I will not apologize for, rightfully belittling to the point of tears, child-people who decide to uses tabs in their code instead of spaces. That's not snobbery; that's a moral imperative.
The supercharger charges at a maximum rate of ~400V and 300A (~120KW). The reason it takes an hour is because that rate slows down significantly as you approach 100%. Limitations on the Li-Ion battery and all.
At full 120KW, it'd take exactly 30 min to fill up a 60KWh battery. And 45 min to fill up a 90KWh battery.
Those numbers are somewhat exaggerated. My 85kWH battery takes roughly 1 hour, 10 min to get from 5% to 100% (I've measured). To get to 80% takes about 40 minutes.
The cabin conditioning is a tiny fraction of electricity used. Realistically, a 100% charge will net ~240 miles at 75mph (say, highway 5 in CA). The AC has relatively little impact on that range (maybe 5%). The biggest impact is if you live in a really cold area. That can get you down to 200 miles on 100% charge if you're at, say, 30F ambient temp or lower. I've driven in parts of Oregon during the winter and haven't really noticed more than a ~10% hit in range at 70mph cruising speed.
It's definitely less convenient than a gas car by far. But not insurmountable as you make it out to be. On my route from SF to LA, it adds about 1 hour of drive time for a 7 hour drive. That was when there was ~150-200 miles between chargers. Now, on highway 5, there's a charger every ~100 miles. Some even less (Harris Ranch -> Buttonwillow -> Tijon -> Burbank is about ~50 miles each hop).
Trying to drive long distance without Supercharger access is a terrible idea (though I've done it for the lawls).
If the OP undersold the difference, you're definitely overselling it.
If you're going for long-distance, the optimal strategy is to charge for 30 min to get to ~70% then drive to the next charging station. The charging rate for Li-Ion gets significantly slower as you approach 100%. You'll start out at around 120-130 KW and fall down to about 50 KW at 80%.
It wasn't the case ~2 years ago but nowadays, the maximum distance between any 2 charging stations is about ~150 miles. So you should have plenty of charge after 30 min to get to the next station even if you drive like a maniac.
The average human has gotten more and more skilled and capable throughout history. That's an actual trend. You can read up more on the data for that from Erik Andeersen (yes, I know).
Mozart, by modern standards, would be a mediocre music player at best. The greatest olympians of the 20's would barely qualify for regional trials today.
Humans aren't static; we also improve with time. Your average McD employee is likely leagues more literate than many feudal lords.
I think you're viewing "creative work" through a very narrow lens. Creative work isn't limited to creating music or art. Just about anything an algorithm would be bad at -- read: needs understanding of human emotions -- would fall under this category. This could be something as simple as wanting a human nanny instead of a robot one. Or wanting a waiter instead of a touchscreen.
And the very existence of "doggy hotels", "cuddle for hire", "personal yoga instructor" and a myriad of other jobs that could easily be automated but isn't indicates humans tend to have a preference for inventing things other humans may not need, but want and are willing to pay for.
So...go back to the barter system? You act like there were no problems with it and that common, controlled, centralized currency didn't fix a massive amount of those problems....
I don't think the idea of basic income is that people wouldn't want to work or shouldn't work. As you pointed out, some smaller western european nations want that but most of the proposals I've seen see basic income as applied to the US view it more of an extension of the current social safety net programs and probably a better one at that; replacing food stamps, disability checks, unemployment benefits, etc.
We're always going to go through periods where there will be a lot of joblessness. This could be due to the natural economic boom/bust or massive technological change. During those times, it's better to have people not worry about the basics such as food/shelter and have them be able to focus on things with better long-term potential such as furthering education and rearing children.
A basic income with some sort of ladder system similar to the earned income tax credit would both allow people to not live in that stress-zone where they make no mental improvements and at the same time give them an incentive to earn more. The idea isn't that most people won't be working. It's that if they can't find work, they aren't living in desperation-level circumstances, which makes it infinitely harder to crawl out of.
Whether or not that works for the psychology of the US population is a toss-up.
Well, the "gig economy" that's growing is kinda exactly that. Uber and equivalent services are essentially filling people with work on-the-fly.
The problem, as you note, is that laws about employment that were established for an entirely different decade still have a stranglehold today and have not been updated for the new economy -- an economy many find scary and wish wouldn't happen.
Think about the problems Lyft, Uber and Airbnb are having with cities going "well, you didn't categorize the people who work for you in the buckets we allow".
You might be surprised at the jobs your local craft beer brewer has had in the past. Or personal trainer. Or the person working at the spa. Or yoga instructor.
There's already an explosion in those industries even now as they become cheaper while simultaneously becoming more in demand.
Technically, if the factory resides in the US, they need to either pay import taxes on materials coming in and export taxes on shipping products out, or pay corporate income tax on products sold domestically.
There are advantages, although clearly not as big of an advantage as having to employ people.
Ya, the US kinda shot itself in the foot. In a race for cheaper labor, it moved all that manufacturing infrastructure and expertise to China. The US government refused to spend while the Chinese poured billions into transportation and seed money to kickstart their world-class manufacturing industry.
It's no longer the case that China is just cheaper -- they simply do it better and on a more massive scale than anything the US could hope to do. The supply chain and business logistics alone is a nightmare to try to start from the ground up. That kinda thing takes decades. Good they China has been doing it for decades....
Well, there are a few ideas that eventually will be forced to take shape out of necessity:
1. Basic income. With all this productive efficiency that don't need human labor, either you deal with a mass uprising, kill them off, or you tax the rich (those who've benefitted) enough to quell the masses with a basic income. You'll then essentially create two classes of people: productive people and dilettantes. 2. People will, due to a lot of time, a need for work and that creativity humans are known for, create more stuff that only humans can create. One obvious area is art and personal services. We saw the shift from physical labor to factory labor when agricultural technology improved. We're now seeing the shift from factory labor to office and household labor due to manufacturing technology improvements. In the future, gadgets may be what food is like now: something only ~5% of the population needs to work on and is universally supplied to all. People will spend ~10% of their income on it just like they do clothes and the majority of spending will be on "touchy feely" objects like "artesian, infused craft beer".
1. Make dividends tax-deductible 2. Raise dividend tax to income levels
That way it's almost identical to payroll taxes, with the exception of SS/Medicare contributions, which we should probably find a way to have dividend earners contribute to as well.
Taxing an ephemeral entity like a corporation is like trying to catch a ghost; tax the people who own and benefit from said corporation.
Except our corporate tax is already really really high and no large corporation realistically pays it. That's kinda his point. It's an ineffective way of taxation. Taxing an entity that doesn't have a physical body becomes really really hard and there are so many complicated unintended consequences. Realistically what you want is to tax the *shareholders*. Because they live in the US (for the most part) and can't just dodge taxation by "moving" virtually to Ireland like a corporation can.
Corporate income taxing sounds good on paper but just end up creating legal loopholes. And normal tax payers end up with the bill (or the nation goes into debt).
Ideally, you'd want to eliminate corporate income tax and raise the dividend and capital gains tax to the same level as income tax. Make bringing money into the US attractive and then tax it when it can't be hidden anymore. Be smart about it instead of knee-jerking "it's not fair! tax evil rich corporations!"
I seriously doubt that even if the corporate income tax were 10%, it'd incentivize companies to repatriate cash.
The real problem with voluntary repatriation is that your competition doesn't have to do it. If both of you have 10B in assets overseas and only one of you brings it into the US, your competition has more cash than you to invest and/or leverage.
This is why all this "Apple/Google should pay taxes outcry" is a bunch of empty BS. The *only* effective way to have companies pay corporate income tax is to fix the tax laws. That way, everyone's playing by the same rules and it doesn't hurt a company competitively to repatriate cash. This is a Congress problem, not a corporate problem.
That being said, the current rate of US corporate income tax is kinda ludicrous; it's the highest in the world.
For those where (rents mortgage interest + property tax) for an equivalent house (after tax deductions are taken into account). It's not a very common situation but it happens. Especially so in places like San Francisco who managed to snag a rent-controlled place.
That's assuming you don't expect housing prices to inflate faster than the average long-term CD as well. Again, not a common situation but it happens.
To be fair, ~60% of Apple's revenue comes from selling iPhones. ~10% from iPads, ~10% from Macs. Those are all sales of pieces of hardware.
The vast majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from software licenses. Although an increasingly larger (but still minority) comes from hardware (Surface, Nokia, etc) and enterprise services (Azure cloud computing).
It's also the same situation with automated public rail systems as well. Or subways. Or monorails. Somehow, they're running just fine and not covered in poop.
How about your kids driving? Would you feel more secure about sending your newly-licensed 17-year old out driving or riding in a car with an AI with a 99.99999% accident avoidance rate?
Everything thinks they're a great driver; some of them even might be. But they forget about the average driver.
Not that I disagree -- especially the bay area city governments. But one could totally see the argument that Apple uses up huge, vast swaths of infrastructure in the city of Cupertino and thus, should rightfully be asked to pay a proportional share for it.
I could see a progressive scale where corporations based in cities that make above a certain amount of money should be made to pay taxes proportional to its number of employees, square footage of land owned/leased and resources used (sewers, electricity as well as the infrastructure build-up and maintenance cost).
In the case of many corporations, a good deal (~40%) of their profits come from overseas. So yes, if heavier taxes were levied on them, foreign nations who purchase goods designed/made by United States companies would contribute to the U.S. tax system. That seems perfectly legit.
Taxes are levied, in theory, on agents who benefit from protections and perks offered by the United States. If a corporation is based in the United States and especially if it's publicly trade in the United States, it enjoys immense benefits and protections offered by the laws of the United States both domestically and abroad. From legal protection of its various properties to the infrastructure built to allow it to operate its design and research centers to the American talent it can draw upon to invent.
The later especially applies to tech companies. Their competitive edge is gained by hiring the talent available to them in the United States. Why shouldn't their profits -- no matter where they earn it -- that is derived from the inventive and productive power the US offer be taxed to benefit the system they've benefited so much from?
When looking at the technical merits of Atom, it was actually quite competitive with the latest and greatest offerings from the ARM camp (with the exception of Apple's offerings, but Apple has advantages others don't).
In this case, the bullet to the head was, ironically, software compatibility. To this day, you can't just put an x86 chip in a phone/tablet and expect *everything* to work right that would've if running an ARM chip. Not to mention Intel charges way too damn much for those things and doesn't have anywhere close to a decent connectivity (WIFI/LTE/GSM) pairing solution.
Their SoC design was also shit. Codecs and DSP algorithms that others have baked in for generations are still missing from the latest and greatest Atom.
Slashdot Mirror
I will not apologize for, rightfully belittling to the point of tears, child-people who decide to uses tabs in their code instead of spaces. That's not snobbery; that's a moral imperative.
At 45 mph on a calm day with no wind and flat roads and 50-80F ambient temperature, sure.
The supercharger charges at a maximum rate of ~400V and 300A (~120KW). The reason it takes an hour is because that rate slows down significantly as you approach 100%. Limitations on the Li-Ion battery and all.
At full 120KW, it'd take exactly 30 min to fill up a 60KWh battery. And 45 min to fill up a 90KWh battery.
Those numbers are somewhat exaggerated. My 85kWH battery takes roughly 1 hour, 10 min to get from 5% to 100% (I've measured). To get to 80% takes about 40 minutes.
The cabin conditioning is a tiny fraction of electricity used. Realistically, a 100% charge will net ~240 miles at 75mph (say, highway 5 in CA). The AC has relatively little impact on that range (maybe 5%). The biggest impact is if you live in a really cold area. That can get you down to 200 miles on 100% charge if you're at, say, 30F ambient temp or lower. I've driven in parts of Oregon during the winter and haven't really noticed more than a ~10% hit in range at 70mph cruising speed.
It's definitely less convenient than a gas car by far. But not insurmountable as you make it out to be. On my route from SF to LA, it adds about 1 hour of drive time for a 7 hour drive. That was when there was ~150-200 miles between chargers. Now, on highway 5, there's a charger every ~100 miles. Some even less (Harris Ranch -> Buttonwillow -> Tijon -> Burbank is about ~50 miles each hop).
Trying to drive long distance without Supercharger access is a terrible idea (though I've done it for the lawls).
If the OP undersold the difference, you're definitely overselling it.
If you're going for long-distance, the optimal strategy is to charge for 30 min to get to ~70% then drive to the next charging station. The charging rate for Li-Ion gets significantly slower as you approach 100%. You'll start out at around 120-130 KW and fall down to about 50 KW at 80%.
It wasn't the case ~2 years ago but nowadays, the maximum distance between any 2 charging stations is about ~150 miles. So you should have plenty of charge after 30 min to get to the next station even if you drive like a maniac.
The average human has gotten more and more skilled and capable throughout history. That's an actual trend. You can read up more on the data for that from Erik Andeersen (yes, I know).
Mozart, by modern standards, would be a mediocre music player at best. The greatest olympians of the 20's would barely qualify for regional trials today.
Humans aren't static; we also improve with time. Your average McD employee is likely leagues more literate than many feudal lords.
I think you're viewing "creative work" through a very narrow lens. Creative work isn't limited to creating music or art. Just about anything an algorithm would be bad at -- read: needs understanding of human emotions -- would fall under this category. This could be something as simple as wanting a human nanny instead of a robot one. Or wanting a waiter instead of a touchscreen.
And the very existence of "doggy hotels", "cuddle for hire", "personal yoga instructor" and a myriad of other jobs that could easily be automated but isn't indicates humans tend to have a preference for inventing things other humans may not need, but want and are willing to pay for.
So...go back to the barter system? You act like there were no problems with it and that common, controlled, centralized currency didn't fix a massive amount of those problems....
I don't think the idea of basic income is that people wouldn't want to work or shouldn't work. As you pointed out, some smaller western european nations want that but most of the proposals I've seen see basic income as applied to the US view it more of an extension of the current social safety net programs and probably a better one at that; replacing food stamps, disability checks, unemployment benefits, etc.
We're always going to go through periods where there will be a lot of joblessness. This could be due to the natural economic boom/bust or massive technological change. During those times, it's better to have people not worry about the basics such as food/shelter and have them be able to focus on things with better long-term potential such as furthering education and rearing children.
A basic income with some sort of ladder system similar to the earned income tax credit would both allow people to not live in that stress-zone where they make no mental improvements and at the same time give them an incentive to earn more. The idea isn't that most people won't be working. It's that if they can't find work, they aren't living in desperation-level circumstances, which makes it infinitely harder to crawl out of.
Whether or not that works for the psychology of the US population is a toss-up.
Well, the "gig economy" that's growing is kinda exactly that. Uber and equivalent services are essentially filling people with work on-the-fly.
The problem, as you note, is that laws about employment that were established for an entirely different decade still have a stranglehold today and have not been updated for the new economy -- an economy many find scary and wish wouldn't happen.
Think about the problems Lyft, Uber and Airbnb are having with cities going "well, you didn't categorize the people who work for you in the buckets we allow".
You might be surprised at the jobs your local craft beer brewer has had in the past. Or personal trainer. Or the person working at the spa. Or yoga instructor.
There's already an explosion in those industries even now as they become cheaper while simultaneously becoming more in demand.
Technically, if the factory resides in the US, they need to either pay import taxes on materials coming in and export taxes on shipping products out, or pay corporate income tax on products sold domestically.
There are advantages, although clearly not as big of an advantage as having to employ people.
Though people do get employed, just not as many.
Ya, the US kinda shot itself in the foot. In a race for cheaper labor, it moved all that manufacturing infrastructure and expertise to China. The US government refused to spend while the Chinese poured billions into transportation and seed money to kickstart their world-class manufacturing industry.
It's no longer the case that China is just cheaper -- they simply do it better and on a more massive scale than anything the US could hope to do. The supply chain and business logistics alone is a nightmare to try to start from the ground up. That kinda thing takes decades. Good they China has been doing it for decades....
Well, there are a few ideas that eventually will be forced to take shape out of necessity:
1. Basic income. With all this productive efficiency that don't need human labor, either you deal with a mass uprising, kill them off, or you tax the rich (those who've benefitted) enough to quell the masses with a basic income. You'll then essentially create two classes of people: productive people and dilettantes.
2. People will, due to a lot of time, a need for work and that creativity humans are known for, create more stuff that only humans can create. One obvious area is art and personal services. We saw the shift from physical labor to factory labor when agricultural technology improved. We're now seeing the shift from factory labor to office and household labor due to manufacturing technology improvements. In the future, gadgets may be what food is like now: something only ~5% of the population needs to work on and is universally supplied to all. People will spend ~10% of their income on it just like they do clothes and the majority of spending will be on "touchy feely" objects like "artesian, infused craft beer".
Which is probably why we should:
1. Make dividends tax-deductible
2. Raise dividend tax to income levels
That way it's almost identical to payroll taxes, with the exception of SS/Medicare contributions, which we should probably find a way to have dividend earners contribute to as well.
Taxing an ephemeral entity like a corporation is like trying to catch a ghost; tax the people who own and benefit from said corporation.
Except our corporate tax is already really really high and no large corporation realistically pays it. That's kinda his point. It's an ineffective way of taxation. Taxing an entity that doesn't have a physical body becomes really really hard and there are so many complicated unintended consequences. Realistically what you want is to tax the *shareholders*. Because they live in the US (for the most part) and can't just dodge taxation by "moving" virtually to Ireland like a corporation can.
Corporate income taxing sounds good on paper but just end up creating legal loopholes. And normal tax payers end up with the bill (or the nation goes into debt).
Ideally, you'd want to eliminate corporate income tax and raise the dividend and capital gains tax to the same level as income tax. Make bringing money into the US attractive and then tax it when it can't be hidden anymore. Be smart about it instead of knee-jerking "it's not fair! tax evil rich corporations!"
I seriously doubt that even if the corporate income tax were 10%, it'd incentivize companies to repatriate cash.
The real problem with voluntary repatriation is that your competition doesn't have to do it. If both of you have 10B in assets overseas and only one of you brings it into the US, your competition has more cash than you to invest and/or leverage.
This is why all this "Apple/Google should pay taxes outcry" is a bunch of empty BS. The *only* effective way to have companies pay corporate income tax is to fix the tax laws. That way, everyone's playing by the same rules and it doesn't hurt a company competitively to repatriate cash. This is a Congress problem, not a corporate problem.
That being said, the current rate of US corporate income tax is kinda ludicrous; it's the highest in the world.
*rent is less than (mortgage interest + property tax)
For those where (rents mortgage interest + property tax) for an equivalent house (after tax deductions are taken into account). It's not a very common situation but it happens. Especially so in places like San Francisco who managed to snag a rent-controlled place.
That's assuming you don't expect housing prices to inflate faster than the average long-term CD as well. Again, not a common situation but it happens.
To be fair, ~60% of Apple's revenue comes from selling iPhones. ~10% from iPads, ~10% from Macs. Those are all sales of pieces of hardware.
The vast majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from software licenses. Although an increasingly larger (but still minority) comes from hardware (Surface, Nokia, etc) and enterprise services (Azure cloud computing).
It's also the same situation with automated public rail systems as well. Or subways. Or monorails. Somehow, they're running just fine and not covered in poop.
How about your kids driving? Would you feel more secure about sending your newly-licensed 17-year old out driving or riding in a car with an AI with a 99.99999% accident avoidance rate?
Everything thinks they're a great driver; some of them even might be. But they forget about the average driver.
Not that I disagree -- especially the bay area city governments. But one could totally see the argument that Apple uses up huge, vast swaths of infrastructure in the city of Cupertino and thus, should rightfully be asked to pay a proportional share for it.
I could see a progressive scale where corporations based in cities that make above a certain amount of money should be made to pay taxes proportional to its number of employees, square footage of land owned/leased and resources used (sewers, electricity as well as the infrastructure build-up and maintenance cost).
In the case of many corporations, a good deal (~40%) of their profits come from overseas. So yes, if heavier taxes were levied on them, foreign nations who purchase goods designed/made by United States companies would contribute to the U.S. tax system. That seems perfectly legit.
Taxes are levied, in theory, on agents who benefit from protections and perks offered by the United States. If a corporation is based in the United States and especially if it's publicly trade in the United States, it enjoys immense benefits and protections offered by the laws of the United States both domestically and abroad. From legal protection of its various properties to the infrastructure built to allow it to operate its design and research centers to the American talent it can draw upon to invent.
The later especially applies to tech companies. Their competitive edge is gained by hiring the talent available to them in the United States. Why shouldn't their profits -- no matter where they earn it -- that is derived from the inventive and productive power the US offer be taxed to benefit the system they've benefited so much from?
When looking at the technical merits of Atom, it was actually quite competitive with the latest and greatest offerings from the ARM camp (with the exception of Apple's offerings, but Apple has advantages others don't).
In this case, the bullet to the head was, ironically, software compatibility. To this day, you can't just put an x86 chip in a phone/tablet and expect *everything* to work right that would've if running an ARM chip. Not to mention Intel charges way too damn much for those things and doesn't have anywhere close to a decent connectivity (WIFI/LTE/GSM) pairing solution.
Their SoC design was also shit. Codecs and DSP algorithms that others have baked in for generations are still missing from the latest and greatest Atom.