I’m anxious about being on the layoff list because I submitted my self-appraisal without reading the step that says: use ai to summarize your assessment and copy-paste to the summary field. Dammit, I wrote it myself

That can be a dangerous line of thought ……

Started thinking of my legacy and

• I’m divorced
• I’ve been bad at keeping up with friends
• I’m unlikely to have grandkids and am estranged from my only niece
• I live far from my family
• my kids can’t afford to live in my town
• I won’t be able to leave a house or other inheritance
• even if one of my kids has kids I’m not sure I can run around with them anymore

Everything I’ve done has no lasting value. I’ve always loved tech and can fix the problem of the day but a year or two later that’s no longer relevant

I’ve read the same but am skeptical because no one ever pulls out any numbers. I know every country does that same thing to some extent so just saying they do it doesn’t mean anything.

I’ll believe it when I see actual data

It’s also not necessary for the current reality to have happened. Following the K.I.S.S. principal, the current Chinese car industry is explainable by consistent government policy over many years, out in the open, so why are we blaming it on things we don’t o ow or don’t see? I’m not saying it’s not there, just that we’d be in the same boat whether it is or not

I’m pretty sure maintenance still is a bottleneck. I did have to get warranty work done and the wait was significantly longer than I’ve waited for warranty work on traditional cars. I haven’t read much about it in the last year or though, so who knows.

But do you even have to goto Tesla? Certainly the drivetrain and any software is highly proprietary but it also rarely needs attention. The shop I use for inspections claims they can do wear items like tires, brakes, suspension

Body work on the other hand is probably a nightmare. Actually it’s a nightmare for traditional vehicles and can only be longer for Tesla based on lack of parts inventory

Everyone has different definition of lifetime and very few keep theirs 40 years

I personally buy new and keep it for its lifetime, as defined by “needing more work than its value “. That has worked out to be 12-15 years for ICE cars. For an EV I’m reasonably confident the battery will last longer than I own the vehicle and it will still have some amount of resale value based on batteries degrade rather than die

Also I’ve seen quite a few articles like

• https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-makes-surprising-discovery-tesla-101549360.html

Tesla is ahead there too. Its average EV lifespan is 20.3 years, whereas the average electric vehicle has a lifespan of 18.4 years. By comparison, the average gas-powered vehicle’s lifespan is 18.7 years.

wouldn’t necessarily say that from what’s visible outside the information confines of the CCP is cheating.

I do have to say I’m skeptical of all the claims that they are subsidizing industry and this is a problem. They are. In the open. And that’s normal. I have yet to read a convincing story that they are doing this enough to be substantially different from every other country. And being consistent over multiple years is clearly not cheating

Chinese companies have a deserved reputation for industrial espionage and not respecting intellectual property. I haven’t read complaints recently so does that mean they’ve cleaned up their act?

Maybe, but there’s a lot more chance to solve it 20 years out

More importantly, generating and transmitting more power is not the only option. It is for ai since a datacenter needs huge power continuously. However EVs need much smaller amounts of power intermittently. If I plug in overnight, I don’t care when it charges or how fast as long as it’s done by morning. Not everyone does that at the same time, and we ought to be able to create a “smart” solution to coordinate this and minimize the impact

EV potentially could coordinate with the grid so we don’t need much or any additional power but just use it at different times

I don’t think anyone is denying Chinese aggressive intent here, just our response. Give us a response where we can get onboard, a response that is more legitimate than their approach, and wecan all be mad at China.

Or think of it this way. We all agree on all the ways China are the bad guys, but our behavior is making them look like the good guys. wtf are we doing?

While I’m positive they are playing dirty in many ways, the fundamental difference is they saw a long term transition, welcomed it, guided it. Whereas us sees a long term transition, pulls our head into our shell, holds on tighter to old ways of doing things, keeps focussing shorter and shorter term. Whatever China may be doing to “cheat”, it really seems like this is mostly self-inflicted

Not practical, no one wants it.

People are already bitching and moaning about how hard it is to build out charging, when it’s based on existing electric system that’s is already everywhere. You really think it’s at all practical to build out everywhere a network of station with a large inventory of one ton batteries to fit every age of every vehicle in every location no matter how rural and heavy automated equipment to maneuver them? You want to hold battery technology stagnant to support this? You want to lose the efficiency and reliability benefits of structural batteries.

The reality is current batteries already last longer than the first owner keeps a vehicle and newer ones easily exceed lifespan of ice vehicles. The reality is charging is already more convenient that battery swapping. The reality is building out chargers is much easier than any other infrastructure

grid systems couldn’t handle a complete EV swap by 2035. Look at the issues these stupid ai server farms

While we’re so stagnant it would be a challenge, do you not see the difference between

• a known, gradual transition with a 20 year timeframe (10 to end ice production + 10 for most existing to age out)
• an immediate demand for for large amounts of power for a bubble technology that didn’t exist a couple years ago

You can plan for a well known and couple decades timeframe, or the failure is yours. It’s harder to plan for surprises

If it has to be forced, then it probably isn’t a good idea

It’s not like people want to do that for shits and giggles.

A different perspective is the market shift is inevitable. We can work with it to make the transition smooth, to help existing manufacturers retool, to more quickly build out the necessary infrastructure, ensuring least disruption and existing manufacturers are still in business. Or we can let the market be disrupted by new companies predominantly in other countries. The transition will be longer and rougher as jobs are lost, infrastructure lags, existing manufacturers cling to old technology, until eventually that entire industrial base collapses

Or of course there’s the perspective of acknowledging long term climate trends and understand the responsibility to our children, our society, our descendants, to make small steps to mitigate the harm we do them

Someone should tell them “struggle to keep pace” is different “abandoning the attempt”

Too true

The most hopeful part about those other chemistries is we already have nmc demonstrated to last beyond the average life expectancy of a vehicle…. And most of those newer chemistries should last significantly longer

I don’t know whether that is currently a bottleneck or will be any time soon. I only know we’re “20 years away” from using it regularly, just like we have been my entire life

I suppose it’s good science to figure out if we can do it, just like it’s good science to see if we can establish more access to space

NASA as a whole is a tiny fraction of the federal budget but has always generated outsized contributions to humanity. It’s an easy argument that money spent on nasa is money earned elsewhere. It’s a good investment

SpaceX Falcon has revolutionized space launches and I don’t believe that is government supported at all. It does fill government launch contracts but more cheaply than they could have done so themselves, and reliably enough to capture most of the world’s market. This does not add to the deficit and the early investments have been handsomely rewarded

Both SpaceX and blue origin, as well as other new generation space companies have been much much cheaper than old style projects. Just look at Artemis for example. Huge developments costs, continually More expensive, and $1B-$2B per launch. Yet I believe the total nasa funding for the entire starship program is around not like $2B. That is a very good use of our money. Heck, it’s probably cheaper than our little tantrum in Iran and certainly for a better purpose

For sure it was over-hyped and jumping the gun on what’s possible. But if we ever do live off earth, mars is more likely than the moon

Mars is also an inspirational challenge - doing something that has never been possible. Going to the moon is something we already could to half a century ago. What’s the point of doing that again?

Assuming we do go to the moon, it had better be noticeably more than what we did 50 years ago. Personally I’m looking for a permanent moon station, similar to what ISS did for human presence in orbit

In one hand, the moon is smarter because you can have Interaction and any change takes only a week or two. While we can’t harvest local resources, the cost to location is relatively low. You could even completely run out of food and still have everyone survive

We can’t afford to screw up anything to mars when there is no Interaction and it takes 18 months or more to make a change. Imagine if there’s a medical Emergency or the garden dies: 18 months is a really long time. Everything you send there is correspondingly more expensive and everything needs to much more stock in case anything goes wrong. There are many more possible issues to plan and prepare for. This will be especially expensive until we develop in-situ resource usage

And we don’t even know if people could survive that long

• mars has no magnetic field so both moon and mars are fully exposed to radiation, but an astronaut needs to survive like 3 years of it to goto mars
• we know that microgravity causes long term health issues limiting long term presence in orbit. But we don’t know how much gravity is enough to prevent those issues. Going to the moon is short enough to not worry and gives us a second data point. Going to mars is long enough to be a serious problem if it’s gravity is not enough

But in the other hand mars is smarter because more gravity and more resources. If you believe we should eventually have colonies in space, that will never happen on the moon but might on mars

The huge potential of helium-3 is for nuclear fusion. Yet we don’t have fusion reactors that use helium-3 and fusion is “20 years away”. We could get to mars before needing this is any quantity