Same story with Free ADSL: I used to get terrible speeds from anything on AWS (including our own services), around 100 KB/s, until very recently when suddenly I was able to saturate my ADSL line from them. Now I don't dread having to download GB-sized log files.
It didn't really make sense to me why AWS was a target of their bandwidth extortion tactics until I realized Netflix uses AWS.. So I guess thank you Netflix for paying the ransom?
There's one thing I've been thinking about that I don't see anyone else talking about, which is the role of hybrids in the decline of the ICE.
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that most cars sold in 5 or 10 years will be at least hybrid electric. As battery prices continue to fall, it will make sense to include some electric capacity in addition to an ICE. So let's imagine a future where most new cars have a relatively modest 20 kWh battery with a range of more than 100 Km:
Most people, most of the time, drive short distances that will seldom require the use of the combustion engine and its fuel (many hybrids today come with special fuel tanks to prevent the fuel from "going bad"). Buying fuel will become an increasingly rare thing, and people will start to think of it as an expensive inconvenience. The current ICE fleet is reliant on a large, complex and expensive infrastructure to provide this fuel, and as people buy less and less of it, maintaining it will become less and less sustainable. As fueling stations start closing and the fuel prices go up (will they? I'm not sure about this point), it will become even more costly and inconvenient to fuel a hybrid, perpetuating the cycle.
At some point, the idea of a noisy, dirty ICE running on expensive, hard-to-get fuel will become so unattractive that it's no longer a viable option for most people. While this decline is happening, the cost, range and performance of all-electric will improve to the point where there really is no other reasonable choice.
My 2017 Volt is amazing for these reasons and more: best car I've ever owned.
It's also completely gameified me reducing my carbon footprint: I do everything I possibly can to avoid letting the gas engine kick in, mostly just because it makes me happy to win that game.
Good point. Especially the cost part. If you commute less than 100KM and plugin at work ... you could go months without buying gas and paying about 25% of the price of gas for power. So you would really feel the pinch when you needed to buy gasoline.
There are a lot of similar "long tail" reasons that explain why once cost of electric cars is on par with ice's electrification will speed up.
To add to your "gas station" example, most of these stations make profit not from gasoline but from other stuff they sell like cigarettes, sodas, chips etc. Once the traffic decreases, the profitability will drop substantially so their demise will be faster than if you only consider gasoline sales.
My predictions:
- once electric school buses are available parents will push for their quicker adoption so their kids don't have to breath in the diesel and its waste products.
- since electric cars require less maintenance automotive parts stores and car service centers will be hit. No need to change oil every few k miles. No need change your muffler, transmission fluid etc. This will make ice parts availability to drop and price to increase.
- if Tesla is successful with its direct sales other manufacturers will eventually follow. Number of dealerships will drop
- some stores like Costco offer gas discounts for their customers. If they see that number of electric cars is increasing they will replace that with free charging spots for the best customers.
- electric cars will (presumably) not be required to do emission testing, which in turn will require states to lower number of emission testing centers. After a while it's possible that these emission centers will be few and far between, an emission testing will become even bigger annoyance that it already is.
- Once number of gas stations starts dropping all of the trucking companies that deliver gas will have harder time making profits. After few of them go bankrupt, gasoline deliver will be more expensive.
- Once sales of gasoline substantially decrease, refineries will have more trouble selling their products, so new refineries will not be build. This will again increase price of gasoline but also the price of heating oil.
- After electric cars hit 10% of the market, ICEs will be considered a "new smoking". Peer pressure will keep growing, having an ICE will be uncool.
- once oil companies stop being as profitable people on the stock market will start moving their money to other stocks. This will force these companies to stop their dividends, which in turn will make them even less attractive.
- states will have to increase taxes on gasoline to make up for the lost revenue. Eventually electric cars will be taxed in some way but before that happens gasoline will become even more expensive.
- once oil production is in decline because of decreased demand, countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia will have to deal with huge economic problems that could lead to crash of their economies. This will make access to oil even harder raising the price of gas even more.
- electric cars will lower cost of batteries, which in turn will make them a better solution for power tools, lawn mowers etc.
«To add to your "gas station" example, most of these stations make profit not from gasoline but from other stuff they sell like cigarettes, sodas, chips etc.»
I think this is why the Convenience stores may (again) out last the pumps outside them. On long road trips, bathroom breaks and snacks/food will still be useful, even in an electric future.
As you also note, the new convenience store is the supermarket and the supermarkets are also best setup to electrify large parking grids as the transition happens.
"The most extraordinary things about Stephen Harding's The Last Battle, a truly incredible tale of World War II, are that it hasn’t been told before in English"
I'm quite sure I've read this story before, in English.
Rather than assuming that these soldiers negotiated truces out of purely pragmatic reasons, I think the article completely ignores that most people actually don't want to lie half-frozen in trenches killing each other. They had these "truces" because war is hell and everybody wanted a break from it. If there was nobody there to order them, most would've gone home.
It gave examples of how shelling didn't occur during wartime, and how latrines and food trains weren't targeted, because people wanted food, wanted to eat in peace, and need to take a crap - and if they did it then the other side would respond in kind.
I guess I'm confused about how "everybody wanted a break from it" isn't a pragmatic reason.
But the essay continues: "Initially, this was a purely instrumental impulse, self-serving cooperation to prevent retaliation." (I think that's your 'purely pragmatic'.) Followed by:
> With time, however, this sense of responsibility developed a moral tinge, tapping into the soldiers’ resistance to betraying those who dealt honorably with them. It occurred to them that: The other side didn’t want dinner disturbed any more than we do; they also don’t want to fight in rainstorms; they also have to deal with brass from headquarters who screw up everything. A creeping sense of camaraderie emerged.
I can't help but think that the essay takes on your point whole-heartedly, and doesn't ignore it.
A "Live and let live" policy is very pragmatic if you are lying soaking wet in a rat infested trench. It was common for troops to avoid offensive actions in the understanding that the enemy would do likewise. It would have been blatantly obvious people that the fighting in more quiet sectors had little strategic value.
It is common in Europe that owners of the phone lines must give other ISPs access to it (for a - regulated - price). This in turn stems from the fact that the owners of the phone lines are (or used to be) owned by the state.
I don't see anything pretentious about it. He's not bragging about being smart, just stating that he is what most people would call intelligent.
Intelligence can mean many things, but I like to think of it in terms of "brain power"; the amount of abstract thought you can hold and process, your brain's RAM and CPU power so to speak.
The term depression is very broad and probably encompasses numerous as-yet-undefined sub-categories, but his description is very much like my own experience: A dulling of the mind. It's like downclocking the brain's CPU and emotional coprocessor from 2Ghz to 200Mhz. Thinking became slow and required more effort, analytical capabilities pretty much went away and I didn't have the spare capacity to really enjoy anything. A song or a movie I knew I liked just didn't register because my brain wasn't capable of processing it the way it used to. Learning became uninteresting and a chore and problem solving became near impossible. In short, I felt really dumb. I knew I wasn't, but I couldn't "smarten up" however much I tried. Knowing this, not being able to enjoy learning, problem solving or experiencing something was the worst terror of depression.
The experience left me wondering about the immutability or genetic predeterminism of "intelligence". If we broadly define intelligence as "brain power", I know now that it can vary a great deal. I wonder how much of this brain power is predetermined through genetics and how much is affected by the environment. We know that diet plays a large role and that certain diseases affect the brain in this way. How much of a person's "dumbness" can be removed by changing the external factors? In addition, I think broader aspects of intelligence such as analytical abilities, memory and "abstract capacity" can be taught or improved through training. I know my own "intelligence" certainly has required lots of training through the years, not to mention the knowledge that plays a large part of it that had to be acquired.
I think XUL was/is vastly better then than HTML5 is today for what everyone seems to want: Actual applications (instead of web sites) that run in the browser.
XUL had/has a proper GUI toolkit with proper bindings to an event framework for user interaction. It was similar to HTML/CSS/JS but much, much better. The problem was people wanted "real" apps without having to do real work, and we're stuck with HTML which is a document language and will never be what we really want.
Oh, and it wasn't that complicated, it was rather easy.
I'd really be interested in knowing why it's not "Stripe EU" instead. What sort of problems they had trying to do that, and what needs improvement for that to become reality.
Mostly because there's a bunch of subtlety around bank transfers and identity verification. The EU simplifies a lot of the regulatory framework but the actual operations still entail a decent amount of heterogeneity from country-to-country.
