Sure. but that's just like, OK, that by itself means very little.
It could mean the standby PCU somehow activated by itself, maybe damage causing a un-commanded activation, maybe software bug, maybe God said fuck this plane in particular.
The point is we have no idea since there are not enough details to know. But of course, on HN we have a army of people who think they know stuff because Wikipedia.
Over the past decade the Class 1's have been working towards doing 1 man crew's. But they're still 2 man at minimum. This bill achieves nothing. This is a "hey we did something about it! (please don't read what's in the bill and catch us bullshitting)."
What they should be doing is looking at the absurd increase in length of these trains to increase profits for the sake of safety, and the shortcutting of car maintenance. The latter which would've caught this issue to begin with.
Google hasn't released many products appealing to consumers since 2015, with the exception of hardware and incremental Android work. Google's ground-breaking days are over. Search, AdWords, Image Search, Gmail, Maps, NASA partnership + Earth + Moon and Mars maps, YouTube, Chrome, Translate, Suite/Workspace, Android OS, Drive, Docs, Google+, Chromecast, Photos - all the exciting stuff happened before the Alphabet transformation in '15. We haven't had almost any new iconic Google apps since.
While I agree, there are so many other traditions that make much more sense than astrology. Meditation, quiet shrines with incense in groves, yoga, taichi etc. And they are not at odds with scientific temperament.
Once secularism changes peoples beliefs, no one is actually in control to decide what they choose to replace it with. They might choose yoga, they might choose astrology, or they might choose qanon. Nietzsche and other philosophers talked about these problems a lot, but most this society failed at the task of living up to what was needed(ie society as a whole guiding peoples and establishing healthy alternatives).
This fast paced transition doesn't sit right with me, still. I feel like people are turning a blind eye to the negative environmental impacts this is going to have.
The question is does this environmental havoc replace or lesson the current environmental havoc + military and political conflict over oil supplies (yes potential for rare earth or other material conflicts persist).
As always though, this move is optimizing the wrong thing - we don’t need more efficient cars we need fewer cars. But nobody likes subtractive solutions.
It's not a matter of subtractive solutions or not: It's that in a low-car environment, way too many people's real estate investments are worth near zero. How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? Entire subdivisions are worth basically zero. Same thing with commercial areas that are not really reachable on foot.
Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised. Reshaping in the other direction would involve a similar amount of hardship, but on people that vote. We can make it easier to increase density, but the kind of efforts that would make us not end up relying on EVs have such economic and political costs that we lack the state capacity to go there.
> How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable?
Idk. How much remains usable if it’s under water? Should we let people in Florida tax the rest of the country for their road development? Can Florida afford to maintain and build the roads they want to build?
> Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised.
Can you elaborate on this? How are you accounting for highway development that destroyed minority neighborhoods in this assessment?
Well, many (not all) want car-only infrastructure, but they've also been unable to realize the true cost of their decisions, hence South Florida will be underwater. It costs too much money to build and maintain the infrastructure that would be required to maintain the lifestyle. So far things haven't gotten too bad but insurance companies are beginning to refuse to insure homes in Florida and so it has been left to the state to subsidize at a loss. Similarly as the state continues to build out unmaintainable car-only infrastructure and attempt to keep much of the state from "going underwater" it'll require either transfers of wealth from other states or increases in taxes. Neither of those proposals are politically viable either, so eventually the infrastructure just won't be maintained.
In the 50k miles I’ve had my EV, I’ve saved at least 48 barrels (~2400 gallons) of gas from being burned vs the gas car it replaced. The (very slow) rate of battery degradation suggests at least 150k+ miles on this battery pack.
I have a hard time envisioning that the impact due to lithium mining for one battery pack is worse than the extraction and pollution from burning ~150 barrels of gas. Plus another 3 barrels of motor oil from oil changes.
Not to mention, they are forecasting out over 25 years, on a technology that has been rapidly changing, and is seeing immense investment. Batteries from 15+ years from now will have very different chemistries, and lithium will likely have safer sources. The Chevy EV1 launched with lead-acid batteries about 25 years ago - modern EVs aren’t remotely similar.
Kinda so-so article that gets some issues exactly right (oversized vehicles, too many individual cars vs transit options) and badly misses others, like lithium sources.
Lithium deposits are geologically widespread and abundant, but 95% of global production is currently concentrated in Australia, Chile, China and Argentina. Large new deposits have been found in diverse countries including Mexico, the US, Portugal, Germany, Kazakhstan, Congo and Mali.
There are massive Lithium deposits at the salton Sea in souther California which are just bubbling up out of the ground in heated brine, meaning the earth is doing most of the work bringing it to the surface as mud. Refining it will need significant water, either from contested supplies fed by the Colorado river or as-yet-unbuilt water pipelines from desalination plants at the coast. But these deposits are massive and the extraction part of the process would have minimal environmental impact compared to the open-pit mining required elsewhere. It's odd that this article doesn't mention this at all.
It's so funny to me that a few pounds of lithium brings out so much hand wringing, whereas all that copper and even ton(s) of steel does not. Or for that matter, the far more massive amounts of hydrocarbon extraction!
If somebody is even half serious about these concerns, they had better be advocating for extreme reduction in car use. Otherwise it's pure hypocrisy.
At some point, the illusion that we will be able to avoid changing our transportation infrastructure in the US, will be unmaintainable.
The problem is not in EVs, it's in private automobiles, our settlement patterns, and our utter lack of funding public transportation in all of its forms.
At some point we need to stop acting like transportation solutions for areas with orders of magnitude higher population density than the US are obvious solutions. Infrastructure for a country like the Netherlands (a popular “see we should bike” example) with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2.
It is just as naive to think the US can remake its transportation infrastructure to be like Europe, as it would be to expect every road in Italy to be made wide enough for a Ford F-150 Raptor. Places in the US with high population densities (NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, etc) often do have far better public transportation than the rest of the US.
> with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2.
This is a silly comparison though. Large swaths of the US are either completely uninhabited or nearly completely uninhabited.
If you want a better comparison, look at New Jersey. Its population density is 488 people per km^2, so a little higher than the Netherlands even, yet its infrastructure is dismal comparatively despite having the density to support Netherlands-style infrastructure. Almost all major population centers in the US look like this -- dense enough to support much better, but yet we don't have it. The fact that it wouldn't work in the vast rural expanses of e.g. Wyoming don't mean that it wouldn't work for our big metropolitan areas.
Mining for combustion cars also breaks havoc and nobody cares.
It would be best to reduce our car dependence, but I guess a new electric car is still better than a new combustion car.
The timeline is interesting but I think it's slow enough for regulation to catch up.
This shifts the focus of problems from many different places to one. In the article you linked, it mentions alternatives to reduce lithium needs including smaller batteries, and battery recycling.
This is much easier to regulate, and there is plenty of time to do so - although yes this is putting some trust on governments doing the right thing.
The news is that we are discovering that he wasn’t just funneling money to Democrats.
Even his public money was weighted towards Democrats 2:1…it’s not like he was publicly only donating to Democrats, but now it appears that overall he probably donated equally to both parties.
If you believe Democratic politicians were in league with the fraud, this would be a way to deflect attention from that I guess.
(to be clear, I don't believe that, and also see no reason he'd be lying. That doesn't mean there isn't one though - and he could also be lying for no reason)
His donations became a political hot potato so maybe they’re like “look, man, my hands are tied here so maybe if you can deflect some of this heat we can work something out.” Voila, millions of untraceable donations to the republicans.
Only the Inquirer and Washington post pieces said Trump was going to ban TikTok because of racism/xenophobia; and those were both published in the editorial sections. Is that the best you got?
This. Mechanical watches are happiest when continually running. If you take it off all the time and throw it back on once in a while, and it keeps shutting down in the process, it's not going to last as long as you think without some servicing. This is why people buy watch winders for the ones they don't wear often that keep them running.
