The fact that doctors haven't been considering treating patients with nutrients before now is alarming
It would be alarming, if it were true. Doctors pretty much always recommend improving diet for illnesses for which it is effective (like the ones mentioned -- heart disease, diabetes -- not for acute conditions, infections, etc....) But two big problems (not the only ones, no doubt) with a nutrition-based treatment plan are patient knowledge (knowing what to eat) and patient compliance (actually making the recommended dietary changes). This study attempts to improve those aspects by providing meals for patients. That's the big innovation here, not that better nutrition leads to better health outcomes.
Also, I'm not sure why you think there is some sort of dichotomy here. There is none, and can't be. Virtually everyone being treated with drugs also eats food. The real question is more how much each is emphasized in the patient's care.
This shit is never going to work if it can't handle random, illegal, and stupid behaviour from the humans on the road.
Yeah, it's too bad they've stopped trying to improve them and are claiming they're ready for the road now. Oh wait, that's exactly the opposite of what's happening, as cited specifically in the article:
As Telenav [representative of others] put it, “Our autonomous system is still being developed and we are working on improvement cycles. At this stage we expect that (the) driver will be taking over the car control from time to time due to the fact that it is new technology.”
It's easy (also stupid and pointless) to say that if they never improve, they'll never be good enough, because none of them claim they're ready today and all are focused entirely on improving performance.
This is just hubris from the tech industry who are pretending they're closer to solutions that work in the real world than they really are.
I'm aware of at least one company for which that seems to be true. As for the more than 50 other companies doing or preparing for road tests, it's likely that you're not listening to or not understanding their claims (for the ones that have even made any claims at all) or sourcing your expectations/beliefs from somewhere other than where the actual work is being done.
You would have to expose it not just to the current environment, but evolutionary time environments to have an "android."
I guess you have a weird definition of "android". Traditionally, it's just an anthropomorphic robot. The truth is, we don't know what stimulus would be necessary to cause a system to display characteristics of human-like consciousness. Logically, the necessary inputs would tend to vary based on the complexity and attributes of the system.
How can we ever know if a machine is conscious?
I expect that as soon as we have machines that can reliably pass a Turing test, we'll come up with new measures, hopefully well thought out ones, to get at that.
We would have to consciously replicate that since we are making an artifact.
Obviously, we can't know that unless and until an artificial construct demonstrates measurable aspects of consciousness.
Believing otherwise is just more of nature-is-an-idiot-and-we-can-do-better thinking
The opposite, actually. The idea that we can make something simple(ish) and somewhat open-ended or non-deterministic that can evolve through self organizing/emergent behavior depends on "nature" (broadly used here to include natural processes happening to and/or acting on an artificial construct) to do part of the work.
You seem to be making a few assertions here that are simply your beliefs, but using them as facts to support your conclusion.
For instance, the notion that we can't replicate something that has evolved over millions or billions of years. (BTW, humans/pre-human ancestors only branched off from other hominid about 7.5 million years ago. The earliest estimates for life existing on Earth are about 3.8 billion years ago, so no, human consciousness was not evolving before single-celled organisms.) However, we have replicated bipedal locomotion in robots, despite that taking considerable time to evolve in our ancestors. So I'm not sure why you think mental processes cannot be replicated.
You also claim that humans will never understand human consciousness, but only cite a philosophical bon mot or two "a thing cannot make an artifact as complex as itself" and "you must know more about reality than the thing you are creating" that have a satisfying sound to them, but no evidence that they are actual "laws of the universe".
Here's another good one:"We perceive the internal states of others and react to those states by modifying our own behaviors.... The HMA will never be replicated in a machine for this reason." Except that robots and chatbots that observe and respond to human emotion already exist. And evidence suggests that they will be better at it than humans before long.
It seems to boil down to either "I can't conceive of how it is possible, so it must be impossible" or just "it's a really hard problem", neither of which is a compelling argument to me. There's another piece to it, also, that you may not have considered. You seem to be assuming that people, humans, need to fully understand consciousness and will then need to build it from scratch. However, you're overlooking the possibility that an advanced set of hardware and algorithms that forms a "thinking machine" of some type will develop consciousness on its own. Consider that evolution of organic entities takes a long time because many generations may be needed to fully develop the adaptive traits. Software is much more malleable. It can change in response to stimuli in real time and undergo hundreds of iterations of changes in less time than it takes a person to recharge as is required daily (sleep).
Machines might never achieve consciousness or emotion that is similar to humans, but it's way to early to declare it impossible.
Well, who's the sexist now? No surprise, it's still you: assuming my gender AND that of any partners I may have, AND trying to assign us roles in the relationship?
Back on a serious note, I think we both realize there is gender bias -- aside from any self-selection bias -- in lots of industries, including entertainment. And pretending there isn't or pretending we have to precisely quantify it before we can even acknowledge it only perpetuates it.
This notion that every industry, every hobby, and every interest ought to be equally populated by women is perhaps the biggest error imaginable.
Not sure if you just didn't understand the article/summary, or you are just extrapolating what was actually said to "every industry, every hobby, and every interest" because that's easier whine about? What Cameron actually said is that in Hollywood in general, 14% of directors are female. And it's not like we don't know gender bias exists in the entertainment industry. Book publishing provides an easy example. A few years back, a female author submitted her novel to the same set of 50 literary agents under her own (clearly female) name, and under a male pseudonym. As a female, she got 2 manuscript requests. Under the male pseudonym, 17. For identical submissions, except for the name of the author. If your first inclination is to try to come up with a way that that doesn't show bias, maybe it's time to just admit that sexism is just fine with you? And 14% to 86% is a bit less, but similarly lopsided. Wouldn't it make more sense to ask why there is such a large split, instead of suggesting that there is no industry bias, and that women probably don't want to direct?
I've never met a woman who likes using a urinal.
In what way is directing a film specific to male anatomy? It is obvious that using a urinal is, but I really don't get why you think standing up to urinate is analogous to directing a film?
Depending on where you are, they also include one-day or same day delivery (not even counting 2-4 hour delivery of selected products, plus grocery and restaurant delivery in places "Prime Now" has been rolled out). Plus all the other stuff --video, music, kindle books and magazines, etc... -- which, to be fair, may or may not have value for you.
And you can share (at least some benefits) of membership with family members, roommates, whatever. So you can split the cost. For people who use the benefits even only on a regular-ish basis, it's still a pretty good deal. Especially if you're splitting it 2 or 3 ways.
What would be nice is that you only need to work half the time. What will happen is that either you or your cow orker will get fired and the person staying will do the work of both.
You're close, but more likely, they'll lay off two out of three (three out of five, if you're lucky) instead of just half.
Humans are industrious creatures in that we'll find something else to do
The trick with this round of automation is if we develop advanced enough AI to do the automation, there isn't going to be something else
I think you're both right, to some extent. There will be new types of jobs and perhaps new industries that either can't be done by machines, or that people would rather have (and pay a premium to have) humans do. But personally, I don't believe those will come near to matching the numbers of people who become unemployed, perhaps even unemployable, due to automation.
There are some hard-to-predict variables that confound discussions like this. For one, how fast is machine learning/AI/automation getting better? How soon jobs can be replaced depends on that. Will it be three years before we see significant impacts, or 5 or 10 or 15? Also, how fast will the adoption of new tech be? That depends on how costly the tech itself is, how much money it actually saves, how much retrofitting/redesigning is needed to incorporate it, and how good it is. I am sure that we will see companies that go out of business because they are ahead of the curve and try to deploy new tech before it's ready, as well as ones that wait too long and get out-competed by more automated businesses.
And if you can answer all those questions for AI/machine learning, for many jobs you will also have to answer them for robotics/sensors/physical environment components.
On top of those considerations, we can't really predict yet how automation might change business processes. There are certainly going to be things made obsolete by automation. There are also going to be things that are currently obsolete, but are still being done, that will be exposed by looking at whether a job/function/task can be automated. Very likely, there will be cases where one function or task prevents a job from being automated, resulting in that function or task being eliminated rather than holding on to human workers to do that bit. It won't always be possible, of course, but there will probably be a fair number of people surprised at losing their jobs because they thought it was "impossible" to get rid of some aspect of what they do.
How soon and how fast are the big questions, and that will of course vary by industry/job type. For something like self-driving cars, you would expect "how fast", i.e. rate of adoption, to be pretty fast once level 5 is reached since nearly 100% of any given driving job will likely be handled by the automation, and there are other advantages aside from the direct cost reduction of replacing the human labor (e.g. more than doubling the available operating time of vehicles in trucking, since human drivers have strict limits on hours of operation/service). Whereas if you have an automated system that can do 10 or 20% of a job, there is less incentive/advantage to adopt quickly.
Sure, lots of people will say that "I can do backups for less than that", but an actual disaster recovery plan is way more than just doing backups.
That's true, but if they had decent backups at a minimum, they would be assured of getting all their data back. From what I've read, it is not clear that they did.
Two senators. Every state has two senators. You don't get to vote for them both at the same time, because they are elected (overall) 1/3 at a time due to their 6 year terms. But every district in the states is represented by one House member and two Senators.
Wow, you are really struggling. Let me walk you through it. You tried to say that long commutes are a problem for wide adoption of EVs (which I will call "The Point") . They're not. I explained this in detail and laid out the numbers, refuting "The Point". But instead of substantively responding to that and staying on "The Point" you tried to raise a different argument, as if it had any bearing on what we were talking about (it doesn't).
And then? When I mention that your complete lack of substance to support "The Point" indicates that we've put "The Point" to bed (i.e. settled the matter), you act as if I were referring to your alternate argument. I don't know if that is just bad reading comprehension, or another attempt to incorporate extraneous matter into "The Point". Either way, I think you can do better.
By the way, we also settled your alternate argument that electrics are 4X the cost of gas cars.
You can find a $15k car brand new if you're willing to pressure the dealership(aka know how to negotiate). But all of those vehicles you mentioned run between $40k-68k up
Two things to say on the above: 1. 40 is not 4X of 15, so you're already wrong using your own numbers. 2. MSRPs or GTFO
Stat can's data is rather a mess. Especially since they use what's a combination of "rural-urban" for instance.
In the U.S., we say suburban. But that has nothing to do with the numbers we were looking at, right? Sounds more like you're saying that the stats are hard for you to understand, not that they are inaccurate.
You're also forgetting about the realities of cost.
You might almost have a fair point there -- at least something to discuss-- if it wasn't a bullshit attempt to move the goalposts. Obviously, you know very well that what you said, and what I responded to, was:
Distances are too large... people being on the road 5-6hrs for a commute is common all across north america.
And we've clearly put that bit to bed, haven't we?
However, I would very much like to see the new cars selling for $7,250-$9,250. That would be 1/4 of the $29-32K MSRP of the Leaf, Hyundai Ioniq, Kia Soul EV, eGolf, Fiat 500e, Focus Electric... maybe a couple others in that range, or on the slightly higher end, the Bolt's $37K. I don't know any cars that sell for those prices new in North America, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough? Also, we'll overlook the fact that I am rather generously using just price. Cost (in the U.S. specifically) can be around $10K lower depending on your state of residence due to tax incentives (up to $7500 federal, various state rebates and credits). And let's not even get started on operating costs. Gas is relatively expensive compared to electricity. But since we weren't even talking about cost to begin with and we've already dealt with your 4X cost claim just on price (unless you're ready to show me the new cars in the $8K range), running the numbers seems a bit much.
people being on the road 5-6hrs for a commute is common all across north america
Unless you mean per week, you are way off. Average commute in the U.S. is about 27 minutes (one way). About 7.3% of U.S. workers commute an hour or more each way. For comparison, about 8.5% walk, bike or take public transit (and those groups are not mutually exclusive. About 23% of those with commutes more than an hour use public transportation).
So almost all commuters who drive themselves to work could simply charge at home if they drove an EV. Even current ones with the lowest range (about 58 miles for 2018 Smart Electric) could accommodate most (68%) of commutes, which are 15 miles or less each way according to the U.S Bureau of Transportation Statistics. And other low-ish range options (Fiat 500e @84 miles or Honda Clarity @89 miles) could handle up to about 89% of commutes (about 21% are 16-30 miles, along with the aforementioned 68% that are 15 or less). And there are several other current EV offerings (Leaf, e-Golf, Soul EV, Focus Electric, etc...) with ranges of 110-150 miles, and a few (Teslas and the Bolt) greater than 220 miles.
tl,dr: commuting distance is not a problem for current generation EVs for 90+% of U.S. commuters. (In Canadia, your mileage, or kilometerage, may vary -- and they're actually better according to the slightly dated stats here which says 89% of commutes are 24km or less)
Obviously, the ones who want to mimic the iphone design as much as possible probably should.
On the other hand, plenty of others already have good designs with "zero" or near-zero bezel, or with a wider bezel that accommodates a front-facing camera without making the screen area weird.
Or the market simply does not support the demand for that many full EVs.
But somehow, half a million people not only signed up to get on the waiting list for a Model 3, but put down $1000 to do so (in a time when nearly half of Americans could not pay for an unexpected $400 expense), even knowing it would be more than a year and probably more than two before they'd get it. Nah, it's not lack of demand. If another automaker could produce an EV with a similar feature set and price point to the Model 3, they could probably sell them as fast as they could make them.
But maybe Tesla is a unique case, between having the best range by a significant margin (until the Bolt came along, nearly double anyone else), the supercharger network, plus an advanced driver assist (aka autopilot), maybe it is a mistake to think of it as just an EV.
Hybrids seem to be catching on left-and-right,... but pure EVs are still lagging
Pure EV sales are continuing to increase across pretty much across the board. But the Bolt vs. Volt numbers make for an interesting comparison, since they come from the same automaker (so any differences wouldn't be affected by brand preference), are priced in the same range, and share many features. And right now, it looks like the pure-EV Bolt is killing the hybrid Volt in sales numbers (I'm looking at U.S. sales. It may be different where you are). So perhaps it is not so much that demand is not there for EVs done well, but more so that most EVs on the market are not done very well.
Why is every tech company thinking they have the domain expertise to get into the car industry?
First of all, they're not getting into the car industry. They're trying to get into the self-driving systems industry, which is in large part a decision-making-systems industry.
Because at this rate we're going to end up with dozens of different self-driving cars
Seems like there is a word for that..... competition? Sounds like that might be a good thing.
You know, he could have gone thousands of [feet] higher in a hot air balloon.
I was thinking the same thing. Commercial recreational hot air balloon rides can easily top 2000 feet, and a normal hot air balloon of that type is capable of exceeding 20K feet. He probably could have significantly exceeded his rocket altitude (not to mention time at that altitude) for a couple hundred bucks. But I guess he's trying to get his rocketry skills up to par since, per the article:
He wants to build a "Rockoon," a rocket that is carried into the atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and lit. This rocket would take Hughes about 68 miles up.
Of course, the smart thing would be to test the rocket thoroughly before getting into it. But I suppose a well-reasoned, scientific approach is not entirely consistent with being a flat-earther.
If a community self-enforces a behavior then you're much less likely to have problems.
Sure, but the subreddit isn't the community that Reddit has to worry about. All of reddit is. And that community doesn't have a very good track record of across-the-board upstanding behavior.
Because the answer to the question: "Can [Reddit] trust all users to police themselves?" is a solid "no", it makes more sense to ban all transactions for goods that have virtually any restrictions on sale or transfer.
They want you to see "guns" and "drugs" in the same sentence time and again
Have you been to reddit? There are large communities there that look quite favorably on drugs of many types. This is simple CYA. They are not a commerce site, so there really isn't much up side and there may be significant down side to allowing strictly regulated items to be exchanged or sold on the site.
Don't get me wrong. I support your right to get as outraged over this as you want. I just think you are mistaken in attributing malicious intent to this particular policy.
And then again "free speech" is not what you think it is.
You may be thinking of rights guaranteed by the first amendment. Free speech is what (along with the other enumerated rights) is protected by the first amendment. The terms are often used interchangeably, but can certainly mean different things.
It only means the government can not harass/punish/imprison you for what you said AGAINST that government.
If by "it", you mean the 1st amendment, you are not quite correct. For a famous example, look up Larry Flynt. He has been the target of numerous legal actions attempting to limit his free speech/expression rights, most of which were not related to anti-government expressions but rather for "speech" that was offensive to some portion of the community. That kind of thing could be described as "against community standards" or "against the mores of the majority of the population", but not really against the government. The U.S. Constitution protects all speech (from being infringed upon by the government), regardless of the subject or intention (with limited exceptions).
Corporations have no free speech "rights", check your constitution.
My copy (of the U.S. Constitution -- if you mean some other constitution, you should specify which one) doesn't say "except for corporations" anywhere in it, nor does it say anything about "humans" or "people" with regard to free speech in the first amendment (it does regarding peaceable assembly and petition for redress of grievances, but those are distinct rights enumerated separately from free speech). Maybe you should check your copy? Compare it to an "official" copy from the Government Printing Office, or National Archives or somewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that doctors haven't been considering treating patients with nutrients before now is alarming
It would be alarming, if it were true. Doctors pretty much always recommend improving diet for illnesses for which it is effective (like the ones mentioned -- heart disease, diabetes -- not for acute conditions, infections, etc....) But two big problems (not the only ones, no doubt) with a nutrition-based treatment plan are patient knowledge (knowing what to eat) and patient compliance (actually making the recommended dietary changes). This study attempts to improve those aspects by providing meals for patients. That's the big innovation here, not that better nutrition leads to better health outcomes.
Also, I'm not sure why you think there is some sort of dichotomy here. There is none, and can't be. Virtually everyone being treated with drugs also eats food. The real question is more how much each is emphasized in the patient's care.
This shit is never going to work if it can't handle random, illegal, and stupid behaviour from the humans on the road.
Yeah, it's too bad they've stopped trying to improve them and are claiming they're ready for the road now. Oh wait, that's exactly the opposite of what's happening, as cited specifically in the article:
As Telenav [representative of others] put it, “Our autonomous system is still being developed and we are working on improvement cycles. At this stage we expect that (the) driver will be taking over the car control from time to time due to the fact that it is new technology.”
It's easy (also stupid and pointless) to say that if they never improve, they'll never be good enough, because none of them claim they're ready today and all are focused entirely on improving performance.
This is just hubris from the tech industry who are pretending they're closer to solutions that work in the real world than they really are.
I'm aware of at least one company for which that seems to be true. As for the more than 50 other companies doing or preparing for road tests, it's likely that you're not listening to or not understanding their claims (for the ones that have even made any claims at all) or sourcing your expectations/beliefs from somewhere other than where the actual work is being done.
Boys in the band. A movie
An odd non-sequitur.
You would have to expose it not just to the current environment, but evolutionary time environments to have an "android."
I guess you have a weird definition of "android". Traditionally, it's just an anthropomorphic robot. The truth is, we don't know what stimulus would be necessary to cause a system to display characteristics of human-like consciousness. Logically, the necessary inputs would tend to vary based on the complexity and attributes of the system.
How can we ever know if a machine is conscious?
I expect that as soon as we have machines that can reliably pass a Turing test, we'll come up with new measures, hopefully well thought out ones, to get at that.
We would have to consciously replicate that since we are making an artifact.
Obviously, we can't know that unless and until an artificial construct demonstrates measurable aspects of consciousness.
Believing otherwise is just more of nature-is-an-idiot-and-we-can-do-better thinking
The opposite, actually. The idea that we can make something simple(ish) and somewhat open-ended or non-deterministic that can evolve through self organizing/emergent behavior depends on "nature" (broadly used here to include natural processes happening to and/or acting on an artificial construct) to do part of the work.
You seem to be making a few assertions here that are simply your beliefs, but using them as facts to support your conclusion.
It seems to boil down to either "I can't conceive of how it is possible, so it must be impossible" or just "it's a really hard problem", neither of which is a compelling argument to me. There's another piece to it, also, that you may not have considered. You seem to be assuming that people, humans, need to fully understand consciousness and will then need to build it from scratch. However, you're overlooking the possibility that an advanced set of hardware and algorithms that forms a "thinking machine" of some type will develop consciousness on its own. Consider that evolution of organic entities takes a long time because many generations may be needed to fully develop the adaptive traits. Software is much more malleable. It can change in response to stimuli in real time and undergo hundreds of iterations of changes in less time than it takes a person to recharge as is required daily (sleep).
Machines might never achieve consciousness or emotion that is similar to humans, but it's way to early to declare it impossible.
Well, who's the sexist now? No surprise, it's still you: assuming my gender AND that of any partners I may have, AND trying to assign us roles in the relationship?
Back on a serious note, I think we both realize there is gender bias -- aside from any self-selection bias -- in lots of industries, including entertainment. And pretending there isn't or pretending we have to precisely quantify it before we can even acknowledge it only perpetuates it.
Doubling down on sexism. Got it.
This notion that every industry, every hobby, and every interest ought to be equally populated by women is perhaps the biggest error imaginable.
Not sure if you just didn't understand the article/summary, or you are just extrapolating what was actually said to "every industry, every hobby, and every interest" because that's easier whine about? What Cameron actually said is that in Hollywood in general, 14% of directors are female. And it's not like we don't know gender bias exists in the entertainment industry. Book publishing provides an easy example. A few years back, a female author submitted her novel to the same set of 50 literary agents under her own (clearly female) name, and under a male pseudonym. As a female, she got 2 manuscript requests. Under the male pseudonym, 17. For identical submissions, except for the name of the author. If your first inclination is to try to come up with a way that that doesn't show bias, maybe it's time to just admit that sexism is just fine with you? And 14% to 86% is a bit less, but similarly lopsided. Wouldn't it make more sense to ask why there is such a large split, instead of suggesting that there is no industry bias, and that women probably don't want to direct?
I've never met a woman who likes using a urinal.
In what way is directing a film specific to male anatomy? It is obvious that using a urinal is, but I really don't get why you think standing up to urinate is analogous to directing a film?
So, $10/month for unlimited, free 2-day delivery
Depending on where you are, they also include one-day or same day delivery (not even counting 2-4 hour delivery of selected products, plus grocery and restaurant delivery in places "Prime Now" has been rolled out). Plus all the other stuff --video, music, kindle books and magazines, etc... -- which, to be fair, may or may not have value for you.
And you can share (at least some benefits) of membership with family members, roommates, whatever. So you can split the cost. For people who use the benefits even only on a regular-ish basis, it's still a pretty good deal. Especially if you're splitting it 2 or 3 ways.
What would be nice is that you only need to work half the time. What will happen is that either you or your cow orker will get fired and the person staying will do the work of both.
You're close, but more likely, they'll lay off two out of three (three out of five, if you're lucky) instead of just half.
Humans are industrious creatures in that we'll find something else to do
The trick with this round of automation is if we develop advanced enough AI to do the automation, there isn't going to be something else
I think you're both right, to some extent. There will be new types of jobs and perhaps new industries that either can't be done by machines, or that people would rather have (and pay a premium to have) humans do. But personally, I don't believe those will come near to matching the numbers of people who become unemployed, perhaps even unemployable, due to automation.
There are some hard-to-predict variables that confound discussions like this. For one, how fast is machine learning/AI/automation getting better? How soon jobs can be replaced depends on that. Will it be three years before we see significant impacts, or 5 or 10 or 15? Also, how fast will the adoption of new tech be? That depends on how costly the tech itself is, how much money it actually saves, how much retrofitting/redesigning is needed to incorporate it, and how good it is. I am sure that we will see companies that go out of business because they are ahead of the curve and try to deploy new tech before it's ready, as well as ones that wait too long and get out-competed by more automated businesses.
And if you can answer all those questions for AI/machine learning, for many jobs you will also have to answer them for robotics/sensors/physical environment components.
On top of those considerations, we can't really predict yet how automation might change business processes. There are certainly going to be things made obsolete by automation. There are also going to be things that are currently obsolete, but are still being done, that will be exposed by looking at whether a job/function/task can be automated. Very likely, there will be cases where one function or task prevents a job from being automated, resulting in that function or task being eliminated rather than holding on to human workers to do that bit. It won't always be possible, of course, but there will probably be a fair number of people surprised at losing their jobs because they thought it was "impossible" to get rid of some aspect of what they do.
How soon and how fast are the big questions, and that will of course vary by industry/job type. For something like self-driving cars, you would expect "how fast", i.e. rate of adoption, to be pretty fast once level 5 is reached since nearly 100% of any given driving job will likely be handled by the automation, and there are other advantages aside from the direct cost reduction of replacing the human labor (e.g. more than doubling the available operating time of vehicles in trucking, since human drivers have strict limits on hours of operation/service). Whereas if you have an automated system that can do 10 or 20% of a job, there is less incentive/advantage to adopt quickly.
Sure, lots of people will say that "I can do backups for less than that", but an actual disaster recovery plan is way more than just doing backups.
That's true, but if they had decent backups at a minimum, they would be assured of getting all their data back. From what I've read, it is not clear that they did.
Two senators. Every state has two senators. You don't get to vote for them both at the same time, because they are elected (overall) 1/3 at a time due to their 6 year terms. But every district in the states is represented by one House member and two Senators.
No, because you've already missed it.
Wow, you are really struggling. Let me walk you through it. You tried to say that long commutes are a problem for wide adoption of EVs (which I will call "The Point") . They're not. I explained this in detail and laid out the numbers, refuting "The Point". But instead of substantively responding to that and staying on "The Point" you tried to raise a different argument, as if it had any bearing on what we were talking about (it doesn't).
And then? When I mention that your complete lack of substance to support "The Point" indicates that we've put "The Point" to bed (i.e. settled the matter), you act as if I were referring to your alternate argument. I don't know if that is just bad reading comprehension, or another attempt to incorporate extraneous matter into "The Point". Either way, I think you can do better.
By the way, we also settled your alternate argument that electrics are 4X the cost of gas cars.
You can find a $15k car brand new if you're willing to pressure the dealership(aka know how to negotiate). But all of those vehicles you mentioned run between $40k-68k up
Two things to say on the above:
1. 40 is not 4X of 15, so you're already wrong using your own numbers.
2. MSRPs or GTFO
DO fear the reaper?
Stat can's data is rather a mess. Especially since they use what's a combination of "rural-urban" for instance.
In the U.S., we say suburban. But that has nothing to do with the numbers we were looking at, right? Sounds more like you're saying that the stats are hard for you to understand, not that they are inaccurate.
You're also forgetting about the realities of cost.
You might almost have a fair point there -- at least something to discuss-- if it wasn't a bullshit attempt to move the goalposts. Obviously, you know very well that what you said, and what I responded to, was:
Distances are too large... people being on the road 5-6hrs for a commute is common all across north america.
And we've clearly put that bit to bed, haven't we?
However, I would very much like to see the new cars selling for $7,250-$9,250. That would be 1/4 of the $29-32K MSRP of the Leaf, Hyundai Ioniq, Kia Soul EV, eGolf, Fiat 500e, Focus Electric... maybe a couple others in that range, or on the slightly higher end, the Bolt's $37K. I don't know any cars that sell for those prices new in North America, but maybe I'm not looking hard enough? Also, we'll overlook the fact that I am rather generously using just price. Cost (in the U.S. specifically) can be around $10K lower depending on your state of residence due to tax incentives (up to $7500 federal, various state rebates and credits). And let's not even get started on operating costs. Gas is relatively expensive compared to electricity. But since we weren't even talking about cost to begin with and we've already dealt with your 4X cost claim just on price (unless you're ready to show me the new cars in the $8K range), running the numbers seems a bit much.
people being on the road 5-6hrs for a commute is common all across north america
Unless you mean per week, you are way off. Average commute in the U.S. is about 27 minutes (one way). About 7.3% of U.S. workers commute an hour or more each way. For comparison, about 8.5% walk, bike or take public transit (and those groups are not mutually exclusive. About 23% of those with commutes more than an hour use public transportation).
So almost all commuters who drive themselves to work could simply charge at home if they drove an EV. Even current ones with the lowest range (about 58 miles for 2018 Smart Electric) could accommodate most (68%) of commutes, which are 15 miles or less each way according to the U.S Bureau of Transportation Statistics. And other low-ish range options (Fiat 500e @84 miles or Honda Clarity @89 miles) could handle up to about 89% of commutes (about 21% are 16-30 miles, along with the aforementioned 68% that are 15 or less). And there are several other current EV offerings (Leaf, e-Golf, Soul EV, Focus Electric, etc...) with ranges of 110-150 miles, and a few (Teslas and the Bolt) greater than 220 miles.
tl,dr: commuting distance is not a problem for current generation EVs for 90+% of U.S. commuters. (In Canadia, your mileage, or kilometerage, may vary -- and they're actually better according to the slightly dated stats here which says 89% of commutes are 24km or less)
Obviously, the ones who want to mimic the iphone design as much as possible probably should.
On the other hand, plenty of others already have good designs with "zero" or near-zero bezel, or with a wider bezel that accommodates a front-facing camera without making the screen area weird.
Live coverage as of about 1:30pm PDT.
Or the market simply does not support the demand for that many full EVs.
But somehow, half a million people not only signed up to get on the waiting list for a Model 3, but put down $1000 to do so (in a time when nearly half of Americans could not pay for an unexpected $400 expense), even knowing it would be more than a year and probably more than two before they'd get it. Nah, it's not lack of demand. If another automaker could produce an EV with a similar feature set and price point to the Model 3, they could probably sell them as fast as they could make them.
But maybe Tesla is a unique case, between having the best range by a significant margin (until the Bolt came along, nearly double anyone else), the supercharger network, plus an advanced driver assist (aka autopilot), maybe it is a mistake to think of it as just an EV.
Hybrids seem to be catching on left-and-right, ... but pure EVs are still lagging
Pure EV sales are continuing to increase across pretty much across the board. But the Bolt vs. Volt numbers make for an interesting comparison, since they come from the same automaker (so any differences wouldn't be affected by brand preference), are priced in the same range, and share many features. And right now, it looks like the pure-EV Bolt is killing the hybrid Volt in sales numbers (I'm looking at U.S. sales. It may be different where you are). So perhaps it is not so much that demand is not there for EVs done well, but more so that most EVs on the market are not done very well.
Why is every tech company thinking they have the domain expertise to get into the car industry?
First of all, they're not getting into the car industry. They're trying to get into the self-driving systems industry, which is in large part a decision-making-systems industry.
Because at this rate we're going to end up with dozens of different self-driving cars
Seems like there is a word for that..... competition? Sounds like that might be a good thing.
You know, he could have gone thousands of [feet] higher in a hot air balloon.
I was thinking the same thing. Commercial recreational hot air balloon rides can easily top 2000 feet, and a normal hot air balloon of that type is capable of exceeding 20K feet. He probably could have significantly exceeded his rocket altitude (not to mention time at that altitude) for a couple hundred bucks. But I guess he's trying to get his rocketry skills up to par since, per the article:
He wants to build a "Rockoon," a rocket that is carried into the atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and lit. This rocket would take Hughes about 68 miles up.
Of course, the smart thing would be to test the rocket thoroughly before getting into it. But I suppose a well-reasoned, scientific approach is not entirely consistent with being a flat-earther.
If a community self-enforces a behavior then you're much less likely to have problems.
Sure, but the subreddit isn't the community that Reddit has to worry about. All of reddit is. And that community doesn't have a very good track record of across-the-board upstanding behavior.
Because the answer to the question: "Can [Reddit] trust all users to police themselves?" is a solid "no", it makes more sense to ban all transactions for goods that have virtually any restrictions on sale or transfer.
They want you to see "guns" and "drugs" in the same sentence time and again
Have you been to reddit? There are large communities there that look quite favorably on drugs of many types. This is simple CYA. They are not a commerce site, so there really isn't much up side and there may be significant down side to allowing strictly regulated items to be exchanged or sold on the site.
Don't get me wrong. I support your right to get as outraged over this as you want. I just think you are mistaken in attributing malicious intent to this particular policy.
And then again "free speech" is not what you think it is.
You may be thinking of rights guaranteed by the first amendment. Free speech is what (along with the other enumerated rights) is protected by the first amendment. The terms are often used interchangeably, but can certainly mean different things.
It only means the government can not harass/punish/imprison you for what you said AGAINST that government.
If by "it", you mean the 1st amendment, you are not quite correct. For a famous example, look up Larry Flynt. He has been the target of numerous legal actions attempting to limit his free speech/expression rights, most of which were not related to anti-government expressions but rather for "speech" that was offensive to some portion of the community. That kind of thing could be described as "against community standards" or "against the mores of the majority of the population", but not really against the government. The U.S. Constitution protects all speech (from being infringed upon by the government), regardless of the subject or intention (with limited exceptions).
Corporations have no free speech "rights", check your constitution.
My copy (of the U.S. Constitution -- if you mean some other constitution, you should specify which one) doesn't say "except for corporations" anywhere in it, nor does it say anything about "humans" or "people" with regard to free speech in the first amendment (it does regarding peaceable assembly and petition for redress of grievances, but those are distinct rights enumerated separately from free speech). Maybe you should check your copy? Compare it to an "official" copy from the Government Printing Office, or National Archives or somewhere?