A real eye-opener, and almost an exact replay of the Credit Mobilier railroad scheme of the 1860s: A government-regulated corporation receives a monopoly franchise as well as generous subsidies from the government, yet still manages to rack up huge losses because so much of the money is siphoned off to other ventures, while a few of the principals accumulate astronomical wealth.
Even though a handful of owners of the original NiMH RAV4 EVs still rave about them, the vehicle has always struck me as rather an odd duck. Until and unless the price comes way, way down, the market for battery EVs consists of the environmentally conscious, and what environmentalist would want to drive an SUV, the quintessential symbol of profligate waste, self-importance and environmental degradation?.
Seems to me their claims are contradictory. If the cell doesn't heat up at all during charge/discharge, then it must have very low internal resistance and consequently if there is a short, it will release its energy almost instantaneously and be more, not less, susceptible to thermal runaway and fires (it's carbon after all). No matter how low the internal resistance, the energy when has to go somewhere. Relatively high internal resistance is what makes LiFePO4 cells safe for EV hobbyists - short out a cell and it will heat up and destroy itself, but slowly enough that it won't explode or catch fire. Proprietary lithium chemistries used in commercial EVs have lower resistance and better performance but are much more volatile.
When I was in college (1968-72) the big contest was between FORTRAN and ALGOL. ALGOL was supposed to be more logical, readable and humane, but it certainly was more verbose, and FORTRAN won out with its brutal efficiency, telling the machine what to do, in the minimum possible number of characters.
I remember being particularly fond of the Arithmetic IF (a legacy feature even then):
IF (X/Y*Z) 100,300,50,
which would go to statements 100, 300 or 50, depending on whether (X/Y*Z) was negative, zero or positive. I haven't written a FORTRAN program in decades, but I'm still saddened to hear that feature is now obsolete. (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10758935/fortran-compiler-warning-obsolete-arithmetic-if-statement)
Most of the authors' analysis rings true, but Dr. Harold Varmus, in particular, contributed enormously to the perverse incentives he now complains about when, as NIH Director, he mandated "modular grants", in which scientists simply request grant support in multiples of $25,000 without the traditional detailed budget and without any salary data. Indeed, scientists were (and still are) expressly forbidden from including in their application any information on exactly how they proposed to spend the requested grant money or what they were paying themselves. The predictable response of the universities (and I speak here from first-hand experience) was to strongly encourage faculty to put larger portions of their salaries onto grants, and be rewarded with higher base salaries. Such policies were enthusiastically sold by department chairmen to upper-level administrators as a way of incentivizing faculty to acquire more grant support, while at the same time raising faculty salaries, all at zero net cost to the University. The fact that all this occurred at the same time as the doubling of the NIH budget only encouraged the process. Now the hard times are here again, money is tight, and support personnel are being let go, but faculty are not giving up their higher salaries and the universities aren't going back to paying faculty from university funds to do research, at least not without a fight.
When I arrived at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1968, all programs were running on a Univac 1108, soon to be replaced with a much more powerful IBM 360. In those days every science major learned to code in their freshman year. You would type your program onto punch cards, one instruction per card, then type your data onto cards, and dump into the submission box. Hours later you'd pick up your printout in your (physical) mailbox. Faster turnaround if you submitted at say 2AM. No security at all in those days, so occasionally your program cards would be stolen, if you hadn't duplicated it you'd have to start from scratch.
The opaque price structures of both Verizon and the cable companies show just how essential a regulated service is. If the telcos want to abandon POTS, then in return they ought to be required to offer comparable service on whatever system they propose to replace it with, and at the same price it was on POTS, a price that can never rise more than inflation. After all, electronics costs are dropping all the time, and they ought to be saving millions not having to maintain 2 separate systems anymore. Instead they seem to be offering exactly nothing in return. Where it's still available voice + DSL can be had for $50. Any hardwired replacement, cable or fiber, approaches $100, and so does wireless with a data cap comparable to DSL (150 GB/month). In my area, you can't even get internet without also taking voice. It's criminal.
The other thing they need to do is to ban bundling and teaser rates. Mandate standard, transparent pricing: one price for the connection, then separate prices for internet, TV and voice. As it is, the pricing structure all but forces consumers to buy entertainment services if they want a connection at all.
These charter-school folks have a long-term agenda, and that is the conversion of public education from a public service to a fully privatized profit center, with the added perk of eliminating teachers unions as a political force. A key factor in achieving this is that wealth inequality has become so extreme that local governments no longer have the resources to educate the nation's children, but billionaires do. Can parents and boards of education afford to say "no" when, in the face of decaying buildings and teacher layoffs, big-time donors come offering modern, well-staffed facilities, with all the latest IT and other equipment, if only you let the donors do it their way? Once the public school system is reduced to being merely a dumping ground for the worst, most disruptive and unresponsive students, the donors won't have to be so generous, they'll be making handsome profits as the contractors in a privatized fee-for-service education system. It's just like the 1990s when deep-pocketed for-profit HMOs offered healthcare at below-market rates. Once all the nonprofit hospitals and insurers were driven out of business, the for-profits jacked up premiums at double-digit rates for decades. It was a brilliant strategy, and it's happening all over again, in education.
To me, the Times is well worth the 2 bucks a week I pay for it (with an.edu address). The articles are more comprehensive than any of the free news sites, and the ads are low-key. I feel news is something we should pay for, after all, someone has to pay all those reporters, editors, etc. It's become clear online ads aren't going to do it, and it shouldn't be governments paying them either. There are only going to be a few survivors in the online news game, but the Times might be one of them. They'll need millions of subscribers though, and last I heard they didn't even have a million yet.
Automotive grade lithium batteries are slowly falling in price but currently cost about $500 per kWh and can last perhaps 3000 charge-discharge cycles, so the cost to store and release one kWhr is about 16 cents, more than the total price of electricity in most of the US even at peak periods, but a good bit less than the retail price of electricity in Japan, about 32 cents. So in Japan it might actually make sense, depending of what the peak/off-peak differential is. But as suggested in the initial post, yes, is would make just as much sense to simply put some batteries in the basement and forget the cars. For that matter, you don't need lithium, lead batteries - cheaper but less durable - work out to about the same cost per kWh stored and released. But as lithium battery prices continue to fall, the day is not that far off when storing electricity from intermittent solar and wind sources in very large batteries will be economically feasible.
"[it] can run at an 80 percent efficiency when used to provide both heat and power." This makes no sense. If you count the heat produced, any combustible material can easily yield much better than 80 percent efficiency just by burning it. Condensing natural gas boilers, for example, routinely run at >95% efficiency. Of course, they're producing all heat and no electricity, but by the specified criteria, that's more efficient than the Cube. Straight % efficiency in producing electricity only, would be a much more useful number. I doubt that they're only counting electricity in the 80%, but it's ambiguous as written.
We are in fact increasing longevity and slowing down the aging process, but that only means an ever-longer period of helplessness preceding death. The most frightening statistic I've heard is that for every year of increased longevity that modern medicine has provided, only seven months is an increase in the time one is in good health. The other five months is an increase in the time during which you're still alive but have lost the ability to care for yourself. What's really needed is to minimize that period of dependence, in other words, delay the aging process while at the same time making it more sudden. Slowing it down is the worst thing you can do.
I've often taken notes on laptop at seminars and scientific meetings, and I've found it helps me concentrate on the talks. Taking notes on paper is distracting primarily because it requires constant glancing down at the paper. Further, I can type much faster than I can write. Rather than transcribing exactly what the speaker is saying, though, I find myself putting things in my own words, which keeps my attention from straying. But it's essential to be typing by touch and not looking down at the keyboard or the screen, which is as distracting as writing on paper. Typing errors, sometimes approaching one per word, can be corrected later, and in fact provide a convenient opportunity to review the material. If the study excluded surfers and included only touch-typists, I'm confident the laptop note-takers would do better.
I'm thoroughly confident that if I ever had to actually (or virtually) see myself as others see me interacting in a social situation, I'd never go to a party again.
Their strategy with GoogleDocs/GoogleDrive is truly incomprehensible. Seven years after its launch, it is still pathetically primitive, lacks even the most essential functions like detailed formatting of figures and legends. DOS WordPerfect was more sophisticated. MS-Word is a terrible program, still crash-prone, expensive, frustrating and distracting. It cries out for a replacement, even though almost every enterprise and public sector institution is dependent on it. Google engineers can make a self-driving car, you'd think they could program a decent word processor in an afternoon. It's clear they're not even trying. Why??
If the states really wanted to collect all that sales tax, all they would have to do is enforce current law (requiring residents to pay the tax themselves) and increase the penalties for evasion. Random audits would reveal massive infraction - supposedly less than 1% of taxpayers in states requiring it report any internet or other purchases where the vendor did not charge tax. But they won't do this, they're too scared of the backlash from voters. In short, they want somebody else to do the dirty work for them.
I don't see how their system makes anything more affordable, and it's outrageously inefficient. When I'm writing a grant or a research article, I might easily look at 20 or 30 articles in a single day. So, that's $120-$180 if I just look at them temporarily or up to $330 if I want to keep them permanently. So I could spend thousands per month just on access to references. Plus, I'll be spending an inordinate amount of time and mental energy on constant decisions of whether to rent, buy or pass up every article I encounter. Usually, I don't know whether an article will be relevant to the specific question I'm trying to answer until I actually look at its data. This system really will be a major impediment to scientific progress, if investigators are regularly ignoring articles that might contain a critical piece of information, just because they wouldn't risk the $6 - not a huge risk of course, but multiply it by hundreds of articles and it adds up quickly. The people particularly hard-hit would be those who for example have just lost their funding, and so have to write grants more or less nonstop but at the same time have no grant support to pay for article access.
The best solution in principle is the author-pays model (with allowances for those who truly can't afford to pay). At least with that system you eliminate the infrastructure needed to charge users and maintain the security of paywalls, which is a big part of the expense of electronic publishing. The problem with author-pays is that currently it's just too expensive, a few to several thousand dollars per article, and that has to be brought down. Perhaps with better software and better-informed authors, you wouldn't need all the layout techs and copy editors that put articles into a standard journal format - the authors could do that themselves - at least for low-impact journals that seem to present the biggest problem.
Right, so, absolute worst-case scenario, an electric run on pure coal power will match a fairly fuel-efficient ICE car. But coal plants are rather rapidly being abandoned in favor of natural gas, with half the carbon emissions, or solar and wind with almost none. Plus, a quite substantial fraction of electric car owners become motivated to install their own solar panels to power it. As far as carbon emissions in manufacture, making an ICE compact creates about 12,000 lbs CO2, or about a year's worth of driving, so even doubling it can't make a difference of more than 10%, assuming a 10-year lifespan. And who discards any car after 100,000 km (60,000 mi)? With proper care, even today's lithium batteries should last at least 100,000 miles, and if they go bad, they can be replaced - the other components, like the motor and electronics, ought to last much longer. But the real advantage is energy independence. Every year we send $200 billion to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the like, and eventually it ends up added to our national debt. Keeping that money in the US would be as stimulatory as a $200 billion tax cut,
I'd agree, actual fraud is still pretty rare despite all the pressures, if only because the consequences of getting caught are so unspeakable. The more common problem is that in an age of scarcity, everything has become more politicized, with personal connections and salesmanship becoming much more important than they once were. Everyone is more obsessed with claiming the maximum possible credit for their contributions to a project, simply because they have no choice, and that has taken a toll on the traditional collegiality of scientists.
No amount of tinkering and obfuscation is going to fix an obsolete business model, which is what Target et al. now have. Just when the need for low-margin big-box stores is evaporating, they are proliferating everywhere: Wal-mart, Target, Costco, Best Buy, I've probably got twenty of them within 10 miles of my house, and 90% of the time, I choose none of the above. No "sales associate" can possibly compete with the detailed customer reviews you find at amazon and elsewhere online. And in the end, no physical store can possibly be as efficient as an amazon warehouse. Display shelves and all the infrastructure that they require are enormously expensive, and have been rendered entirely unnecessary. In the end, Target et al. simply can't match online prices and still make a profit. There will always be some holdouts who like going to physical stores and being coddled and complimented by salespersons, but they will be paying dearly for that socializing.
Unfortunate, perhaps, that's it's happening in Russia, but this is precisely what is needed to get the move to electric vehicles into gear: a massive high-risk investment in mass production of lithium batteries. The raw materials for lithium batteries are not rare or expensive; the high cost is due to the sophistication of the manufacturing process. But with sufficient investment in high-volume output, those costs can be brought down, just as with other high-tech commodities like hard drives or memory sticks. American battery makers like A123 and EnerDel have been unwilling or unable to make those investments on a sufficient scale and remain low-volume, high-cost producers. Try to buy a large-format, vehicle-grade lithium cell, and you'll find several companies willing to sell them, all Chinese. The sad truth is that batteries may have to be imported in order to compete with gasoline in cost per vehicle-mile, but that's still better than importing all that oil.
Slashdot Mirror
A real eye-opener, and almost an exact replay of the Credit Mobilier railroad scheme of the 1860s: A government-regulated corporation receives a monopoly franchise as well as generous subsidies from the government, yet still manages to rack up huge losses because so much of the money is siphoned off to other ventures, while a few of the principals accumulate astronomical wealth.
Even though a handful of owners of the original NiMH RAV4 EVs still rave about them, the vehicle has always struck me as rather an odd duck. Until and unless the price comes way, way down, the market for battery EVs consists of the environmentally conscious, and what environmentalist would want to drive an SUV, the quintessential symbol of profligate waste, self-importance and environmental degradation?.
Seems to me their claims are contradictory. If the cell doesn't heat up at all during charge/discharge, then it must have very low internal resistance and consequently if there is a short, it will release its energy almost instantaneously and be more, not less, susceptible to thermal runaway and fires (it's carbon after all). No matter how low the internal resistance, the energy when has to go somewhere. Relatively high internal resistance is what makes LiFePO4 cells safe for EV hobbyists - short out a cell and it will heat up and destroy itself, but slowly enough that it won't explode or catch fire. Proprietary lithium chemistries used in commercial EVs have lower resistance and better performance but are much more volatile.
When I was in college (1968-72) the big contest was between FORTRAN and ALGOL. ALGOL was supposed to be more logical, readable and humane, but it certainly was more verbose, and FORTRAN won out with its brutal efficiency, telling the machine what to do, in the minimum possible number of characters. I remember being particularly fond of the Arithmetic IF (a legacy feature even then): IF (X/Y*Z) 100,300,50, which would go to statements 100, 300 or 50, depending on whether (X/Y*Z) was negative, zero or positive. I haven't written a FORTRAN program in decades, but I'm still saddened to hear that feature is now obsolete. (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10758935/fortran-compiler-warning-obsolete-arithmetic-if-statement)
Most of the authors' analysis rings true, but Dr. Harold Varmus, in particular, contributed enormously to the perverse incentives he now complains about when, as NIH Director, he mandated "modular grants", in which scientists simply request grant support in multiples of $25,000 without the traditional detailed budget and without any salary data. Indeed, scientists were (and still are) expressly forbidden from including in their application any information on exactly how they proposed to spend the requested grant money or what they were paying themselves. The predictable response of the universities (and I speak here from first-hand experience) was to strongly encourage faculty to put larger portions of their salaries onto grants, and be rewarded with higher base salaries. Such policies were enthusiastically sold by department chairmen to upper-level administrators as a way of incentivizing faculty to acquire more grant support, while at the same time raising faculty salaries, all at zero net cost to the University. The fact that all this occurred at the same time as the doubling of the NIH budget only encouraged the process. Now the hard times are here again, money is tight, and support personnel are being let go, but faculty are not giving up their higher salaries and the universities aren't going back to paying faculty from university funds to do research, at least not without a fight.
When I arrived at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1968, all programs were running on a Univac 1108, soon to be replaced with a much more powerful IBM 360. In those days every science major learned to code in their freshman year. You would type your program onto punch cards, one instruction per card, then type your data onto cards, and dump into the submission box. Hours later you'd pick up your printout in your (physical) mailbox. Faster turnaround if you submitted at say 2AM. No security at all in those days, so occasionally your program cards would be stolen, if you hadn't duplicated it you'd have to start from scratch.
The opaque price structures of both Verizon and the cable companies show just how essential a regulated service is. If the telcos want to abandon POTS, then in return they ought to be required to offer comparable service on whatever system they propose to replace it with, and at the same price it was on POTS, a price that can never rise more than inflation. After all, electronics costs are dropping all the time, and they ought to be saving millions not having to maintain 2 separate systems anymore. Instead they seem to be offering exactly nothing in return. Where it's still available voice + DSL can be had for $50. Any hardwired replacement, cable or fiber, approaches $100, and so does wireless with a data cap comparable to DSL (150 GB/month). In my area, you can't even get internet without also taking voice. It's criminal. The other thing they need to do is to ban bundling and teaser rates. Mandate standard, transparent pricing: one price for the connection, then separate prices for internet, TV and voice. As it is, the pricing structure all but forces consumers to buy entertainment services if they want a connection at all.
These charter-school folks have a long-term agenda, and that is the conversion of public education from a public service to a fully privatized profit center, with the added perk of eliminating teachers unions as a political force. A key factor in achieving this is that wealth inequality has become so extreme that local governments no longer have the resources to educate the nation's children, but billionaires do. Can parents and boards of education afford to say "no" when, in the face of decaying buildings and teacher layoffs, big-time donors come offering modern, well-staffed facilities, with all the latest IT and other equipment, if only you let the donors do it their way? Once the public school system is reduced to being merely a dumping ground for the worst, most disruptive and unresponsive students, the donors won't have to be so generous, they'll be making handsome profits as the contractors in a privatized fee-for-service education system. It's just like the 1990s when deep-pocketed for-profit HMOs offered healthcare at below-market rates. Once all the nonprofit hospitals and insurers were driven out of business, the for-profits jacked up premiums at double-digit rates for decades. It was a brilliant strategy, and it's happening all over again, in education.
To me, the Times is well worth the 2 bucks a week I pay for it (with an .edu address). The articles are more comprehensive than any of the free news sites, and the ads are low-key. I feel news is something we should pay for, after all, someone has to pay all those reporters, editors, etc. It's become clear online ads aren't going to do it, and it shouldn't be governments paying them either. There are only going to be a few survivors in the online news game, but the Times might be one of them. They'll need millions of subscribers though, and last I heard they didn't even have a million yet.
Automotive grade lithium batteries are slowly falling in price but currently cost about $500 per kWh and can last perhaps 3000 charge-discharge cycles, so the cost to store and release one kWhr is about 16 cents, more than the total price of electricity in most of the US even at peak periods, but a good bit less than the retail price of electricity in Japan, about 32 cents. So in Japan it might actually make sense, depending of what the peak/off-peak differential is. But as suggested in the initial post, yes, is would make just as much sense to simply put some batteries in the basement and forget the cars. For that matter, you don't need lithium, lead batteries - cheaper but less durable - work out to about the same cost per kWh stored and released. But as lithium battery prices continue to fall, the day is not that far off when storing electricity from intermittent solar and wind sources in very large batteries will be economically feasible.
"[it] can run at an 80 percent efficiency when used to provide both heat and power." This makes no sense. If you count the heat produced, any combustible material can easily yield much better than 80 percent efficiency just by burning it. Condensing natural gas boilers, for example, routinely run at >95% efficiency. Of course, they're producing all heat and no electricity, but by the specified criteria, that's more efficient than the Cube. Straight % efficiency in producing electricity only, would be a much more useful number. I doubt that they're only counting electricity in the 80%, but it's ambiguous as written.
We are in fact increasing longevity and slowing down the aging process, but that only means an ever-longer period of helplessness preceding death. The most frightening statistic I've heard is that for every year of increased longevity that modern medicine has provided, only seven months is an increase in the time one is in good health. The other five months is an increase in the time during which you're still alive but have lost the ability to care for yourself. What's really needed is to minimize that period of dependence, in other words, delay the aging process while at the same time making it more sudden. Slowing it down is the worst thing you can do.
I've often taken notes on laptop at seminars and scientific meetings, and I've found it helps me concentrate on the talks. Taking notes on paper is distracting primarily because it requires constant glancing down at the paper. Further, I can type much faster than I can write. Rather than transcribing exactly what the speaker is saying, though, I find myself putting things in my own words, which keeps my attention from straying. But it's essential to be typing by touch and not looking down at the keyboard or the screen, which is as distracting as writing on paper. Typing errors, sometimes approaching one per word, can be corrected later, and in fact provide a convenient opportunity to review the material. If the study excluded surfers and included only touch-typists, I'm confident the laptop note-takers would do better.
I'm thoroughly confident that if I ever had to actually (or virtually) see myself as others see me interacting in a social situation, I'd never go to a party again.
Their strategy with GoogleDocs/GoogleDrive is truly incomprehensible. Seven years after its launch, it is still pathetically primitive, lacks even the most essential functions like detailed formatting of figures and legends. DOS WordPerfect was more sophisticated. MS-Word is a terrible program, still crash-prone, expensive, frustrating and distracting. It cries out for a replacement, even though almost every enterprise and public sector institution is dependent on it. Google engineers can make a self-driving car, you'd think they could program a decent word processor in an afternoon. It's clear they're not even trying. Why??
Just one more step on the gradual transformation of traffic laws from deterrent to revenue source.
If the states really wanted to collect all that sales tax, all they would have to do is enforce current law (requiring residents to pay the tax themselves) and increase the penalties for evasion. Random audits would reveal massive infraction - supposedly less than 1% of taxpayers in states requiring it report any internet or other purchases where the vendor did not charge tax. But they won't do this, they're too scared of the backlash from voters. In short, they want somebody else to do the dirty work for them.
I don't see how their system makes anything more affordable, and it's outrageously inefficient. When I'm writing a grant or a research article, I might easily look at 20 or 30 articles in a single day. So, that's $120-$180 if I just look at them temporarily or up to $330 if I want to keep them permanently. So I could spend thousands per month just on access to references. Plus, I'll be spending an inordinate amount of time and mental energy on constant decisions of whether to rent, buy or pass up every article I encounter. Usually, I don't know whether an article will be relevant to the specific question I'm trying to answer until I actually look at its data. This system really will be a major impediment to scientific progress, if investigators are regularly ignoring articles that might contain a critical piece of information, just because they wouldn't risk the $6 - not a huge risk of course, but multiply it by hundreds of articles and it adds up quickly. The people particularly hard-hit would be those who for example have just lost their funding, and so have to write grants more or less nonstop but at the same time have no grant support to pay for article access. The best solution in principle is the author-pays model (with allowances for those who truly can't afford to pay). At least with that system you eliminate the infrastructure needed to charge users and maintain the security of paywalls, which is a big part of the expense of electronic publishing. The problem with author-pays is that currently it's just too expensive, a few to several thousand dollars per article, and that has to be brought down. Perhaps with better software and better-informed authors, you wouldn't need all the layout techs and copy editors that put articles into a standard journal format - the authors could do that themselves - at least for low-impact journals that seem to present the biggest problem.
Right, so, absolute worst-case scenario, an electric run on pure coal power will match a fairly fuel-efficient ICE car. But coal plants are rather rapidly being abandoned in favor of natural gas, with half the carbon emissions, or solar and wind with almost none. Plus, a quite substantial fraction of electric car owners become motivated to install their own solar panels to power it. As far as carbon emissions in manufacture, making an ICE compact creates about 12,000 lbs CO2, or about a year's worth of driving, so even doubling it can't make a difference of more than 10%, assuming a 10-year lifespan. And who discards any car after 100,000 km (60,000 mi)? With proper care, even today's lithium batteries should last at least 100,000 miles, and if they go bad, they can be replaced - the other components, like the motor and electronics, ought to last much longer. But the real advantage is energy independence. Every year we send $200 billion to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the like, and eventually it ends up added to our national debt. Keeping that money in the US would be as stimulatory as a $200 billion tax cut,
I'd agree, actual fraud is still pretty rare despite all the pressures, if only because the consequences of getting caught are so unspeakable. The more common problem is that in an age of scarcity, everything has become more politicized, with personal connections and salesmanship becoming much more important than they once were. Everyone is more obsessed with claiming the maximum possible credit for their contributions to a project, simply because they have no choice, and that has taken a toll on the traditional collegiality of scientists.
Sounds like a lot of lame excuses for cheap tasteless food. Why is it that, whenever I take my own sandwich onboard, it tastes just fine?
No amount of tinkering and obfuscation is going to fix an obsolete business model, which is what Target et al. now have. Just when the need for low-margin big-box stores is evaporating, they are proliferating everywhere: Wal-mart, Target, Costco, Best Buy, I've probably got twenty of them within 10 miles of my house, and 90% of the time, I choose none of the above. No "sales associate" can possibly compete with the detailed customer reviews you find at amazon and elsewhere online. And in the end, no physical store can possibly be as efficient as an amazon warehouse. Display shelves and all the infrastructure that they require are enormously expensive, and have been rendered entirely unnecessary. In the end, Target et al. simply can't match online prices and still make a profit. There will always be some holdouts who like going to physical stores and being coddled and complimented by salespersons, but they will be paying dearly for that socializing.
The batteries, probably ~half the cost, are also from China. They say then intend to eventually make them in Ohio.
Unfortunate, perhaps, that's it's happening in Russia, but this is precisely what is needed to get the move to electric vehicles into gear: a massive high-risk investment in mass production of lithium batteries. The raw materials for lithium batteries are not rare or expensive; the high cost is due to the sophistication of the manufacturing process. But with sufficient investment in high-volume output, those costs can be brought down, just as with other high-tech commodities like hard drives or memory sticks. American battery makers like A123 and EnerDel have been unwilling or unable to make those investments on a sufficient scale and remain low-volume, high-cost producers. Try to buy a large-format, vehicle-grade lithium cell, and you'll find several companies willing to sell them, all Chinese. The sad truth is that batteries may have to be imported in order to compete with gasoline in cost per vehicle-mile, but that's still better than importing all that oil.
Rename DHS the Department of Defense, and rename the current Defense Department the Foreign Legion.