm just extending your analogy. You are, I think, arguing through analogy that capitalism is the enemy because it corrupts the government.
I'm throwing that back at you, saying that you can't trust a corruptible government to do what is right.
The problem is the governmental system, not the capitalism. Bernie Sanders proposed an amendment to banish corporate and union money from politics. I think that's an excellent start.
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Using race as a criteria for whether something should or should not be done is, by definition, racism. If you are saying that the Chinese are a race (I'd disagree, but race is certainly subjective anyhow), and you are saying that China should stay racially Chinese as a matter of policy - yeah, that's racism. If you think a majority-Caucasian country should stay majority-Caucasian as a matter of policy, yup - still racism.
Good luck making 1.4 billion Chinese people a minority in their own country, by the way. Sounds like a 200+ year project.
I'm just thrilled that these millionaires are doing the beta test for us. In a few years, they'll have most of the bugs worked out and the tech will be a commodity. They are true martyrs for the little man.
Yes, well, until I get to zero I'd still be making money. My point is that the system should feel free to make me a profit. If I'm capped at zero, it should stop trading when it gets there - or mine bitcoins with the "extra" power :)
The problem with this is that the raw material source can't be traced after the initial mining operation. If I make things out of recycled aluminum or steel, I have literally no idea where those elements came from. I could make the exact same widget out of recycled aluminum one day and "fresh" aluminum straight from America's finest bauxite mines the next and I'd need to use two different labels. I don't think that's a meaningful distinction.
I could see that concern if the battery behavior didn't seem to follow a gradual, linear decline. As it is, so long as you are making more money on power arbitrage than it costs to replace the battery, who cares? If you aren't making that kind of money, then you have a bad algorithm indeed!
By this I assume you mean have the car operate as a sort of ride-hailing service for the general public?
Well then let me stop you right there... no, that's not what I meant at all. Did you read the summary? This story has nothing to do with ride sharing, and everything to do with using the battery pack in your car to store cheap power and sell it back at a higher rate. I was saying that I could safely allocate 60% of my battery to this kind of arbitrage.
ask yourself why fellow members of your society are trying to kill you?
I don't know, but I know I'm not going to change it by being a martyr.
And of course then there is the winter, where it is dark when I leave work. And the mornings when I need to drop off kids at school for activities. And the afternoons when I need to take the kids to their sports practices and games. Not everyone lives the swinging single life.
Even if the US had large deposits of gold, the value added on a ring is the manual labor - not the cost of the raw materials.
Actually, I think I stumbled upon the solution. Measure the value added, just like the Europeans do to calculate their VAT. If the value-added to the consumer is greater than 50%, it's 'Murican.
You'd need to exempt raw materials from that. To take an extreme example, jewelry production cost is dominated by the price of the precious metals... I think most people would agree that a handmade ring from New York was made in the USA even if the gold ingot came from South Africa.
It would be suicide. The roads have no shoulder for the most part - very bike-hostile. I do need a car, but only if I want to live.
On the other hand, if the infrastructure is currently underutilized at night, then this move to nighttime usage could be a good thing.
400v isn't dangerous though, it's the amperage that's behind the 400v that's dangerous.
That's a silly point to bring up, though. You only need a few milliamps at that voltage to kill you, so unless you are arguing that the battery cannot deliver a few milliamps this point is meaningless. Current is determined only by your body's resistance via I = V/R, and your body's resistance is a function of a number of things - one of them is voltage. Dry skin will be somewhere in the neighborhood of a kOhm or two. That's 200-400mA, so you are dead.
That's really cool, but:
Yikes! That battery isn't going to last long if that's the yearly cycle wear!
I don't have a powerwall, solar panels, or an electric car. But I could get on board if I had all of those things. Let's say I had a 200-mile range car. My commute is 10 miles. The vast majority of the time, I only need 20 miles of charge - let's double it for safety to 40 miles. That means I'm only using 20% of my battery's capacity. I could see telling the car to go ahead and try to make me some money with the remaining 60% most of the time, overriding this when I know I have a trip or something. The algorithm it uses to "trade" could factor in depreciation and whatnot before deciding to make the transaction.
Lexus probably figures that people plugging in for cost reasons will buy Toyotas, and luxury buyers who care for the environment (by purchasing a car ensconced in leather, but I digress...) will spring for the full-electric. I'm sure they are missing where the two Venn circles intersect, but that might not be a terribly large group.
Why wouldn't powerwall customers have the same concern? Cost of installation is marginally lower in the home or something?
Pasting editable spreadsheets into Word/Powerpoint was always pretty handy, if quirky.
Of course Russians want the Soviet Union back - they have a kleptocracy that has not appreciably improved their standard of living while simultaneously they have watched their world influence shrink. Venezuela's government proudly and openly nationalized the oil industry, so I have no idea what dark corner of the internet you are getting your news from. They also nationalized much of their agricultural infrastructure, have long owned their aluminum mining sector, nationalized their banking, nationalized their media, have long run their own weapons factories and built their own ships, nationalized the electric grid, nationalized gold and steel mining and production. They even make their own computers.... what in the heck are you referring to when you say it is "owned primarily by foreign multinational companies"?
Hahaha, I hope not - but hope so at the same time :)
that some regulation of a market based system is necessary for the general good.
Absolutely! The government needs to set up the playing field, and needs to be there to enforce the rules. But that does not mean that the government then has a free hand to intervene beyond enforcing those rules. Accepting money from large corporation, and then changing the rules mid-stream to favor large those large corporations is not "capitalism", and it is antithetical to free market capitalism.
It has nothing to do with health care or any of the other things people wrongly associate with socialism.
The problem is that people use it wrongly, and intentionally. The word now has multiple meanings. For instance, Bernie Sanders wore it as a badge, despite not being a socialist at all. None of his plans, save perhaps healthcare, involved any socialism at all. People now use it to mean that they support using the government to redistribute wealth - in the old days of 2 years ago we'd have called him a social democrat. Or, as you say "capitalist welfare".
The whole discussion is a huge mess at the moment, mostly driven by deliberately misleading arguments over semantics. People have substituted shaming, labeling and name-calling for sincere discussion.
If you could watch the cooling liquid percolate through the little impossible do-dad, that would sell it for me.
By the way, if you haven't seen Cliff Stoll get excited about Klein bottles, this is your chance.
Sanders amendment IS a good place to start. The right place to start. But still- attacking "government" in general because government has been infected, and can be infected is ridiculous. Inoculate it. Don't kill it.
It sounds like we mainly agree and were getting hung up on what essentially is a semantic argument. I see the problem stemming from a flaw in our government, whereas you see the problem stemming from the economic side of the equation... that's kind of a chicken-and-egg discussion since both of us recognize that now it's a vicious cycle that needs to be stopped, and we even agree on a potential remedy.
Governments, and bodies of humans are corruptible, period. Everyone has a price.
Agreed!
With governments, at least, you have the theoretical ability to vote in change until you make attempting that corruption punishable by fucking death.
Agreed!
The fact that the government is currently corrupt isn't an indictment against government, it's an indictment against THIS government. Replace it with one that is serious about fighting corruption.
So, you can't say that governments are corruptible and also say that isn't an indictment against government. We always have to be wary of the fact that when we put big groups of people in charge of stuff, we're going to have actions that are not necessarily in our collective best interests. We need an incentive structure where the best interest of the big group of people is mostly aligned with the best interest of society in general. Right now - in the US - there are too many incentives in place to help the wealthiest Americans, because that is where the real political power is derived. This 100% needs to change.
So where is capitalism implicated in this? Because that is where the money comes from? So what? You don't think there would be a different power concentration if the US government controlled the economy directly? The government is the problem, along with it's corporate extensions. The feedback cycle needs to be broken, and Bernie Sander's constitutional amendment is a good place to start.
Velcro is not exotic or proprietary enough. They will use a patented, 3D printed, titanium, sintered, anodized clip with a custom bluetooth chip.
I'm just extending your analogy. You are, I think, arguing through analogy that capitalism is the enemy because it corrupts the government.
I'm throwing that back at you, saying that you can't trust a corruptible government to do what is right.
The problem is the governmental system, not the capitalism. Bernie Sanders proposed an amendment to banish corporate and union money from politics. I think that's an excellent start.