We had EVs over 100 years ago and folks already knew the advantages of electric power over fossil fuel power. However, batteries have been the limiting factor for awhile. Even now, only Tesla seems to have batteries that meet consumers power/range/cost expectations and they exclusively own the largest battery plant in the world.
I'm not sure we can blame VW for being slower to EVs than Elon Musk and FWIW, the VW company seems to be pivoting to EVs the fastest. The Taycan - a VW product - is the first car that's competitive with a Model S.
Well let's think through a conventional truck frame. It's maybe 800-1200 lbs, uses 3-8 different materials, and has 100-200 fastening points and all those materials probably cost nearly as much as stainless steel.
And remember, the cost of an automobile isn't just the material cost, you have to amortize the manufacturing plant and the paint shop. By stressing the stainless steel skin (like an aircraft), Tesla doesn't really need to buy additional material, but they simplify the manufacturing dramatically because they don't need a paint shop and they don't need to assemble a frame.
Don't you think workplace marginalization would cut the other way? If you have 250 people angry enough about this to leak to the press, imagine what they'd do to their fellow employees who oppose them.
I understand that the wording is not very intelligent and even malevolent, and, what is interesting, if you abstract that's how I would imagine an accurate description would sound out of an internet troll's mouth.
Narrative and contexts are extremely important, in this case, Islam has been historically (and still is) of the strictest religions (if not The). With precisely described and followed rules for entering (conversion), and exiting (death is the only exit on papers, but majority are quite moderate and the worst you'll get is a disappointed kick in the butt by your family), and about "universal" way everyone should live their live.
And specifically due to this "strictness" (easy to convert and "impossible" to break out) we see the "popularity" of this religion on the World's Map, and also due to this "strictness" modern views and prejudices have been formed as it is very easy for a small group of extremists to take it over the top.
This is a softer form of religious flamewar in its own right. Please don't post arguments about to HN which religion is the worst. It can lead nowhere good.
Also history is fascinating! Just a couple centuries ago the roles were reversed! Middle east is the cradle of the math as we know it! While West and Europe were busy with crusades and inquisitions, they were doing math and science in Alexandria. Wonder how things will play out in a couple hundred years from now.
There are lots of articles about how Americans have become increasingly cynical and dismissive of science. Who knows, maybe another reversal will occur in a hundred or so years, with Americans abandoning science and the Middle East abandoning religion.
I'm a data scientist and this is an incredibly embarrassing 'n00b' error to make. If these researchers were using anything other than deep learning, it's almost certain that each parameter of the model was manually selected. That the author made the mistake is bad, that no one caught the error is a disaster.
Maybe things would be better if people paid for their own health care? Having workers pay for their own healthcare along with the healthcare of those who are unwilling/unable to work just means that things are going to be expensive for workers.
>There is a popular and persistent image of college admissions in which diversity-obsessed universities are using affirmative action to deny spaces to academically talented affluent students while admitting low-income students with lower ability in their place. Boeckenstedt says the opposite is closer to the truth.
I'm sure that Boeckenstedt is a good blogger and everything, but you can actually calculate how many SAT points race is worth (black positive, Asian negative) compared to wealth. And poor, non-Jewish white and East Asian males, are huge losers in the current admissions system.
One problem is that "diversity" means a lot of things to different people, and unfortunately to some, it means "freedom to exercise my hatred of <insert non-diverse boogeyman group>."
There’s no such thing as black race being worth positive SAT points and Asian negative. It’s only relative. Your race can only be an absolute positive or negative factor if there’s a no-race or neutral race to compare against ... oh you mean compared to white.
Does he have any statistics to back up that claim? Every study I have seen says that students with privileged backgrounds get better results in college which suggests that the disadvantaged students who currently gets admitted are worse.
Gender diversity is important at college because students live at college and often have little time for socializing outside of campus. If you have too unbalanced a male/female ratio among the heterosexual students it's very annoying for both the males and the females.
At best it is very distracting, and at worst very depressing, and can lead to poor academic performance.
Hm… I don’t know about the poor academic performance claim. Colleges were male only or completely gender segregated until actually pretty recently. If anything, the academic performance was stronger 100 years ago than it is today.
Oops...I had a note about single-gender colleges in a draft but took it out. Yeah, they can be relatively fine.
If your school is all male, then your heterosexual romantic/sexual social life is either non-existent, or with people outside of school. Neither of those cases leads to anywhere near as much social rivalry and drama as you have in a mixed gender school with a ratio far from 50/50. It's that rivalry and drama that gets in the way of academics.
With little exception, college isn't about scholarship anymore. It's about having a good time and preparing you for your trade. Caltech doesn't have demographic quotas; there's the exception.
> Caltech doesn't have demographic quotas; there's the exception.
They don't have quotas, but Caltech has gone to considerable effort to lower the male/female ratio to address the problems mentioned in my comment.
They were male only before 1970, and then started admitting undergraduate women. When I was a student there, in the late '70s and early '80s, around 15% of the undergraduates were women, and this imbalance was the #1 complaint by far among both the male and female students about campus life.
Caltech worked on improving this by actively recruiting female students. They didn't change admission standards or give any preferences to females when evaluating applications, but they tried hard to make sure than more females applied, and that those accepted didn't pick another school over Caltech.
For example, as a male with good enough grades and test scores to get into Caltech but only about average for an incoming Caltech student, Caltech was indifferent to whether or not I applied, or whether or not I accepted when they offered admission.
For a female with the same grades and test scores, they would have reached out and tried to convince her to apply, and there is a good chance they would even have sent someone in person to argue the case for Caltech to her and her parents.
These efforts paid off, with the male/female ratio steadily improving. They are now at about 55% male/45% female.
I'm not sure we can blame VW for being slower to EVs than Elon Musk and FWIW, the VW company seems to be pivoting to EVs the fastest. The Taycan - a VW product - is the first car that's competitive with a Model S.