Electric motors are demonstrably more reliable than internal combustion engines. That is where the meme comes from.
Cars have lots of electrical problems because most automakers don't know how to build good electrical machines. Look at the hardware failure rate in your tablets, phones, furnaces, air conditioners, dishwashers, light switches, TV, VCR, and the rate of electrical failures in automobiles. Auto company engineering top honchos are all mechanical engineers who suck in electrical machines.
Look at the biggest pissing contest between the automobiles. Time to do 0-60. Their solution, make bigger and bigger IC engine, more and more complex transmission. The could have removed the first gear, replaced it with an electric motor, just strong enough to get the car to 2 or 3 mph. Heck, they could have engineered the starter motor already meshing with the flywheel to do it. Then the powerful IC engine kicks in, as it ramps up the rpm, it would accelerate the car to 60mph much faster. Tesla with pure electric motor it was beating BMW, Mercedes, Porche, Corvette, Lexus all of them in their biggest prize 0-60 time. The top engineering leads on all those companies should hang their head in shame. This is the technology nothing to do with batteries, nothing to do with renewables or efficiency or anything. It is something that would have earned them bragging rights over their competition in their most important pissing contest. They flunked. They could have done this in 1960s! Nothing new.
OK OK I am talking with hindsight. But it is not my job to imagine and envision the next generation of automobile. It is their job. And they did it so poorly.
It sounds weird, isn't it? But it works. Everyone pays price printed in the weekly circular from the grocery store, and no one haggles. Once you are sure everyone pays the same price, once you are sure the grocery store can't charge you more than the next guy, you stop haggling. The problem is not haggling, it is the secrecy. In stock market people constantly haggle, sell identical products many many times a day and all transactions are listed openly. That works. People haggle for home prices. They love it. Because in the end the price one paid is listed openly in the deed book. Haggling is not the issue, the secrecy, the ability of the dealer to take a gullible customer to the cleaners, and the feeling that you could be the gullible customer is the problem.
Corporate mentality doesn't care about anything but profit.
Nor do car dealerships or gas station owners. The only time we ordinary consumers benefit is when giants compete in a free level field. Right now it is tilted far too much towards the NADA.
Can Tesla do something like pick a dealership and add conditions like, "must sell only tesla or only electric cars", "Tesla will retain the right to sell directly too" etc? Why are the standard auto makers not able to sell directly? Is it because A: the law stops them or B: They had signed exclusive agreements already. If Tesla starts with a clean slate, can it have dealerships and sell directly too? Or at least have some more balanced rights and decent negotiating position compared to the gas giants who are wimps against NADA.
No, no, no. Please don't consider franchising or dealing with the devil called auto dealers. For country that loves the automobile, where automobile is the second most expensive thing one buys in a life time, given the love and joy and pleasure the car brings to so many Americans, it is shameful we dread the auto buying experience. We always leave feeling we have been over charged a thousand or two. The auto dealers are the trolls living under the bridge, demanding their pound of flesh for us to get our beloved automobiles.
We were hoping we found a giant killer, a veritable David against Goliath, a David on our side. Now you eh, tu! Elon? Don't. Break their back. Bring national direct auto buying directly from the manufacturer to the nation that deserves it. It is long past time, we let the free markets to be free.
He’s also become more focused on education, and hosts a podcast called All Things 3D, on which he often invites doctors to speak. Recently, he organized a free seminar on 3D in medicine. “My big message now is that this stuff is out there, and a lot of it is free,” he says. “The first thing is getting the word out that your hands aren’t tied. Your buddy’s got a 3D printer? Use it.”
The medical industry is horrified. I could hear the CEOs of healthcare industry barking to their minions: "It is Free? as in beer?, what the hell? This is a situation that must be rectified. Got all the buzz words, 3D printing, rapid prototyping, minimally invasive, micro robotic, if it costs less than 1 million dollars to treat this condition, we are leaving money on the table. People get to work. Do not have come back till you have patents all the way to moon and back. We will not rest until we close every loophole that allows that cancer called open source. Must. not. rest. till. open. source. is stopped dead in its tracks".
The experiment of comparing how communication helped some one make better flint tools is not very good. All the participants know communication is possible. For example only dogs will follow your finger and look at what you are pointing at. All other animals will only look at your finger. It requires a certain mental make up to even imagine someone is trying to communicate. So this experiment is not very good.
But Steven Pinker looked at the structure of the language and came up with some deep insights.:
1. Time is treated like space. examples: Friday comes before Saturday. The fork in the road comes after the oak tree. This structure of time and linear travel is very deep and is found in almost all the languages. Before/after in time, and in space is treated almost exactly the same in almost all languages.
2. Words used often change more slowly than the words used less. Words for father, mother, one, two etc change very very slowly. Among the group of slowly changing words are "before", "after", "towards", "away", "left".
Eventually builds this line of logic to argue language possibly originated to create coordinated hunting strategies, exchanging info about good locations to do the gathering etc.
I am sure the Microsoft keyboards are well engineered and will not allow a random listener within earshot to snoop in on communications. Microsoft has a well earned reputation for placing security above everything else. It would not compromise the security for some trivial thing like ease-of-use for dimwitted user. The keyboard will be using encrypted communication between the wireless keyboard and the host PC. In almost all the conference rooms in our office we routinely use wireless keyboard to log in to the conf-room PC, then remote desktop to login to our workstations to make presentations. We would not do it, if someone is using a compromised USB charger in the conference room.
I have very good experience walking past grave yards whistling.
In the book Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein, (pulitzer, librarian of the library of congress) mentions an incident about Kepler. His wife gave him a salad for dinner and he apparently asked her, "Imagine! If lettuce leaves, drops of oil, grains of salt and slices of eggs have been flying about this room since eternity for ever. Is it possible, by pure random coincidence, they could come together and form this salad?". Apparently Mrs Kepler replied, "They might, or they might not, but they won't make a salad as nice as I have made!"
I chalked it up to brilliant minds struggling to fathom the differences in infinity in a pre-calculus era. Two things might be infinite. (time elapsed and the jauxtapositions of the salad ingredients in space). But still one thing could be more infinite than the other, and natural languages are quite inadequate to grapple such things.
Here it looks like the artist is understanding the principles of Quantum superposition in a vague non-mathematical non-physical sense, the way someone from that pre-calculus era might understand it. Yes, the state could be a superposition of all possible states. But superposition of all possible things would be some random squiggle, not art. It is almost like saying the md5 checksum digest of my file TriangleTetIntersection.cpp actually "represents", not just the characters and letter strings in that file, but actually all the algorithms in that file.
You seem to think the low voter turn out is a bug and you are trying to fix it.
Please sit down, it might come as a big shock to you.
It is not a bug, it is the feature. Politicians do not want high voter turn out, they don't want informed voters either. The system is working as designed (by the politicians). How else can you square less than 20% approval ratings for congress with higher than 90% reelection rates for the incumbents?
NADA vs Tesla battle is not really about Tesla. It is NADA vs gas car makers.
I have friends who have worked as IT consultants in Detroit. Their inside story is that NADA is more powerful than the automakers. It is not that the auto makers are saints, but the laws governing data sharing between the dealers and the auto makers is very heavily biased in favor of dealers. Even very minor data gathering projects have to go through several layers of approval from NADA. NADA is very suspicious of the automatkers.
There is very good reason for the strained relationship. The automakers would dearly love to ditch the dealership model of sales and go for direct sales. The auto makers believe the dealers are acting in bad faith and against the interests of the makers. Many dealerships are actually selling cars from different vendors. Even when the dealerships are nominally different they are owned by same clan or extended family in a market. They demand the automakers to cut deals with them and they are not above promoting one maker to punish another maker. The present set up is so biased in favor of the dealers, if it at all it is possible to ditch them, the auto makers will boot them in no time.
What NADA is really afraid of is setting a precedent allowing Tesla to sell cars directly breaking their monopoly of access to auto buyers. Americans love cars. Automobile is the second most expensive thing a person buys, after home. (Slowly slipping into third place, behind college tuition). Still car buying is the most unsatisfactory part of car buying. We can thank NADA and its selfish policies for this anomaly. Once Tesla breaks the dike, so NADA believes, all automakers will sue for equal access to the market and the dealerships will be at a huge disadvantage.
"Efficient" means different things to different people. For you efficient means cheapest priced gas for your car. For the gas stations, maximum price they can charge for gas for the minimum cost. For the owners of the tar sands, it is getting maximum money for minimal investment. If the cost of safety measures or pollution abatement is more than the fine or compensation, they have to pollute and pay the fine, compromise safety and pay compensation. That is the definition of efficiency for them.
You too can take the same stand, "I want my gas cheap, I don't care about how it gets to be cheap." But usually people in the bottom 99.5% do not get much break. They live closer to these plants, they themselves or their relatives or friends might work in these plants. Or they will work, or their customers will work for corporations run by people with their definition of efficiency. So just be careful. They can dish out a lot and hide behind a huge wall of wealth. You probably can't.
Be my guest. Put it on a boat. Make sure you adequately insure the boat and the railroads. You spill them on our land or water we will sue for damages. Just wake up and smell the coffee. Oil price has crashed, You tar sands is worthless, The pipeline will not be built even if it is permitted, It is unprofitable at this low oil price.
I second you. The corporatocracy has taken over our countries. Both USA and Canada are transitioning from democracies to wholly owned subsidiaries of these multinational corporations.
Yes, I have. It would be unprofitable, The only way to get usable fuel out of tar sands crude is to take it to places where wages are low, labor safety and pollution control is non existent. They can't refine it in Canada. That is why they want to pump it all the way across the bread basket of America. It is not about energy independence of Americas. It is simply trying to create value for an extremely dirty product,
If you cut these kind of statements out, you could become a "Energy Investment Consultant" and charge oodles of money. I don't think the talking heads and columnists in Bloomberg "know" stuff more than you do. They are doing exactly what you are doing, except they don't admit making stuff up and not knowing.
... or even build pipelines to ship it to you. Energy independence? Only if it fits an environmentalist agenda for some people.
Canada does not need Keystone XL to ship oil to the USA. Already enough pipelines exist to ship crude to US refineries. It needs Keystone XL to access the ports in Gulf of Mexico to export it to other countries. Keystone XL will create about 2000 temporary jobs to build and about 100 permanent jobs to maintain it. But if we force Canada to ship crude to USA, and we do the refining and then export value added products to rest of the world, there would be 10000 permanent jobs in the USA. What Canada really wants is a cheap way to gets its crude to places where there is no pollution control, no labor safety and low wages to do the refining.
10000 jobs works out to about 1 billion in wages. Cost of pollution abatement and labor safety would add another four of five billion a year. To save that money and funnel it to the top executives as bonuses and pay rises, they are engaging in scorched earth politics and divisive rhetoric.
Why export crude? Build the damned refineries in the tar sands. Capture the pollutants and bury it back where you dug the crude out. You have permanent jobs and all the profits that could be made in refining the oil too.
Oh, I get it. Your crude is too expensive to be refined safely paying decent wages to the workers and without causing too much of pollution. All that talk about USA's energy independence and enviro - nazis, all that rhetoric is to basically mask these facts: Canadian tar sands crude is extremely dirty. It has no market value unless you cut pollution abatements, labor safety and wages.
Yes. Even second stage cancer is better than terminal stage. If we think if something is not perfect, it is horrible we would have very tough time negotiating life. My data plan is not perfect, but good enough. My personal life right now is quite bad, but it is still better than the lots of lots[*] people. Even someone who gets diabetes has to think, "at least it is not cancer, with medicine and diet it is controllable".
Bribe the low paid worker who services the machine to plug in a usb fob for a few minutes, unplug the device and walk away. There were some ATM machines where if you use a coat hanger to snag the edge of the plastic cover and pull, you could expose a usb port under the screen. Once the malware is uploaded into the machine, then it can be made to remotely dispense cash. Again they recruit low paid mules to actually pick the cash.
Diebold is the ATM maker with near monopoly marketshare. They also make voting machines. There were lots of conspiracy theories from the left that there are backdoors and secret keys that could be used to remotely steal an election. Mostly based on tenuous facts, like the top managers of Diebold donated (caution pun ahead) liberally to conservatives. So they might believe there are secret backdoors to all Diebold machines, including ATMs.
There are lots of stories of how bad Diebold is in upgrades and that most ATMs are running on WinXP and how they can be made to dispense cash with remote exploits. Though it all requires physical access to the usb ports inside the machine first.
We need to understand the meaning of the term "liberal arts". The word liberal does not come from any connection to any political philosophy. Liberal here comes from "free men", men of independent means, who do not have to work for a living. Only they studied the arts for the liberated men. People who have to work for a living studied technical arts, not liberal arts.
What is the point in training people if there are no jobs for them? So your burger flipper now has an associate degree. How does that help the burger flipper?
It would be far more effective to train people in basic programming skills and back office operations and bring the jobs back from India, Ireland, Israel and Indonesia. Costs there have gone above the US minimum wages, when you factor in all the costs of offshoring.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but apple competes with microsoft and google.
Cars have lots of electrical problems because most automakers don't know how to build good electrical machines. Look at the hardware failure rate in your tablets, phones, furnaces, air conditioners, dishwashers, light switches, TV, VCR, and the rate of electrical failures in automobiles. Auto company engineering top honchos are all mechanical engineers who suck in electrical machines.
Look at the biggest pissing contest between the automobiles. Time to do 0-60. Their solution, make bigger and bigger IC engine, more and more complex transmission. The could have removed the first gear, replaced it with an electric motor, just strong enough to get the car to 2 or 3 mph. Heck, they could have engineered the starter motor already meshing with the flywheel to do it. Then the powerful IC engine kicks in, as it ramps up the rpm, it would accelerate the car to 60mph much faster. Tesla with pure electric motor it was beating BMW, Mercedes, Porche, Corvette, Lexus all of them in their biggest prize 0-60 time. The top engineering leads on all those companies should hang their head in shame. This is the technology nothing to do with batteries, nothing to do with renewables or efficiency or anything. It is something that would have earned them bragging rights over their competition in their most important pissing contest. They flunked. They could have done this in 1960s! Nothing new.
OK OK I am talking with hindsight. But it is not my job to imagine and envision the next generation of automobile. It is their job. And they did it so poorly.
It sounds weird, isn't it? But it works. Everyone pays price printed in the weekly circular from the grocery store, and no one haggles. Once you are sure everyone pays the same price, once you are sure the grocery store can't charge you more than the next guy, you stop haggling. The problem is not haggling, it is the secrecy. In stock market people constantly haggle, sell identical products many many times a day and all transactions are listed openly. That works. People haggle for home prices. They love it. Because in the end the price one paid is listed openly in the deed book. Haggling is not the issue, the secrecy, the ability of the dealer to take a gullible customer to the cleaners, and the feeling that you could be the gullible customer is the problem.
Corporate mentality doesn't care about anything but profit.
Nor do car dealerships or gas station owners. The only time we ordinary consumers benefit is when giants compete in a free level field. Right now it is tilted far too much towards the NADA.
Can Tesla do something like pick a dealership and add conditions like, "must sell only tesla or only electric cars", "Tesla will retain the right to sell directly too" etc? Why are the standard auto makers not able to sell directly? Is it because A: the law stops them or B: They had signed exclusive agreements already. If Tesla starts with a clean slate, can it have dealerships and sell directly too? Or at least have some more balanced rights and decent negotiating position compared to the gas giants who are wimps against NADA.
We were hoping we found a giant killer, a veritable David against Goliath, a David on our side. Now you eh, tu! Elon? Don't. Break their back. Bring national direct auto buying directly from the manufacturer to the nation that deserves it. It is long past time, we let the free markets to be free.
He’s also become more focused on education, and hosts a podcast called All Things 3D, on which he often invites doctors to speak. Recently, he organized a free seminar on 3D in medicine. “My big message now is that this stuff is out there, and a lot of it is free,” he says. “The first thing is getting the word out that your hands aren’t tied. Your buddy’s got a 3D printer? Use it.”
The medical industry is horrified. I could hear the CEOs of healthcare industry barking to their minions: "It is Free? as in beer?, what the hell? This is a situation that must be rectified. Got all the buzz words, 3D printing, rapid prototyping, minimally invasive, micro robotic, if it costs less than 1 million dollars to treat this condition, we are leaving money on the table. People get to work. Do not have come back till you have patents all the way to moon and back. We will not rest until we close every loophole that allows that cancer called open source. Must. not. rest. till. open. source. is stopped dead in its tracks".
But Steven Pinker looked at the structure of the language and came up with some deep insights.:
1. Time is treated like space. examples: Friday comes before Saturday. The fork in the road comes after the oak tree. This structure of time and linear travel is very deep and is found in almost all the languages. Before/after in time, and in space is treated almost exactly the same in almost all languages.
2. Words used often change more slowly than the words used less. Words for father, mother, one, two etc change very very slowly. Among the group of slowly changing words are "before", "after", "towards", "away", "left".
Eventually builds this line of logic to argue language possibly originated to create coordinated hunting strategies, exchanging info about good locations to do the gathering etc.
I have very good experience walking past grave yards whistling.
I chalked it up to brilliant minds struggling to fathom the differences in infinity in a pre-calculus era. Two things might be infinite. (time elapsed and the jauxtapositions of the salad ingredients in space). But still one thing could be more infinite than the other, and natural languages are quite inadequate to grapple such things.
Here it looks like the artist is understanding the principles of Quantum superposition in a vague non-mathematical non-physical sense, the way someone from that pre-calculus era might understand it. Yes, the state could be a superposition of all possible states. But superposition of all possible things would be some random squiggle, not art. It is almost like saying the md5 checksum digest of my file TriangleTetIntersection.cpp actually "represents", not just the characters and letter strings in that file, but actually all the algorithms in that file.
Please sit down, it might come as a big shock to you.
It is not a bug, it is the feature. Politicians do not want high voter turn out, they don't want informed voters either. The system is working as designed (by the politicians). How else can you square less than 20% approval ratings for congress with higher than 90% reelection rates for the incumbents?
Still car buying is the most unsatisfactory part of car buying.
Sorry for the dumb editing. I mean car ownership.
I have friends who have worked as IT consultants in Detroit. Their inside story is that NADA is more powerful than the automakers. It is not that the auto makers are saints, but the laws governing data sharing between the dealers and the auto makers is very heavily biased in favor of dealers. Even very minor data gathering projects have to go through several layers of approval from NADA. NADA is very suspicious of the automatkers.
There is very good reason for the strained relationship. The automakers would dearly love to ditch the dealership model of sales and go for direct sales. The auto makers believe the dealers are acting in bad faith and against the interests of the makers. Many dealerships are actually selling cars from different vendors. Even when the dealerships are nominally different they are owned by same clan or extended family in a market. They demand the automakers to cut deals with them and they are not above promoting one maker to punish another maker. The present set up is so biased in favor of the dealers, if it at all it is possible to ditch them, the auto makers will boot them in no time.
What NADA is really afraid of is setting a precedent allowing Tesla to sell cars directly breaking their monopoly of access to auto buyers. Americans love cars. Automobile is the second most expensive thing a person buys, after home. (Slowly slipping into third place, behind college tuition). Still car buying is the most unsatisfactory part of car buying. We can thank NADA and its selfish policies for this anomaly. Once Tesla breaks the dike, so NADA believes, all automakers will sue for equal access to the market and the dealerships will be at a huge disadvantage.
You too can take the same stand, "I want my gas cheap, I don't care about how it gets to be cheap." But usually people in the bottom 99.5% do not get much break. They live closer to these plants, they themselves or their relatives or friends might work in these plants. Or they will work, or their customers will work for corporations run by people with their definition of efficiency. So just be careful. They can dish out a lot and hide behind a huge wall of wealth. You probably can't.
Be my guest. Put it on a boat. Make sure you adequately insure the boat and the railroads. You spill them on our land or water we will sue for damages. Just wake up and smell the coffee. Oil price has crashed, You tar sands is worthless, The pipeline will not be built even if it is permitted, It is unprofitable at this low oil price.
I second you. The corporatocracy has taken over our countries. Both USA and Canada are transitioning from democracies to wholly owned subsidiaries of these multinational corporations.
Yes, I have. It would be unprofitable, The only way to get usable fuel out of tar sands crude is to take it to places where wages are low, labor safety and pollution control is non existent. They can't refine it in Canada. That is why they want to pump it all the way across the bread basket of America. It is not about energy independence of Americas. It is simply trying to create value for an extremely dirty product,
I'm just making this up, I don't know, ...
If you cut these kind of statements out, you could become a "Energy Investment Consultant" and charge oodles of money. I don't think the talking heads and columnists in Bloomberg "know" stuff more than you do. They are doing exactly what you are doing, except they don't admit making stuff up and not knowing.
... or even build pipelines to ship it to you. Energy independence? Only if it fits an environmentalist agenda for some people.
Canada does not need Keystone XL to ship oil to the USA. Already enough pipelines exist to ship crude to US refineries. It needs Keystone XL to access the ports in Gulf of Mexico to export it to other countries. Keystone XL will create about 2000 temporary jobs to build and about 100 permanent jobs to maintain it. But if we force Canada to ship crude to USA, and we do the refining and then export value added products to rest of the world, there would be 10000 permanent jobs in the USA. What Canada really wants is a cheap way to gets its crude to places where there is no pollution control, no labor safety and low wages to do the refining.
10000 jobs works out to about 1 billion in wages. Cost of pollution abatement and labor safety would add another four of five billion a year. To save that money and funnel it to the top executives as bonuses and pay rises, they are engaging in scorched earth politics and divisive rhetoric.
Why export crude? Build the damned refineries in the tar sands. Capture the pollutants and bury it back where you dug the crude out. You have permanent jobs and all the profits that could be made in refining the oil too.
Oh, I get it. Your crude is too expensive to be refined safely paying decent wages to the workers and without causing too much of pollution. All that talk about USA's energy independence and enviro - nazis, all that rhetoric is to basically mask these facts: Canadian tar sands crude is extremely dirty. It has no market value unless you cut pollution abatements, labor safety and wages.
[*] first lot=fate, next lot=many
Bribe the low paid worker who services the machine to plug in a usb fob for a few minutes, unplug the device and walk away. There were some ATM machines where if you use a coat hanger to snag the edge of the plastic cover and pull, you could expose a usb port under the screen. Once the malware is uploaded into the machine, then it can be made to remotely dispense cash. Again they recruit low paid mules to actually pick the cash.
There are lots of stories of how bad Diebold is in upgrades and that most ATMs are running on WinXP and how they can be made to dispense cash with remote exploits. Though it all requires physical access to the usb ports inside the machine first.
There people listed as "female" are not allowed to drive.
We need to understand the meaning of the term "liberal arts". The word liberal does not come from any connection to any political philosophy. Liberal here comes from "free men", men of independent means, who do not have to work for a living. Only they studied the arts for the liberated men. People who have to work for a living studied technical arts, not liberal arts.
It would be far more effective to train people in basic programming skills and back office operations and bring the jobs back from India, Ireland, Israel and Indonesia. Costs there have gone above the US minimum wages, when you factor in all the costs of offshoring.