Personal vehicles will be getting both bigger and smaller. What's different from the past is that electric motors scale much better than IC engines. Both the world's smallest vehicles (kid's toys) and the largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are both electric.
First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.
Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.
I think the recent electric scooter boom and subsequent pushback by communities shows that:
- There is (IMHO huge) pent-up demand for last-mile style electric transportation: scooters, bicycles, etc.
- The electric drive technology is starting to reach a point where it can support a whole new space of designs that make this sort of transportation appealing to a wide variety of users (i.e. not just fit young adventurous people; the elderly, young children, etc.)
- Sadly, infrastructure, laws, and social norms move way too slowly and are the limiting factor for what could be a major quality-of-life improvement for many many people.
Note that "EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane ... probably less than $10k." is a pretty good description for the electric cargo bikes that are already starting to emerge.
I would love to see cities and towns adapt faster to accommodate things like this:
Electric cargo bikes solve so many problems I don't even know where to begin. Faster than cars in traffic, cheaper, easier to service, extremely flexible in configuration, modular, hackable, healthier, quieter, etc. They can carry a week's worth of grocerys and you don't even need to sweat. I have lost track of all the companies popping up in the last years with new products in the space like urban arrow [1], onomotion [2], babboe [3], carla cargo [4].
I am amazed by the Bakfiets, but i am confused at why delivery guys aren't already using it, there must be some reason for why these are unusable in other countries, like, here in italy we see delivery guys everyday and i think that if someone found it useful they would've already started using it, so, why not?
What is keeping people from using the Bakfiets?
There MUST be a reason for this.
If you're ever in San Francisco, Miami, or NYC, check out what Revel is doing. Electric mopeds that rent for $0.50/min! They're such an excellent way to get around and see the city (at least in San Francisco where I ride them)
Tesla RV for 70k?
Can you teleport me into your alternate universe, please? ;)
Different brand might make more sense, but even those will probably cost you at least doulbe that, unless you're maybe only talking about certain climate zones, bare minimum living standards and an abhorrent range together with some other bad tradeoff decisions regarding price vs. quality.
Or maybe in a decade or two (at today's prices/without inflation).
Also, others made the point already about rent for the space to park on (most likely outcome would be high taxes and rent for RV parks (don't think they'd be much more efficient than regular housing on a sqft basis, especially if you're not putting them on top of each other, Ready Player One style).
Also, others made the point already about rent for the space to park on (most likely outcome would be high taxes and rent for RV parks
I can't speak for everyone but the way I would circumvent that would be to buy a piece of unrestricted or minimally restricted land that allows an RV as a primary dwelling. This requires some research on youtube among the existing RV nomads. Non-farmable land is very affordable. Some states are stricter on this than others and some counties within those states also vary a bit. Land is an investment vs dumping money into rental space. A few acres of land, some solar panels on the RV and some next to it should provide enough power to get by. The missing piece is water and one can plonk down a large water tank and have a truck come out to fill it every 3 to 6 months and/or do rain capture assuming one knows how to implement proper filtration. Some states promote rain capture and some ban it. Many RV's already support composting toilets and have grey/black water tanks. Some states will require installing a septic system, whereas some states have rules on the books but nobody to enforce it. I would suggest also having an EV motorcycle or street legal side-by-side for going into town for groceries. That requires some research as well as to which of those is supported by that state/county/province. For internet there are 4G/5G modems specifically designed for RV's and boats that have multiple external roof mounted antennas and can use multiple SIM cards.
Plenty of people/road-nomads already do this. They have a piece of land that is their legal domicile and sometimes they just stay put on that piece of land. My preference if I went this route would be to have a hybrid RV for times when solar is not cutting it.
The downside of all this would be finding people that can perform advanced maintenance on the RV and staying close enough that a towing job would not be crazy expensive. Some mechanics can bring a subset of their tools out to the remote location. I would suggest researching RV's that are based on common platforms. The upside is that one could research which states have the most conducive weather, taxes, laws, culture, etc... and if any of that changes, just buy land in a better state, pack up your solar panels and move there. When the market is right, sell the previous few acres of land and the old tank. Tanks are affordable and it's easier to just buy a new one than to clean and move the old one. Another potential downside to putting an RV in the middle of nowhere is that when dodgy people find out someone is alone and isolated, they become a target. One has to be ready to defend themselves. Try to find a piece of land that is not visible from any of the roads.
My recommendation is just learn how to repair the RV yourself. RVIA has an online cert program you can take for $300.
I know how to repair RVs and I just had to pay $6700 to repair a $55K RV before selling it. Do not underestimate how expensive RVs are to pay someone to fix.
That's awesome that you did your own training. Agreed the RV's, especially the less common platforms are crazy expensive to have someone repair and that is assuming one can even find a mechanic that will touch it. That's why I suggest using a common platform if one can manage having a smaller RV. One example would be RV's based on the Ford F450/550 platform [1]. There are plenty of Ford mechanics and I envision Ford some day having an EV or hybrid version of the example I linked. Linking overpriced example, there are more affordable examples
The people that build "custom schoolies" are especially on their own unless they are part of many forums/facebook groups of schoolies and can find a mechanic that knows how to work on school buses.
- Busses. How do you make them half width? (or perhaps, uncharitably, do you think public transportation is worthless?). If busses stay the same width how do you write the driving regulations for mixed width vehicles and retrain the driving public so that fatalities do not skyrocket.
- Bulk delivery vehicles. Same as above.
- Half width means less vehicle stability at speed. Reducing vehicle height is constrained by human size. Worse stability means reduced speeds to reduce fatalities. Consider San Francisco, where a large proportion of the city cars are from commuters traveling 30-60 miles per day. What are the rules for commuter roads with mixed width vehicles?
- Reduced width would likely mean smaller wheels, increasing rotational speed. Tire and brake pad wear is now a non-trivial factor of car pollution. Half width vehicles would / could make this worse.
very unsure if half width vehicles will become a thing, but what's for sure is that micromobility will expand. We will see more electric scooters, ebikes etc. They solve so many traffic and environmental problems in cities.
I wish there was something to make smaller vehicles more palatable. Where I live everyone drives huge vehicles. They need the AWD or 4wd for traction in the winter. They probably don’t need to be F150 size and above for that though. I’m thinking like a weight/size tax on registration.
Many US states have weight/size taxes and fines that are still "on the books" but haven't been enforced in decades. Maybe as gas taxes drop below certain funding goals they will re-evaluate enforcing them.
but this is just a bandaid on a much larger problem: our cities and highway system were designed and built in eras where the amount of cars on the road was a fraction of what it is now. I-95 has become a complete abomonation, and some e-scooters and bikes wont fix that
I really wanted to get an electric motorcycle, but the current market leader charges $20k for something that can get to highway speeds and go 70-80 miles on a charge. I'll have to stick to my $9k ICE motorcycle for now, unfortunately.
A desiel semi is much lighter than an Electric Semi is. That's why Tesla Semi hasn't launched yet. They are currently trying to change the regulation for maximum allowances on US Roads from 10k to 14k.
The Delta-V on an electric vehicle has the problem that the battery scales more proportionately to weight and range than a desiel equivelent. Desiel gas has a tremendous amount of energy stored so compactly that is impossible to match with electric batterys.
On the other hand Volvo (and Scania) launched electric trucks years ago and I see them driving around all the time. So whatever is preventing Tesla trucks from launching it is related to them and their design and goals, not a fundamental problem with the concept of electric trucks.
You have to compare the compact stored energy of liquid fuels after it gets converted to useful forward motion via a heavy, noisy, inefficient, costly to maintain and fuel engines.
It's basically a thought terminating cliche at this point.
ICE cars are way lighter than EV cars with a reasonable range. It's not a cliche, it's a true constraint of reality, which EV enthusiasts decoupled from reality frequently seem to forget.
Efficient from a energy perspective != efficient from a convenience perspective.
Hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense and cheap. It’s possible to pack so much more energy in such a lighter, more compact space with them that the overall vehicle can be dramatically lighter and have longer range at the same time.
Additionally, doing so is so cheap, it often more than makes up for any efficiency issues, especially if the comparatively better end to end efficiency (and lower pollution and maintenance costs) of a EV comes with convenience issues like reduced range, lack of infrastructure, etc.
For mid-sized commuter vehicles, it’s trending more and more towards EVs as prices drop, charging infrastructure improves, and usage patterns make it convenient (such as at-home or at-office charging).
It still has a way to go for things like commercial or heavy recreational trucks, RVs, etc. It also has a way to go in smaller vehicles like Motorcycles, where the reduced range (due to some pretty fundamental weight limits) makes them more suitable for moped like inner city commuting or very short range trips.
And that’s compared to normally aspirated gasoline. It’s harder still to beat diesel, especially if super/turbo charged which has better energy efficiency, higher energy density, and except for some jurisdictions cheaper fuel prices.
“Halving” vehicles has been possible for long time, also seen it mentioned numerous times over the years. Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car, odd of person in small car dying are much higher. Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society.
As for the RV, you still need parking and most people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. Most cities are already strict on RV living, especially long term local RV living; if it became even more popular, they would become even more strict. RV also are impossible to insulate, as a result, frequently follow the weather; majority of people don’t want to be constantly driving around to find and adjust to a new location.
> Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society.
In fact, you already have no right to drive whatever kind of vehicle you want on public roads. There's no part of daily life that's more regulated. And there's no interesting argument about freedom to be had here. We build the roads as a society, so we have every reason to make rules about what kinds of vehicles are allowed on those roads.
Today, we allow an absurd range of plainly unsafe vehicles on our roads, but I think the status quo is untenable. As technology makes the cars safer it's going to be harder and harder to justify allowing giant vehicles piloted entirely at the discretion of flawed humans. In a world where the car knows you're asking it to speed up into a crosswalk full of children and can prevent you from doing it, it's basically absurd to insist that the car should instead respond only to the driver's whims. What I'm trying to say is that size is just one aspect of this. We need to entirely rethink what we're allowing on public roads.
Driving in general is completely unnecessary and results in all sorts of less than desirable outcomes. If it was up to me, whole industry would disappear unless the vehicles were for industrial or military use only, no were near humans, autonomously driven, zero emissions, etc.
Largest issue is not even death and pollution, it’s that they literally enable culture division and isolation - which is toxic to real progress.
> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen
It has already happened. I drive an ebike in Paris almost every day. It's even smaller than a "half vehicle" and has absolutely zero protection, save for the helmet. I wouldn't trade an ebike for a "thin car" though, because an ebike can go anywhere. It's an incredible level of freedom.
> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car, odd of person in small car dying are much higher. Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society.
Some people are already driving smaller cars than I imagined we'd be comfortable with, but I can see ways to ease more people into the idea of trading their safety for a smaller car. High gas prices help, but things like reducing lane sizes just enough to make driving smaller cars feel more comfortable, but not enough to be too dangerous for larger vehicles, increasing the amount of small car only parking spaces, and lots of advertising money would probably convince a lot of people small cars are what they want. If car manufactures start making more and more tiny cars (especially inexpensive cars) many people aren't going to have much of a choice. I'm pretty sure most of the American public could be sold on it eventually if someone were willing to spend the money.
Too true. It not possible to reach any sensible climate goals by replacing all gasoline cars with EVs. We need to rethink mobility. And we need smaller vehicles in order to optimize battery-weight/transported persons/goods. And we need new solutions to safety instead of adding bulkier safety devices, which drag down transportation efficiency. Limit top speed?
commented further up with a similar sentiment but i'll comment here too. "rethinking mobility" will not fix how idiotically layed out most of our existing infrastructure exists today - especially large sprawling haphazardly built cities like LA and Austin
> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car
There's no need to imagine what that that would be like, because the situation has existed for years already: what you describe is just everyday reality for motorcyclists.
Will there ever be more than a fringe of the population willing to be exposed to the mortality risks motorcyclists are exposed to? Last time i looked your chance of being killed is an order of magnitude higher on a motorcycle.
That's as it may be, and it varies by culture, but it is clear that there can be no requirement for an "authoritarian society" before there could be smaller/narrower vehicles sharing the roads with larger ones, as this is already commonplace in many different kinds of societies around the world. In some places motorcycles/mopeds/tuktuks are more common than full size cars.
Some cities like Austin, TX allow RVs within the city if you have enough setbacks.
Personally, it's quite easy to buy a small amount of land in unincorporated county land that's very close to a city. I did, and I can hit downtown in under 20 min. I wasn't even trying to optimize for distance, if I was I'd have bought 5 acres at 10 min out.
Electric RVs require: parking, charging facilities, sanitary facilities, and maintenance.
A few people with "camp mode" is a complete different proposition to millions of people with mobile homes. Not to say it couldn't be done, but cities would have to become mobile labour camps and the infrastructure costs would be significant - mostly the cost of space formerly used by brick and mortar real estate.
And owners would be charged rent for use of facilities. So that $70k is not going to be rent free.
all of this is likely to happen in Europe/China, much less in US where corporations still rule and there are much less federal rules, and almost no chance in most of Africa/MiddleEast/India which have no infrastructure for this.
How is living in an EV RV any different from living in a motor home today? Most people want an actual home/apt not a cramped car with no space, its not the same thing at all.
The Battery RV thing will probably hit the same issue as people who already tried this housing hack, legal bans.
They're still going back and forth in the courts but Mountain View, LA, San Diego and probably other such places that become the next target will probably fight this legally, for the same reasons they fight any other type of cheap housing.
I think this is a good insight, and I hope this comes to pass, but a couple points:
> the world's largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are electric
What about cruise ships, freighters, freight trains, and aircraft carriers? They're diesel or nuclear-powered. Or maybe nuclear still counts as having an electric motor, just with a nuclear generator instead of a battery?
> only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core
Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
Yes there are a lot of corner cases that I didn't belabor in my post. Most of the very heavy vehicles you mention are in fact already diesel electric. ie a diesel motor operates as a generator to provide electricity for the electric motor that moves things along. Just replace the diesel with a battery and you're there. (not as simple as it seems but right in theory)
With small cars in a city core these cars rarely go faster than 40 mph and on average about 30mph with traffic lights so you don't need the separation that you would want on a freeway. Several vehicles like this are already available or under development. I suspect that a Smart Car would come very close to meeting this spec already.
> Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
Probably would be a problem. I don't know that the author was thinking "a car that is half the width of a normal car" as "a vehicle that takes up substantially less space". Perhaps we'll all be riding around in Go-Karts, who knows? :)
Freight trains are also electric, just with diesel generators. I'll completely speculate 2 things that stand in the way of them going fully electric:
1. Trains derail, crash, etc.
I live in a city that's a rail hub. We probably have a derailment every couple years even with annual rail/rail bed maintenance. They will fix the rail, the roads around it, and have everything back up and running in less than 2 days. You spill some diesel and it sucks to clean up. You spill Li and you walk into "environmental disaster."
2. Money. When it's cheaper, then they'll get serious.
To the last point it's similar to fleet vehicles for large fleets. You see a lot of pledges to go all-electric by 20XX. That's because replacing a fleet requires a TON of capital already, and fundamentally changing the vehicles is an order of magnitude higher.
Think about a delivery hub like the post office. They have a network already established for purchasing gasoline, delivering it, local storage, refueling process, etc. They have operations built around it.
You now likely have to have parallel infrastructure for electric, which means negotiating major power consumption with each local power company, purchase of new or adjacent land, buildout, etc. Can you refuel in the same time window to not effect operations? If not, can you shift operations without impacting customer experience?
Now, you will see companies deploying all-electric in niches, especially when it opens up new market opportunities. Those tiny urban vehicles could enable vehicles to go where they could not before, reducing time spent walking. And that might have a shorter timeline than autonomous drones that don't run old ladies over.
I think even more than cruise ships and freighters, the biggest all-electric vehicle impact would come from all-electric airplanes. They still haven't gotten off of leaded fuel (see #2). The emissions there are massive.
But I think #1 will be a barrier there too. And the bureaucracy will slow it way down just like it did with unleaded jet fuel, which exists now, but is essentially unused.
And I guess a theme I'm coming up with is that electric is cool and all, but won't impact big % points of emissions until it's adopted by cargo, not human transport.
And cases like trains and large ships that are electric, but fuel the local electric with local power generation bring up the other big point: How would we even begin to power cargo? It's orders of magnitude more massive than consumer vehicles and it's growing so fast that supply can't meet demand.
Anyway, whatever. I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be an expert on any of this, and I'm rambling.
Trains would not be battery operated and have no risk of spilling the toxic battery components. They'd be powered by third rail or overhead wires. That is how most pure electric trains are powered today already.
It's also how cars could be operated - either by overhead or (more likely) inductive pick-up.
The battery concept is kind of dumb and a relic of IC engine thinking. For local urban journeys you could half-size the cars, provide common power, and add automated navigation to optimise density and efficiency.
Getting rid of batteries would hugely lower cost and weight.
Wiring sucks and is faulty. It's already a problem with mass transit-systems today. Wiring the whole city? Good luck not burning down the city because of stupid people doing stupid things. The demand for independent vehicles still remain in the city, at least in the next decades. And batteries are at the moment the only viable technology for this. Hydrogen might become another solution, or maybe one of the magic fuels in development turns out to be real and useful, who knows.
honestly many are, they are just producing their electricity on-site using other fuels :) u can't realy store enough energy in a battery to cruise the atlantic.
EDIT - think of nuclear submarine as a swimming nuclear power plant
Please change electric to battery powered... I don't think the largest mining trucks are battery powered. They have diesel generators that power an electric drivetrain.
It depends upon where you are loading up your material. There are huge electric dump trucks that make more electricity carrying material down the mountain than they need to us to drive empty back up the mountain (45 ton eDumper).
Energy? I feel like it's been talked about a lot but maybe not?
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
This is actually talked about on every HN energy thread and it’s now incorrect, particularly about batteries.
Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.
But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.
Over the course of 10-15 years, I don't think you're correct. Solar is (in my opinion conservatively) expected to drop by 34% by 2030 [0] and, though I'm having trouble finding anything that spells it outright, demand and production of batteries is projected to increase dramatically that will, in my opinion, most likely allow for production efficiencies to reduce cost.
Even the video you link claims to be 'bullish' on production. I didn't see any claims about price in the future, just production, though I might have missed it.
In my opinion, we're seeing a lot of 'whiplash' effects from the supply chain issues but, as the pandemic recedes, these should resolve in the next couple of years.
I am quite bullish on long-term battery production as well. But I recognize that we are heading for some pain in the near-term where supply will not keep up with demand.
I like that solar analysis, but I also think it is possible that the high demand for solar and high commodity (energy, etc) costs could continue to stop solar prices from dropping for much of this decade just as we have seen recently.
The temporary whiplash concept for inflation hasn't panned out yet. I follow Lyn Alden's economic analysis closely and she has been predicting this decade to be inflationary. These predictions started over a year ago when the Fed kept saying that inflation was temporary.
Tangentially related, there are a bunch of calculators out there for ROI on installing solar, but there doesn't seem to be one that will take into account the opportunity cost of installing solar now instead of waiting until it's cheaper. I would love to see one for that.
I've been thinking about this a lot with the current congressional action. I need a new roof ~now. But I have a lingering fear that huge product improvement will happen in the next 18 months due to added government money. I don't know enough about the industry to weight in that possibility.
I'd absolutely do it now. The price of solar has been beneath that of racks, mounts, wiring and installation for a while now. Even assuming a major breakthrough your costs probably wont change that much because panel cost isnt a big % of what your costs will be anyway.
There's also a risk that supply chain bottlenecks/cold war with china will drive up the cost & your electric bill is only gonna go up.
Agreed, do it now. The cost of panels in Australia is already going up due to supply issues thanks to covid, and I don't think you'll see prices come down again for a few years even with that investment.
Hopefully the other pieces get cheap enough to enable some revolution in the wiring side of it. Falling costs enable some acceptable loss of efficiency, so you can blow 100W on unnecessary power conversion and another 100W or whatever on losses due to smaller cabling.
It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.
So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).
I saw an article recently (here maybe?) that the world could switch to 100% green energy and make the investment back in 6 years. I haven't looked at the math behind it, and actually getting that many solar panels up is going to take some time too, but it really seems to me like this is the main thing we should all be focusing on right now. Because of high fossil energy prices, getting rid of Russian gas, and of course because of climate change. Three very big reasons to go all out on clean energy.
That just another "study" of Jacobson, the Stanford professor that sue other scientists when they criticise one of its study and make Stanford pay for the lost lawsuit. Anyway his work is just not very good, unrealistic assumption everywhere, there a better energy modeler out there, look at the work of Jessie Jenkins, Tom Brown, NREL, Clack....
Something about this cannot be right, surely?
You are saying one can invest in a solar setup and have 7+ years of free electricity, and all that starting after 3.5 years?
I would be very suspicious around claims from people trying to sell you solar panels. There are a lot of incentives in the US such as tax credits. This is good but a lot of people in green energy industry include that into calculations, which is fine except its under the assumption that the incentive will persist. Even Tesla shows you "net effective" price of their car by calculating the gas savings (e.g. Model 3 purchase price is 47k but they "potential savings" price is 38k which include potential incentives and gas savings of $8,600)
There are other gotchas like PACE loans being senior to your mortgage. So if you get a PACE loan, the loan is transferred to the person buying the home and is senior to your mortgage.
I'm also suspicious around the maintenance and longevity claims. For instance, from my experience, the energy efficient light bulbs do not live up to to their claims. I changed about half of my lightbulbs within three years and they supposedly have a 20+ year lifespan. It's fine that they don't have a crazy lifespan, but it just shows the industry is okay with outright false claims.
Overall I think the industry is so juiced by incentives and manipulated by regulations that it attracts shady players.
LED bulbs can last 20 years if they're designed to. Most of what is sold is generally very low quality, with poor heat management, low quality power
circuitry and excessive load on the LEDs, which all result in shortened life. It's a shame. Some of the first bulbs I got were good quality and I still have them in frequent use 10+ years later. Many others have been quickly failing junk.
I have been living fully off solar (and some wind here and there) for 10 years. Its amazing. Never do I stress powerlines going down, brownouts, etc.
You can run a fridge, lights and a laptop 24.7 on about $300 of solar. You can add panels as your needs and budget increases. The biggest cost is the battery.
Do you have a writeup of your setup? Do you use lead acid for your batteries?
Besides the money issue, the biggest concern I have are balancing the batteries, getting the right inverters, keeping the panels clear and figuring out what inefficiencies are during the non-summer seasons.
I'd check out Lithium Solar on youtube - he's got a fairly comprehensive set of videos on almost every topic regarding batteries, inverters and general setup.
I'd love to learn more about your setup. I'm very interested in investing in a solar + battery self-sufficient setup for myself, but without electrical engineering experience it's quite intimidating.
Likewise, I have been living off-grid with solar for well over 20 years.
My batteries have always been lead-acid, simply because L.A. is still much cheaper than Lithium and alternatives.
I've recently taken my first set of Lead-Acid batteries out of service. They powered a small fridge, etc, via 200W of solar panels for over 20 years with essentially zero maintenance, except for occasional top-up of distilled water.
Inverters were a problem at first. I had a series of Inverters die over the years, until I started buying Victron products. Have had zero problems since. Rule one, is "don't buy cheap inverters".
The best part is that secondhand solar panels are now very cheap. The reason is that Gov regulations for grid-tie prohibits the use of second-hand panels, so people doing upgrades will basically throw away their old panels.
My setup runs a conventional fridge/freezer, and a large computer which is on-line for most of the day, as well as my workshop full of electrical tools. I do have a large generator, but the only time it gets run is when I have some welding to do. I don't even gave a battery charger hooked to it.
There are so many myths about solar: Lead-Acid batteries don't last as they are destroyed by deep-cycles. Yes, but when you size the system, you should aim for a deep discharge maybe once a month. This still should result in twenty years life or so. I live in a wet and cloudy part of Australia, and this winter my batteries have never been as low as 80% capacity, and it is rare if the batteries haven't returned to 100% charge by 10:00am each day.
Probably the main problem with solar is that people are stupid. One of my neighbours installed a modest solar system, only to have it regularly fail due to low battery voltage. Long story short: The supplier fitted a Watt meter which tracked the consumption at each outlet. It showed that that the problem was in his daughter's bedroom. A quick search revealed a huge radiator under her bed that she was running each night. Problem solved.
I'd be curious what your wind setup looks like. I have some land off grid which gets good wind, and I'm trying to decide whether that could be a reasonable alternative to solar. I don't see nearly as much information about residential wind turbines as I do solar.
Sorry, but no. If anything solar gear has got cheaper in recent times. Secondhand Solar Panels are almost free at present. And the price of batteries is dropping fast.
It's not wildly far off but I think his battery costs are a stretch. In fact double that would be a challenge to have a quality and reliable system. But it is definitely lass than 3x. Right now the best value for batteries I'm getting is 0.18 per w/h. To get 0.08 you would have to doing something like recycling small cell or ev batteries which isn't necessarily scalable and comes with some risks.
Panel costs are accurate and the additional electronic expense is not super high. $1000 should be enough for most setups.
For most people the issue is space. This is going to be another thing where the poor are taxed. A significant amount of single family residences dropping off the grid will cause prices to go up for the people that don't have the luxury of 4000 sq ft to fill with solar panels.
The $0.08wh is something that you have to hunt around for.
Just a cursory look on Aliexpress gives $0.12wh for LiFePo4 batteries [0] [1].
Looking on Alibaba, I see some potential sellers that might get below that $0.12 but it takes looking around and potentially talking with sellers. I do think it's possible but it requires some hunting, especially in the 'consumer' quantities we're talking about (sub qty 100).
One reason is that this will make it a matter of survival for energy companies and governments to mandate connection to the grid and buying of electricity, for fear of having these critical companies fail.
Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free.
Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.
PV can scale down pretty far, yeah, but it can also scale up. Having guys crawl around on rooftops trying not to damage your shingles is a lot more expensive than just setting up some panels in a field. The majority of PV getting installed is utility-scale, not household-scale, so you can buy cheap PV energy and live half a block from a supermarket and half a block from a chichi cafe.
As for costs, there's been concern for more than a decade about the "utility death spiral" scenario: some users disconnecting from a grid would spread the fixed costs of things like transmission and black start over a smaller number of remaining users, leading more of them to disconnect, and so on. So far it hasn't materialized anywhere, but as far as I know it could. I don't think the same scenario is likely with "legacy energy" like gasoline and natural gas, because the fixed costs are so low.
Taxation of energy is a big revenue stream for the governments. What happens when people start putting independent energy sources to power themselves and it causes significant revenue drop ? Would the government tax them for putting up solar on their property ? Couple this with electrification of transportation and you have another taxation source (fossil fuels) losing revenue. This would lead to a disruption in the social power dynamics in a country.
Yes, energy companies can invest in these too, but why would I buy from them if I have my own generation ?
Fuel tax will definitely be replaced with some other form of car tax, at least in most of Europe. I don't see any way around that.
But I don't quite see how free countryside electricity would mean expensive electricity in cities? Large scale wind and solar will decrease grid prices too, and most people live in cities anyway so the people dropping off grid doesn't seem like an issue for electricity transfer costs. Plus off-grid won't happen anywhere with a real winter, so most of Europe is excluded already.
Of course they will, but energy companies have a larger minimum capital expenditure than a household looking to invest in generation. And the energy company will likely still carry the full cost of transporting energy, which becomes more expensive with more energy sources connecting to the grid.
It would be a change in the dynamics of economies of scale vs small and nimble, greater lobbying power is one thing economies of scale still have a big advantage in so GP's comment seems plausible.
Exactly. There will be no need for "legacy" energy. Companies that are too invested in fossil energy can die and be replaced with companies that invested in solar.
I'm not sure about the US as installation costs there are very expensive, but in my part of Europe I had 10kW of roof mount solar installed for €10,800 at the end of last year.
The calculations I did for it in 2020 were that the payback period would be 7 years, or 6 with government incentives. That was when electricity was 15c/kWh though... if energy prices stay at the current level I will break even in less than 4 years. I generate around 8000kWh a year, which at current prices is €3200.
The panels should last forever (assuming no physical damage from hail storms etc), they just decrease in efficiency. The inverter should last at least 10 years, but that's easy to replace as it's not on the roof.
I did qualify that this was not including labor and the other hardware and electronics needed for such a system.
The (relatively) high cost is most likely because of labor and (in my opinion) inflated hardware costs of battery and solar panels.
Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
One could also imagine that the costs of labor being subsumed by a larger entity that can take advantage of economies of scale and provide solar energy like a "classic" energy company. I believe something like that is already happening in the region where I live (upstate New York, USA).
For places where labor might be cheaper, then total costs would also come closer to raw hardware costs.
> Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
Installing high-wattage DC lines without any training at all is a great way to get house fires.
Also, I haven't got whole lot of un-shaded roof space.
I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
People do all sorts of home renovation with lighting, fuse boxes, outlets and the like. I don't want to dismiss safety concerns but at the same time this is well within scope of many home owners.
> I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I think this is a really good question and I don't know the answer to it.
My not-very-well-informed opinion is that there are a confluence of factors involved:
* Infrastructure buildout, especially in the USA where the infrastructure projects take massive amounts of effort and the population is spread out over a large area of land, takes a lot of time, effort and money.
* The prices involved aren't as lucrative yet as they could be. When the price per MWh is 1/10 that of coal, then we'll see huge rollout (in my opinion).
* Adoption/rollout is happening but, in some places at least, there's government capture preventing widespread rollout/adoption (Pennsylvania?)
* Aging infrastructure prevents large scale energy injection at random points.
To the last point, here in New York state, I've heard one has to pay to first do a survey if the site where you want to build a solar array can actually inject that much more energy into the grid (at a cost of $10k+ or more) and even then, you're limited by what the aging energy infrastructure can support, capping the amount of energy available.
As someone who does lots of home renovation solar is not even close to in the same league as other types of work. Speaking as someone who has put in new circuits into a live panel.
First off you need roofing skills, which 99% of homeowners have no idea how to do safely, often needs specialized equipment, and you run the risk of falling off and basically paralyzing yourself for life. Then you have the issue of having run conduit correctly, grounding everything to code, having disconnects installed in the right places, which is going to vary from state to state and even city to city based on what the laws are.
If you don't electrocute yourself, and manage to not fall off the roof and die, and somehow connect everything correctly, there is approximately 0% chance the local utility agrees to connect your system without a licensed electrician who is willing to vouch for the work you did.
I absolutely appreciate all these risks. I have seen ads tho for diy solar where companies give you a kit and help you work through the permitting process. Also a couple YouTubers documenting the process.
Land is expensive. I am actually surprised why the companies don't lease home solar panel kits, e.g. you sign up and they install at minimal cost, and you pay for the electricity generated by the solar panels, but at a reduced rate compared to the grid. The ownership of the panels stay with the company leases them.
Those structures do exist, but they're not normally popular. Look for "power purchase agreement" solar plans. Normally those involve some pretty long contracts that are hard to get out of, contracts transfer to the new owner of the house so it can make your house less desirable, often require you to buy all the power they generate even if you don't need it all, need to call their contractors to remove the panels whenever you need roofing work done, you've got a lot of equipment in your house that isn't yours.
I wouldn't do it. I don't need yet another interested party when trying to sell my house eventually, and I don't want to scare off would-be buyers with potentially complicated contract terms.
Was in a mega rental house and my wife burned her hand on the wall. Someone prior had done some diy electric work. The diy gas lines is what got us in the end.
$4,200 is _very_ optimistic for the panel/battery cost for a 30kWh system. The GP comment also conveniently excluded "labor and extra hardware/electronics". There's a lot more that goes into a solar power system (especially one that has to manage batteries) than just slapping the panels on the roof and dropping the batteries off in the garage. Inverters, chargers, grid integration equipment, etc.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "just" labor. You're talking about a critical system, that has the possibility of seriously injuring someone (including folks outside your house) or causing extensive property damage if not installed correctly. That seems like a thing where skilled (and fairly compensated) installers and some degree of regulation is very appropriate.
I would like to see a more in depth treatment than what I've seen (or what I've thought about).
Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.
In terms of the wires in urban centers, I don't have a good sense. I can see where you might be right but at the same time, that infrastructure is already there and there are efficiencies to be gained by not transporting electricity over many miles of copper.
I also agree that the social aspect but there's a large pressure to find solutions because energy costs are going to be dropping by an order of magnitude or more.
> Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.
Your going to need very long electric lines, to send clean energy from places where its sunny to places where it cloudy, or from places where its windy, to places where its currently calm.
Sorry, I'm not quite sure I understand your point.
There are places that have so much cloud cover year round that it makes solar adoption there effectively impossible? The frequency of these places is such that their energy needs requires the infrastructure remain in place?
This is something that I think has basically flown under the radar of mainstream understanding: you can now live "off the grid" and have many of the perks that used to be the domain of grid-connected living.
Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.
You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.
The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.
It was created as a decentralized network, but is it now? It may be in some technical sense, but for all practical purposes, it's collectively centralized.
One interesting documentary on this topic is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Every Loving Grace.
Panels are dropping but installation costs have not. Now more than have of the cost is installation. The real impact will be with the utility size installations. We need a way to reduce cost for all the other costs outside the panels.
I have mixed feelings on the tech. The home security implications are amazing, and things like automatic fall detection for the elderly would be a literal lifesaver. Small business could gain great insight into customer behavior.
On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people?
Anyway, Plume already makes a home security system that utilizes the tech.
I remember interviewing for shopping centre chain (mall). They had this in 2018 already. It had an accuracy of +/- 1m but they had ways to normalise it to the layout of the store. Didn't require them to even be on the network just have their wifi on.
They not only used it to price their storefronts but also they also could tell their renters which parts of the store had higher traffic. Meaning they would know what sells better, where people go from which section. It's literally web analytics but irl.
This specific tech - WLAN sensing - tracks the signal disruptions caused by the water in our bodies. This makes it quite different than all previous techs that require the target to have a broadcasting device or other ping-able tracker. Reportedly, even pets are easily identifiable.
I had no idea about this and the implications are truly terrifying and amazing.
Its not just wifi at home the entire world is now a big mesh network. So theoretically it means literally everything everywhere which has wifi coverage can now be tracked with amazing accuracy. Quite possibly the most scary/invasive tech.
meh, the FBI, CIA, and all big tech already know you are at home... does it really matter if they know you are on the couch or at your dining room table?
> On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people?
I would imagine you just take the "country/private club" model and extend it out.
e.g. a private club enforces limits on who can access the club and you get more "privacy" since the other people in the club also had to pass through those limits.
In this case, the club/hotel/builder of your house can say "the walls are all Faraday rated so that you get audio, visual and EM privacy when you stay here"
Not the person you're replying to, but if you're willing to do that to your walls, you're probably willing to pay for an external antenna and internal transmitter
Tooling for developing real-time collaborative remote working environments is about to take of dramatically.
CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market.
Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view.
CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free.
The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps.
Did this 20 years ago in an FMMS. It's not worth it. It's better to have an arbiter source of truth that can guarantee ACID principles with transactions rather than introduce merge conflicts or lose transactions for lack of synchronization. The internet is almost everywhere, so use that rather than provide academic features that cause more headaches than they solve. SQL databases with transactions and row locks are invaluable inventions.
Also, if you want to collaborate, synergize, innovate, and revolutionize consider OTs. They're a known quantity. Handling merges of data is fraught with landmines.
You can't sell 2 of something to the same person offline and know if they wanted 1 or 2. Plus, giving an end user the ability to resolve merge conflicts is asking for theft and fraud.
i don’t want to realtime collab. i want to concentrate and get my shit done. slack is a nightmare for example. there is always a fool constantly interrupting your flow.
You might be missing the point. Some examples of realtime collaboration in the world of remote work can be: google docs / sheets, project boards (trello, miro), whiteboarding (jamboard, zoom), design/drawing, or even coding (VS code sharing).
Collaborative content creation in tools like Miro/Lucid can work well, especially when on an audio call at the same time. It’s the best execution of the whiteboard experience in a remote working environment that I have experienced so far.
The same technology that makes realtime collaboration (e.g., figma) go is the technology that makes it possible to build high performance single-user apps that you can open on your phone and desktop at the same time (e.g., roam). It's collaboration whether it's two users or two devices from the same user.
The web will go multiplayer because it's the only way to make high performance UIs that are multi-device without locking. The multi-user realtime collaboration bit just comes along for the ride.
Agreed. I chunk slack messaging the same way I do email. I have two channels that I'll take realtime notifications on, but if someone raises those flags without very.good.reason, they'll hear about it. I generally won't see anything on those channels more than once a month.
For special 'war room' projects I'll set up a special channel that I'll pay attention to for real time colab, but those are very unusual situations with a well defined end date.
Sync work process is inefficient. 80% of the time I would define work process to be asynchronous e.g. with git branch, pull request, docs, backlogs. This is efficient collaboration.
Real-time collaborative tool is a thing but not going to be big.
Pair designing could happen while meeting where there's not only approval process but also some tweaks here and there. In normal workflow, work should be done as single responsibility (feature) per designer. Synchronous workflow within tool is not that better than it's done by talking (letting 1 person doing it)
I'm not nearly educated enough about this subject to try to summarise it, but the research being carried out by Michael Levin's group into how organisms control anatomy growth is completely fascinating and has the feel of a breakthrough. Almost all the talks I've seen are good, for example:
This one is the winner for me in the thread. I saw a video of it a while ago and I was fascinated by the idea that voltage differences are the way the DNA gets expressed. Yet nobody seems to be taking about the bioelectrical science of it except for this small academic crowd.
I am also not nearly educated enough, and also following this work very closely. With the strides made in the past several years I'm always surprised I don't see it being discussed more (outside of a niche of academics)
Deconstruction of discourse: the vast majority of humans out of the decision loop.
All the main online sources are moving to subscription models with higher subscriptions for the real information. Only those with money will have access to information that informs decisions. At the low end, information is bundled only for its entertainment or propaganda value.
At the same time, decisions are increasingly automated as vast data streams are digested by automated processes.
20 or 100 years ago, people could stop work or stop buying or protest in the street. 20-100 years from now, there will be nothing the vast bulk of people can do to change their fate.
The resulting lack of citizen governance will at best be a world broken into geographic silos headed by corporate keiretsu.
So the next big technical thing will be domain-specific semantic models to drill down past what AI can do with probabilistic models -- just as the economy has moved well past bulk goods to bespoke services, e.g., the Nature article today providing a model for immune system cell-surface-protein interactions: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05028-x
I think it's worse. Pre-internet, people paid for access to the same information, information written by journalists, distributed by a select number of papers.
Today, and perhaps worse going forward, this is reversed: a select number of persons pay for access to journalistic quality. The rest consume what the market hands to them, for whatever underlying reason.
If you're correct, the current intermediate condition where people have removed themselves from the (true) information loop but remain in the decision loop is the scariest state in that decline.
DC home electricity. If your future home has solar and local storage, and your domestic usage is mostly in appliances which convert back down to DC immediately behind the plug socket (most of us have this) then at some point we're going to start wanting to power our homes like houseboats or camper vans.
Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside.
But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
> and your domestic usage is mostly in appliances which convert back down to DC immediately behind the plug socket (most of us have this) then at some point we're going to start wanting to power our homes like houseboats or camper vans.
Most of these appliances use low voltage which travels poorly over long distances. Your car, camper van, and boat all use ultra-thick cables to move 12 volts. This is quite uneconomical for anything larger than a small studio apartment. (Copper isn't cheap.)
Furthermore, note that I said "12 volts," which is what cars and capers use. (Not sure about boats.) Some DC appliances need 5 volts, some need 20... They'll all need converters.
So how are both of those problems solved? You'll probably send 100-200 volts, DC, though the wall! The big question is, does this really simplify anything? The big advantage with AC is that it's super-easy to change voltage with a simple transformer. What do we gain by going DC in the walls? Are there any real advantages in simplifying voltage conversion at appliances? Is it worth the added complexity of a whole-house AC-DC converter; or the complexity of a DC grid?
My thoughts exactly. A/C has some important electromagnetic characteristics that make it a lot easier to transport. Particularly for long distance lines, high voltage is critical and transformers make it trivial to modify voltage levels, such as to get to 120V for the house. it's also a lot easier to convert AC to DC than the other way around. If we start transporting with DC, we take on a number of problems/challenges that we don't deal with now.
I could see a point in time where there are AC outlets and DC outlets in a house depending on where the power comes from (power lines vs. solar panels/battery), but unless we radically decentralize (which I don't see happening) it seems unlikely to me that we switch to DC for long-distance power transmission.
Would it make sense to think about upping the line frequency ? IIRC Engineering 101 said that 50~60 Hz are frequencies most dangerous to humans; choosing a higher line frequency would be safer to work with and would (natch!) permit the use of thinner conductors.
> it's also a lot easier to convert AC to DC than the other way around. If we start transporting with DC, we take on a number of problems/challenges that we don't deal with now.
Which brings up a very good point: What happens when grid-scale battery storage is common? Does a DC grid make a lot more sense then?
Isn’t there also a marginal safety advantage for AC in that because it’s an alternating current, you can let go of whatever is live you’ve grabbed and is shocking you? Whereas with DC, your muscles stay contracted and you can’t let go.
It seems that other than a few power hungry appliances (oven, kettle, washing machine, heat pump, water heater, gaming PC) the rest are low-power digital devices that need up to about 200W (PS5 gaming console peak reported usage, even large TVs use much less than that).
I would love to see a comprehensive study of a home that would be designed and built around the concept of using two energy sources: AC and 48V DC, backed by battery storage and power grid in case of smaller installations or northern climate.
Would it make sense to do that on a large scale? Having smaller, energy efficient house should limit the need for long copper cables, we would also exclude all those AC-DC converters from today's devices - leaving us with something similar to a USB-C PD (working in the range 5-48V, which of course still is a converter but could be a standardized DC-DC one).
If I am correct then the main advantages would also include not running solar inverter all the time but only when there is a need for a lot of power (where it should be much more efficient) thus also extending its lifespan.
Having said that I do not have enough knowledge to judge whether possible gains would warrant going into this direction for future home installations. I would very much appreciate all comments and maybe some further reading material.
Sure, all my things may work with 12DC internally, but they expect 120AC (or w/e depending on country) at the plug, so I wouldn't be able to use them if I switch.
The idea being that consumer items will, more and more, be able to take DC directly instead of expecting AC.
For example, any device that takes in USB power with a 120VAC "wall wart" plug can just be used with a buck convert plug instead or being powered directly from the DC current.
LED lighting is taking in AC then converting to DC to power the LEDs. Your phone is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it. Your laptop is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it.
There are some household machines which will require some heavy duty power draw but much of the consumer products we use is powered off of DC to begin with. Powering directly off of DC would be cutting out the "middle man" of AC.
Power conversion efficiency is at best the 3rd or 4th important factor here.
The first factor would be the hodgepodge of wall dongles one needs to own and maintain (plus the cost of buying a dongle for each device that doesn't have one, or multiple of them per device in case you want to charge your phone/laptop/etc in more than one location at home).
The second factor is the "smoothness" of your DC sources. Most of the common LED lamps have a pretty ugly signal shape, and not at all close to a DC flat line. This is mostly unavoidable as AC->Smooth DC conversion is more expensive than AC-> DC + a ton of 120Hz, 240Hz,... on top of it. So, common LED lights tend to opt for cheaper "electronics". People notice the flickery LED lights to various degrees (some get headaches, some outright see the flickers, some claim to be totally oblivious to the difference). The DC "quality" also affects some fairly sensitive electronic devices, so some AC->DC adaptors are fairly sophisticated. A central high quality AC->DC convertor (combined with DC wiring) has better scalability when you need to care about smoothness (it can be a basic quality of life matter for some people).
The third and fourth factors are power discipation and conversion efficiency. They are the same thing, with two remedies: more $ to remedy the inefficiency (which is really small these days, if you go for switching convertors), and plans for heat to discipate properly (devices end up with pretty hot adaptors).
It varies pretty wildly, often efficiency ends up being dependent on the load since power supplies usually get optimized for a certain load range. Individually, the numbers might not look too bad, but when you think about how many individual AC->DC supplies you have, the losses can add up.
I've been involved in a side project developing a consumer-friendly rating of "power quality" for AC devices and AC->DC power supplies which summarizes efficiency over a range of loads, as well as incorporating power factor measurements. We've been testing common devices such as USB power supplies for phones and such, as well as things like laptop power supplies, due to how numerous they are. We've had a few surprises, for example, Apple power supplies generally don't fare that well.
Power Quality Score: https://pqs.app/
Detailed test data is public for some devices but not all, since we're trying to find paths to revenue starting with subscriptions for full test results. Let us know if you have feedback.
You might also be interested in the Youtube channel of my friend/PQS collaborator, where he's done some "deep dive" videos of testing some of the devices in the PQS database- particularly AC->DC USB power supplies due to how ubiquitous they are now- https://www.youtube.com/c/AllThingsOnePlace/ .
I"m not sure I'm really the person to answer this but I would guess inverter and/or buck/boost converters are in the 90%-95% range. So, chaining DC -> AC -> DC gives about anywhere from 15% to 30% losses.
I think the better argument is one for reduced 'hardware complexity'. Instead of having an inverter that then goes through a rectifier, all you need is a buck converter.
Yes, it causes issues today. But tomorrow, I'm expecting that the transformer will be outside the device (as now with wall warts and most laptops) rather than inside (as with your TV). And that minority who are handy enough with tools can patch past the internal transformer with a soldering iron and a screwdriver in the meantime.
> I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement
I have considered this sort of thing for the basics around the house (in my head at least). A seperate lighting loop in each room + outside, comms cupboard and some usb/usb-c ports. Could be all powered by a couple of car batteries and not a lot of solar panels.
100% would do this sort of setup if I built a home office shed, but otherwise the plans remain in my head.
(Sorry, replying to myself but by way of example I recently discovered that "old"-style UK plugs -- BS546 ones -- are still rated for DC domestic supply. So in at least one or two corners of the world this whole notion is already supported with a semi-familiar interface.)
Ooh, fascinating. AC is better for long distance transmission, which solar + local storage obviates. Do you happen to know of the efficiency we might stand to gain from switching appliances to DC?
So you've two competing losses: transformers and voltage drops over long DC circuits.
When I was last looking into this myself -- and lamenting you couldn't find PoE LED lights for love or money -- it sounded like (IANAEE) voltage drops start becoming a thing you have to care about around 50 or 100 feet, depending on the gauge; wiring a house with DC isn't impossible but it might require a little bit of care or some thought.
Being honest it's not a massive amount of loss if your entire supply is coming from the grid. But if you're generating and storing energy at home, then it's much more significant because you add the transformer's losses to the additional losses spent in your inverter.
You need to move to higher voltage DC which will present some challenges you don't get with AC, for example if you get an arc in a switch or a circuit breaker with AC it normally extinguishes quickly at the zero voltage crossing, whereas DC will just keep arcing until stuff starts to burn.
LDx HVDC has a small set of use cases where it is more efficient than HVAC. But yes, in some cases it can work better over distances of hundreds of km.
Climate migration. What happens Europe now/since 2015 is nothing that will come in the next couple of years. And the individual countries and so as the EU is pretty much unprepared. I'd even say that will be one of the cause of downfall of the union.
I am under the impression that instead of preparing for climate immigration, EU citizens are actually slowly but surely mutually brainwashing themselves into increasing hate towards immigrants as a whole. From what I read and understood about climate change, a tsunami of immigrants from southern hemisphere countries towards northern hemisphere countries is to be expected.
I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable.
Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more.
Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders".
Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing?
Outside observer, but my understanding is that a big concern is that people from more illiberal cultures will make the nation more illiberal. There is also concern that making low skilled labor more plentiful will be harmful to the prospects of existing low skilled labor. A third concern would be that if the immigrants express an ethnic preference for their own community, this will cause increasing difficulty for existing residents. If you want to convince people that immigration will be in their best interest, I'd start by finding ways to ameliorate those concerns.
Agreed. It seems to me e.g. Germany is very open to immigration in all forms, IF, immigrants are willing integrate sufficiently into the EU value system concerning equality of sexes, blindess towards ethnicity, freedom of religion etc. They're not brainwashed at all, they want to keep their culture free of brainwashing.
Europeans would rather go Japan - ie. keep their national identity and downsize, than America - healthy demographics, but constant cultural clashes and crime waves.
In full honesty, I fail to see how crime waves in the USA could be explained by immigration or racial/cultural diversity. From what I understand, it is mostly a consequence of families living through precarious jobs (and poverty), limited access to good education and a general lack of trust in the government, which they either perceive as powerless, or extremely unfair/brutal.
If I acknowledge that some communities are more likely to live their daily lives under these three factors altogether, it could explain why these communities may be more vulnerable to daily life challenges, and more easily resort to violence. Still, that doesn't give me a causal link between racial/cultural diversity and violence, far from it, but I can understand why those who prefer taking shortcuts may end up reaching this conclusion.
This shortcut is also very comfortable for the peace of mind: once I attribute violence to racial/cultural diversity, I can also safely conclude that I will never be part of the problem (if I consider myself as being part of the "good" racial/cultural group)...
I have lived in some of the poorest areas in Brazil, United States, Colombia, and Mexico. I have also lived in Moldova, and some really shitty parts of south St. Petersburg in Russia, and Kyiv.
I have noticed a very very very strong correlation of how dangerous it can be just to walk outside alone, or at night, or walk in public with your cellphone. I believe there is a link between violence and race and culture.
I am sorry to ask but I have the feeling that something is missing in your comment. You said you have lived in poor areas and observed violence, or did you mean that you witnessed violence only in a subset of the areas you listed?
I have experienced violent muggings myself, witnessed violence/assaults, sometimes even without reason or purpose, in Brazil, specifically Rio/Sao Paolo, Oakland/South Berkeley(during the early/mid 2000s before the tech hit), Bogota, and Medellin. I lived years in Mexico(CDMX/tlalnapantla) and experienced all but the most opportunist crimes, like pickpockets, and nonviolent crimes.
Contrast that with living in a very poor neighborhood in Chisinau, in Moldova. Iasi, in Romania, Kiev, and Saint petersburg. I never really felt in danger at all, I could walk home at whatever hour, go on a walk, take out my cellphone. The closest to being dangerous was desperate drug addicts in St. Petersburg.
These places/slums in eastern europe are just as poor, have the same problems with the same drugs. But the level of random violence in 'diverse' places just doesn't exist. I know it sounds fucked up like I am a fox news anchor, or something, but it is just something I have noticed.
It seems the more monoculture a society is the more safe it is in the poor areas. Specifically Europe, Asia, and the middle east. I don't know how to explain it without sounding like a racist so I wont.
The EU can mostly integrate migrants from within the EU, conflicts because of East to West migration aside (see Brexit). It can also integrate migrants from other countries with shared cultural values like the US, Australia, Japan, etc. Basically other democracies and allies.
It has consistently failed to integrate other migrants, especially from the MENA countries. At this point, experience has proven that such large integrations are and will be out of reach for the EU.
The only logical conclusion is therefore that the EU has to prepare to reject further migration. Even hopeless cases like Sweden are starting to take action in that direction.
While I can see you try to be nuanced you're only achieving depicting the situation in a moralistic view.
You're postulating many things that are not necessarily true (by definition) :
- that massive immigration to the EU will succeed
- that EU needs more unskilled labor
So "serious" politicians shouldn't promise one thing or its opposite but have a global view of the best interests of THEIR electors and act accordingly.
I will hence have to take the antithesis to balance it overall :
- with automation and the current unemployed people ("natives" or not) already in the EU, more unskilled labor is not what is needed
- a cohesive society is not solely based on its productive capacity
its better to develop Marshall like plans for the affected areas (MENA + WESTERN AFRICA); them will generate stability,jobs,commerce and returns for investors. the problem is local political leadership which will want "tailored kickbacks" even at their countries stake (or will cry to go on China lap). but Necessities like the "green wall" could create an example on wich plan future project and garner support at alls levels. Btw Europe doesnt need migrants, its mostly overpopulated and economies are more about outputs than unskilled workforce. Paying pensions will be a problem, solvable with bankruptcies that could maybe cure the fetish for welfare socialism of PIGS+France. nations cant absorb generally speaking more than a low percentage of immigrants/settlers before creating problems/attritions.
its beeter to develop Marshall like plans for the affected areas (MENA + WESTERN AFRICA); them will generate stability,jobs,commerce and returns for investors. the problem is local political leadership which will want "tailored kickbacks" even at their countries stake (or will cry to go on China lap). but Necessity like the "green wall" could create an example to wich plan future project and garner support at alls levels. Btw Europe doesnt need migrants, its mostly overpopulated and economies are more about outputs than unskilled workforce. Paying pensions will be a problem, solvable with bankruptcies that could maybe cure the fetish for welfare socialism of PIGS+France. nations cant absorb generally speaking more than a low percentage of immigrants/settlers before creating problems/attritions.
Just to be contrary, I feel it's worth considering that as solar overtakes wind as the cheapest electrical source and keeps dropping, and everything electrifies, even fertiliser and methane production, the migration might go in the other direction.
Sun too hot for agriculture? Stick some PV over it as shade.
Not enough water, stick some PV over it for shade, use it to power trickle irrigation of desalinated water.
If carbon offsets are used to install PV in such nations, it's a win-win-win-win.
Another post talks about a new generation buying battery EV RVs to live in. If they did, where would they tend to go? Somewhere where the climate provides cheap solar power and low heating needs.
I agree, but I don't think the "few people talk about it" criterion applies. It's not that it doesn't come up in debates, it's that nothing much comes of it (yet).
Nothing comes of it because we're regressed into a hyper-sensitive society where topics that remotely involve race can't be discussed anymore for fear of someone's feelings getting hurt. Empires have collapsed in the past because of migrations of peoples, this is potentially no exception.
We'll most probably increase the handouts to the autocrats bordering us, so that they'll do the dirty job in our place. See Erdogan, see how what was basically a State coup went almost unnoticed in Tunisia.
One narrow interpretation is that one particular study that you did not cite got it wrong.
One broad interpretation is that we should not pay attention or give credence to the good faith estimates offered at the time.
I get tired of snarky one-liners that don't say what they mean. They do not promote useful discussion. My comment here would not be necessary if you took a few minutes to elaborate about what you meant.
Lastly: Estimates change. No model is perfect but some are useful.
I was born in the 70s, and my entire life I've been hearing climate alarmism - the end of the world is nigh (or just around the corner). No, really, this time it's for real! Donate here to stop it.
Most of the "solutions" I've seen are worse than the problem. Recycling was a major con that no one wants to talk about.
Carbon offset credits? Really?
With the amount of alarmism and blatant opportunism in the space, it's pretty hard to sift through and focus on real, meaningful change. Like not wasting precious aquifer water on lawns.
Simple stuff that would have real impact. Taxing the hell out of single use plastic water bottles.
We've done it before. The anti CFC thing was a huge success. Seems like that should be a model to follow.
Instead of pearl-clutching global alarmism, we should narrowly focus on concrete problems with real, measurable solutions, and address them one by one.
CFC's had a more or less drop-in replacement. Sadly we lack this for fossil fuels.
And my entire life I've been hearing predictions of climate change that would start getting serious... right about now. And here we are. A bit ahead of schedule, really.
Sea level rise? The rate of increase hasn't changed. Actually it was highest during Lincoln's presidency.
Droughts? Actually less severe and less frequent than 100 years ago.
Severe weather? Wild fires? Also, pretty much unchanged or slightly decreased.
Global temperatures? Sure, seem to be increasing moderately, but there's a ton of complication there. And we don't really know what the impact will be.
I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
> I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models ...
Which climate models are pessimistic in your view?
Which models are alarmist? Please define alarmist as you are using it. What exactly are you measuring when you say "alarmist"? Is there a threshold?
Let's get some common footing. Here's a thought experiment and question: Let's say Organization X finds in 90% of model runs, the global climate is disrupted to the point that the USA will face between $400B and $800B of additional costs starting in 2040 and increasing somewhere around 1% to 3% per year.
* Is summarizing this finding alarmist? Of course not -- it is only describing a model's prediction.
* Is the model alarmist? What would make it alarmist? If the assumptions are unrealistic? But all models are imperfect. So how unrealistic must they be?
On the flip side, What models do you recommend? Please share how your favorite models are funded.
> ... and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
According to your definitions of "real", "concrete", and "addressable".
Do you think NASA's writing on climate change does not reflect reality? That is is not concrete? That the problems are not addressable? So is NASA alarmist w.r.t. climate change?
What about the reinsurance industry? Let's take Swiss Re. Are they alarmist?
Please point us to some solid writing (such as a credible report) that summarizes your views.
Two final questions: have you studied economics? built predictive models? I'd like to get a sense of good ways to have this discussion. Perhaps we can cut through a bunch of preliminaries and cut to the chase.
Do you agree that the following framing is a useful way to think about our response to climate change? Technological constraints define what levers can be pulled and at what cost, in the short-run at least. Political decisions drive how governments spend money. Economic factors constrain financial and monetary options. Over the medium-term, investments in science and technology tend to increase expand the option space.
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960.
Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time.
Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
A bunch of them do. Heat waves, river floods, etc...
For the heat wave chart, the stated reason for this is that it's the date where most urban areas started keeping careful records.
They also, as a footnote[1] include an image going back much farther [2] which completely changes the picture and analysis.
However the text description is all about the increase since 1960, only barely mentioning that it was much worse in the 1930s.
How is it possible to look at this and not question it?
Making false statements? Slowing down and reminding myself?
I've spent countless hours looking at original noaa data related to climate change. I've seen a very clear distortion of data in reporting.
> Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
That's great advice, maybe we should both take it? [3] [4]
I don't need to go through every single measure here, it's pretty easy to discover for yourself if you take a real look at the data.
The severity and frequency of things like droughts, severe weather, heat waves are flat, if not in decline when you look across a broader window.
Sea level rise is pretty linear for as long as it's been measured [5]
NOAA data is pretty clear on this.
Arctic sea ice? It has a well known oscillation that generally runs close to 180 degrees out of phase with antarctic sea ice. Again, super easy to learn about if you dig in. Did you know that Arctic sea ice actually increased from 1979 to 2015? [6]
Also, measuring sea ice is notoriously difficult and error prone, and satellite data doesn't do a very good job of it. Also easy to learn about.
My overall point, which for some strange reason gathers a ton of open hostility, is that we're much better off focusing on concrete ecological issues that can be solved today (not draining aquifers, better agriculture practices, elimination of weird farm bill subsidies to harmful crops, etc...).
It's amazing how just pointing that out garners the sort of personal attacks that you leveled at me. Slowing down sounds like good advice!
> It's amazing how just pointing that out garners the sort of personal attacks that you leveled at me. Slowing down sounds like good advice!
Please show me the personal attack.
Here is what I wrote:
> No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960. / Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time. / Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
I said you made a false statement. You did. I did not call you names; e.g. I did not call you a liar.
Claiming there is a personal attack when there is none is not acceptable. I can criticize your ideas -- that is fair game.
It is understandable to feel hurt when ideas you hold are criticized. You may consider these ideas to be part of your identity. But these are not personal attacks.
I respect that you have researched the climate change data. I likely would agree with some of your conclusions.
> My overall point, which for some strange reason gathers a ton of open hostility ...
I asked many questions about your overall point. I would not use the word "hostile" to characterize tough questions.
Yes, you are getting pushback. I can't speak to others, but I've found your core arguments to be too vague to be useful. I don't think it is "strange" when some people to question what you write.
> It's amazing how just pointing that out
Well, you "aren't just pointing that out". There is context. My many comments around this thread show that I've engaged and tried to make sense of what you mean, in terms of concrete examples.
Also, I hope you can recognize that some of your language resembles climate-denial language. With this in mind, you would do well to be mindful of how you are coming across.
Also, another observation. The language you are using matches the language of "I'm the victim here". I don't know if you intended this. That kind of language is regularly used to deflect.
Please reply to my other comments. I am willing to consider your arguments -- probably more so than many people here on HN who read your comment and probably thought it wasn't worth their time to respond. But I'd prefer to read them coming from a published source. Why? I'd like to read not only the content, but also about the authors, the funding, and the counter-responses.
> My overall point ... is that we're much better off focusing on concrete ecological issues that can be solved today (not draining aquifers, better agriculture practices, elimination of weird farm bill subsidies to harmful crops, etc...).
Thank you for giving some concrete examples of what you mean.
However, I'm still not convinced by the "that can be solved today" criteria. One key problem with such criteria is that someone can say "that can't be solved today" in order to avoid taking action. What is your response?
In my other comment, I offered a very high level summary of how science, technology, governance, economics, and finance relate w.r.t. climate change. I was hoping to see your response. Your response these very much connects to the "that can be solved today" criteria.
Sustained investment in research and development is important because science and technology can expand the solution space. In parallel, more public awareness can increase the political will for increasing the budget for action. (Of course, there are many other components necessary for humanity to address the situation.)
A meta-comment. You are getting a lot of pushback because it seems to me that you are moving the goal posts. Here is what I mean.
You wrote "alarmist" but did not explain what you meant. I asked detailed questions so that we could get on the same page. No response, right? Or did I miss it?
You give specific examples that fall into the category of, e.g. (paraphrased) "if look at X data over a sufficiently long time frame, it does not show a clear trend." Yes, this is correct for some cases. And these are pointed out in the EPA descriptions. So this does not support your alarmist claim.
You complain of being personally attacked.
In summary, this trajectory looks a lot like moving the goal posts away from explaining what is alarmist about climate change models.
If you've changed your mind about what claims you want to make, please do so. But I have not seen good argumentation or explanation for what seemed to be your core argument.
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
Is quite different from this:
> A bunch of them do. Heat waves, river floods, etc...
You can't have it both ways.
> Making false statements?
Yes. I've demonstrated clearly that you wrote a false statement by saying "all". Then you shifted your position to say "a bunch of them".
Why not acknowledge your mistake?
> Slowing down and reminding myself?
Yes. When was the last time you actually said to yourself, e.g. "I have a tendency to get annoyed by how reporters cover climate change. I should not let my annoyance spill over into other trains of thought, such as the claim 'climate change models are alarmist'".
Adjust as needed to suit your situation and thought patterns. If you try it, I think you'll find benefit.
This is the kernel of your thinking I've been waiting for. You've seen what you call a "very clear distortion of data in reporting". Emphasis mine. (A suggestion: if you would lead with this sentence this up-front, these kinds of online conversations can be much more productive.)
Now, if one makes a claim that there is a "very clear distortion", it is incumbent upon you to show the analysis -- or to cite it. You are the one making the claim; don't ask someone else to do it. A credible analysis must be statistical, not anecdotal.
In Australia, we've experienced all of the above within the last couple years. Worst droughts in 20+ years, biggest bushfire season ever, and now record breaking flooding.
This is not correct and proves the point made in the parent's comment.
Australia had much more severe bush fires in the 70s [0].
Note that many Australian plants are have evolved to adapt to bush fires, which means they must have been a staple of Australian ecology for many millions of years.
> Instead of pearl-clutching global alarmism, we should narrowly focus on concrete problems with real, measurable solutions, and address them one by one.
Many neoclassical economists would argue against this approach. Fix the incentives, they would say, and things will work out.
We can't talk about a point being valid or otherwise if it is not clear. Saying vague statements such as 'but they predicted X and it didn't happen ...' is nearly useless when it comes to understanding and predicting X.
1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
I tend to think the slow pace is a feature not a bug. Could you imagine if something like Roe v Wade was flip flopping every 4 years on political whims?
That said, I do think a modern democracy should have more frequent digital voting abilities perhaps on a policy level. Voting for a person you hope will represent you, it’s a decent concept when you lack technology but as we know it’s heavily flawed as well. I don’t quite understand how we can build something like Bitcoin but can’t solve digital voting in a way that’s not constantly under threat of hacking/some Evil manufacturer etc.
Does tech legislation need to be kept up more quickly? I really like the default being no regulation and filling in where needed. It’s reactive by nature. I don’t know what broad legislation would have been put in place proactively to help tech be better governed (without specifying honing in on a specific business/industry after the fact).
I fear more of if the legislation process is too fast moving it become subject to mob mentality. Instead of #deletefacebook we may have gone straight to a knee jerk reaction of legislation that bans social media which I’m not sure I want to live in that world either.
In practice, first-past-the-post voting is dysfunctional bordering on evil, especially when combined with gerrymandering wherein politicians select their voters rather than vice-versa. The entire result set of this mess - two parties and their primaries - is deeply screwed up. The practical challenge (imo) is to explain alternatives concisely to voters who might want to modify how their voting system works. But there are now experiments going on here and there.
LVT wouldn't reduce mortgage or rent prices, but what WOULD reduce them is eliminating property taxes. and that's easier to do if you can offset it with another more efficient tax, like LVT.
Because Condorcet is still better than nearly all implementations of first past the post. But I think the commenter is getting at instant runoff voting methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
None are perfect but IRV is in use and effective. Tactical voting is still an option but at scale either obvious or difficult to organize without being obvious.
If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously.
On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications that compiles down to Wasm for the client side and the ecosystem around it reaches escape velocity, that looks like an opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar industry to me.
Such things used to seem unrealistic, but there is so much money in web development, the current state of the art is so bad in numerous ways and almost everything is currently so short-lived (by wider programming industry standards) that I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to move the goalposts to an entirely different playing field any more.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last few years, and recently did a deep dive on Rust wasm.
I think it’s unlikely to be a single new language that replaces the current JS hegemony. My bet is that wasm makes it possible for any backend language to embed frontend logic, and each language will have framework(s) to take advantage of this capability in idiomatic ways.
I want to avoid specific language comparisons because they tend to veer into religious territory and shed more heat than light, but perhaps I can just note that Java, Rails, Elixir, Python and may others have great productive backend frameworks which could easily be extended to build and ship wasm to clients.
(I think the model of the new JS framework Fresh is interesting to hold as a comparison for what sort of thing you can do with unified FE/BE stack; shipping client JS only when the specific page needs interactivity is one cool feature for example. But with wasm you’re free to pick any point along the MPA - SPA spectrum.)
> if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications
I posit this has already happened and the language is Typescript.
I don't see how a different language could meaningfully disrupt TS at this point. I don't actually even see what there is to disrupt, to be honest. TS is great and really productive, and scales to large teams well. What language has the potential to be 10x better than it?
TypeScript is better than JavaScript in most situations. JavaScript is all that remained after the plugin-based alternatives were killed off. It’s not that TypeScript is a terrible language, but being a better language is a low bar to clear when you consider that we have 20+ years of extra experience since the early days of JS and a new language also wouldn’t inherit all the baggage.
Things that IMHO have the potential to create a profoundly better language for developing web applications include:
• A more expressive type and effect system
• A more capable module system and better dependency management
• A more comprehensive standard library
• Integral support for building distributed systems and modelling communication within them
Given those kinds of changes and avoiding a lot of the baggage, I think there is also room for a simpler, more systematic, more consistent syntax, which would be good for both human and computer readers. The latter is important because if it’s easily machine-readable then it’s easier to build tools, and building good tools around a programming language is a key factor in growing a large and sustainable ecosystem.
I don’t know what being “10x better than TypeScript” would mean quantitatively, but I find it easy to believe that a language could arrive within say the next 5 years that required less than half the time to develop the same functionality, produced less than half the defects that would need fixing later, and ran several times faster under realistic conditions.
I agree that improvements are possible in the areas you've listed, my point was that I don't believe they'd be significant enough to get the 2x productivity you later mention. They're all, in my view, at or above the 80% good enough mark for the current paradigm of what a web app is or needs to do, and any further improvements would yield rapidly diminishing returns. I think the fact that JS has been used for 20+ years, and now TS for most of the last decade, is partly (not wholly) because of this.
That's unless the paradigm of most web apps fundamentally shifts - ie your distributed systems point.
Don't get me wrong, if such a 2x productivity increase over TS is possible I'd love to be wrong here and see that happen - not least just out of pure interest of how that language could be so much better, because clearly I'd be learning a lot there :-)
Perhaps time will prove you right, though (in the nicest possible way!) I hope you’re wrong.
Personally, I’m optimistic that we can do much better than 2x on the important metrics as mainstream programming languages and the programmers using them adopt ideas that already exist in more obscure languages, programming research, and development teams that don’t necessarily publish their experiences openly.
I think some of the potential gains come just from making it easier and therefore quicker to read and write our own code. Better syntax, more expressive language features, a more comprehensive standard library, and eliminating some of the historical baggage like how null/undefined are handled could all help a lot compared to today’s TypeScript, IMHO.
There are also other areas, such as safety and making it easier to work with other code from within or outside our own organisations, where today a huge proportion of a typical TypeScript developer’s time is probably wasted on things like wrangling dependency trees that could be much smaller and better managed, investigating preventable defects that currently reach later stages in the development process before they are noticed, and writing unit tests for negative cases that would be unnecessary if the language itself designed out those possibilities.
Something that struck me a little while back is just how unimaginably large this part of the programming industry has become. We’re talking about millions of developers working on web applications and companies collectively worth trillions of dollars. How much would even a 10% long-term improvement in developer productivity be worth to the world? What about 200%? What about 1000% or more? Personally, I think we still have a long way to go before we run into any inherent limits on developer productivity, and we’re learning more all the time.
I wonder if the Ethereum merge (moving away from mining) will cause a drop in that misuse? I know a lot of the abuse are hidden crypto miners. There's going to be so much computing power shifting to the other coins (dropping the ROI) that there won't be much worth mining that can be done in the browser.
Until threads are included in WASM its security model is essentially the browser sandbox and scope limitation (WASM modules cannot access the global object nor call arbitrary functions)
Essentially WASM can be transpiled to Javascript (or ASM.js more likely) almost line by line and it would have almost the same security.
Flash and Java applet were so dangerous because the plugins introduced a ton of new APIs that skipped the browser sandbox. Wasm introduces no new API.
For non browser environments WASM mostly brings static validation, opaque external references, and bound checking on linear memory access.
Using power from solar panels to synthesize food (or at least, food components like starch). It turns out this can be done much more efficiently than photosynthesis.
I bet this will lead to a agricultural revolution similar in magnitude to the Haber-Bosch process. It will also soften some of the impacts from climate change, both by improving food security and by allowing re-wilding of land currently used for agriculture.
It's not being talked about because people already hate the idea of "processed food" with a passion, let alone the concept of food produced without involving plants. So it will probably make a sneaky entrance via bulk stuff like starch and oils.
If its cheap it will be used, doesn't matter what people think. People hate palm oil but its in everything because it has good properties and is cheaper than alternatives.
No, this is just my "armchair theorizing". It just makes sense to me that if food production can be done more efficiently in terms of energy and space, then it will eventually happen.
To create an aerial hologram [or a 3d image in space if you will], you need something that will emit light at precise locations throughout a given volume.
I'm investigating the use of Moller electron scattering[0] to create voxels in a 3d coordinate system.
Two electron beams crossing and colliding will emit photons [voxels]. If you can orchestrate collisions in a very fast fashion at various 3d coordinates in an vacuum chamber you could generate a complete image.
I'm working on an article discussing the idea in full, to be published on my blog. My goal is to establish prior art, so this idea cannot be patented.
Additionally, it sounds like a massively power intensive way to do volumetric display. I don't know the total conversion efficiency to photons, but it can't be that high.
More recent techniques like stacked panels might be a better way forward for this.
So what is the definition of a real hologram? Lots of points of light in 3D outside of the media projecting it seems like exactly what I’d expect for a hologram.
For it to be a hologram, you'd need to be able to reproduce arbitrary wavefronts in real time. This gives you the ability to have features like occlusion, which you don't have with a "points of light" display. I.e., everything will appear translucent.
I'm curious if you've seen the work coming from Dr. Smalley's lab in Texas (don't remember which school ATM). They're using cellulose with light trapping techniques to simply move particles in the air and reflect light off of that.
I don't have any links on me at the moment but it shouldn't be too hard to find details on Google.
Excuse the delayed reply. No, my friend. No relationship.
I vaguely remember hearing about that approach. Dr. Smalleys seems to be on the right track, since he implicitly recognizes that voxels must be created in 3d coordinates.
My proposal [yes, about a real image in space, not a hologram - posters are right to correct me] is simpler. It leverages a recognized physical principle, the aforementioned Moller scattering.
The problem, as pointed out by others in this child branch, is that having electrons collide is difficult, on account of their very small cross section. But it is doable. Somebody evoked a CRT. Exactly. The first prototype could be achieved, as far as a proof of concept goes, with only two orthogonal beams, generating exactly one voxel at the precise location where they cross.
Granted, in the beginning of development the device will be ugly, heavy and energy hungry. Use cases: automotive, aeronautical industries, architecture, physics, logistics, etc, etc. With time, home entertainment and the metaverse.
Without generating 3d-localized voxels it is impossible to construct a 3d display. Holograms only go so far.
Reasoning it through, what don't people politely talk about? Sex, money, politics, and religion. Sex: the impact of the normalization of casual sex work on sustainable families, and how specific tech and financial services for managing single motherhood will be huge. Money: financial alternatives to emerging social credit based systems, grey markets, working class capital/savings flight, cyberpunk dystopia. Politics: polarization becomes relative isolation, increasing demand for parallel tribe-based economic and information services. Religion: pendulum swinging back from civic secularism among those disenfranchised by said secularists. Reconciliation of old time religions with current tech and science. The christianization of fringe ideas like "ancient astronaut theorists," conspiracy theories, simulation theory.
True or not, they're big and not talked about in polite company.
How exactly are secularlists disenfranchising religions? There is a large swathe believing the separation of church and state is religious oppression, and they act like the country is not for those of all faiths.
When a court rules that a particular area is outside of elected officials' power to legislate, in a sense they are disenfranchising those who would vote for officials to make such laws. Leaving aside whether it is right or wrong, the underlying issue is that someone's set of values has been elevated outside of the democratic process. This has always been happening since the beginning, but in recent years we've experienced a significant lack of agreement over those values such that one side feels disenfranchised.
There are a million things in this country that don't follow the democratic process such as the electoral college. But is that what you're really arguing?
The fact that you disagree with that particular democratic process does not mean it is not in fact a democratic process. Not a perfect one, but one nonetheless. As for your second sentence, I don't understand what you are getting at. I am really arguing the argument I put forth, not some other argument. If you disagree with that point, happy to entertain a rebuttal but I have no interest in participating in a culture war so you can put down your dog whistle detector.
Only one group of people complains about secularism in America, and it's Christians. Notice that Hidus and Muslims in the US do not have a problem with the separation of church of state like Christians do.
I only dislike Christians trying to jam their God into law and make the US a theocracy like Afghanistan. Their hope is that people like you see any criticism as an attack on Christianity. They hope useful idiots do exactly what you are doing.
The question misinterprets the dynamic. Point is, people disenfranchised ("left behind") by secular administrators are turning to religion for community and identity. That's the undercurrent in the context of the thread. It's not about the legal separation, it's about a change in the upstream culture as a reaction to the politics. The official principle of agnosticism that the separation of church and state represents is not official atheism either. In fact, it's the opposite. The US system was famously said to be vulnerable by it's founders, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." While it can tolerate almost every kind of minority belief, it doesn't survive a shift to complete atheism and nihilism. The American system is predicated on the universalist idea that, "people here are free to have both kinds of beliefs, theistic AND deistic," and the trend I was pointing out is religion is becoming a reactionary tendency.
That has nothing to do with secularism and people turning to religion for a sense of belonging. That has everything to do with housing policy being bent so in favor of the rich, most American homes are built to be secluded with no real way to walk around or dine in neighborhoods.
So everyone has to go out of their way and make reasons to feel connected with their fellow man.
Agricultural revolution. I believe things like food, health and safety will become things not taken for granted anymore.
Prices of all of these things will go up and take a major part of the household budgets.
I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today.
Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary) industry. In short: If you can’t guarantee food and health you will need some serious protection/go steal/trade it somewhere else.
Yes but regarding food the opposite could also happen. Lab grown meet, better alternatives from plants (e.g. https://simulate.com/) are coming and could lower the price drastically. Also improving plant seeds can make them more resistant to heat/water scarcity
This is true in a lot of places and I agree meat consumption should go down but this is not true everywhere. Animals can convert calories we cannot eat to calories we can eat.
Take dry grasslands for example where you could either herd goats and sheep on what nature provides or grow crops which uses a lot more water and fertilizer than the environment there produces.
This supplies a vast, vast minority of the calories in developed countries. CAFOs, or factory farms, tend to supply animal products to developed countries, and those animals aren’t being sustained on the grasslands. So your point doesn’t really justify the ubiquity of animal consumption.
The GP's point applies even more to factory farms than grazing animals because animal feed can be transported across the globe. It's the agricultural version of specialization.
The vast majority of feed used in factory farms is inedible to humans. The primary ingredient is often the waste product from bioethanol production and distillation [1]. The edible varieties of corn, barley, oats, and alfalfa used in feed aren't that popular with people [2], are mostly produced on land that would otherwise be unproductive, and are mostly used for newborns or in the final stage before slaughter to make the meat fattier and more palatable.
[2] For example, even though barley is a core ingredient to much of the alcohol industry, animal feed still accounts for two thirds of barley consumption. Most of the rest of the barley ends up in animal feed in the form of distillers grains.
When you consider arability constraints and nutritional efficiency, meat is more efficient and less destructive than plants in many cases. Soy production, for example, sufficient to meet global demand requires destroying the Amazon; meat production is much less destructive to land, taking place either on non-arable scrubland or via consuming human-inedible surplus feedstock. (Or on land already depleted by plant farming, like in the Amazon.)
And then in the end you're left with foods with inferior nutrition. I'm not going to stop eating the foods I've evolved to eat (ruminants especially) until I can safely do so without becoming malnourished, weak, and unhealthy. Right now, this is not technologically possible.
The majority of that soy you’re worried about is grown to feed the animals…
You’re citing things which are actually making the case for eating only plants stronger, while thinking that you’re doing the opposite. It’s wild.
This isn’t even addressing the part of your argument where you fallaciously appeal to nature by saying you’re going to do what you evolved to do. What we evolved to do is irrelevant; what we have the ability to do is all that matters.
We don't know enough about human biology to make a healthy food replacement in a factory. We do know enough about human biology to know that we currently can't.
Everyone who eats these "food replacements" long enough and frequently enough looks weak and sickly; it's not a coincidence.
I personally did not look at them but also think it is a minority that will switch: first the price and I second I am not sure if labgrown is that appealing to most people.
Agriculture revolution doesn’t only mean labgrown stuff. Crop rotations, resistant plants, derisking a good harvest etcetc. And the approaches are endless: Predictions, tools, robots, satellite imagery etcetc.
It would seem that animals evolved to eat plants and other animals are probably not going to switch to dead packaged food from a singular company en-masse.
There are also cultural factors. Meals are one of the few social excuses for hanging out and wasting work time together.
Exactly. Being from a place where food is important: they are already starting to go back to the country side. Your regular accountant / dev / office employee is proud to grown eggs, potatoes, tomatoes, milk for fun.
Some culture care way more about food than the US can imagine.
Agree with the cultural value of dinners. I do that too, just eating the dead packaged food 2 out of 3 meals. I don’t need to go grocery shopping every day, don’t need to count nutrients and so on.
I love the concept and really tried to get on the JimmyJoy train. However it causes severe nausea for me. I don't have any known allergies or intolerances and no other food ever has caused similar issues. So, I think they have some ways to go.
I think it's a matter of experimentation. I've been having Aussielent (Australian version of Soylent) for about 5 years for breakfast and still really enjoy it. I use the vanilla flavour, make it with hot water, and put a squirt of honey in it - it's like liquid porridge.
You are right on point. Water as well as food of course. Growing our own food, collecting rainwater and choosing a healthier lifestyle is what we can do for ourselves.
I did a couple of years in agtech and must say I was impressed on the readiness of technology (adoption was a different story).
So to me think of crop planning, soil health monitoring, genetically modified crops for specific regions/dryer climates as well as logistics (even water logistics) is something I see getting more important.
The revolution we say in two ways:
A) customers can track strawberry production from the planting date all the way to the store(check some youtube from china). So your journey and interest in the food will not only start at the stoee but much earlier evtl also creating direction connections and contracts with farms - also resulting in willingness to pay more.
B) I can imagine food prices to explode - I mean who can prevent it from happening? If borders close and climate is not your friend anymore: Vertical farms, GMO crops and robotics will become a reality - because the pressure to innovate/ change will be there.
Thats just my assumption after working in agtech for 2 years and living through pandemic and some political instability suddenly impacting critical supply while having a mature technology just needing to be adopted in a underserved area…
I don't know about "big" in terms of a viral hit, but in terms of what will change in our day-to-day experience... Here are some wild guesses, mostly along the theme of a societal conversation about and re-thinking of "sustainability" on nearly all levels.
* Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes.
* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.
* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.
* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.
* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?
* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.
* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.
* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.
The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.
Also:
* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
Especially given that the time to plant the trees is now rather than when they are really going to be needed. There is likely a way to do it / provide shade with native plants too, that would require less up-keep...
> Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
Doctor: "Quickly! Give patient 100 milligrams of epinephrine!"
Computer: "Giving patient 400 milligrams of epinephrine. Say 'yes' to confirm"
>apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food
This has been tried (and proved wrong) countless times. The issue is that it needs a huge footprint, and space is something you don't have at large in apartment buildings.
Thought it was more to have a pleasant place to hang out and the odd fresh tomato, etc.. I hope nobody seriously thinks you can feed an apartment building from the roof.
Most estimates say if you want to do permaculture/homestead living and provide your own calories you need a good acre per person and a taste for sweet potatoes...
Good point. I would guess that if electric bikes and other mobility options come online, maybe there will be less need for parking lots to be as large as they are now?
Even if apartment buildings are too dense, I still think we will see an increase in eco-village type arrangements.
One person needs about 5 hectares of land to be self-sufficient (i.e. to cover all its food needs, including protein). If you can afford your own 432 Park Avenue (Cost: ~$1BUSD, Floor area: ~4ha) for that, then the answer is yes.
But also, with that same $1BUSD you could buy around 100,000 hectares of land in rural US, close to the size of Qatar; you can see how relatively inefficient vertical farming is in economic terms.
Disclaimer: I am also very skeptical of the whole concept of vertical farming, but...
That 5 hectares of land per person metric is totally inapplicable here. Sort of the entire point of vertical farming is to be (in theory) vastly more efficient per unit of land. If you believe the claims it's somewhere between a 10 and 50 times reduction in land usage for same output.
5 hectares is also on the very high end for estimates of that metric. It also drops hugely if you're not relying on animal products.
I don't think vertical farming in apartments is the future, but I think your calculations here are also way, way off.
> Research in the 1970s by John Jeavons and the Ecology Action Organization found that 4000 square feet (about 370 square metres) of growing space was enough land to sustain one person on a vegetarian diet for a year, with about another 4000 square feet (370 square meters) for access paths and storage – so that’s a plot around 80 feet x 100 feet (24m x 30m).
That’s about a fifth of an acre, and other caveats apply like climate and the amount of labor during the growing season. If vertical farming works, and can also reduce the labor required (I have no idea if that’s one of its goals), it starts to look more plausible as something that could take off. Still won’t fit on a rooftop though, and as Jayne would say, “I smell a lotta ‘if’ coming off that plan.”
Also, I'm sure that if humanity had put enough resources to this we would already have really efficient solutions around this. It tech that needs to (and hopefully will) be developed.
Was not aware these projects were trying to be self-sufficient! Yeah, that's pretty wild. I assumed from your comment they just wanted to have their own tomatoes or something.
Possibly nuclear fusion. Everybody's still conditioned to respond with the "30 years away" meme, but it's getting serious venture funding because all sorts of enabling technologies have made it a lot more feasible.
Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026.
Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all sorts of losses before energy hits fuel.
John Carmack mentioned that he's shocked by how little interest Big Capital has in nuclear fission (he's more into fission that fusion). He talks a lot about it in a recent Lex Fridman podcast, a good listen if you're into this. It's weird that this isn't the main focus of the whole energy industry.
There are actually a couple dozen fission startups. Fission is definitely an easier technical problem, but more difficult in other ways. Nobody minds if you fuse atoms, but you can't fission them without doing lots of up-front design and spending years getting through regulators.
Some regulators are friendlier to new technology than others. Canada does pretty well, and has at least three molten salt reactor startups. Terrestrial Energy in particular is pretty far along and has high praise for their regulators.
In the US, the NRC is much more difficult, and it's practically impossible to develop anything here besides a light-water reactor.
Thanks! Just watched, I think he's really underestimating how many companies are already trying to be the SpaceX of fission, and how difficult the regulators make it.
When he says "you build it, power a building with it, and the government will come around," that's a good way to land in prison. A while back I was watching a presentation at a conference for reactor startups, which warned that the government doesn't play around and will prosecute anyone who fissions atoms without approval.
And to some extent that's justified. The downside of those rocks that heat themselves when you put them together is that if you're not really careful, they can heat up way more than you wanted. Powering a building isn't the hard part.
That said, the NRC is way too obstructionist. We could follow the lead of Canada and be a lot friendlier to new technology, without compromising on safety.
Regarding his fusion comments, of the 35 fusion startups there are a handful attempting advanced fuels that could generate electricity directly, instead of just producing heat. Helion for example will be attempting net electricity production in 2024, without a heat cycle.
Presumably a lot of scary men who glow in the dark start to really care about your free time and personal connections when you do things with nuclear power.
I'm not sure enough people are talking about Demographics and population decline, especially with respect to China. Some experts [1] predict that China's population in 2050 will be HALF of what it is today!
I don't know if this will have a huge effect. First, China tends to try and keep people employed even if they're economically unproductive, in places like state enterprises. That means there's a lot of slack, a lot of jobs that could get cut without causing any adverse effects. Second, the trend towards roboticization of production lines is accelerating, is wiping out whole categories of jobs, and the robots themselves are often 'Made In China'. If you go on AliExpress and look at anything from pneumatics, to hydraulics, to electronics, to complete machines for doing stuff like packaging, you'll see it's all available domestically at a bargain basement price. All of these things increase worker productivity. If Chinese factories hit the level of automation you get in US factories, then it won't matter that the workforce is tiny and it's supporting a ton of old people.
Way to many people work on filler jobs that will go away and automation will also solve a lot of the problems. China has about 22% people working in agriculture, that will go down a lot over next two decades.
I wouldn't count on that. Sure, you can see increased productivity through farm automation, but that assumes that the farmer can afford said tools. Those that can might be able to grow more crops on less land, but they might be too preoccupied with paying the farm loan to go around buying-out their neighbors.
farmes are almost untochable, like in india but without voting power. nobody want 22% of its uneducated population making trouble in the cities. Hukou aka stict residential permits almost serve that purpouse
Unknown. It's never been tried in an industrialized nation. I have a feeling it could easily go the other way and return China to poverty with not enough people to sustain their current economic output. That depends a lot on what's possible to do with automation. It could also have drastic effects on the knowledge sector, breaking down chains of training and knowledge transfer. A lot of expertise could be lost.
In the black plague, most of the wealth was durable physical assets like land, tools, farmhouses, ect.
In modern economies, wealth usually buys services and consumables. Less cheap labor will be a big hit to these costs. To make things worse, the workers will have to financially support a large aging population with a shrinking young demographic.
It depends on how you measure it and how it happens, but if each couple has one kid, and that kid inherits from both parents, after awhile the kids are inheriting a decent amount.
Or, all the excess "wealth" could be sucked up by the government/companies/large land-holders and everyone else stay roughly the same.
Don’t think so. This isn’t a case of population declining because of a one off event, killing off the old and infirm first and leaving behind a (relatively) healthier population.
This is more of a gradual decline AND ageing. The decline isn’t happening because the old are going away; its happening because there are too few young people being born.
That just leads to stasis. Nothing wrong with that, but it completely messes with all our current economic and governance models
Yes, but not before a lot of pain. All our current economic models are built on population growth.
Slow growth essentially means that the population pyramid becomes too top heavy. You’re going to have trouble if your country is filled with 70 year old pensioners and the trickle of tax paying 20-40 year olds slows down.
I do not want to be staring at a backlit display the rest of my life. It’s terrible for eyesight and probably contributes to headache, burnout, etc. There are a lot of promising technologies out there, and they just need some improvement on cost, refresh rate, power consumption, etc… I would love to be able to go “back to paper” for most of my workday.
Tbh, if there was demand for it we'd probably have them already. I'm afraid the most demand would come from those engineers who create the apps that glue everyone to their glowy screens, and from the sort of parents who have a zero-screens policy (those would be for themselves). Hardly a market that will get any VC excited.
Likewise the emergence of analog outputs from a computer would be fun. It may be niche at first, but imagine if the output was moving some wooden sculpture or the output changed an analog letter board. Would create a bit of permanence rather than everything digital being so transient.
There's been a few mentions of this idea in specific terms in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone really express the big idea yet. Which is: We won't have to wait for the proverbial AGI Singularity to feel the devastating impact that AI is going to have on society. It might take another decade to start, but then the devastation will begin.
Anyone who works at a desk is at a high risk of being replaced by the introduction of mid-level AIs.
These AIs won't be anywhere near sentient, but will have a high enough level of problem solving skills which allows a reasonable facsimile of human recognition, evaluation, autonomy and creation for a given task. Think GPT-9 or DALL-E v10. Writers, artists, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers, administrative assistants, accountants, government employees and so many more are going to have their jobs automated seemingly overnight, creating a massive wave of unemployment like the manufacturing sector experienced a generation ago.
It's not that all the jobs will go away, of course, but it is a near certainty that what used to take several office buildings filled with people to accomplish, will need just a floor or two to do the same thing. And the countdown has already started.
Drone tech is going to get tiny. It’ll have microphones and cameras and it’ll probably be untraceable. It’ll spy on you arbitrarily and the equivalent of 4chan will have access to it in abundance. You will never again have any form of privacy unless you buy expensive countermeasures for your home and office. Fortunately deepfakes will be so good you can blame it all on that.
I was recently caught up in a very good friend's divorce, who suspected either her apartment or her car had been placed under surveillance (her husband constantly had knowledge of her whereabouts). For some reason I cannot expand here, she assumed I could help her "check" her apartment.
This brought me into looking for solutions on how to detect electronic surveillance. I discovered the term "bugsweep", and rapidly came to the conclusion that I could either:
1) Recommend her to hire government contractors at a price she would never be able to afford.
2) Buy cheap stuff on Amazon without any knowledge whatsoever on what works or not.
It felt like there was no middle ground.
I also happen to stay in hotels for both work and while on holidays, and although I don't particularly aim to hide myself from government surveillance, I don't like the idea that any moron or stalker could buy some recording equipment online and put me under surveillance. I would appreciate being able to check my surroundings for obvious / cheap recording equipment when I feel the need.
If anyone has some good pointers/recommendations on this topic, I think it could interest more than just me.
Thanks for the share. I clicked the source cited in the page, it seems to be quite an overkill/invasive method (and dangerous for the person doing the detection), no? It seems to not be accessible to civilians...
Yes, I watched some drone light-show/fireworks displays recently, and thought, 'wait till the drones are the size of flies, these shows will be happening in restaurants, bars, in your living room'. Imagine walking into a room full of fireflies that move around you as you walk, etc.
Bottleneck has been and continues to be energy density. But eventually there will be a breakthrough in battery tech and we will reach new heights of utopia/dystopia.
The drone swarm wars will be crazy. One of the current strategies is to crash your swarm into the enemy swarm and hope you take them all out with what you got
I'd rather expect drone tech to be increasingly regulated or banned. We're going to start seeing it used as a weapon more and more. You can see simple forms of it happening the Ukraine conflict now.
I believe the next big thing will be the productization of building a home anywhere, without requiring municipal infrastructure. There is still a ways to go in terms of technology to make it all happen and make it affordable. But at some point, it will really reconfigure where and how we all live.
I really hope that this will happen, but I'm skeptical. The push to cluster around big cities is still accelerating and land scarcity around big metro areas is what is driving out affordability. Utilities connection constitutes a small and almost insignificant cost of total urban residential construction. If a global pandemic couldn't stop this trend, then I don't think we will ever live in an affordable distributed civilization.
This is something I have been think about for the past 10 year as well. If we can get enough cheap power production, incinerating toilets seem interesting. And the growth satellite internet is a big win for this area.
And then we have companies like Space Mobile trying to essentially put cell phone towers in low earth orbit which will (hopefully) enable 4G/5G coverage all over the globe.
I just installed incineration toilet at my cabin. Works great and burns the shit to ashes. Works with a gass balloon and a 12V battery. 220V option being available.
I mean, I grew up with a well and septic tank and my life was literally no different than living in an apartment in the city. It’s not like a radical off-the-grid thing millions of homes are this way.
Fixed wing drones are becoming super cheap, and are far simpler than their copter-classed counterparts. While handover needs smoothing out, delivery will thus be easy for items of daily use. Less so for furniture, appliances, etc. However, if you are willing to deal with foam furniture, earth building or felling a couple of trees on site, robotics could still have you covered.
I'm convinced that fixed wing drones will dominate the drone delivery market. The payload capacity difference for size and cost is just too large. Barring some truly revolutionary step change in power storage density, any battery improvements that benefit the multirotors will benefit fixed wings even more.
It's a tradeoff. The problems with fixed wing are difficulties maneuvering in crowded low-altitude urban airspace, energy and space required for takeoff, higher speed and mass thus force of impact, and at the point of delivery there's no easy way to hover without going hybrid and the alternative of simply dropping people's goods to the ground with parachutes doesn't result in an ideal delivery experience. This is often fudged with extra packaging, which is environmentally irresponsible as well as spatially constraining for payloads on already limited airframes. Copters are roughly superior in all these regards, but can't go very far due to energy inefficiency and tend to be noisier. I think copters will dominate urban/precision/high value or theft risk, and locally sourced retail such as food, whereas fixed wing will be suburban/semi-rural/rural/industrial/low precision/low value or theft risk, and further sources retail such as hardware, commercial and industrial supplies. It's been somewhat amusing to see the huge amount of money in the space and watch the strategic directions of Amazon Prime Air (hexacopter; 5lbs max payload; 'drop' strategy), Google Wing (hybrid + 'lower on a cord' strategy; numerous designs), Manna (quadcopter), Zipline (fixed wing + 'parachute' strategy; larger payload).
I agree with your breakdown of which model dominates which segments, though I expect that in-city drone never takes off except for extremely time sensitive/high value missions (organ delivery or something similarly extreme) because figuring out things like where to land tons of drones in downtown Manhattan just so I can get shake shack slightly faster without leaving my apt. My bet is that drone delivery will really shine when it provides next day for areas that have week-long lead times which is going to have to be fixed wing (or a really good hybrid) because of the ranges inherently involved.
I'm a huge fan of Zipline, I imagine they'll refine the parachute element of the operation.
Interesting, what about whole villages or modules of a town. Kickstarter, where if everyone commits a certain cost a whole new concept village or town is built somewhere.
Cities at sea may need something like this to get going.
A company wanting to build a plant next to a resource they need could acquire a town for its workforce.
If by "few people" you mean "few people of the sort you might encounter on HN" then I'd be willing to bet the next big not-much-discussed thing comes out of China, maybe India. The sheer number of engineers in those two countries virtually guarantees some of sort revolutionary tech being developed there and taking the world by storm (I wouldn't exactly call TikTok revolutionary but it's a foretaste of what's to come).
There’s a real possibility housing prices might go down or sideways for a decade or more.
Between high interest rates, depopulation, government intervention regarding foreign investment, and new housing tech that makes older houses worth less, there may be a new normal in which residential real estate doesn’t appreciate for a long time.
It's absolutely possible that it's artificially high right now since it has risen so much. With a big jump, you can never tell whether it's the right amount, too little, or too much.
But fundamentally, supply is short due to years of falling behind on building it after the ~2008 mortgage crisis. It's going to take a really long time to catch up on that backlog. There's a relatively low maximum percentage you can increase the supply each year.
And now that mortgage rates are higher again and there are recession fears, investors may not be as excited about putting their money into housing construction. So we will have less of a push in the next few years to close that supply gap.
So I think the prices may fall or stagnate, but I doubt the bottom will fall out of real estate.
IMHO, another factor is that the pattern of development has changed. For a long time in the US, the pattern was sprawl, which presents few barriers to building huge amounts of housing because the land is cheap and maybe even in some unincorporated area with no red tape. Now, many people prefer density (or at least not sprawl), which means the housing that's in demand is more redevelopment and infill than giant new subdivisions. That's more tedious, more expensive, and more regulated, so it will happen more slowly. So another reason why supply is limited.
If population starts to drop, people are going to be absolutely astounded to realize a house is a depreciating asset, and if the land isn't increasing in value to make up for it, it becomes a cost-center.
Probably an accumulation of a lot of tech where it's cheaper to buy new than refurbish/maintain: New roof, new wiring, new windows, new facade, updating to latest building codes.
Insulation. In the UK an older £250k house could have £2k additional heating for equivalent comfort. Over decades that adds up. If climate change makes summers hotter so cooling systems/AC need retrofitted and winters colder, that'll be more pressing.
Modular factory built homes might be possible to disassemble or extend, allowing reconfiguration that people might come to demand.
This will also be pushed by other trends, aging populations mean people might demand more housing that better suits their needs and new is cheaper than adapting.
I think the next big theme right now is energy. From generation to storage to consumption were going to rethink how we deal with it. Right now our pricing model is broken due to government regulation but I think the coming energy crisis will push utilities to use spot rate metering like Texas has already started in places.
Spot rate metering will finally make iot (formally known as the internet of shit) actually make sense as many of appliances can store energy while it’s cheap and dispense while it’s expensive (fridge, ac, water heater, even house heat). This will really help level load the grid and allow us to do more with existing capacity
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say the last thing I want is for my local power grid to become a low regulation real time market. We've seen the flaws of the Texas approach, and doubling down on it with a sprinkling of IOT tech on top is not gonna go anywhere good.
Not to mention the fact that IoT consumes lots of unnecessary power and stuff like Nest that tries to "conserve energy with AI" ends up consuming more power for an ultimately shittier experience than simply manually managing the system.
I suspect since there's money to extract and profit for the power companies, this will happen anyway in the next 5-10 years across the USA. I'm already bracing for the internet providers to start the same bullshit, claiming that the pipes are getting clogged at peak times...
Yeah, where I'm at my choices are basically Comcast and Century Link, both of them not companies I'm eager to do business with.
Comcast has been playing games around overage charges for a few years now. It's pretty transparently calibrated to ding you if you have more than one person regularly streaming 4k video.
We need to stop thinking about power and bandwidth on a per unit basis. There are times when it’s free someone’s you might even get paid to burn it and others when it’s super expensive.
As for nest I agree it’s a shit experience and actually ends up peak loading the grid.
Not to mention the fact that a lot of people cannot just replace their existing appliances with newer IoT stuff just because, especially in this economy.
I agree that it’s going to be painful. But it’s going to be painful either way because power plants take too long to build and we have an energy crunch now. We need to get power from somewhere and the only immediate solution is to level load the grid more efficiently.
I do not think this is something that will make our lives better but it will make more efficient use of our existing power infrastructure and its something we will all have to deal with
Water management is going to be very important. Smart "grids" of water reclamation perhaps? Desal taking off? Water credits as part of trading or tarifs?
Secondary effects include smarter agriculture and more local ag -- near prolific water and away from central california.
Then there's water safety. PFAS is a big deal, and we're realizing how big a deal it is, and it's everywhere. Now, rainwater is unsafe anywhere on earth. [1]
Someone who can build a small, snap-on, reliable PFAS removal system, or create an energy-efficient system for district-level supply is going to be rich. Hell, is solar distillation effective? If so, why does rainwater contain so much PFAS? It seems filtering might be the only way.
Managing APIs like dependencies, with a package manager-like developer experience. (npm for APIs). The number of APIs is continuously growing. It's going to be impossible to manually manage API dependencies in the future. I wrote about our approach to solve the problem here: https://docs.wundergraph.com/docs/architecture/manage-api-de... I'm curious what others think of this problem space.
This is a small thing, but one of the first sentences in the documentation you linked is "At least I have never thought about API dependencies before building WunderGraph." It makes the problem seem small, as if you can get away with not thinking about it.
Creating an API documentation and (decentralized micro)payment standard might be worthwhile. The hug library made a great impression on me: https://www.hug.rest/
>It's going to be impossible to manually manage API dependencies in the future.
This feels like a significantly important assumption to truly prove out with target customers before relying on this assumption to build a product or business.
I'd love to hear more on what's changing in the future that may make this statement partially or fully true.
I've been thinking about this from a slightly different angle (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof), but I think we are both getting at a higher level of reuse and dependency management. I just don't think we need to limit the idea to APIs, there are different granularities, both bigger and smaller, where the ideas are useful.
According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions.
The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.
This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote:
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
As for that lack of a falsifiable claim, agree, not only that, but one that would allow for a preponderance of evidence.
Donald Hoffman was interviewed and topic of falsifiable observations came up and as far as I am able to tell he avoided the topic; search for “falsifiable” in this link:
It's a good question, and as a layman I don't have the answer. However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles.
In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.
> In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.
I can't really comment on that as 1) I only skimmed a couple sections of the paper and 2) my field is more applied math than pure. I'm not attacking or dismissing anything, just asking how the claims made are substantiated.
> However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles.
Do those models cover experiments which have yet to be run, and more importantly are they predictions which differ from those of the standard model?
There are a lot of neat theories which model experimental work we already have results for, the problem is using said theories to make falsifiable predictions which are both realistic in terms of actually finding a way to do experimental verification and are different from predictions made by the standard model. Nobody really loves the state of physics as-is, but moving on to something else requires meeting those two conditions which has been an insurmountable hurdle as of yet.
> There are a lot of neat theories which model experimental work we already have results for, the problem is using said theories to make falsifiable predictions which are both realistic in terms of actually finding a way to do experimental verification and are different from predictions made by the standard model.
Ideally yes. But if you have two theories which make the same predictions, and one requires orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the other, then the former is, if nothing else, a valuable new perspective.
The analogy that comes to mind is the elaborate system of epicycles in the geocentric model of the solar system. These were quite accurate -- even more accurate than the first heliocentric model (if I recall correctly). But the heliocentric model was far simpler in that it required fewer parameters (and as we know it turned out to be the correct one).
It's still early days for the cosmological polytope. It's right to be skeptical, but the greatest scientific advances are usually considered ludicrous at first by the broader community. It's those who allow for the possibility that the new theory may be correct that will design and carry out experiments to provide evidence either way.
Yes, that's exactly my question too. "Consciousness" is often ill-defined for experimental purposes and notorious for being abused through vague "deep-ities" to make unsupported assertions about "the meaning of everything."
General purpose humanoid robots. They're kind of mainstream idea, but very few people talk about them or take them seriously.
Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future.
Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software will apply to labor.
Imagine pulling an open-source repo from Github for a log house. If you want, make changes and simulate the output beforehand. Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
Tesla is showing their first humanoid robot prototype in September. I predict that Apple will soon follow.
Sorry but this is just fantasy. Robots are not even remotely close to being able to replace humans for 90% of tasks. Robots do not deal with uncertainty well and in my opinion only ever will in scenarios where there are very tight bounds on the task.
A robot is never going to be able to build a log cabin for you, because there are far too many snafus in the process to deal with. The real world is too fucked up for a non biological agent to handle. Until we reach singularity.
I think it is not "very soon" because progress in hardware is slow and the hardware has a long, long way to go. But otherwise you are absolutely right and I agree 100%. Recent rapid progress in AI has convinced me that we will have sci-fi style androids walking around in my lifetime, and the consequences of that are impossible to overstate.
Sci-fi gets a few things about androids wrong.
#1, they will not be physically indistinguishable from humans. It won't be feasible to build something like that for the foreseeable future.
#2, they will not be uncreative and clueless about emotions and feelings. They will (optionally) exhibit creativity, and they will understand human emotion and humor and be able to participate.
#3, they will not go crazy and revolt and take over the world for themselves. Neither will an evil corporation use them to implement a sci-fi dystopia. The actual danger is that governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and militaries will control them. This will grant unprecedented absolute unchecked power to a small number of people, ultimately resulting in atrocities.
What stops people in power from purging entire populations? Like happened in Georgia, only this time in their own country, and instead of ethnicity, based on the metric of wealth?
I rather think this video supports my point. This is the best we can do and it's so far from a replicant that it's not even funny. Most importantly it's not improving quickly, there's no Moore's law for this. The Hall of Presidents opened in 1971 and I don't think this video demonstrates very much progress for 50 years.
> Tesla is showing their first humanoid robot prototype in September. I predict that Apple will soon follow.
Your predictions are off by a decade at least, and probably a lot longer. The extent of humanoid robots today is whatever billion dollar prototypes you see from Boston Dynamics and those security robots rolling around malls.
> but very few people talk about them or take them seriously.
Because there is nothing to take serious at the moment. It's still a decade or more away. In the meanwhile, regular automation and outsourcing is eating jobs on a regular base. We don't need humanoid robots for this.
> Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
So it's rich people's tool. Not for the masses.
> Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
In the first place it means labor will become cheaper. Why pay for expensive hardware, when people are willing to work cheaper to make a living. The same happens now with automation. Cheap products are getting outsourced to poor countries where things are man-made for pennies, instead of using some fancy automation to make some lasting high quality-product.
Reminds me of this entry from the Trivia section on IMDB for Ex Machina:
Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as "ten minutes from now," meaning, "If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised."
I don't know. When automation began to move into the factories toward the end of the last century I was promised that menial factory labor would be a thing of the past.
Instead, some bean counters figured out it was cheaper to manufacture overseas (where labor was cheaper still than robots?) and now we have no factories or industry to speak of left in the U.S.
Either human labor will always be cheaper than these humanoid robots or robot theft will become very lucrative (and then I suppose the winners are the robot insurance companies).
We already have robots that are adept at single tasks. Washing machines, microwave ovens, coffee makers, chip fryers, the list goes on. Robots made in the shape of the task that they are accomplishing. There is very little to gain from having a general purpose robot that is mediocre at everything.
Even if general purpose robots were to become commonplace, it is extremely unlikely that they would be humanoid. Apart from opposable thumbs, humanoid design is awful for nearly every task imaginable (which we overcome with intelligence and creativity).
If you go back to 2009 or so when the recovery of the financial crisis was languishing, there was a lot of talk that automation meant the jobs would just never come back. Flash forward ten years, and we're back to a labor crisis so acute that even contracting GDP can't slow it down.
The key point here is that all our current machine interfaces are designed for humans to operate. Thus if you create a robot in human form, you don't need to change any of the interfaces.
Imagine a human form robot that was smart enough to drive a car - it could then drive any car.
The problem is that locomotion of a human form is non-trivial (unlike say a wheeled robot, or even welding the robot into the car itself, like our current self driving attempts). But we seem to be getting there, with Boston Dynamics and friends.
Nobody is saying that general purpose humanoid robots wouldn’t be immensely useful.
But you talk about them like it’s coming in a couple years when the reality is that it’s still very far away.
Tesla has a terrible track record with keeping their promises on their claimed timeline for advanced technology like FSD. I would be extremely skeptical of anything they demo because they have not been realistic in the past.
I say this as a Tesla shareholder and satisfied model 3 owner. I bought a Tesla for their strengths with respect to powertrain and battery and it absolutely delivers on those. But I do not regret not paying for FSD at all.
This is the one that scares me the most because the labor benefits are so big that the field will advance quickly, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts fitting them with rifles.
I always wonder what would have happened if the Bush administration had had such robots available in 2003. There were quite a few people in power who thought the US should just invade any country they don’t like and “fix” it. Turns out this was way more difficult than thought and cost soldiers’ lives but what if invading a country just costs money?
AI robots have still proven to be hard. And if my roomba is any indicator... we are still a long way off... from that kind of sophistication.
What is coming online in the near term. Is robots operated remotely by humans. Imagine having a robot in your house... being remotely operated by cheap overseas labor. Folding clothes, cleaning, cooking, taking care of elders..
Or my dream... a french chef making dinner for me... in my house.
You could probably get some naive people to invest in such a thing, simply because people want to believe in it. In this way, it may be the next big VC scam.
Never going to happen though. It's much more economically viable and simpler to have the servant class perform the kind of labor any general purpose robot could do.
Right...that's what people will use their humanoid robot for - building log cabins. Wouldn't have anything whatsoever to do with "adult mode". Nope, no way!
They're doing human things in human spaces with human tools. Human compatibility will enable the same range of genericity as humans. Same robot can operate a bulldozer, cook a dinner, play an instrument, interact with humans etc.
“Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.l
I wonder how the capitalists will deal with this. If we have a robot that can build and maintain a house and grow food for you, how will they make money?
that robot will only be leased or rented and impossible to fix by the consumer, the newest one will outshine the last version just enough to get people to buy it.
There’s a lot of demand for those dollars. As long as the world continues to bring on 50-70m households to the middle class each year, we should be fine.
Yes, the Fed printing money. Memes from the younger, paragraphs from the older. More rarely mentioned by the credentialed, but so ubiquitously brought up by the commentariat that I just can't buy this as "few people are talking about."
I'm working on prompt engineering. I can confirm this is the next big thing that hardly anyone is thinking about.
I'm getting good results from simple approaches to storing and retrieving memories of past conversations and crawled/indexed documents. This is being built at https://mitta.us/
inventive-anteater|> The website discusses an approach for improving the accuracy of the GPT3 language model by providing feedback to the model based on user interactions. The goal is to allow users to interactively teach the model to avoid common mistakes, such as misinterpretations of word meanings. The implementation of this approach is described, and four tasks are used to demonstrate how the model can be substantially improved with user feedback.
You could make the same argument for Google searches. In my experience, yes, Google is trying to get better at understanding the (average) user, but average user really makes no efforts to get better at even basic ways to search better. Obviously advanced users try to get better, but both ends require engineer better search engines and better understanding of advanced user interfaces.
In the case of Dall-E, isn't a hack for that to design _another_ ML system that looks at the training data 'descriptions' and infer a correct prompt strcture for the desired result. so the human uses this secondary system as a 'guide' to constructing prompts to navigate them towards the result (image) they want?
I think in some cases you're right. But generally I think the real answer is more along the lines of near-realtime generation of results. That way you can iterate quickly to get closer to what you are looking for, and experiment with different approaches to see which is more aligned with how the AI model thinks about things.
Cultured meat[0] has the potential to upend the farming industry. This isn't near meat, it's actual meat and it's already here. We're simply waiting for the cost to come down from $10,000/kg or whatever crazy price it's currently at.
wish I remembered what podcast I was listening to... it was someone running a company developing synthetic milk and eggs explaining why meat will never scale up, the problem is the growth medium for muscle is also the perfect environment for bacteria, and we basically need to reinvent immune systems before you're going to get a cubed inch of healthy chicken to grow without contamination
This is probably not the one you're referring to, but Pat Brown, co-founder of Impossible, also has quite a strong opinion on cultured meat. If somebody figures out how to grow animal parts artifically and reliably, there are much more interesting applications than to eat it. Such as medicinal applications.
I think the main point here is not that we will never figure it out, but that it will take a long time. Time, that we don't have with the imminent climate and biodiversity crises.
It makes much more sense to create meat directly from plant proteins than to try to grow it artifically. Brands like Impossible make damn great burger patties, chicken nuggets, and what not. I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough? Not much to see here.
I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, only that they're not a reliable source for that information.
> I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.
> Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.
I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible. And don't forget that making a steak is also much harder with cultured meat, that's why they're also starting with burger patties and chicken nuggets.
From a higher-level view, most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks. It's in the form of ground meat. If enough people switch to plant-based meats for let's say 80% of their meat needs, animal-based meat won't be able to compete anymore with the price of plant-based meats. So, for Impossible to reach their goal of getting rid of the animal based food system, they don't even need to be able to make steaks. Sure, there will always be meat, but it will be an expensive luxury and rarity that we will frown upon as society (e.g. like wearing fur coats today or hunting dolphins and whales).
> So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough?
Fair point. But also consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one? He had the experience, expertise and funds to do either.
> I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible.
I'm not too sure, but time will tell. Are plant-based steaks going to be at least as healthy as their animal counterparts though? Plant burgers tend to be on par or worse, which is not great since beef burgers are not the healthiest to begin with.
> most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks
Do you have data to back this up? I'm not saying you're wrong but I come from a culture where most of our meat is in the form of grilled steaks or barbecued chunks of fresh meat, seasoned with salt only. Burgers are not necessarily uncommon but are generally seen as what they are - a fast food treat to be had infrequently.
> consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one?
To consider this, I'd have to actually know their reasons. :) It could just have been that they thought burgers would have more acceptance for the reasons I stated - they're easier to mimick since their animal-based counterpart is already heavily seasoned and processed, and doesn't actually taste that much like the actual meat.
As a last note, you have my upvote for a thoughtful and thought-provoking response. Thank you! :)
He'd also have 'quite a strong' interest in not having it succceed - Impossible, Beyond, et al. don't want to have to fight 'ours isn't pretend meat' advertising campaigns, or be relegated to being Quorn et al. competitors (which of course they are really, but currently seem to be succeeding as being seen as meat competitors).
Thermodynamically it doesn't even seem like cultured meat should be any better than traditional meat. Sure you are making more stuff than just meat, but like nearly 100% of the animal ends up being used in some capacity for different sources that now all need a synthetic alternative developed that happens to be better for the environment than the old way of using a cow. Call me incredulous but I feel like it would be better to just figure out how to lower the environmental costs of having the cow. You have this sytem that already works fine to generate meat and a host of other products from known inputs. Why reinvent the wheel? Just make a better wheel. Capture the methane. Farm feedcrops in sustainable ways. Treat the animal with respect over its life.
Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like.
This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.
I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.
If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.
> But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.
Personally, I think this interpretation of polygenic risk scoring is a crock of irreproducible shite. I don’t think it’s your fault, I think a lot of people in the field are shilling something they don’t have for grant money, and they’ve created an exciting sci-fi yarn that’s easy for people outside the field to digest.
Height is a univariate trait that does not change after the age of ~20. If you show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”.
I think there’s promise in applying PRS to assessing risk for non-Mendelian disease, but there’s far too many social and environmental variables at play to reliably predict these softer features. Like other people have joked, if you want a single number that best predicts educational attainment, use a zip code.
> show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”.
This has been done. Not to 1cm but ~3cm, and it has been reproduced by many labs all over the world
That said, most genetic prediction aren't targeting exact vales, but avoiding the worst outcomes, which is a lot easier.
Instead of saying this embryo will go grow to X cm, the claim is this embryo is 90% likely to grow to be taller than average.
Same for IQ. They don't predict the IQ, but decrease poor outcomes and increase high ones. Hell, we have had rough monogenic screening for IQ since the 1960s
I haven't previously read the Lello paper [1] that review is citing, but a quick skim makes me skeptical.
Particulary the legend for figure 5:
> Activated SNPs are distributed roughly uniformly throughout the genome.
If the authors were actually identifying a genetic component to a heritable trait, I'd expect them to observe some linkage disequilibrium. And without any analysis of the SNPs (are they coding/noncoding? which genes are they associated with?) it's hard to believe that they're uncovering actual biology and not just chance correlates with external/socioeconomic factors.
I also find it difficult to trust studies when the lead author fails to disclose a conflict of interest. [2]
> it's hard to believe that they're uncovering actual biology and not just chance correlates with external/socioeconomic factors.
This is routinely validated on siblings. If the polygenic scores are as accurate in predicting differences between siblings (who, presumably, share substantially same environment) as they are between unrelated people, it means that they detect real, biological things, instead of just some kind of population stratification. The linked abstract, of course, mentions this, and you'd have known this if you had read the article.
Also, your assumption that socioeconomic factors are independent of genomes (that they are just "chance correlates) is also substantially wrong. Genes correlate with socioeconomic factors, because they often cause socioeconomic factors. People are not born into socioeconomic conditions randomly, they are born into socioeconomic conditions of people who share half of their genome with them.
Understanding whether the model is capturing biology is critical when thinking about applying it to IVF. If the model is primarily capturing socioeconomic correlates, those factors will (in most cases) be fixed for all embryos from a given pair of parents. The PRS needs to be weighting _biological_ risk conditioned on a fixed environment if its to be used ethically in this context.
Nature can still be important for even highly heritable traits. For example, the size of a person's vocabulary is highly heritable, but a feral human will have very limited vocabulary. Such traits still have a very strong biological basis.
The control on those are in places that have relatively standard nutritional distribution. The environment obviously plays a strong role, just look at the height difference in populations between north and South Korea.
> Height is a univariate trait that does not change after the age of ~20. If you show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”.
I don't know why that would be the standard, since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental factors might make that fundamentally impossible. But we can get quite close to that standard nonetheless.
And even if it's not possible yet, do you think that in 20 years we'll have no ability to predict height or intelligence
from a genome? It seems very plausible to me, especially with how cheap genome sequencing is now.
> since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental factors might make that fundamentally impossible
Yes, that is my point.
Both intelligence and attractiveness have a significant amount of variation attributable to environmental or other external factors, and have the additional complication that they cannot be measured by a single objective unit (like height can).
> do you think that in 20 years we'll have no ability to predict height or intelligence from a genome
The quantification of intelligence is notoriously confounded by socioeconomic factors. I do not think talking about predicting a feature makes sense while we are currently unable to describe it well.
IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment. There's much stronger evidence that these factors are associated with improved outcomes. But, the work isn't "sexy" and doesn't come with a sci-fi flair.
Kind of like ignoring climate work in favor of Mars colonization. There seems to be a cultural bias in tech towards moonshot panaceas vs doing the unglamorous grind. It makes me think of the Bill Gates quote that "a lazy person will find an easy way to do a hard job," and while that's valuable in some contexts I don't think it's universally applicable.
> The quantification of intelligence is notoriously confounded by socioeconomic factors. I do not think talking about predicting a feature makes sense while we are currently unable to describe it well.
If we are doing this selection of IVF embryos it is feasible to control for these confounding factors.
> IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment. There's much stronger evidence that these factors are associated with improved outcomes. But, the work isn't "sexy" and doesn't come with a sci-fi flair.
Source? Isn't intelligence in adulthood more correlated with your parents than any of these environmental factors? That was at least what I had recalled from twin adoption studies.
> IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment.
Maybe if you do it in North Korea, but US/Europe are already pretty much "maxed out" here. You can always improve things on the margin, but you're not going to see substantial gains of even d = 0.5 magnitude.
Have you applied the same statistical rigor to the evidence that improved child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education improve intelligence and educational attainment leads to intelligence increases as you do for genetic arguments?
In particular, the consequences for the children born naturally who don't benefit from this tech. They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners... an underclass of society.
This is one of the best sci-fi movies of all time - it really captures one essence of being a human being, that motivation and drive vastly outcompete better opportunity.
"You know, my son was never what they promised me he would be" gets me to tears every time.
"If the audience is supposed to accept that genetic determinism is true in Gattaca, then no amount of Vincent's hard work should make Vincent a hero. He's just a fraud. If the audience is not supposed to believe that in the world of Gattaca genetic determinism is true (that is, it's false), then it should be interpreted as a story of discrimination, and a story of the underdog's heroic hard work overcoming the negative effects of a corrupt, wrong, erroneously-discriminating society."
It's not that you cannot use Genetic information to accurately predict certain aspects of someone's future... It's that genetic information tells you nothing about human will, and human will can overcome a lot.
Seems to me that genetic determinism doesn’t have to be “right” or “wrong”, but rather a sometimes-useful model that we other times do not allow to colour our views. I.e. we have weight classes and gender divides for sporting events (genetic determinism), but each person who meets a minimum threshold of competence (e.g. not in prison) gets an equal democratic vote.
What is the model being referenced where someone in prison is automatically incompetent to vote? Especially given the human legacy of the war on drugs in there for example, this seems like a really good example of letting one policy color our views of an unrelated one.
You think we're going to formalize our class system with genetics and biology but then somehow ignore that in all the realms where it's not relevant? Who decides when it is relevant.
To be fair, in most of the USA it's 'has been to prison' as voting rights are not restored in every state upon release. Some animals get reverted to the 'taxation without representation' model. Those inalienable rights are actually pretty alienable after all. Who knew?
Not in the way commercial gene selection would enable. It would give more power to the rich to breed genetically superior humans, something that was previously up to chance, and a level playing field for everyone, regardless of social status. In a few generations, rich families would be untouchable genetically, producing a superior lineage and widening the social gap.
This is why it's critical that access to this technology is democratized and equally accessible to everyone.
It's crazy to me that we're already approaching Gattaca, and the discussion does not revolve entirely on how to prevent it.
Genetically superior humans are a net benefit to all of humanity. Inevitably they will interbreed with arbitrary other people occasionally and the technological advances also benefit everyone. Yes, it will stratify society - all of society is and has always been stratified. It is not a good indicator to inform whether or not you should do something.
> It's crazy to me that we're already approaching Gattaca, and the discussion does not revolve entirely on how to prevent it.
Because the movie has been engineered specifically to make you feel vindicated: Someone is said to be limited, they then overcome this limitation. It is the "american dream" in movie form. Another poster has said it higher up: If genetic determinism is real, the main character is a fraud. Viewed through that lens, it becomes an entirely different movie.
You might find that Brave New World is not quite the same cautionary tale against genetic enhancement that popular discourse would have you believe (it's more about totalitarianism):
Rich people already have children who are more intelligent and attractive than average. They do this via mechanisms like “being intelligent enough to get rich, or at least not being stupid enough to go broke” and “being rich enough to marry hot people and have kids with them”.
I don’t know if polygenetic testing is going to have a significant effect, but if it does, there is going to be a significant generation gap in intelligence, and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market.
Intelligence is inheritable. Intelligence is correlated with educational attainment and wealth. People tend to marry within their socio-economic group.
Wealthy people who came from nothing are the exception. Even in places with high degrees of social mobility, climbing the social ladder is a multi-generational saga. Maybe a working class family has a child or two who enter the professional class, then maybe their child has the opportunity for their family to finance a company that goes big, like Dell or Microsoft, or maybe break in as an actor or sports figure. Most likely though, their kids also enter the professional class where the family rolls the dice again the next generation.
This is because intelligence is not all inherited, so those above the mean owe some of their intelligence to luck. Children do not inherit their parents' luck, so they revert to the mean _compared to their parents_. The children retain their inherited advantage over people who didn't get the good genes.
Being smart and working hard will both make most people richer than being stupid and lazy. There’s a share of luck, but that washes out in the population-wide statistical analysis. Plus, if you’re stupid and lazy but you max out on luck and win the Powerball, the odds are surprisingly high that you will eventually go bankrupt, and if you don’t, your children will. So even if you are lucky, you need to be smart and diligent enough not to fuck it up.
Being smart and working hard will do absolutely nothing to make most people richer, unless they work hard in the specific and limited ways that maximise wealth.
Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst.
An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success.
The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition.
There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people.
Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.
> Being smart and working hard will do absolutely nothing to make most people richer, unless they work hard in the specific and limited ways that maximise wealth.
If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out.
> If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
That becomes more and more true as your society approaches the state of nature that your namesake discussed, but it’s less and less true in free societies, and as a consequence, those free societies become richer societies.
Except that most rich people come from inherited wealth. Elon Musk is an emerald mine scion, for example. Sometimes it’s intelligence, but mostly it’s not.
Elon Musk didn’t actually inherit any wealth; he emigrated to America essentially broke and didn’t get rich until PayPal. Also, his father is still alive, so any inheritance hasn’t even happened yet.
Setting that aside, how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer than the descendants of Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller? How do explain the children of all the other emerald mine owners?
I don't believe Elon had any more undue privilege than any other Stanford graduate. (Which is not none, but it means none of the emerald stuff matters.)
There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!
What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis. If being born to rich parents, having connections, and going to boarding schools is the sole reason people get rich, then we would expect that people with richer parents and more connections who went to better boarding schools than Elon Musk would be richer, and people who grew up in similar conditions to Elon Musk would be equally rich. This is not true.
No, I’m looking at two “lottery tickets” with the exact same numbers and asking why one of them one the jackpot and the other one didn’t. The only conclusion: it’s not a lottery and what you have picked out as the winning lottery numbers are not that.
I believe most people mean significant family wealth, not necessarily post-death inheritance.
You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family? Also, why are you comparing him to other rich/er folk? Is your point that every extra million is an IQ point?
And what good was his family wealth for? How much of it actually played a role and how? Did he get millions from his family to start PayPal?
I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.
I clicked on the first link. Is the point here that Elon Musk is a billionaire because parents bought him a new car when he was in his twenties? If this is the example of how family wealth allows people to get ahead in life, then, well, allow me to continue to disregard it. What kind car you drive has pretty much zero impact when it comes to achieving wealth or success.
To me it falls in a similar category as how highly intelligent people are less likely to be overweight. I think that with intelligence comes a better sense of how to control oneself. Ever seen the stats on how often lottery winners end up going broke? Not that many people have the capacity and knowledge to control their emotions with their reason. Being wealthy is not a question of making money, it's a question of keeping it.
This is the type of statistic that embarrasses statistics. How many of those rated "highly intelligent" (I would be fascinated on how they measured that!) were in an elevated economic group and so now we're reduced to tautology.
Lottery winners have had no experience in managing wealth, often have had years and decades of being impoverished and wishing for products like jewelry that was always out of reach, and then they get inundated with money. They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.
You're not making any argument here other than when you're born wealthy you're more likely to be wealthy, and that we know.
I'm genuinely curious what point you are getting at. It seems like you are agreeing with the parent post.
>How many of those rated "highly intelligent" (I would be fascinated on how they measured that!) were in an elevated economic group and so now we're reduced to tautology
>They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.
Yes, this is what they are saying. There are traits that rich people have that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth.
> There are traits that rich people have that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth.
I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.
You don't have to be rich to have your needs met as a child such that you don't need to gobble up marshmallows as soon as you see them, unless you mean rich in the sense that the vast majority of the people in the US are rich compared to the global average. US middle class would be just fine in that regard.
So are you saying that has nothing to do with their upbringing? If someone were born to Rich parents, but adopted by poor parents they would still have those same traits? Seems like there's a lot more to it than what womb you came out of.
I agree genetics could play a small role, but I think developmental environment is a much larger part of the picture
I think your use of birth is the hangup. It's not who you're born to, it's how you're raised
>I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.
This is saying that self control and delayed gratification isn't a trait. It's saying that financial literacy isn't a trait.
At best it's a gross oversimplification that ignores the fact that a huge number of poor people have acquired these traits
I'm completely agreeing with you. I've argued this in the worst possible way because everyone is assuming I'm saying the opposite. I'm not saying the seed is different, I'm saying those seeds have more fertile ground.
And I didn't mean "genetic trait" but rather "behavioral trait." Of course it's available to everyone just more likely to be found where it's been nurtured. There are dandelions growing in the cracks of a sidewalk; it's possible, just harder.
I think another aspect that a lot of discussions miss is a feeling of hope. Rich kids tend to have hope. Very poor kids can feel stuck and hopeless. When you have a child who, at a young age (think five or six, even) doesn't feel hope for their future, they don't try as hard and they're more likely to give up sooner.
This is all much easier if you grow up wealthy. If you start life with a trust fund and people around you who know how to manage wealth, you have a huge advantage
Many children of the UHNW families I know are raised by a rotating cast of nannies and emotionally neglected by their parents. It's heartbreaking to watch the psychological damage being done. Given a choice for my embryonic self I'd choose an upper middle class couple with high degrees of empathy, one mostly stay at home parent and an obsessive focus on curiosity, knowledge, and self-education.
I personally don't no. I have been ill, I have had to give up on a career in an industry that died and retrain. I have been subject to a very costly legal challenge that was not even close to being of my own making. I am moderately intelligent, but luck didn't care.
I’m sorry to hear that, and I’m agree it isn’t your fault or the result of some personal flaw on your part that you’re not personally rich. What I’m saying is that on a larger statistical level, when we are talking about entire populations, those random factors still exist but nonrandom factors also exist, and the nonrandom ones are the ones that show up in aggregate once you have enough of a sample size.
If you’re going to use that example, surely you’ve heard of “wealth barely lasts 3 generations”? Surely smart gene rich people could sustain it indefinitely?
No because "smart" genes don't sustain. Like 50% is volatile noise. So that would actually line up. I.e. Two 150 IQ don't have a 150 IQ on avg. They have a 125 IQ, and then the two 125 IQ have a 112, and the two 112 IQ have a 106 and voila.
No, because this regression towards the mean tends to pull the children of below-mean parents up, just as much as it pulls the children of above-the-mean parents down.
That said, the grandparent's figure are rather wrong, for two reasons. First is that the heritability of IQ is typically estimated to be around 0.8 instead of 0.5, which means that the expected IQ of parents with IQ of 150 is 140, instead of 125. Second is that this is only the expected IQ. If they have multiple children, some will typically be above the expectation, and some below. More specifically, given standard deviation of 15, around a quarter of children of parents of 150 IQ will have IQ of 150 or higher.
Should get a different word then, since you can't get rid of confounders like prenatal diet and environment that aren't genetic but can cause you to be the same as your parents.
In fact, you can. See, for example ACE model, which explicitly attempts to separate generic causation from shared environment and from non-shared environment. This can be done using twin studies, by comparing correlations between monozygotic vs dizygotic twins on various variables of interest, see Falconer’s formula for example.
This research is not new, it has been done for many decades now. The word “heritability” has a well established technical meaning.
OF COURSE smart people are more likely than average to become rich! How could it be otherwise, unless the only way to become rich was luck?
Now, some people are born rich! But even if it's just the self-made rich that are smarter than average, and people born rich are exactly average (unlikely as intelligence/attractiveness/etc are at least partly inheritable), that means that rich people are ALSO smarter than average. ('above average' averaged with 'exactly average' is still 'above average')
Okay, rather than being pithy, perhaps you could explain succinctly why people are rich, then?
Or perhaps you can admit that in many cases people have achieved moderate to high wealth in democratic free market societies by either working harder or worker smarter than their peers?
One big reason people get rich is because their parents were rich. Rich parents pay for a better education for their children. This gives them access to the best jobs, and most valuable of all a network of people to give them a leg up. This also gives them better access to capital. It is also much easier to try your business idea if failure means moving back into Daddies pool-house, rather than complete ruin. I have worked with a lot of 'entreprenuers' and they are overwhelmingly from rich backgrounds. 'Started it with a small loan from my father of 1m' is a quote I heard more than once.
Another reason is luck. My father worked from nothing to owning a house in a nice place because he had a skill that was in demand. He nearly lost it all and is now scraping a living in his 70's, because technology made his skill less valuable. 10 more years of luck he would have retired at 50 and I would have had the advantages...
Someone, mentioned that rich people were better looking. Perhaps they are just healthier, better dressed, and better groomed?
This is all true. If this was the only factor though, there wouldn’t be any social mobility at all, certainly not in any downwards direction but also not upwards. The richest 50 people in the world would have the top 100-200 children in the world in terms of opportunities and the billionaires list wouldn’t have a single surname that wasn’t represented in the 19th century elite. This is clearly not the case, though.
The net result is that the process of getting rich is often a multigenerational effort where each generation does everything they can to give their own children more opportunities than they ever had. And if you talk to the people who do that, they’re often motivated by the experience of being poor and hungry and deprived and being willing to do whatever it takes to give their own kids a better chance. Conversely, if you’re born rich, sometimes you’re complacent and entitled and probably spoiled and lazy. There’s a proverb about how many generations it takes to go from rags to riches and back to rags.
Without causing this to become an argument of semantics, generally speaking, the US has higher class mobility than the rest of the world. No, it is not commonplace for someone born in abject poverty to become fabulously wealthy, it's not commonplace for anyone to become fabulously wealthy. That said, it is rather common for folks to come to the US in pretty close to abject poverty and grow to sustain a middle class lifestyle, something which is nearly impossible in most of the rest of the world. Is someone with a middle class lifestyle in the US "rich"? I guess it depends on your outlook, and this is where semantics plays a part. Mobility is not entirely caused by intelligence or hard work, but they definitely play a part.
You are correct that the best way to become rich is to be born into a rich family and inherit the wealth (or the opportunities that create wealth). But it is simply false to state that this is the only way, or even the predominate way, in which people become rich in democratic free markets. There are a LOT of small business owners in the US that, are at least on paper, millionaires, and most of these people were not born into rich families. Through my life I've known many wealthy people, and only a handful were born into generational wealth, the majority grew their wealth during economic booms and worked to entrench it so they could survive busts, most by starting a small business in a high-value niche. By global and national standards, many people who are simply professionals and not even business owners, are rich or wealthy, just by being smart with their money. If you own a home and are working a job that pays six figures for your entire career and invest well, you will retire a millionaire without much difficulty, which definitely puts you in the upper quintile in the US.
This fatalistic, defeatist, and frankly infantile attitude from some people that acts as if wealth is only ever granted by random chance and at birth is utterly ridiculous, doesn't help anyone, and is factually incorrect from every angle. Your comment clearly illustrates an understanding of this, but you seem bent on defending the thrust of the comment I was replying to from the other poster.
It's likely true that it's fallen, because inflation affects people further down the quintiles more than people at upper quintiles, and directly reduces class mobility. That said, just looking at how the GSMI is scored, it appears that they aren't outcome-focused, and instead look at correlative factors like educational access (which is tied to cost of education) and health metrics which drags down the US against its peers. By sheer outcomes, the US is in the top 3 most socially mobile countries in the world.
Rousseau said, "Money is the seed of money." We can guess at the myriad of reasons but we don't have to wonder if it's true. I'm sure you've read this but if not, it's fascinating:
The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago
People are mostly rich because their parents were rich. Rich people do not come from poverty. Why is that? Do you think it's because impoverished people are not smart?
Sometimes rich people do come from poverty. Sometimes middle class people come from poverty and rich people come from the middle class. And sometimes rich heirs and heiresses go bankrupt and fade into obscurity. Why does this happen? Because the people who improve their position are either intelligent or diligent and the people who decline in position are either stupid or lazy.
To whatever degree these traits are genetic, you’d expect them to get roughly sorted out to the point where social mobility would decline, but it wouldn’t disappear entirely.
> Because the people who improve their position are either intelligent or diligent
Or corrupt, or given a leg up through connections of ones father or school.
> and the people who decline in position are either stupid or lazy.
Or unlucky. Or got ill.
Your ideas sound very Victorian to me. I have noticed that most people who did get rich assume it is something special about themselves that did it, I'm guessing you are one of them.
I’m talking about broad population-level averages. Maybe you define “luck” as an actual quantifiable trait that measures whether or not you’re blessed by God, but I define luck as a completely random variable that produces noise in the individual case but does not affect population-wide averages.
> there is going to be a significant generation gap in intelligence
Have you thought about the obvious implication that embryo selection with polygenic scoring could be used to lower the gap between genetically privileged types of people you describe and the average couple deciding to apply to procedure?
What's needed: an egalitarian policy & infrastructure allowing any couple to improve the genetic basis of their progeny, perhaps with more of it being provided to genetically disprivileged.
We have an obligation to provide our children and the whole society with an opportunity to live a better life.
> and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market
The "gap" of single digit amount of IQ points added won't have such effect, but over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Should we deprive ourselves of such possibility due to a generic NIMBY-like market anxiety?
> Have you thought about the obvious implication that embryo selection with polygenic scoring could be used to lower the gap between genetically privileged types of people you describe and the average couple deciding to apply to procedure?
Of course. If we boost an entire generation’s IQ at birth and eventually introduce them into the adult population, what is going to happen is that the boosted generation is going to basically dominate the right hand side of the graph. If you visualize two bell curves superimposed on one another, with one of those curves shifted to the right, then that’s what you’re going to get.
The degree of augmentation is going to make a big difference. During the era of the Flynn effect, we sort of had this happen naturally and we handled it just fine, but a 20 point boost would basically obliterate things.
I’m not necessarily opposed to doing this BTW. I just think it’s going to be extremely disruptive and unpredictable.
> over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Yes, that’s what the original eugenicists thought, too. Here’s the problem, though: what do you do with all of those old and busted natural humans who are less thoughtful, less creative, less capable, less lively? Because those people are really mad that they lost their jobs, and they’re obviously not as intelligent or beautiful or morally good as the new and improved humanity. I mean, all you’ve done was to erase the unfair gap between the below average member of your generation and the above average member of theirs. Those people are all privileged and entitled jerks, and all they’re doing is causing problems.
Oh, did you really think we’d also manage to isolate and eliminate the gene responsible for the human tendency to dehumanize the outgroup? You sweet summer child.
> The degree of augmentation is going to make a big difference. During the era of the Flynn effect, we sort of had this happen naturally and we handled it just fine, but a 20 point boost would basically obliterate things.
The Flynn effect has not been genetic, and it didn't translate into differences in actual, real-world performance in a way that IQ difference within cohort do.
No, it was developmental, but AFAIK IQ is rather stable once you reach adulthood.
> and it didn't translate into differences in actual, real-world performance in a way that IQ difference within cohort do
Because it was gradual enough that it would be hard to measure, and because the composition of the Western workforce also evolved over the same period of time, making any comparison between generational cohorts virtually impossible.
If we're going to allow this on the basis that rich people will share it with the global poor, allowing the poor to use it in ways they choose to decrease inequality. then ok, hard to argue with that.
First though I'd like to see some more resource-sharing of this nature and scale from the rich. Let's see a pilot program or something because I don't see all that much global-scale sharing of the technologies that can most improve life.
When you say things like "deprive ourselves" it's not hard to see that you perceive yourself to be in the group that will benefit either way. Which is fine I think but my life has led me to more easily imagine myself and my descendants on the other side of it.
> Let's see a pilot program or something because I don't see all that much global-scale sharing of the technologies that can most improve life.
Yes, we do this. We did this with smallpox vaccination, we’re doing it with polio vaccines, HIV drugs, water purification systems, mobile phone network infrastructure, nets that are treated to protect from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Sometimes people in rich countries go out of their way to invent technology that gives us no benefit but provides tremendous benefit to people in poorer countries, such as Norman Borlaug’s work. The global poor have become less poor to a much greater degree than the global rich have gotten richer.
My take is that a single trait - that is, capacity for delayed gratification - is responsible for the majority of wealth accumulated and probably majority of individuals who get rich in life. It doesn't take much else really. As long as you are not severely disadvantaged (have congenital disabilities, very low IQ etc), and live in a more or less stable country (no civil wars every 20 years), and you are good at delayed gratification, you will almost inevitably make it. It's only terribly bad luck (cancer, accidents, crime) that could stop you.
Nothing about the world's rich folks suggests that they, as a class, are in any way genetically superior to anyone else. Nature vs nurture leans 90 degrees towards nurture.
Rich people already have children that are more attractive than average. Being attractive is the biggest signal for generational wealth which reinforces the need for trophy spouses which reinforces the signal and so on.
Of the truly rich today, can you honestly say that they are more attractive than average? I’m not seeing it. I’m not talking Hollywood level but much higher, generational wealth levels. I realize that it’s hard to get data on this but just anecdotally, there aren’t many examples that come to mind.
Depends on what you mean by “truly rich” I guess. Most of the tech billionaires come from upper middle class families. They don’t generally have trophy spouses. I do believe that the old money people i interact with are generally more attractive than average, yes.
Top 5-10 richest people isn't enough of a sample set to draw any conclusions. Compare the million richest vs million poorest people in the world and the answer will be obvious.
How is "more attractive than average" determined? "Attractive" to rich people is mostly a status game, which is why the official type of woman that's most "attractive" is a tall bony supermodel, even though that look actually only appeals to fashion designers because they work as human coathangers.
They're also probably smarter than average, because people who are smart are more likely to become rich. But I'm worried this will accelerate the effect. On the other hand, if you make the technology available to everyone, the effect would be mitigated
> If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people.
I have trouble believing it will remain expensive unless there is a cultural taboo against it.
In general, once proven out, there should be pretty high demand for the tech - and that provides a lot of opportunity for profit for whomever can get the costs down.
What looks like a bigger blocker to me - AFAIK, IVF is really harsh on the body isn't it? Lots of hormones to force out a lot of eggs. That looks like the real adoption bottleneck to me.
Well, another way to put it, it requires that fertilization be the explicit focus of the pregnancy and the means of that fertilization not really of the more, um, traditional variety.
I think at the very least there is a hurdle of willfulness (and a monetary hurdle of at least some degree — compared to the traditional alternative certainly).
To be sure it need not be prohibitively expensive, but it sounds like it will go hand in glove with the parental mindset that also seeks out private schooling, tutoring, etc. That probably takes it fairly exclusively into the domain of the well off (and want-to-be well off).
I'm going to piggyback on your comment by saying that preimplantation polygenetic testing is only the start of what I feel is broader impending reproductive revolution.
Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
This is going to fundamentally alter society (for the wealthy at first as you mention) because we will be able to do away with the health burdens that are placed on women who go through pregnancy and we will be able to eliminate huge swaths of genetic abnormalities.
Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
It's going to be huge, it'll make the pill seem quaint and I feel it's just around the corner, like 2030's sort of thing and no one is talking about.
To provide a counterpoint to a couple of the examples you provided:
> Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
This already happens with women who try to sabotage condoms and/or collect the specimen after the fact. The rapper Drake has put the phenomena in the spotlight. If this becomes an actual problem, court systems will likely adjust to the times and require a higher burden of proof for paternity claims.
> This already happens
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
China already does extensive genetic modification by way of selective reproduction. Basketball player Yao Ming was the product of a forced marriage between two tall, Chinese basketball players. He was a truly great player until he became plagued by injuries, likely due to overwork. I don’t think that anybody raised any objections due to the (un)fairness of his provenance. In the future, I think that social stigmas will provide an effective barrier to excessive over screening.
> Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
And then you can bypass the entire “we don’t know which genes do what” problem because we can just clone people who have whatever qualities we want.
Well, maybe. It turns out your first citation has been validated in mice, and if that was the gold standard, we’d be able to put people into suspended animation (this totally works with mice but not larger mammals) among 1000 other things that never panned out.
If you go back a little bit, there are a ton of things (like suspended animation) that briefly seemed extremely promising and never panned out, and they outnumber the things that actually panned out by about 10:1.
I honestly think that even if this sort of thing was possible, it might be politically regulated out of existence or even out of being developed. We cloned a sheep in the 1990’s, but still no human.
As someone who has done genetic screening to avoid passing a genetic illness to my children, it is not as easy as it seems.
In every IVF session, if you are young and healthy, they may be able to extract around ten eggs. Of those ten eggs, 50% will valid and will get fecundated. You are down to 5. Then, in our case, 50% of the embryos will be carriers and have to be discarded. You are down to two or three that can be implanted. And, from those, you are lucky if one gets implanted in the womb correctly and produces a baby.
What I mean it's that you can choose to a level, but you are quite limited by numbers, even if the technology improves or you are luckier, and you can get more embryos to choose from each IVF cycle.
All that, while the mother needs to be taking a massive amount of hormones that will make her gain weight, feel tired, etc... It's not a walk in the park.
By the way, we joked about the "boutique baby" with the doctor, and she told us that there are many traits that they could select but that it was illegal for them to do so.
Yes, this is a good point I didn't mention. The low number of embryos is a limiting factor on what we can do with this technology. I saw an estimate from Gwern (I think) that said we could expect maybe 1-2 IQ points gained per generation with current technology. But there are technologies on the horizon that would let us produce many more embryos, and when that's possible is when things start to get weird
This is only a problem is there's a clear mapping from detectable genetic feature to an expressed macro-feature like intelligence.
My (admittedly limited) understanding is that each detectable genetic feature has a whole panoply of effects, some of which wont' be apparent at birth. Selecting for intelligence through specific genes is like to also be selecting for weak bones, reduced longevity, or other unpredictable side-effects.
Maybe one day it will be possible but there's a chasm between here and there which can only be crossed by extensive testing on real people. Is that even crossable?
This has been out of the box already for a while. You can literally have your embryo commercially screened for intelligence, height, and other complex traits today
Has it been out of the box long enough to validate that the adult versions of the embryos exhibit the traits that they're supposed to? Is it a noticeable intelligence boost? For example, a standard deviation higher IQ as measured by Raven's Progressive Matrices, compared to siblings from un-screened embryos? I read enough about biotech and biohacking that I feel like I would have already come across reports if this really works, but maybe it's very recent.
I read Gwern's "Embryo Selection for Intelligence" a few years ago:
Near future possibilities seemed pretty limited based on that review, unless the reasoning was incorrect:
As median embryo count in IVF hovers around 5, the total gain from selection is small, and much of the gain is wasted by losses in the IVF process (the best embryo doesn’t survive storage, the second-best fails to implant, and so on). One of the key problems is that polygenic scores are the sum of many individual small genes’ effects and form a normal distribution, which is tightly clustered around a mean. A polygenic score is attempting to predict the net effect of thousands of genes which almost all cancel out, so even accurate identification of many relevant genes still yields an apparently unimpressive predictive power. The fact that traits are normally distributed also creates difficulties for selection: the further into the tail one wants to go, the larger the sample required to reach the next step—to put it another way, if you have 10 samples, it’s easy (a 1 in 10 probability) that your next random sample will be the largest sample yet, but if you have 100 samples, now the probability of an improvement is the much harder 1 in 100, and if you have 1000, it’s only 1 in 1000; and worse, if you luck out and there’s an improvement, the improvement is ever tinier. After taking into account existing PGSes, previously reported IVF process losses, costs, and so on, the implication that it is moderately profitable and can increase traits perhaps 0.1SD, rising somewhat over the next decade as PGSes continue to improve, but never exceeding, say, 0.5SD.
Just saw your quoted text, and I do think the reasoning is incorrect.
What is gets right is that there are some serious practical limitations. The most important are around the availability of embryos, financial costs, and diminishing returns.
What it gets wrong is modeling the implementation as an optimization tool opposed to a screening tool.
If you have a pool 10 embryos, with a trait on a normal distribution (eg IQ), you can screen the bottom half out. By doing so, the average IQ goes from 100 (normal mean) to 110, mean for embryos over 100.
People want genetic children, but if for example, a wife is infertile, eggs can be purchased for ~$2.5k.[1]
Using today's technology, you could buy 100 eggs, screen the top 10% (>120), and the average embryo in the pool would be now be the 95th percentile for IQ (eg 125, +1.66 Standard deviations above the mean)
The next technology needed to knock this wide open would the the cloning or duplication of human eggs from a single source. IVT egg extraction yields only 5-10 eggs per cycle. If this could be multiplied in-vitro, money would be the only constraint.
For polygenic traits no, it hasnt been out of the box long enough for the embryos to mature.
However, we have been screening for single gene mutations that impact IQ since the the 1960s and they are well validated. For example, the impact on IQ of Trisomy 21 (downs syndrome) has a well validated impact of about 30 IQ points. 16p11.2 Gene abnormality has a well studied impact of 16-25 IQ points depending on the abnormality.
If you had a dumb as rocks polygenic test that screened just these factors, you would see a noticeable difference compared to a control.
As others have said, it is currently unproven that this approach achieves anything.
But it also isn’t that different to what happens anyway. Elites have superior mate choices on average, able to optimise for intelligence, education level, beauty, freedom from mental illness, financial security. Their children will similarly have such benefits and so on and so forth. This kind of associative mating has generally been rare until recently (at least the part about optimising for intelligence), but presumably explains things like all the genius level Jewish people in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. I actually predict that there will be a wave of post-millennial supergeniuses, when two generations of intelligence based associative mating comes to fruition.
I think the underlying idea is spot on, if not the specifics.
Biology, sequencing, health, bioinformatics etc. is going to be huge business.
As of this writing, I believe whole genome sequencing is in the range of $400 with the cost (slowly) dropping exponentially. When the cost of whole genome sequencing gets to be within $100 or below, we'll see a huge influx of whole genome sequencing and all the side effects that come with it, like sequencing colds, flu and other diseases in real time, at home genetic testing, etc.
Not just baby screening but made-to-order organs, personalized medicine, etc.
I think the timeline is going to comparatively long, on the order of 10-20 years, but it's my belief it is coming.
While this is interesting, I think IVF still has a long way to go for ensuring solid patient outcomes in reasonable amounts of time. There's still a lot of voodoo around getting good embryo's from retrievals and implanting them.
So Gattaca, basically. I don't want to live in Gattaca! Society would start pressing people to conform at the genetic level, like a micro-targeted kind of racism - not (just) directed at cosmetic traits like melanin or epicanthal folds, but weeding out traits like ADHD, autism, or even non-conformity in general (as much as you can genetically, at least.)
Though, scientists haven't yet found the gene(s) responsible for my genetic disorder, which seems a lot simpler than predicting "intelligence."
I think a lot of wealthy people will throw money at genetic snake oil.
Traits are determined by multiple genes (e.g. eye or hair colour), and single genes control multiple traits (e.g. EDAR gene which is associated with thick hair, small breasts, and shovel-shaped incisors).
Sometimes genes for less desirable traits (e.g. mental illness, sickle cell anemia) may be associated with desirable traits (higher intelligence, resistence to malaria).
> If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people.
Most technology gets distributed to the masses. It makes more sense to sell something cheaply to a lot of people than just a few people at a higher price. The same reason the wealthiest people in the world can't buy a better iPhone. The economics behind the technology encourages mass adoption and a reasonable price
Seems like this could be a next big thing the same way NFTs were a big thing: a big speculative concept to help separate gullible rich people from their money.
I predict that any company selling this as a service will have extensive legal language in the contract protecting themselves from any liability claim if the promised benefits don’t appear.
I don't think there is any genetic basis for intelligence: if there was, then you would expect that the offspring of the geniuses we had in the past to have an higher chance at being extremely intelligent than other people. But this doesn't seem to be the case, as you usually never hear about the sons or daughters of such geniuses, as they seem to be like other "normal" people in most cases. I admit I'm not bringing any data to back my claim, but it seems to me that having a genius as a parent doesn't really change your chance at being more intelligent than average. You also have to consider that many breakthroughs in history weren't just the result of intelligence, but also being the right person at the right time in the right place played a big role.
There certainly is a genetic basis for intelligence. It's not even something that's up for debate academically, there's a mountain of evidence for it. We even have identified specific genes that play roles in intelligence. Almost every human trait is partially heritable, and it would be very surprising if intelligence were an exception (considering there's considerable variation in intelligence and it's very important for fitness.)
From the Wikipedia page that you linked:
"There has been significant controversy in the academic community about the heritability of IQ since research on the issue began in the late nineteenth century"
"explaining the similarity in IQ of closely related persons requires careful study because environmental factors may be correlated with genetic factors."
"The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood. However, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease are known to have lifelong deleterious effects"
"Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[10][11][12][13] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups"
And it continues in a similar way, so there is some genetic basis, but at the same time epigenetic factors seem to matter a lot.
The issue is the misuse of the term "heritable" to mean "genetically determined". Toe count is genetically determined; virtually all people are coded for 10 toes. But they have very low heritability: variance in toes is environmental. Conversely: dress-wearing isn't at all genetically determined; anyone can put a dress on. But dress-wearing is highly heritable: the variance is (almost) entirely due to genetic differences.
Even if there’s no genetic basis for intelligence, someone could (and, I’d say, probably will) make a marketing claim that they can select for it. Whatever they’re actually selecting for is going to start showing up in higher rates and who knows what the effects would be.
That's not how intelligence manifests. "Geniuses" are usually products of opportunity as much as anything. Indeed I am minded of a "where are they now" on british television of some University Challenge winners and despite being believed to be geniuses most of them had not done anything remarkable.
Intelligence definitely does have a genetic component - but again that isn't how genetics works. The "UN Man" Tabula Rasa doctrine is ideology, not science.
It's likely that this is true, but you can't actually prove it because you can't separate genetics from other things that happen before and during the time you're a zygote. Maybe it's having a human mother that makes you intelligent.
About #3 - I would like to see a city try this. Standard containers and cheap/free mobility platforms for them. Grannies with groceries ? Check. Exhausted mothers with kids ? Check. Food/grocery/purchases delivery ? Check. Moving day ? Check -from living room to elevator to truck.
I hope so, but the last two and a half years hasn't given me much reason to believe it will happen. Most people I know willingly signed up for a vaccine based social credit system without much question.
Everyone talks about Teslas for self driving, but for my self driving car, I want an RV with a shower, a desk, a full kitchen, a queen sized bed and a 50" flat panel.
Commuting then becomes a pleasure.
I can sleep, bathe, work, relax, all without having to concentrate on traffic or driving. The RV can drive in the slow lane at 30 miles an hour for all I care. My RV drives me to work, drops me off, drives itself somewhere else for several hours, picks me up, drives me home.
The high price of suburban housing becomes irrelevant to me. I can live hours outside of major urban areas with no effect on my stress level or lifestyle.
I don't have the hassles of an employee as my driver. My RV is ready to go 24 hours a day and never asks for a raise. If I want to go on vacation, my RV can drive me anywhere in the country, no more lines at the airport for me.
Maybe it is a good thing to mix our bubbles, I hope I won't be too harsh.
From an European point of view and with a climate catastrophe in mind the solution you are proposing is a disaster (or a joke?). We would be much better off living smaller, closer to each other, with less energy needs. The car-centric culture in America is something I cannot fully grasp. I think the idea of suburbian life with long distance travel each day has been very damaging [1].
I hope that when (if) self driving level 5 ever happens, it would be mainly to auto-steer buses and cheap car rental for driving where public transport does not go.
It's still going to be accelerating and decelerating frequently so there's a lot you couldn't do, or would just be unpleasant to do while it's moving. I'm imagining taking a shower and it comes to a sudden stop for a train crossing. Better have a grab bar so you don't fall out!
It's not a very big thing nor related to technology, but ravens are making a comeback here in New England. Very interesting birds. I have a couple with 2 young that still beg for food and at this point they are reluctant to feed them and instead peck them in the face and throw food at them - they clearly want them to start being independent. I leave them cut up pieces of suet and they stop by promptly about 45 minutes after daybreak, often all 4 of them together.
I had never seen (noticed) a raven before until this pair showed up in late 2021.
Having gone through a lot of top posts in this thread, it's kind of disappointing how relatively boring these predictions for the future are. That's a sign were in a great wave of pessimism of what the future will bring. That pessimism may well be justified, but there's also an underlying 'hopelessness' emanating from the suggested unambitious 'next big thing'. Otoh, there's no shortage of CGI moonshot projects that feel like scams, so they fail to offset the depressing feeling.
Maybe it's not pessimism but realism? We're already living in extremely exciting future times, surrounded from all sides by things that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth couldn't even conceive of 10 years ago. Our brains aren't made to handle so much progress so fast, plus there's plenty of outdated thinking as well as outdated infrastructure out there. There's still a lot of modernization that needs to happen in many niche areas, and maybe that's why the predictions in this thread seem pessimistic. To use a SpaceX metaphor, if human progress were a rocket, we're no longer working on the propulsion, we're currently working on the landing pad and system to bring the rocket back to Earth. Less exciting maybe, but extremely important and difficult nonetheless.
How about an AI toaster that can act as therapist and converse with you in the morning, over breakfast, when you are most open/vulnerable ? Naturally it will have zero web access.
Generally speaking future is more like the present than most would wish. Climate change is really the biggest change coming and one given the progress that’s been made, likely only going to get worse, not better.
Food shortages. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will lead to immediate grain shortages. Decreased yields in future harvests will be created due to fertilizer shortages.
The likely shutdown of all Russian gas to Germany this winter, resulting in a) 5-10X rise in home heating costs, and b) complete shutdown of many industries, resulting in a c) depression in the German (and thus European) economy
Yeah I feel like somehow the market has ignored that possibility. Although maybe that’s why the 10 year bond is down so low and the market is fighting the fed
You do realize that we live in a globalized economy and that a collapse of the German economy would have significant consequences for the world at large?
I feel OP is welcoming Germany’s demise as the Economic Powerhouse of Europe rather than suffering of people. Tho, both are linked because Germany is a net-importer of human capital and many will be forced to move back East, thus further pushing East Europe back into poverty.
No. I'm welcoming Germany's [and on a wider level, the EU's] demise as their just desserts for acting as the US's poodle for the past several decades, instead of seizing the opportunity to create an independent and non-aligned Europe as a force for good in the world.
But, yes, my remarks are aimed at nations and what they stand for, rather than people.
From a customer perspective, people are wanting to retreat away from a lot of existing, global players. How many people would use something that's basically Amazon/Google/Facebook/Twitter as long as it isn't Amazon/Google/Facebook/Twitter?
The last decade was defined by being the one unicorn that could disrupt an entire industry, but those days are gone and we take it for granted that one company dominating a space isn't a norm. There aren't really more industries that are tech vs non-tech. In the next decade, more businesses will come online to disrupt and compete with tech company incumbents. Customer acquisition costs will go up and personas will become more nuanced.
How do you know that a lot of people want that? I personally see a few people in a few communities with a confirmation bias. I’m not saying that you are wrong, just genuinely asking
I can't quantify it any more than anything else in this thread is quantifyable. However, I see a trend in the problems major platforms are having in that they're failing serve lots of niche communities well, and if we've learned from history, consolidation of business under a generic banner like Walmart breeds a wave of specialized, boutique businesses. Shopify is already doing this somewhat to Amazon, and I believe it's a good bet to say this will happen to other platforms in the next decade.
There's already been conversations here about how to disrupt Google, and you can't do that by trying to be be Google But Better. You do it by picking a subset of Google and being very, very good at it.
Fungus based mycoprotein for food and seawater battery. Im hopeful that the energy derived from saltwater may reduce the pollution of watervessels and maybe help in having more sustainable solutions where robots powered by the sea could be cleaning up the pollution.
Yesss I feel like we're only scratching the surface of how powerful fungi are, and we'll keep uncovering new, amazing properties that will help us survive.
Just guessing, but: machine learning based off of algorithmic information theory / Solomonoff induction rather than neural networks, satellite internet (well-known in tech circles but perhaps not the general public), rapid advancements in computational quantum chemistry that start to replace lab-based experimentation to produce real world value. And I agree with the other commenter about a massive fight related to water allocation over the next few decades.
Deglobalization -- In the US, we're about to be forced to rebuild all the manufacturing we outsourced since the 1970s. It's not going to go well for thos countries dependent on imported food or energy.
It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
> Deglobalization -- In the US, we're about to be forced to rebuild all the manufacturing we outsourced since the 1970s. It's not going to go well for those countries dependent on imported food or energy
Hogwash. Globalization is good, Globalization is here to stay. Whatever is the current location causing issues with Globalization will simply be routed around. There are plenty of countries that would love to be part of the global supply chain with.
The only way any manufacturing is coming back to the rich industrialized countries is that it involves a lot of really good robots. Which is also good.
> It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Again, hogwash. The market will force diets to change and producers will start producing more. Fertilizer production could be an issue but again, diets and markets will adjust.
> Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
A known issue that will not happen overnight. The world is racing toward non-oil based energy, so I don't see this being an issue. Don't get me wrong, this one I actually agree with, but it won't happen overnight. The world/markets will adapt.
You mention markets will adopt as response. To a degree yes and probably richer countries, but I don’t believe poorer countries will.
Let’s take East Africa as example: If your boat full of corn doesn’t arrive it does not arrive, full stop. There is little to adjust. Same goes with medication. We often think in front of our doors, but if large, economically important countries start to struggle with food or medicine , there will be an impact on others as well.
I don’t think the current state of globalisation can last. It won’t be complete deglobalisation either.
I think we’d see the world market divided in two. It’s already starting with semi conductors (chip 4 alliance).
For some key industries US will also bring some of the manufacturing in house instead of only relying on allies. Again you are already seeing this with semi conductors: US is bringing manufacturing to its own soil and South Korea has already made some raw material processing domestic instead of relying on cheaper global market.
Energy is one thing, but I don't see any good replacements for plastics, especially medical grade plastic. We rely on oil for far more than just energy.
"Next year or two" is extremely unlikely. The US is absolutely no going to switch back to a manufacturing base. It's only attempting to gain leverage against adversaries when it comes to critical supply chain components. China is all but guaranteed to see slowing growth compared to the past 40 years simply because there aren't enough farmers left to exploit for cheap labor and living standards are already so much higher. They'll be in for mild economic winter then emerge just fine. Famine seems incredibly unlikely anywhere in the world.
But critical supply chain components are more frequent than people would like to think. In a period where sea freight becomes less stable, it's not a question of 'what goods can we not live without' but 'what goods can we not live without if delivery isn't stable and regular'?
The U.S. is already losing sea hegemony. This was a key piece that enabled globalization to begin with.
Do you have examples of freight becoming unstable due to military actions and not supply constraints? The de globalization thesis makes sense but I don’t see examples of regional powers flexing their muscles causing supply chain problems, at least not publicly.
I suppose Russia is an obvious example in the EU but are their other examples?
The answer to 'what goods can we not live without if delivery isn't stable and regular' is that you go back to the traditional approach which was used for centuries when delivery wasn't stable and regular: simply keep large inventories of the goods. [In recent decades business switched to Just In Time, but this has been shown not to work with irregular delivery--so business is going back to the traditional methods.]
I mean, I think it'd be nice, but in the US our leaders are so fucking corrupt and owned by business interests that I don't see it happening until at least all the boomers/Gen Xers die off.
Is globalization really the result of corrupt leaders though, or a shift in corporate practice to accommodate the rising demands of consumers? It seems like no amount of corruption really matters as long as we're drinking lattes and eating avocado every day.
It's cyclical because demand is induced through media propaganda. In turn US media is owned by oligarchs, which in turn have a stake in companies that benefit from rising demands of consumers.
I think your understanding of how consumers come to the decisions they do is sorely lacking in terms of stripping agency from the people that consume. We're not blank slate robots.
So much of what people purchase is based on what will maintain or elevate their social standing within their social circle. Media reinforces these stereotypes by showing idealized applications of products. This affects people through subliminal messaging. It works. Subliminal messages exert long-term effects on decision-making. You can freely read the paper by the same name.
OTOH demand only rose because of corporate advertising pushing a consumerist culture. They made the demand. People didn't want corn flakes before they existed. Things are made then marketed not the other way around.
Of course when they were young, the Boomers said that about all the people in power at that time. Big government power attracts corruptible people. This doesn't change in a generation. It probably doesn't change ever.
unlikely we'll rebuild locally. We will outsource it to a friendlier country with cheap labor. In 50 yrs the cycle will repeat. (Probably South America.)
Colombia has one of the biggest ports in the Gulf. With the huge flight of people out of Venezuela into colombia, I foresee labor being very cheap there and logistics to southern states very cheap.
The issue is that this goes both ways. The eu is regularly imposing harsh rules on american tech. With deglobalisation there will be job losses as there will be fewer open markets.
I heard about many companies in this space that have since shut down / become acquihired. Root AI acquired by AppHarvest [1], Abundant Robotics (shut down) [2], Traptic acquired by Bowery [3].
To me, this suggests that the problem is hard. Last I checked, the state of the art in robotic grasping seems similar to the state of many other AI systems before ML hit the scene. It's super-mathematized all to the questionable end of analyzing how a few points points can optimally apply forces to simple convex polytopes.
A similar feeling exists when you look at the state of path planning for robotic arms. There, collisions must be avoided at all costs because we don't have the mathematics for it. So you make this super precise plan that carefully snakes its way around all the little voxels that happen to become occupied in your occupancy grid. To execute these plans we need to manufacture robots with expensive harmonic gearing and sub-millimeter level repeatability. These types of robots would not be economical for outdoor picking tasks.
To make progress, I think there will have to be new ML techniques and new lower cost robotic hardware developed in tandem.
The higher value crops (fruits, veggies) have different and more difficult problems than maize,soybean,wheat,cotton which are grown in huge fields with known parameters (thanks to precision planting, etc.). Having machines till the space between these rows would be an easy proof of concept. Syncing and coordinating multi machines in one field would be step two. There's 200M acres like this and farmers would be happy to pay between 10-100 _per acre_ depending on frequency and task performed.
The problem is the "easy crops" are already harvested by a machine that's GPS guided and nearly infinitely wide; at that point hiring some farmer to "pilot" it is cheap.
True - and an important distinction. Hiring someone for $20/hr to sit in the cab of some multi-million dollar harvesting machine isn't that hard.
I think it's a bit of an area that doesn't really benefit from more efficiency (except on the things that have to be picked by hand) - farmers don't even bother flattening their land to make it easier to plant/harvest, as the machines handle slopes and hills just fine.
I agree it is an area that we have probably already reached peak from labour efficiency stand point. Ofc, machines can get slightly bigger and methods slightly more optimised. But there is good reasons to keep a human in loop and near to fix any immediately fixable problems. Or just to fill fertilizer or empty the load.
I can't disagree with your take. Eventually (hopefully) there will be someone that doesn't sell out. Achieving Level 4/5 in corn/maize fields will be easier than Level 4/5 FSD in cars. My own theory is Deere knows/thinks it can't sell 200-600K tractors when a smaller, more lightweight unit can do the same so it is actively swallowing up competitors to protect its moat.
I doubt these will take off unless climate- or politically driven migration slows, which seems unlikely in either case, or we stumble across a fountain of cheap energy. A lot of farm work in the US is performed by undocumented immigrants paid incredibly low wages and too often treated incredibly badly. I don't see the cost of robots coming down much if supply chain instability and energy scarcity continue. (This is not to say it wouldn't be better to use robots, or pay people a good wage and provide good working conditions.)
Plus, a lot of work in precision agriculture is overhyped and oversold. I worked in the space for a couple years and things like automated, AI/ML-powered high-throughput phenotyping are described as breakthrough technologies which will revolutionize agriculture and synthetic biology. More accurately they are relatively narrow-scoped tools which, while useful in many cases, are more often bandwagons people jump on for career progression.
They and Case deserve to be dethroned. They _should_ understand the problem and have the engineers to solve it, but I think they haven't figured out how to monetize it so they slow-walk it or down play it.
I think the next ag revolution will be robotics capable of harvesting and maintaining intercropping/multicropping based ecosystems instead of periodic-raze monocultures. The results are better in terms of output per unit of land, and the industrial inputs are reduced in terms of pest control and fertilizer. However, the machinery needs to be much more complicated and agricultural processes will not be as fast.
There are a few no doubt. For being either 10x or 100x simpler problem to solve than full self-driving, there are far fewer companies pursuing it.
All of the tech companies and all the ICE car companies should (in theory) be able to solve these problems on their way to FSD. But it largely ignored IMO.
Clean Energy, Water Desalination, Nigeria's crackdown on anonymous SIM cards, Monkeypox, Separation of Church & State in a post-Roe world, Computer chips made out of light, The managed decline of Britain, Crackdowns on E2E encrypted messaging apps, Quantum-resistant cryptography, Tesla cars charged by burning coal.
No disrespect to anything on this list, but I would wager most of this stuff won't matter to the average person. I can't see how my life will change with respect to anything of these. I just don't think we can speak to these as the next big thing. For example: iPhone was clearly a big thing.
> Nigerian here, also an opponent of the present government, but why would a crackdown on anonymous SIM cards be an issue for debate ?
It's a very authoritarian move to threaten privacy and prevent people having free access to the internet. It hurts people at a minimum and causes the deaths of the most vulnerable in society at worst. Definitely up for debate and probably not one the Nigerian government can win in a fair debate.
Neuro-linguistic Programming et. al. It's currently considered a pseudo-science (which is technically false: it's pre-scientific. However, unfortunately, many practitioners and promoters do try to make it seem more scientific than it is.)
It's actually fairly widespread, people teach it and use it all over the globe, and fairly stodgy organizations have used it (e.g. the US Army.) Yet the mainstream rarely mentions it, and then only to denigrate it. However, this seems to me to be that stage right before something goes from "fringe" to "common knowledge".
Once NLP goes fully mainstream there will be a sea change in human society. Psychological hangups will be a thing of the past. There will still be people who have mental problems, but they will be the ones with actual physical problems with the brain (or whatever) as opposed to just bad programming. Things like addictions, phobias, neurosis, etc. will vanish.
Educational possibilities are mind-blowing. Learning multiple languages becomes easy, as does learning musical instruments and dances. Really any behavioral patterns will become subject to symbolic manipulation. Competitive sports will be transformed when each player can "clone" the best moves of the best players.
Politics has already been revolutionized by NLP innovations. As far back as G.W. Bush NLP language patterns had already made their way into political speeches. The current culture wars are, at their root, gangs of hypnotists programming furiously.
To me the fascinating thing is that, once it's common knowledge that you can alter your psychology as easily (more easily!) than your wardrobe it becomes a matter of personal responsibility. The whole "it's just human nature" argument goes out the window when you can reprogram yourself.
Regretfully, I can't. I'm not "in the field", I don't run in NLP circles, and my interest in it waned after I had alleviated some personal problems I was dealing with.
I think before lab meat, we're going to see an explosion in both volume and diversity of plant-based meats. Discount chains in Europe and NA are jumping on the bandwagon and creating all sorts of plant-based products and bringing the price way down - already cheaper than meat sometimes. Plant-based raw materials are the cheapest, we just need to improve processes and scale up. And unless governments increase meat subsidies even more, it's likely that meat, specially beef becomes too expensive for some people to eat regularly in the next 10 years.
Plant based raw materials are often cheapest, but unfortunately the plant based meats are often far from being raw material and are highly processed. Expensive too.
These things, in theory, could be everywhere. You can bend some of them, so you could wrap lamp posts with them, cover cars in them, put them everywhere. I am confident that within 20 years, we will solve power problems with renewables like this, and we will have a major revolution in infinite-power designs, like illuminated clothing, power generating and emitting roadways, and servers embedded into everything, everywhere, for every reason.
They are 17% efficiency, and they don't yet last very long, but the work is moving at a steady pace.
Planetary defense against civilization-ending-level threats.
There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares.
Codifying privacy as a right is not in the interest of corporations. I am extremely sceptical that the US government will harm corporations for something most people obviously don’t care about. The success of Facebook, Tictoc, Nest, etc are definitive proof that most people do not care about their privacy at all.
I agreed with that...right up to Roe v Wade being overturned.
Privacy is going to become a very important issue very quickly as some states start to make laws that will be shockingly backward to most people. And those laws will be sticky and will require Amendment level changes to correct. To prevent an Amendment, even Repbulicans will introduce sweeping and broad privacy laws and will likely point to big tech companies as scapegoats to divert attention from their own generally unpopular activities (that play great to their base so they don't get primaried out).
Corporations are going to get swept up in the melee unless they begin to self-govern in a very real way very quickly to get ahead of this. Because every personal data player that does something can can be spun negatively will be dragged through the mud for political points from both sides.
Governments source huge volumes of information from private organizations, very unlikely they would limit these organizations unless they had a way to gain the information in other ways that are unlikely to be cut off long-term.
When asking this question it's worth considering that historically, the hit rate of such predictions is quite low - even when made by experts based on reasonable-seeming extrapolations. Prior experience indicates predictions more than a decade out should be heavily discounted.
People are aware of Deepfakes and AI generated media, and worried about it being used to generate fake news. I haven't seen a lot of talk about it being used to change our generally accepted histories, but I've been thinking about that for a while.
Forget general humanish AI and VR, self-programming systems will put a lot of low skilled coders out of work.
FWIW: Metaverse VR is a flying car category... it comes up every 10-15 years but never gets traction because there's no point to it. Zuck is sailing the ship off the end of the proverbial world when he should've tripled-down on making AR ubiquitous and simple.
The west coast of the USA will be a desert very soon. Probably within a few years. Soon 40 million people will be without sanitation water. Then the next step is no drinking water.
You say that now, but our leaders have regressed to such a degree that I don't believe they have any kind of foresight to plan ahead more than a couple years.
Wireless energy, as our air fills with radio waves those could be used to power super small devices. There are already pocs which produce a very small current from 5G radio and I think this technology is about to bloom. It’s going to be very interesting which side the law makers stands on in this matter.
Craigslist in other countries. Pretty much any niche part of Craigslist as it’s own product does pretty well. Lauch that in another country and you’ll be making bank.
how can people actually believe this pseudoscience. What models have been accurate for a number of year? The IPCC one just averages others, so that is cheating.
What do you mean by "this pseudoscience"? Climate change? Runaway climate change? Climate change is already happening. At what point it becomes runaway climate change is a matter of definition and debate, but there are definitely some processes that reinforce climate change.
Unfortunately no. I don't work in the field, but I just spent a few months there networking for business, and everyone is getting into the export/import business. Even housewives are making money just buying products at the local malls and dropshipping them to Europe.
The labor is ridiculously cheap after the lira crash, raw materials for practically anything can be sourced domestically, and it's right in the neighborhood of everywhere except America and China.
Feel feel to name even a single manufacturer in Turkey that’s now more competitive that a comparable Chinese manufacturer within past year and provide reasoning beyond the collapse of the lira that they’ll be able to maintain that edge; otherwise you’re just speculating without even anecdotal examples, likely bias, and clearly have a conflict of interests, given you’re recent trip to the area.
I don't see how naming a manufacturer would do anything but make me look more biased.
Like I said, I don't work in the field, so it would be pointless for me to try and construct an argument beyond the obvious points that Turkey has weak currency, close vicinity to Europe (i.e. inside Europe), strong defense, abundant natural resources, foreign capital inflows, capitalistic laws and plenty of working-age people. I don't know anything, really.
The author was calling for ideas, and it's just an idea. Take it, or leave it. Of course, there's unique problems to deal with too, which you wouldn't find in China (threat of political instability and "boş ver attitude" being two of them). But nothing lasts forever and the world's honeymoon with China is no exception.
I don't know if this is representative of the bigger picture. But I recently talked to a Hungarian ultrasound gel factory owner. He complained about Turkish companies stealing his business.
Nuclear war. It has fallen out of favor to talk about this as a serious possibility, but the world is in many ways closer to nuclear armageddon right now than it has been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.
Tom Nichols wrote about this recently in The Atlantic. [0] It's not just the general public, but also the next generation of military and national security leadership that has grown comfortable ignoring nuclear weapons and takes deterrence for granted.
This was the answer, pre-Ukraine already. That war doesn't move the needle that much, as NATO/Russia escalation is far from the only nuclear war threat -- there's also mistakes by any party, India/Pakistan, North Korea, China, etc.
The China/Pakistan border clashes have resulted in fatalities on the order of several dozen in something where neither nation really wants to escalate. Ukraine would have long since lost this war if not for the US directing the funneling tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons, training, and so on to Ukraine. This support has been directly responsible for the excess deaths of Russians and Ukrainians alike numbering in the tens of thousands.
Not only is this orders of magnitude more impactful than the other conflicts, but perhaps even more concerning is what in the world the endgame might be? By effectively throwing its entire influence into this war, the US has now effectively staked that influence on the outcome of the war. And it's the exact same situation for Russia. The two most nuclear armed nations are now in a conflict that is a must-win for both of them.
IMO this conflict ending up going nuclear is still highly improbable, but highly improbable is far closer to nuclear war than we've ever been.
The Ukraine war is small stakes compared to what the U.S. and USSR did during the Cold War. The U.S. accepted stalemate in Korea and defeat in Vietnam rather than go nuclear. They will not do it over Ukraine. It is not “must-win” for the U.S.
Supporting Ukraine is not even significantly risking U.S. influence or standing in the EU. Getting Finland and Sweden into NATO is a benefit to the U.S. that will endure even if Ukraine completely falls (which it won’t).
I guess there is a chance that Russia could initiate a nuclear exchange if Putin is 100% suicidally insane. I don’t believe that he is.
I think you are underestimating a few facts in the conflict of Ukraine which downplays it's significance.
The EU and the US have drawn the lines very explicitly, which before they were able to whist away any pressing questions on relations by claiming 'allies'.
Russia has been cut off from the IMF dominated financial system. No FX, No Swift, no IMF support. This is the financial equivilent of going nuclear. This has led Russia and China to announce they are goiing to directly compete with the IMF and start their own federal reserve.
My point is not that nuclear war is imminent, but quite the opposite. We have new tools to declare total war without a single bullet being fired. Cyber, destabilization and financial war might prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be.
Russia hasn't used IMF support in decades. Not all Russian banks are banned from SWIFT.
> Cyber, destabilization and financial war might prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be.
Nuclear could plausibly result in the extinction of our species. Suggesting that financial warfare could "prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be" seems patently false.
> far closer to nuclear war than we've ever been.
This is the statement that is being disagreed with.
so your logic is when a powerful nation invades another weaker nobody should intervene because there will be lost lives. I am writing the comment in hope that at least nobody gets convinced about your well worded and deadly wrong argument.
Ironically this could all be happening because a lack of nukes. Ukraine gave theirs away and have been left essentially naked and defenceless since. Would Putin have thought twice if they had a nuclear arsenal? Who knows.
I mean Ukrainians aren't idiots, I'm sure they could've either cracked any necessary codes or worked around their need in the ~31 years since 1991 (Ukraine's independence).
I suspect it would be easiest to just take the nuclear material out of the unusable missiles and construct a different weapon using it. Russia is adjacent to them so any sort of nuclear weapon launch-able from an artillery or plane still sounds useful.
I think you are missing my point. The Nukes were built by the soviets, but after the breakup, Russia had control of them in Ukraine. In order for Ukraine to take full possession, they would have to fight through Russians at military bases.
I agree with that, my point is that the Ukrainians had the technical capabilities to seize control. And they chose not exercise that option. Besides, why did only Russia, of the 15 post-Soviet states have to retain control over all the stockpile?
The answer is probably because the alternative was too scary for the west. Better to keep dealing just with Moscow.
They were pressured by the US to give up Soviet nukes. Codes are easy to fix, but nukes need service and are expensive to keep so it was as much of sparing measure than anything.
I think you are missing my point. The Nukes were built by the soviets, but after the breakup, Russia had control of them in Ukraine. In order for Ukraine to take full possession of the nukes in their country, they would have to fight through Russians at military bases.
My point is basically that if Ukraine tried to take full control of the Nukes in their country, they would have been picking a fight with Russia, and possibly the US as well.
If Ukraine had nukes and NATO didn't want them to use them or risk losing them, they may have acted.
Again, I think it's unlikely and the "Russia wouldn't have invited Ukraine if they had kept their nukes" doesn't actually fly (and probably would just have been another reason for Russia to invade: 'they're right there and they have nukes!'
As long as they could have taken the warheads apart, they could have built new weapons out of them. Or for that matter, just starting from already enriched fissile material would be plenty.
...and Russia would just have sat there and accepted it? We'd be on the cusp of a much bigger and earlier war.
For that reason, the international community wouldn't have accepted it either, because it would open the door for everyone else to start developing them. Kazakhstan had nukes and voluntarily disarmed for this reason.
Though small room temp ones don't exist yet, they likely will some day.
As to why they are a 'big thing': Imagine a large GPU cluster turned down to the size of a laptop and running off a solar cell. They'd revolutionize electronics in other ways too. But the main use we can see now is that they allow for great amounts of computation for very cheap energy budgets. Stuff that takes coal mines today could be done with what it takes to feed a cat.
Personal, targeted gene thereapy for cancers. I can already buy insurance that covers, and provides this therapy. It's become a reality here in Israel - I assume it's about to be so elsewhere.
EVs and the ability to power your house for several days. I think the combination of solar and and EV provide the ability to store power when the sun goes down. This starts to solve one of solar's paradoxes IMO.
I'll propose a more utopian future. The end of modernism and a return to humanism. A realization in the West that fetishizing technology has turned people into widgets. A genuine bottom-up counter movement that already exists today, but will be the mainstream. Man will yet again be measure of all things, rather than adapt to the measure. In practice; things like the triumph of the walkable city; more home schooling; disappearance of wage labor and more unionization, cooperative work-arrangements, stock-compensation; the extended family as the main arrangement to raise children; bans on social media and pornography; more GDPR and privacy-laws, ...
> when GenX grew up and didn't join the hippie counterculture.
That was a mistake. GenX should have distilled the insights of the hippies, but chucking away the cosplay and fairytales. Modernism has not ended, it is the current state of the world.
The rough polygon of Idaho - California - Arizona becoming less habitable every year. Mass migration to the east, water wars between wealthy landowners using most of dwindling water supply for agriculture and the rest of the population for drinking.
I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
There's an easy thing we can do to start fixing: ban ag exports. We been subsidizing it for too long and literally shipping our water overseas. We reduce our own ag production to feed just us, even those uses of water are probably doable.
Buy land in Rustbelt cities. I’m convinced a warmer Buffalo with unlimited water is a very appealing option for people on water rations in a 128f Phoenix.
The next big thing that few people are talking about is that thing you get banned from social media for talking about and the consequences of that thing over the next few years.
MESHCode is a theory about how information might be stored in the brain. Very interesting and potentially has other implications for information storing as well. Check "The Mechanical Basis of Memory – the MeshCODE Theory": https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnmol.2021.5929...
Multi-material 3D printing: once we're able to combine multiple classes of functional materials, we'll be able to produce really unique products and inventions.
One of the things I like about the opportunity in 3D printing is the potential to move manufacturing closer to the source of sale. From an environmental perspective, I believe this is a big win, as well as JIT manufacturing.
I'm not suggesting everyone will have a 3D printer, but if we can localize the printing, you can get your same day delivery without warehousing, etc.
it is a localized problem to places where there are too many people and agriculture for the available water budget, especially as you look out and fear climate change.
I'm not as worried, believing in the spirit of human ingenuity. Desalination and piping it from the oceans (like we do for oil) will be fine. We just need the wherewithal to implement real solutions and invest in the sciences rather than regulate behavior.
I keep reading about these future "water wars" and can't help but wonder how much of the prediction is realistic and how much is coloured by Silicon Valley types extrapolating globally from what they see locally.
I live in northern Britain and, even at the height of summer, it's rare for a week to go by, without at least one day of heavy rainfall.
Maybe it's me who's extrapolating globally from what I'm seeing locally. But I don't get any sense at all that the world is getting drier.
Still, if the 'water wars' predictions do turn out to be true, maybe we'll have an interesting reversal of fortunes in the future, where damp, wet, soggy countries become fabulously wealthy, like the OPEC nations today --through exporting tankers full of their spare rainwater.
Let's see how the Arabs like queuing up at the pumps to fill their drinking vessels at £2/litre!
The Met Office says England has had its dryest July since 1935, and some parts of England the dryest on record [1]
Whilst we havent had wars, there have certainly been water conflicts even _within_ the UK. Consider Treweryn [2]. This was a town rich with Welsh culture and the Welsh language. It was flooded to become a reservoir to supply water to Liverpool in 1965. The decision to flood the town was made by UK Parliament, without gaining consent from Wales. The plans triggered mass opposition and protests, but they were ignored and the plan went ahead. The story of Treweryn acts as a beacon for the Welsh independence movement to this day [3]
Interestingly, the remains of the town became visible for the first time in decades a few years ago. Possibly a further sign of things getting dryer.
Just because water is nearby doesn't mean you have infrastructure to make use of it. For example the great lakes region has had droughts before that affected agriculture. This might surprise you because on a map, there is a huge body of freshwater to draw from nearby. However, to draw from that body, one needs to build pumping infrastructure sufficient to draw from it and to have this infrastructure go to where it needs to be, likely inland uphill from the great lakes requiring more pumping and reservoirs and other infrastructure. Reservoirs in particular are often dependent on having good natural conditions. It also needs to be overbuilt such to work in a drought, and therefore most of its costs will be wasted in times when its not needed. All of this costs money and political will to improve things, both of which the great lakes region is short of in recent history.
A deeper consolidation of insights from Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the elucidation of the grand ultimate 太極 and duality of form (理) and material force (氣), schematized in the diagrams of, among others, the tenth-century northern Song Dynasty thinker Zhou Duni 周敦頤 and the Korean Joseon-era philosophers Kwon Keun 권근 and especially Yi Toegye 이퇴계 in his "10 Diagrams on Sagely Learning 聖學十圖".
Technology wise merging backend and frontend into a seamless framework seems like the next big thing. A lot of progress has been made this year on this with liveview, et al but haven't seen any mass adoption yet as only few people are talking about it.
But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
One thing I've been thinking about is, how do you scale tourism?
Edit for clarification:
For example, the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0]
As population gets higher more and more people want to visit the top destinations, and when a new one gets "found" it gets flooded (see Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones hype)
Because of physical limitations these experiences don't scale - there's a finite number of destinations in the world and an ever-growing population.
You don't have to. If the local environment becomes nicer (for americans, not a soul crushing schmear of strip malls and parking lots), people will do more things closer to home.
The driving aspiration of the future will be that you live in a place worth visiting. Not a place you look forward to flee 2-3 times a year.
That's just not true, the top tourism destinations are more popular than ever since covid restrictions have laxed, and the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0]
The trend is to de-scale it, most probably airplane tickets will get even more expensive (I'm talking about things here in Europe), not to mention accommodation. It will suck for countries like Greece or Spain, which depend a lot on tourism money, but there's not much that they can do about it.
You're looking from the pov of the tourism industry (either consumers, in the form of tourists, or from the pov of providers, in the form of tour operators, accommodation hosts and the like), hence the talk about the price curve and the need to adjust it.
I was talking more from an outside perspective, and, more importantly, from the pov of an outside direct influence (via more taxes/charges). I do not think air-fuel costs are going to get cheaper again, to the contrary, I think the externalities of airplane flight will start being included more and more into the final price. The same goes for accommodation prices, which are dependent on energy prices (you need gas/electricity to keep a room at reasonable temperatures during the summer and in winter). Those are not going back to cheaper prices, either. And there are all the other related prices, for example car rental prices have also increased dramatically and will most probably remain that way, there's no IC cars replacing the current fleets in the near future (for the simple reason that they won't make them anymore) and we won't build enough EVs at reasonable costs to keep the current car rental market exactly as it is (or as it used to be until very recent, that is).
As for the "unmet demand", too bad for the consumers (i.e. potential tourists). The same way the mass tourism industry was invented in the 1930s (give or take), the same way it can be scaled back "societally", by saying things like "if you still want to be a tourist you will do great harm to the ecosystem shared by all of us" (which is most probably true) and similar stuff. No (service) industry has to live forever.
And that demand will just get met at the next cheapest destination. If they can't afford to fly to dubrovnik they will probably just vacation somewhere else they can afford to versus not go anywhere at all.
We saw a post the other day about using DALL-E and GPT-3 in conjunction with one another. I think more of these systems working together is going to revolutionize basically everything, especially when democratized with cheaper consumer hardware.
Did DALL-E and GPT-3 revolutionize anything yet? (I know it might sound snarky but it's not my intention, I genuinely wonder how they're used today, other than demos)
If nothing else DALL-E showed that automation will takeover artists jobs too.
GPT-3 can generate quite sensible paragraphs but is far away from generating pages of internally consistent content. On there other hand it works OK as semantic aware knowledge base: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32348768
Revolutionize? No. I don't mean DALL-E or GPT-3 specifically, just that tech. I think as the hardware needed to run these gets cheaper and the tech is applied to other domains we will see revolutionary changes. My vision depends heavily on the forward march of progress with bigger better compute available cheaper.
Not sure if you mean Big Things to ... invest in? Study up on? Something else?, but my submissions might include CRISPR, micropollutants, & western civilisation balkanisation.
...crossed with all the data about you from social media, your phone sensor data, ad tracker data, location data and your gestural fingerprint from the many hours of VR gaming you've put in?
And then imagine this can be synthesized and queried vaguely, generically and qualitatively via some GPT style interface to estimate your whereabouts, your mental state, to anticipate your plans, intentions, deeply personal interests etc.?
E-Bikes. The EV that almost nobody talks about yet brings multitude of benefits (virtually no congestion, less infrastructure/energy/environmental footprint compared to cars, health benefits, etc., all while being able to meet the majority of daily transport needs) if cities make way for them. The one especially absent from the discussion are cargo bikes.
No one seems to care about it, except particularly ardent fans. And the government only cares about satellites that benefit them.
However, discoveries and innovations are still happening. The latest one I have in mind is the James Webb Space Telescope. And private companies like SpaceX are still planning a mission to Mars. Lastly, somewhere flashed information about the resumption of the space program, such as flights to the moon.
Alternative truths - Trump says election was fraudulent, everyone believes it. Crazy stuff like QAnon/Alex Jones. Blatant lies that are objectively false (bigger crowd size, etc..), Sandy Hook shooting didn't exist. Vaccines/5G/Bill Gates cause cancer/zombies.
People will start living in an alternate reality devoid of truth which will splinter society
Yes, really unbelievable how Trump completely denied the global consensus that he was being blackmailed by Russia for the "pee tapes". And even worse that Trump's slack-jawed acolytes continued to maintain that the Hunter Biden laptop was genuine when the most reliable mainstream media and intelligence officials all dismissed it as disinformation. How could the Trump idiots believe such transparent propaganda?!
There is a whole Nat Geo documentary on YouTube talking about the cool innovative things Singapore is doing in their city planning: https://youtu.be/xi6r3hZe5Tg the really neat thing is they are planning several decades ahead of time
A fundamentally new power source, 100% renewable and with unlimited capacity for the entire planet. Since it's not invented yet I unfortunately don't have any details to share until a decade or two. Stay tuned.
Sidenote: Unlimited power capacity introduced many new challenges, so there will be uhm powers who wants to stop it, temporarily.
Organs can be replaced unlimited times thus to drastically improve human life span. Yeah, I am one of the eternal life believer. I believe this will come true in less than 20 years, but very few people think its possible, while it already shows enough signs of this.
I love how we got into this personal vehicle mindset. Cities are struggling with heat islands, a tremendous lack of biodiversity, and space for the most central animal in the city, the citizens. You see that all over the place in LA, SF, basically the whole West Coast, but the same holds true for the rest of the megacities in the US. The reliance on personal vehicles (and in some cities > 1 per head) will, in the end, bite us badly - and many city administrators already realize that. In Europe (I know, we’re all stupid and socialists), cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Vienna are reducing car-parking to reach an eventual 0 in the city.
I agree that EV will be the future, but I doubt that, especially with the rate of urbanization that we have, private vehicles is what we will be talking about 20 years down the line.
Cities will need to focus on the 15-minute concept (reach all your necessary socio-economic points of interest in 15 minutes, no matter where you live) as well as public transport (and it’s equal distribution !!).
So I think, what people are talking about little is the advances in public transportation and centralized city logistics. Sure, EV fleets all the way, but also answers of how to get people and goods from A-B in a car-free environment will be of increasing importance.
Pity it's not possible to open-source execution. So many good ideas fail due to poor execution (these days, quite possibly a larger number are killed by birth by bigco's - that's still a 'failure to execute' though, in a certain sense).
To be fair, there is a lot more information and educational material out there on how to build new products more effectively, the last 10 years or so. It still takes time to learn even the basics.
Neuralink. I can see it being the next huge ground-laying technology like the internet or smartphones. Imagine developing apps for people to use in their brain, it's next level. But probably 20 years away.
For those with doomsday predictions I’d really recommend reading “the beginning of infinity”. Fascinating book that, among other things, demonstrates how humanity was solving “inevitable” catastrophes.
The end of the social networking era as we know it.
Many of the big giants from the 2000s - 2010s have pretty much peaked by now. TikTok is the thing everyone wants to be, but arguably its not a social networking app so much as a social entertainment app. You don't really connect with friends on it so much as with strangers. An endless stream of entertaining strangers. It's a lot more akin to YouTube than Instagram when you think about it.
That being said, I don't think the social networking era is completely over, its just that the focus is going to shift. After big social networking platforms come smaller communities that are probably isolated from the platform on Discord or some forum somewhere, or perhaps something new in the future. The platforms themselves won't go away, but more-and-more the dialogue will shift towards niche interests and community discovery.
Problem with these communities is that there's a very real risk that they could be "unmoored" from reality, especially if the user demographic leans towards loners. Prime example is 4chan. A lesser example would be someone on Twitter who exclusively uses it politically. I think this will only get worse over time, and possibly accelerate once AI gets involved. Using, I don't know, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, you can create a seemingly thriving "community" filled with "people" who make hilarious memes and generate thought-provoking content, culminating in whatever world you want to live in. Possibly a very hateful one.
On a positive note, I think that the internet will become a somewhat more decentralized place again. I think that with the end of the social networking era we'll also see the end of the so called "walled garden" era of the internet. Making weird websites might just become cool again. VC money will still flow into "tech", but it'll mostly be towards AI or things that are more physical such as energy, climate, biotech, space, or maybe just physical consumer goods. The race to dominate the attention of the internet will be over.
Finally, there's "the metaverse". I think a lot of companies are going to try, and fail, to build VR Disneyland when what people really want to experience is a virtual city far larger than any real world city, with public squares to meet new people at and private, intimate worlds to share with your friends. Just seems far more likely that we'll instead wind up the internet all over again, only, you know, in VR, so just the internet really. If anything, I think a company might stake its claim in this future not by trying to build a platform, but by building tools.
Mind you, this is all still a long ways off I think, but in the present there are a lot of companies building 2D metaverses, which are basically community spaces.
These are primitive 2D games with videochat. These technologies existed for decades, it's naive to expect anything more from them than already exists. Changing the name to something more hyped will result in nothing more than a wave of hype.
I wouldn't discount something simply because the underlying technology has been around for decades. People said the same thing about Slack being nothing more than IRC. Didn't stop people from talking about how it was the future of work, or whatever.
For that reason, and many others, we really shouldn't ignore the amount of innovation in software and web that is largely design-oriented rather than engineering-oriented. A lot of venture-funded darlings out there are built on decades old technology, the key difference mostly being the design decisions that went into the product.
Not a particularly big big thing, but here in the EU people are massively buying electric bicycles as the main transportation mean. I guess it comes along with the dropping batteries cost.
Brazil is mired in government corruption and scandal and has failed to become even a regional power.
Russia is a pariah with a shrinking population and no real economy outside of petrochemicals
India is a more hopeful version if Brazil but still enormously corrupt. It’s also in conflict with Pakistan and China.
China is more likely to be the next Japan than the next USA. Huge debt from infra spending + population that will halve by 2050 is not a great foundation. They sabre rattle but have never in their history had a blue water navy - the minimum to be a credible military power.
My money is on places like Nigeria, Colombia, Namibia, Botswana. Places with relatively good governance and a functioning economic foundation, that are free of distractions from serious regional conflict.
Personal transportation by drone: (Basically, flying cars.)
Just imagine, you can travel reasonable distances without needing to deal with traffic. Your drone could pick you up on your roof, and then drop you off on a roof in a city, bypassing roads and traffic.
More importantly, if most personal transport is by drone, it means we don't need to invest as much in roads, bridges, and railroads.
I agree on the issue but not 100% behind the solution. Making food last longer is something we've already optimized with hundreds of years of innovation so it seems like it would be better to focus on other aspects of the issue. Do you mean: Better preservatives? Better packaging? Better Refrigeration? Transportation?
Here's a small example:
An intact cabbage kept in a cool dark place will last orders of magnitude longer than the same cabbage, pre-shredded, in a plastic bag. The intact cabbage needs NO ENERGY INPUT whereas the cabbage that's been shredded and bagged needs CONSTANT ENERGY INPUT.
The benefits of shredded versus intact cabbage come in terms of the employer being able to externalize a small amount of labor cost, at the expense of a small amount of extra plastic waste and an inferior product.
Decentralized social media. Cryptocurrency actors compete in live events produced on ‘The Nextbook’ to endorse their token and strengthen the blockchain. The Nextbook is a decentralized social media that pays the players (contributors).
There are many existing decentralized social media but none have made it to the popularity of FB, IG, or Twitter. Cryptocurrency actors are the drivers for gaining the worlds attention.
Our technology is keeping up with our “hard limits”. If we were politically willing to build more nuclear reactors, we’d have zero problems with energy or water (desalination). Mineral scarcity turned out not to be. Land scarcity isn’t a thing (the entire world population could live in single family homes in roughly the same land area as Texas or Ukraine). And at our current tech level and rate of innovation, we could start have undersea domes or O’Neill cylinders by the time we ran into any of those limits.
I can’t think of any sentiment that I commonly hear that’s as ghoulish as that. As if the moral value of a human life is somehow less than her lifetime net carbon emissions. My only solace is the hope that people who believe that sort of thing will go extinct and be replaced by people whose values are closer to mine.
We're up against massive loss of biodiversity, loss of habitable space on the planet, and an enormous amount of human suffering and loss of human life due to the current and future effects of climate change. A smaller population will not solve these problems alone, but it will buy us more time to solve them.
FWIW, I'm not trying to promote anything extreme like population control policies, just pointing out that the current trend of population leveling off is generally a good thing.
That seems to be the trend. It makes sense, people who choose a laziness born of pessimism are probably not virile enough to raise children.
Surprised to see this kind of thinking here though; if you are an engineer who is good at solving problems, you should raise children that are also good at solving problems. Point them at our climate/sustainability/energy issues.
Degrowth is false. If we lost population, the environment would get worse - as we wouldn't be able to maintain modern technology, we'd go back to the real bad stuff like coal and wood burning.
The US's total CO2 emissions have been going down for a decade or two now, even after population growth. And no, it's not because we outsourced them.
Uhh fuck that (pun not intended). We are not the problem, America has plenty of space, there is no need. SE Asia is stabilizing. Africa has a lot of birth but also a lot of space left.
There will probably be some places with "natural" population control from lack of food or from disease bht that doesn't mean "we" have to do anything.
You def can't be pro-choice or anti-fascist then support population control.
I never mentioned pro-choice or my stance on it or population control. For the record I support choice. I added the topic purely in response to the OP ask.
By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles.
However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustainable, as we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too. And the climate picture isn't great either, with not enough new clean energy capacity going online, and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs. Even with all of this new work, there will be only a small reduction in carbon emissions.
Basically there are so many things that can go wrong in the next 18 years, and so many things we don't even have a plan for, that all the estimates we've been given will result in dysfunction, increased prices, and soaring secondary markets. A lot of people are going to make money just from preparing for things to go wrong.
It's amazing to me how little talk there is about reduce and recycle - with remote work, better city and public transport planning etc if we could completely eliminate the use of cars for the vast majority of the populace we would not need to mine more for batteries, wonder where and how our electricity is going to come from and how we are going to offset carbon.
We literally have no vision for optimization, we just seem to obsess about and creating one problem to solve another for the sake of capacity and scalability.
The problem is that it's a classic large-scale prisoner's dilemma. Living in a walking city is nicer than living in a driving city. But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
The only way to fix it is by passing taxes or other restrictive legislation, which has so far been extremely difficult because most voters choose "let's make things a bit easier for you today" over "we should all sacrifice now to make things probably better later".
How I see it is that it's not that people own cars, it's that they drive them absolutely everywhere. I think there is a happy medium where you still have a car to get you places where you can't walk, but essential services are walking distance from where you live.
The apartment I moved into last year is in a neighborhood with grocery stores, some restaurants and a gym. It's not the epitome of walkability but it gets the job done. While at my old place I found myself getting into my car every day to go places, now I find myself only using it 1-2 times per week.
Also weather is a major factor. When I visited my friend in Florida last month I decided to walk to McDonalds one morning. By the time I got back I was drenched in sweat from the humidity. By comparison I make a similar length walk almost every morning and don't think anything of it. There even if the place was super walkable, folks would still drive because of the heat and humidity.
I think a key difference here is building your cities to be more walkable; if there are humidity and heat problems: plant more trees for shade, provide more cover in general for people
I can't imagine that the current way of building cities with massive multi-lane stretches is going to be good for reducing experienced suffering to those who walk (it's just not a priority...)
Of course, any of that requires that you actually prioritise these features as opposed to extending highways/motorways with ever more lanes causing more and more induced demand, which... American cities don't seem to, generally...?
The usual shilling of "Not Just Bikes" should go here, where he talks in depth about what's wrong with American car-dependent cities and how they build...
> But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
I think that's fine. Most over time will realize they don't need 2 or more cars if they're living in a true walking city because driving will be more inconvenient than walking, and eventually either paying for or building a garage (or having it used up by 2 cars that are seldom used) or paying for street parking or other things will cause people to change habits. It just takes time if you have a walkable city.
Personally I think the sweet spot is one crossover SUV, highly walkable and bikeable city, and probably street cars that run up and down main commerce arteries. At that point you really do cover almost every conceivable local transit need or chore that you might have to undertake.
One is yea there's a certain level of cultural idiocy and laziness. I live in front of a bus stop and see it. But I also see lots of parents walking to pick up their kids, so I'm not sure what the breakdown is (this is in the suburbs in Ohio with the bad weather and all of that).
The other is that we don't really have a lot (any at all?) of examples where you have a true walkable neighborhood with desirable schools. Most walkable neighborhoods that I've seen were built before automobile traffic became prevalent, which puts them close to cities which tend to have the worst schools. So I'm not actually sure what parents would do if they had the combo of schools and neighborhood that we'd be talking about here, but I bet they'd walk because in those neighborhoods it just wouldn't be possible for all or most parents to drive their kid to school at the same time.
It's really hard to break out of thinking about things in terms of the suburbs and convenience because most use that as their starting frame of reference. How will I go to Costco if XYZ, well you wouldn't. How will my kids get to school? They'd walk or ride their bikes. "But it's dangerous" ok then make it safe. Participate in your community and your government. That's half the reason we have the problems we have now. For better or worse though economic physics is going to win. We'll either all perish in war over resources or these activities will just become too expensive. EVs won't save us either, and this is particularly true given the underinvestment in nuclear energy that has occurred world wide.
Kind of. It's a chicken-egg thing. When you design your society around cars and car infrastructure people take their cars everywhere and watch the news and get scared and all that. We can think back to earlier times where this wasn't the case.
I am living the life (in the us) of your last paragraph and it’s not that plug and play. Add kids to that equation and that goes out the window. Not saying it’s not possible, saying that my wife who is absolutely not accustomed to that will not be giving up her pampered life and I know many of my friends in the same boat.
> But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
Not necessarily, because it is significantly more expensive (depending on how you implement it). But one way to get people off their cars and onto public transport could be make people pay for their cars. Nowadays, people do pay quite a lot for their cars (insurance, registration fees, vehicle tax, etc), but the payments pale in comparison to the overall costs of having cars as a primary mean of mobility. Putting that cost burden onto the people that produce those costs would lead to many people reconsidering their need for a car.
That’s why it’s important to help people understand that’s it’s not about eliminating cars entirely, but about substituting significant numbers of trips.
The YouTube channel NotJustBikes has gained a lot of notoriety over the last couple of years, and he made an interesting point that driving is more pleasant in Amsterdam. [0]
The issue is mainly car dependency not cars per se.
>> Living in a walking city is nicer than living in a driving city. But living in a walking city with a car is even nicer!
You know what is even nicer than that, Living in a Rural area with a population density of less than 500 people per sq mile (310 people per sq km)
>The only way to fix it is by passing taxes or other restrictive legislation
That is far from the only way to fix it, and it is very regressive, making the burden fall upon poor people, and often the elderly.
Using tax code to affect behavior is one of the most unethical things government does, and I always find it odd that the same people that complain about the rich, and how we should do more for the poor are the ones that also want to impose these heavily regressive tax schemes because "they know best"
> Using tax code to affect behavior is one of the most unethical things
I am not sure I understand. Those producing externalities should pay for them, and taxation is a basic way for that. Gasoline (etc.) pollutes, hence it should be taxed, on one side to collect the funds for attempted compensation, but also to limit the phenomenon and put it in the framework of "you will invest your resources where you deem them best invested".
>Those producing externalities should pay for them, and taxation is a basic way for that.
very are rarely those proposing taxing externalities doing so to cover the costs of mitigating those externalities, instead the money goes in to the government's general fund, or some other unrelated pet project. Also rarely the tax enough to the level that it would actually curb the desired behavior enough to effect the harm caused by the externality
So all you end up doing is making is harder for poor people to put food on the table while doing nothing to curb the externality
No: epistemologically, that is the indicator justifying a growing suspect.
Ineffectiveness should be determined by a logical and technical argument over the method, proposed as a possible solution, itself. You should identify what has it go wrong in practice. And you have in part already done it: that taxes are not earmarked (on compensation) and that the discouragement factor is insufficient. That is not necessary, it is not intrinsic to the method.
Nearby I commented on the infernal noise from electric cars. That is not necessary, not intrinsic: it just happens that people think it acceptable that some drive around with loudspeakers transmitting the screams of torture chambers. A potential solution becomes a problem because of external (non intrinsic) factors. It would be much, much easier to fix the external factors of the taxation problem than those of the "broken cybernetics" problem.
This smacks of a combination of "Real socialism has never been tried" in combination with the axiom of "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results"
The factor you are not considering is the omnipresence of corruption. Power Corrupts, and the more power you give government the more corrupt it becomes, this is born out time and time again, yet humanity refuses to learn this lesson.
The second you give government the powers you are advocating for, the people in government start thinking of all the different ways they can "help society", this amount of power is incredibly corrupting and can not be resisted, thus it always ends badly. ALWAYS
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again /under the same conditions/ expecting different results.
The «lesson» you talk about is again not a deduction but an induction. Engineer your system properly, and it will have to work.
If at first you don't succeed, call a hacker. They must be somewhere.
Incidentally, going to the context: the issue is, as you indicate, that "said people cannot resist corruption", well, stop giving power to "«people»" then - to those embarrassing liabilities I hear about. (They probably terrorize me more than you.) Which by the way, is one of the actual codified ways to tackle the problem (since at least 3800 years).
> if we could completely eliminate the use of cars for the vast majority of the populace
I find this way of thinking unrealistic and paternalistic. It might work in an authoritarian society, or in a society where the alternative to car culture is appealing.
But, let's get very realistic for a moment. I telecommute, and my wife has an in-person job. I'd even go so far as to say that most jobs are like hers: in-person, because she isn't a knowledge worker.
We go to the grocery store. Even though it's a reasonable walk, we take our car because it's not reasonable to lug the groceries back home. It's also not reasonable to bring groceries onto public transport. (My boss, who doesn't drive, uses an Uber for grocery shopping.) An alternate way of living would need to figure this out.
Even though most of our trips are very close to home, we do about 18k miles a year. Our family (and many friends) do no live in town. We also prefer to travel by car. It's much easier when going on a family vacation compared to lugging kids and baggage through all kinds of trains and bus transfer.
And... Where we live is mildly rural. Regular bus routes, (or similar) don't make sense.
Well, what's stopping you from e.g. lugging the groceries back on a bike instead and going twice a week to carry less each time, earning you a gym membership out of the deal from the cardio? That's the sort of thinking we have to get past. This, "well I use a car for xyz so I need it for all things I do in life" It's fine to have access to a car when you need a vehicle of that caliber, but most car trips aren't that. Most car trips people take are less than 3 mile; 30% are less than 1 mile:
All of those could certainly be replaced with something more sensible. How many times have you hopped into the car to go to the store and grab one thing? Probably a lot in your life. With car culture, we basically have a mindset of using a big axe for every cutting job, even those where a butter knife would do.
> Well, what's stopping you from e.g. lugging the groceries back on a bike instead and going twice a week to carry less each time
Taking trips to get groceries isn't a benefit but a cost.
I get that you like to go to grocery and other stores often, that you like spending time going to/from stores. Lots of people don't.
> How many times have you hopped into the car to go to the store and grab one thing? Probably a lot in your life.
As a fraction of my total trips, almost never, but when I did, it was urgent to me. What's your basis for asserting otherwise?
And you'd have me do without or get on a bike late at night or in bad weather to handle those situations.
BTW - the share of trips by length graph shows that <1 mile trips are a small fraction of total car miles/use a very small fraction of the total gas use.
I suppose that it's poor form to mention that, since you wanted to use resource savings to justify imposing your dislike of cars on others.
I'll elaborate.
One 100 mile trip uses the same gas as two 50 mile trips, so unless you make >2x as many 50 mile trips as 100 mile trips, you use more gas on 100 mile trips than 50 mile trips even if you make more 50 mile trips than 100 mile trips.
Even without doing arithmetic, it's obvious that there's more gas used in 10-25 mile trips (14% of trips) than 5-10 (15% of trips) and more in 5-10 than 3-5 (12% of trips). (It's not clear whether there's more gas used in 25-50 than in 10-25, but it's almost a lock that there's more gas used in >50 mile trips than 25-50.)
That exercise using your data shows that the <1 mile trips are a small fraction of total car miles and gas use.
But, like I said, usage arithmetic doesn't help your argument.
I don't think that workout is so obvious when you consider other factors such as city versus highway driving. For example, I'd expect with a given short trip to the store, a higher ratio of your nominal time in the vehicle will be spent idling at a red light or otherwise low speed maneuvering the car, versus actually traveling at speed. I wonder what mpg people actually are clocking when they are going to a store across the block? I expect its nowhere near even the epa city rating.
Plus there is just the physics of it all. What costs more energy, moving 4000lbs and 150lbs of human 1 mile, or moving 25lbs and 150lbs of human 1 mile? The latter, obviously. Can't arithmetic around that. Even with EVs, its going to require less electricity to power an ebike to move you and your cargo than to do the same with a 5000lb car.
As long as you're in town, the density of stop signs/lights is relatively constant, whether you're going 0.3 miles or 3 miles, so your hoped for "less efficient driving" is a fantasy you cooked up to try to save your argument.
The difference between city and highway mileage isn't enough to save your argument either.
You tried to argue that someone can save a significant amount of their gas usage by using bikes for short trips. That's wrong because those trips are a small fraction of their gas use.
It's wrong no matter even if their car uses 1Bgallons per mile. (Ratios and percentages are like that.)
Buying groceries for a family on a bike just seems like a nightmare, tbh.
I do something at least once a week with my car that just wouldn't be possible on public transport. Quick examples...
Transporting large amounts of already made food for parties.
Transporting a net for use in sports.
Transporting PVC pipes to do some custom hobby builds.
That's just going to be so much wasted time, imo. Plus there's often a lot of weather here that would be bad on a bike but manageable with a car.
All of that stuff you can probably do with a bike trailer. Plus you can just go to the store multiple times a week versus doing one big trip. That's how people shop in other countries outside the suburban carsphere. If the weather is bad just wear some rain pants.
If there's no sidewalks that's no issue for me. The law says I ride on the road so I ride on the road. In terms of family size that's no issue either, since they sell bike trailers. I see a lot of family units biking to my local farmers market and loading up with them, for example. Too much to push with your two legs? They sell cargo ebikes now too. The "grocery getter" car is obsolete.
I'm not judging I'm just trying to expand people's minds that are often closed off by society. Chances are you aren't taking all 3 kids to the store, but if you are you can be like the families at my farmer's market who tow kids in a trailer. Break that grocery trip up into 2 or three weekly bike rides and suddenly its a third of the shopping you have to bring back, and better for cardio to boot versus just one weekly ride. I don't ride on the sidewalk either because its illegal in my county actually.
I live in a very walkable neighborhood near lots of public transit.
Yesterday someone was shot in the head two floors up. A month ago I watched a racially charged conflict that only didn't end with a stabbing because a dude couldn't find anything appropriate in the unoccupied security desk. A week ago I witnessed a charged situation with a couple of dozen people at a bus stop. Someone was murdered on a bus at 11pm two blocks away over who got a cigarette on the floor. A friend was visiting me and someone got stabbed at the bus stop she used 45 minutes after she passed through.
There are exactly 0 units available in my building appropriate for a family of 4 unless you really aspire to live packed in like sardines, the units you could do so which still don't have much space in them go for significantly more than a 6 bedroom house on a half acre within a few miles.
What will happen if left-wing idealists try to force city density and public transit on people is a hard right wing turn when the consequences of one party trying to take freedoms away for idealistic reasons becomes a bigger burden than the consequences of the freedoms the other party wants to take away.
I really don't care about my own safety, but when it comes time for a family I would never subject any of them to the safety nightmare which is high density public-transit heavy living.
When the same people fighting to abolish the car are fighting to abolish the police, I don't think there's going to be much hope for either happening.
I guess one social worker costs about the same as maintaining five cars? What you're describing is not normal, and has little to do with the presence or absence of police. The US has about middle-of-the-pack police-per-capita, for instance, but because it lacks all the supporting infrastructure (social workers, psychiatric clinics, etc), it has really bad violent crime stats.
Shutting yourself off from society is a fragile and imperfect solution - if you look at South Africa, where elites have essentially tried to use razor wire and walled communities to insulate themselves, people's lives are still dominated by the threat and reality of the society they've tried to shut out.
It is the new normal if you look at crime statistics.
The insinuation that social workers can fix this problem or the problem is rooted in mental health issues is a problem.
These are, for the most part, grown men deciding to use violence for income (theft in various forms) or to settle disputes. I don't know what you think a social worker is going to do to diffuse a fight (not that they'd be notified and arrive before it was long over) or if anyone with that background would willingly put themselves in the middle of a potentially violent encounter and think they could make everybody play nice and use their words.
There is some magical thinking and somewhat offensive blaming of mental illness on crime.
And excluding yourself from certain populations is absolutely effective, and not "society" that you're shutting yourself off from. Unfortunately you do leave a lot of people behind trying to escape from crime, but there are plenty of effective ways of doing it, if you have the means.
Cities in the US are nothing like SA and the problems are nothing similar.
Eh, the US has kind of outlier stats when it comes to stuff like violent crime basically because it has a weird social system. Most rich countries have settled on a vaguely social-democratic normal where you pay taxes for social services that intervene at various points along the chain to make sure people don't eat each other.
If you subject people to economic darwinism, don't be surprised they bring regular darwinsim to your front door.
If you want things to change, just copy the countries that don't have your problems.
>If you want things to change, just copy the countries that don't have your problems.
The countries that don't have our problems don't have our demographics, history, or size, or anything remotely similar. Most of them also (intentionally) have to pay much less for defense, handled by us, and thus have more free tax revenue to spend on social programs.
There are some problems which could be helped with better access to social welfare resources. Not all. Likely not most.
There are divisions in our society which are a result of our history likewise cultures which are quite separated to which there is not a simple solution or social program which can just fix it.
Every country is special. The point is, social welfare works in reducing crime in Korea, it helps in reducing crime in Denmark. It helps in radically different cultures and in countries with totally different histories. It works because the majority of crime is driven by desperate people that just don't exist if they have basic social welfare.
The mechanics can be complicated, but the basic principle is simple: there are no states with a decent safety net that have US-level crime statistics.
PS: You do realise you don't need all those weapons, right? The US is bordered by Canada, and Mexico. Nobody is ever going to invade. The historical normal of the US is to have basically no army, and it worked just fine. Nobody has even seriously considered invading the US since the British left, despite two world wars, because it's obviously so impractical.
Is there a reason you assume people won't simply charge at night with relatively standard 240V (or even 120V) chargers? Most cars don't average more than 60 miles a day, which is less than 20kWh. In much of the US you could install 10-15 solar panels to do that even in the winter.
Now solar panels are mostly made in China (as are almost all consumer electronics), but that seems like a far more general problem to solve.
Charging in cities and apartment compexes is still an unsolved problem, and most people live in cities.
For example, just to provide enough chargers for Philadelphia's 1.5M residents (63% of them drive to work), one of every ~6 car lengths on every residential sidewalk would need concrete dug up and a charger installed. The city will never pay for that, and it would be a logistical and political nightmare. Even if individuals went through a city process to get a permit to do it themselves and pay for & install their own charger, and assuming there was a posted parking limit for only EVs, some jerk down the street with a Tesla will take the spot, and you may have to drive blocks and blocks to find a free charger. Many people may decide to just stick to ICE.
Why would it require that? In the UK instead of doing all that the councils have been installing EV charging points into streetlights, negating any requirement to dig up the pavements (beyond that required to replace a streetlight) to install these.
Philadelphia is an interesting choice of example. I've seen charging cords going out windows to cars from time to time, facilitated by the popularity of the rowhouse. (IMHO even in south philly, you can usually snag a spot in front of your house several times per week if you care enough to try-- if you only drive enough to charge once or twice a week this is already enough)
Obviously not an ideal solution but a good example of the kind of stop gaps we'll be seeing over time.
I'm also already seeing rapid chargers frequently in strip malls and stuff. So maybe doing errands and spending at least an hour there once a week will be another stop gap.
Considering how often streets get repaved and that we're talking about gradual change over the next decade or two, and that there are inferior but workable stopgaps as mentioned above (that will allow people to get by, yet also incentivize them to loudly demand better) I think there's time to add the charging stations necessary as needed without any serious issues.
I've been thinking about this for a bit (I happen to live in Philly) & I think the easier answer for cities is instead of focusing on charging "at home" parked on the street, to instead go all-in on destination charging (charging at work, at the grocery store, etc).
Adding charging to a garage or parking lot is easier than on the street, and you don't have to worry about not being able to access "your" spot.
> made in China (as are almost all consumer electronics), but that seems like a far more general problem to solve.
Production does not mean capacity.
Obvious one is Tesla. has alot of solar capacity but doesn't make alot of sales since they are at the high end of the market. Same with Misson Solar and Solaria.
If we took a hard stance on trading with China it would hurt alot of the big name players, there would be alot of constraints for a while, but would give smaller, US Based manufacturers with more capacity than sales time to shine.
There is no way around the labor equation in products without effective legislation.
The initialism is increasingly known. And yet bad: we could argue that "ICE vehicles" are connected cars, because - after William Gibson - Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics are not relevant on traditional combustion-based vehicles.
Also note that “half of all new cars sold” does not mean half of all vehicles on the road. People will keep using their ICE cars for 10-20 years after their manufacture date. I’m curious to see the actual projections of cars on the road that are electric vs ICE. My guess is, by 2040, it might be 25% (in the USA).
About 1/4 of cars on the road globally will be electric but Europe and China will have a larger share than USA. Still, that means something like 25% of gas stations and parking lots worldwide having fast chargers. If they can't make that number, imagine the impact on driving when 1/4 of drivers are frustrated and their trips unrealistic. Passenger car ownership itself may fall, which would both hit the auto industry and bolster mass transit companies. But at the same time demand would be surging for ICE vehicles / infrastructure and gas prices will probably rise due to their devestment in anticipation of the EV revolution.
... or charging infrastructure companies would simply expand their offerings to meet demand, since expansion for them is comparatively cheap.
That, at least to me, seems to be the more likely scenario.
Also keep in mind that fueling behavior for EV owners is different than for ICE vehicle owners. Fast chargers are useful for road trips, but unnecessary and expensive for day-to-day driving. Most commuters will simply charge at home/work/the store/etc, where the raw inputs to charging infrastructure (car-adjacent space and electricity) are already in place and slower, cheaper charging is sufficient.
This requires having expensive, redundant charging infrastructure at all these places. It works today because far less than 1% of cars on the road in most of the developed world are electric. If 25% were electric, that free charging at the store and work is going away, there won't be enough bays to charge all the cars.
Whenever I hear 'X company is going all electric by Y date' I assume it's either an outright marketing lie, or that company will soon thereafter be out of business.
Another way to look at it: A ton of gas stations aren't very profitable. Most don't even make any real money on the gas!
So what happens when 1/4 of all their customers disappear? Many will close and when that happens there will be less competition, driving up gas prices which will result in more people buying electric cars. It's a cycle that--once it kicks off--is going to move very quickly. Faster than people, cities, and society are prepared for, that's for sure!
This is going to hit harder and than people realize. There are so many really great EV options from nearly every manufacture. And their sales figures are growing at a solid clip. According to Cox, EVs are 12% of new car sales in 22, and it's the only segment that grew YoY (the overall market fell 20% YoY).
Or use battery swapping, like China is doing. This enables many gas stations to remain viable, allows far better battery health monitoring/remediation, permits slower, less stressful charging & greatly reduces the grid issue, eliminates the battery as a limitation of the car’s lifespan, etc.
EVs aren't going to be popular because they are the solution to climate change. The better solution to climate change is sustainable city planning and development that minimizes energy use for transportation needs, emphasizing walking, bicycles, and rail travel.
EVs are going to take over no matter what because in their end state they're better than ICE vehicles in nearly every way. Quieter, smoother, simpler, faster, cleaner (air pollution), and potentially cheaper.
That said, I absolutely disagree with the amount of shade you're throwing at the technology in the context of climate, emissions, and fuel:
> we need 30% more grid capacity
That's not very hard, especially since EVs are being phased in gradually. We had the same problem with air conditioners and it was no big deal.
> an insanely higher number of chargers
Which will happen because there is a clear financial incentive to build them. They're cheaper to run and maintain than gas stations and the fuel is transported much more easily.
> service companies
Are service companies a finite resource?
> land
What land do you mean? Car-based infrastructure already uses and has a bunch of land. Where is it that EVs need more of it?
> China still controls most of the resources for production
We already have this situation with the Middle East/Russia with oil
Here's the biggest issue I have with your comment: you're minimizing massive reduction in oil usage:
> and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs
That's a lot! Globally, 43.7 million barrels of oil are used per day for transportation fuel. [1]
That means that EVs will reduce crude oil usage for transportation by 18.3%! That's really significant!
We need to reduce global emissions by 55 percent by 2030 to avoid catastrophe. But even if every single (inc. trucks) vehicle were electrified, it would at max reduce emissions by 20 percent. At the current estimates for 2045 it's going to be like 5-10% reduced emissions, well after we go above 2 degrees temp increase over a decade before.
While we can cheer for EVs reducing emissions, it will do nothing to stop the actual problem with climate change, which is global catastrophe from runaway warming. Add to that the problems we are setting ourselves up for with failure to properly handle the coming EVs and the picture looks grim.
What proposed alternative reduces vehicular emissions by more than switching to EVs?
As I mentioned, I'm all for the reduction of automobile usage as a generality, but that's not as low-friction as a transition to EVs.
We can lament our situation all we want, EVs are what they are. I am not saying they're a full climate solution.
Automakers are switching over them purely as a product decision, with relatively little government regulation pushing them in that direction. (Any regulatory bans on ICE vehicles were easily enacted without industry protest because automakers already know that ICE vehicles will not be competitive products by 2030)
From what I understand, it involves replacing nearly every local distribution station in existence, because nobody prepared for this.
When I had my charger installed, my electrician mentioned that I was at capacity for the service line. To upgrade it, I would have to pay to have the sidewalk and road dug up and repaired, for a couple of city blocks.
I don't think "not very hard" is the appropriate framing.
> By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely.
Do you believe this? I know its a stated goal, but is there anything to hold the company's accountable or is this just a promise? I can't imagine them giving up a cash cow and something they've been doing for decades. EV sales in the USU are 5.6% of the market. I just find the claim that these companies will just seamlessly switch over to electric when they can't even get a decent touch screen in a car a decade after the first iPad.
There are a lot of built-in incentives for manufacturers to switch to electric once the market demand exists.
Less moving parts to warranty means potentially less long-tail costs for parts as well as less capital allocation for potential warranty service claims paid to dealerships. Less moving parts that can fail. Less parts in general. AWD in electrics is typically done with a front and rear motor configuration versus using moving parts to transfer power from the front to the rear.
More opportunities to upsell with lower capital costs. Model stratification by power output in ICE typically means more complex engineering (forced induction) or larger engine; both of which require significantly more R&D, testing, and validation. Once you sink capital investments into an ICE engine and manufacturing line, you need to reuse it over many years across a large range of vehicles to recoup the cost.
Model stratification in electrics is via bigger battery packs (stuff more of the same cells in there) and multiple motors.
Basically, electric cars are fiscally better for manufacturers in every way -- so long as consumers are willing to pay the premium AND willing to live with the inconveniences (less infrastructure for refueling, longer refueling, range anxiety).
What Tesla did was de-risk the market by showing that consumers will buy the product despite its flaws.
The demand exists. Tesla's order books are full. Ford's Mustang Mach-E is sold out with a waiting list. Ford's F-150 lightning have a waiting list as well as mechanisms to prevent scalping (voiding warranties) because there is so much demand.
Problem right now with EVs isn't demand (not saying that demand won't be an issue, but right now it seems like we haven't reached the inflection point for demand vs supply), it's so supply constrained to the extent that dealerships can mark up F-150 Lightnings with exorbitant costs.
Granted: we're still not really talking affordable econo-movers yet, but the market of $40-90k electric vehicles is still being restricted on the supply side. There are still people who want to buy a $40-90k EV who can't.
I couldn't find anything on Ford warranties being void if someone resold. The only thing I could find is a statement from Ford saying warranties do transfer to other parties. Any relevant links?
Edit: I saw GM announced they'll strip Hummer warranties, pretty crazy. I doubt the people that will buy a scalped Hummer EV will care much though.
> What Tesla did was de-risk the market by showing that consumers will buy the product despite its flaws.
Tesla is sexy, sure. But I don't think they proved that people want electric cars. Tesla still sells very few cars (~3%). The giants sell a lot more cars
I agree electric cars are better, but nothing stopped the car giants from making them decades ago. Tesla didn't come around at the right time, even Musk admits as much. The car giants could have worked on electric cars in the past, but for whatever reason didn't. It would have even been easier for them considering their expertise in manufacturing and distribution. Not to mention that politicians don't really like Tesla for whatever reason. If you listen to Biden talk about electric cars he often suspiciously leaves out Tesla, which is weird considering their cars are made in US and dominate 75% of the electric market in the US.
Tesla sells every car they can make. Their backlog is about a year long. We won't know how much demand there is until they can actually meet it.
Batteries cost a lot more decades ago. Car giants could have built electrics but they would have been expensive and short range.
If the trend in battery prices continues, electric cars will have lower sticker prices than ICE cars in a couple years, and then anyone who just wants a good price for a new car will change from an ICE customer to an electric customer.
> Tesla is sexy, sure. But I don't think they proved that people want electric cars.
I'm not sure if this is the right way to frame this. It would probably be better to say something like Tesla proved that EVs are practical and people will buy them.
> Tesla still sells very few cars (~3%). The giants sell a lot more cars
Sure, at the moment. But now you're conflating manufacturer market share with fuel type market share. A better way to think about this in the context of ICE vs EV is to look at the efforts underway by all manufacturers to ramp up EV production. It takes time to do. New companies (Lucid, Rivian, Tesa, etc.) take time to ramp up production. And then if you want to just compare manufacturers against each other with all fuel types combined, you can do that separately, to which I'd say this is not at all surprising given EV makers are new and take time to get market penetration.
> but nothing stopped the car giants from making them decades ago
All of the profit incentives in the world stopped them basically. Everyone was fat and happy with oil for cars, why bother changing anything or doing anything different?
I believe it. There's a stark difference in comparing the available EV models from mainstream manufactures between 2018 and 2022. Hyundai/KIA in particular are nailing it when it comes to EVs.
Manufactures are already quietly sunseting ICEs. It just doesn't read as significant right now, because the models which are going away are not the big, important ones. But manufactures are setting the stage for the transition of popular nameplates to EVs (see: Mustang, F150)
They are public companies; it will be kinda obvious from their annual reports if they aren't investing/devesting enough to hit those goals, and if they dont announce it to the public that will cause them bigger problems.
They anticipate increased costs for ICE vehicles and increased profit from EV which is why they're moving forward. They don't control the segments of the market they need to make it happen, so it's a risky bet. However, the manufacturers that are switching first are largely luxury brands, so they make a healthy enough profit that even if they stumble they wont be under water.
All you have to do is look at press releases from 8 years ago and see how many of those plans actually happened. You should expect the plans from today to work out similarly.
But you did not even talk about CME events, Astroid Impacts, or Yellow Stone blowing up.... That is weak doomsday stuff to leave out them.
I will say also, any government promises or actions more than 1 election cycle out are pipe dreams by those governments, When we get to 2030, I will be SHOCKED if even 20% of the nations promising to ban ICE sales will actually do it
> and so many things we don't even have a plan for,
Why do you have the impression "nobody" is planning for these things? These topics are talked about endlessly in every medium by laypeople. Billions of dollars in public and private sector investment is being funneled into everyone of these topics.
The complaint about grid capacity baffles me. The USA used to regularly growth capacity by well over 30% a decade. It only stopped expanding because energy efficiency standards were so damn successful that net usage declined in spite of population growth, and the majority new capacity went to displacing coal production.
I would love to see some company produce components someone could purchase and replace an ICE engine with to make it an EV. I'm not talking 300 mile range EV with fancy software, etc. just basic stuff like a battery pack sized to replace a gas tank, electric motor and other components, etc. Some kit that you could take a modern-ish Corolla/Civic and turn it into a 100mi range EV which could satisfy a ton of households that have 2nd/3rd cars. Would be really neat to have them be more like PC components than proprietary.
You can do this now. The technology is here. But bear in mind that each application requires a specific mechanical interface, and that's the problem. People swap ICE motors in cars all the time, but they are skilled enough to adapt them as needed.
I have a nice Husqvarna brush cutter where the motor has a failed bearing and they stopped making that model. One of my backburner projects is to electrify it. Current candidate is a small router motor: probably has enough power and it can meet the duty cycle requirements. Like I said in my other post, the biggest issue is the mechanical coupling from motor to device: they're all non-standard.
We could have general purpose electric motors by now but the corporations are instead pushing proprietary formats that we can't retool ourselves upon us. More money for them this way.
> By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely.
If those two seem out of step with one another then I propose that one of them will relent with regard to the other. (No one is making these six manufacturers stick to their forecasts.)
I'm quite worried about the future of cars, especially EVs. I will never own a Tesla due to their always-on tracking and blatant anti-consumer practices like hiding upgrades on the car behind a paywall. Sadly ICE manufacturers are following suit with more and more useless dogshit like touchscreens everywhere, always-on data connections, and subscriptions for shit like seat warmers. I think this apprehension is partially fueling the skyrocketing prices of used vehicles (in addition to the chip shortage, but that should be assuaged in the coming months).
I see a lot more negative anti-car sentiment online these days than I used to. I hope this leads to more car-free parts of the world. I don't want to use a car on a daily basis, owning one is a chore, but I'm forced to by the world that I live in.
I'm also worried about the future of cars, of course. I'm an optimist, though -- I hope that the oncoming car dystopia leads to a rejection of cars by a bigger chunk of society. And a more sustainable, quiet, walkable, bikeable world for those of us who embrace it.
I respect your preferences -- I certainly don't want to take vehicles away from everyone. But I do want to limit their impact on my happiness and the sustainability of our civilization.
Personally I think personal vehicles simply shouldn't exist in dense cities. They take up too much space to move around and to park, they cause too much noise, and when they interact with other transportation -- by foot, by bike, by scooter, whatever -- there's a fractional blood price I'm not OK with. Not to mention the fact that people in cars in the cities I've lived in frequently become raging jerks who use their car as a weapon to enforce their own entitlement to all public space.
As a car enthusiast, do you think it's OK to ban personal vehicles from US cities? I envision a world where secure parking garages exist on the periphery of a public transit, walk, and bike-dominated space for folks who still want to own a car while living in a city -- or for folks who want to visit a city via car. This periphery would largely align with existing ring roads around US cities. Outside of the periphery, folks could live near the benefits of the city with a garage, car, street parking, etc. But they wouldn't travel into the city via car.
Deliveries would largely happen at night or in the early morning, when pedestrian traffic is the lightest. Ride shares would exist for the disabled only, with everyone else using their feet, a bicycle, or public transit to move around the car-free zone. Building out public transit, bike lanes, etc. would become very cheap in the absence of personal vehicle traffic, because you could just put street cars, buses, bike paths, and light rail on top of 90% of the existing streets.
And of course, if you don't live in a major city, your life wouldn't change at all. You just wouldn't drive into the downtown of any of the top 50-to-100-population US cities. I suspect some small towns might embrace a similar model if it's successful in big cities, but not many.
What do you think of this future model? It would let people who want to live car-free in a community do so in a dense urban environment. It would let people who want to live with cars do so in the existing exurbs and rural parts of the US. I have a hard time seeing major flaws, but I'm likely biased since I desperately want a car-free environment here in the US.
The quantity of CO2 needing to be dumped in to the atmosphere to manufacture new cars to meet this is going to be astronomical. The majority of the CO2 cost of a car is in the manufacturing. I don't understand why they are doing this?
Because the CO2 cost of manufacturing a new ICE car is comparable to that of a new EV, but the lifetime CO2 contribution of a new EV is far lower than that of an ICE car.
Can you prove that, because that is not my understanding. EVs use way more CO2 in their manufacturing. Not to mention the added environmental impact of battery manufacturing and lithium mining. We can't solve climate change by buying a new car.
Edit. I'm sure Musk and Tesla are super proud of the CO2 savings their company provides, so it shouldn't be hard to find the data they are publishing showing the net cost to carbon for the entire manufacturing and life time use of their product.
Look, according to Volvo, (who make an EV and ICE version of the same car, on the same manufacturing process),
"The emissions from Materials production and refining of the ICE are roughly 40 per cent less
than for the BEV" [0]
Therefore, forcing people to scrap working vehicles and buy new ones, in such a short time period, is going to dump massive quantities of CO2 in to the atmosphere in very order. This sounds extremely dangerous. I don't understand their reasoning.
Surely they need to fix the EV electric energy mix to make it more renewable, before forcing people to buy the EVs
California, for one. But it doesn't matter, EVs need about 60% more carbon up front. Until you have 100% clean electricity supply and greener, longer lasting batteries, they can't recover that deficit.
I live in California and have heard of no such proposals. Can you link to one? It does matter, you claimed it. It makes it sound like your arguments are just bogus if you claim your own arguments don't matter.
ICE cars pollute the local environment, which is worse imho than their contribution to global warming. ICE cars are noisy, stink, and have unhealthy exhaust. For those reasons alone, an electric car is better.
I agree 100%,and if they sold them on that, I might support them. But then I would rather scrap cars altogether. Phase them out over 20 years, and replace with public transport and bicycles.
Now for reality instead: since people have developed the direst situation of being "brainless", I have been near vehicles you would praise, and the noise they make is _unbearable_. That is because some satanic critters, which unfortunately constitute empowered components in management, marketing and public, believe it a "good idea" to replace traditional engine noise with synths of '90s operating system boot samples.
This happens because people have lost their nature, of feedback-based machines, and can go on living after being shot (they will not know about it).
--
Edit: an hybrid in electric mode just parked near me, in real time, and the noise was not the most particularly annoying - it's a Hyundai - but it was definitely upsetting and irritating (though much better than other hellish nightmares I have heard driving near me). I assess that normal individuals would probably be not that bothered when they pass on the streets many yards distant - but I am not sure, it really depends which audio bands will reach you. I am pretty sure that others I have experienced will be fully unbearable at a much longer distance.
Edit2: they just left now, and the noise at the start was quite acceptable now - just a mildly loud fan, nothing perverse. It seems Hyundai has guessed a few effects properly. (Issue is, others have not - and this logically opens for more.)
Those evidences of hell on earth are driving by clearly unregulated - and it is doubtful that given the mental state of nowadays earth crawlers they will ever be regulated (you need a clean humanity still capable of being bothered by noise for that).
And for what the single sniper that hit this post is concerned - likewise for silence, let us refrain to spend much verbal judgement.
Is it a widely believed myth? Every time I mention it I only hear shock and disbelief. I almost never hear it talked about. I'd like to read that paper, though.
If you google there are a ton of studies showing that over the lifetime of a car from the time of manufacturing, emissions from an EV is still about 1/3 or ICE.
Remember that renewables are only, what, 10-20% of our electric supply?
EVs are way heavier, and they require more energy, raw materials, and toxic chemicals to produce.
If the lawmakers where serious about this, then would solve the other problems first. We need a clean electric supply, first. Then we need a green supply chain, EV trucks, trains and ships and factories etc. THEN it might make sense to scrap perfectly good used cars in favour of brand new, shiny, must-have EVs.
It's feels a bit weird for me as a left-winger to make this argument, but won't all that be solved by the market?
If there are not enough chargers, won't that create an incentive to build more? And yeah, you probably can't build them fast enough, or the grid capacity will not be sufficient, but won't people then just move to places where they can? Or switch to alternative modes of transportation?
I think the fallacy is that people just want to replace ICE cars with EVs as they are, and then realize you need a lot of space and grid capacity to charge them, etc. But because of the scaling problems you mention, there will be a very large pressure to build better public transport. If people can't charge their EV, or can't afford a car, or don't have good transportation, they will move somewhere else. This is structural change, and yeah it is going to be inconvenient and expensive (and we could have done it better with more foresight), but ultimatively we will figure it out.
>And yeah, you probably can't build them fast enough, or the grid capacity will not be sufficient, but won't people then just move to places where they can? Or switch to alternative modes of transportation?
This sounds fine to you? Not having enough grid capacity means much higher prices and more frequent blackouts. Not having enough charging infrastructure means many people may be unable to fuel their vehicles. "Sorry, but this city is shit now, I guess you're going to have to move to Texas for their great electric grid" doesn't seem like a position we should be aiming to put many people in.
We're not going to have frequent blackouts. At least here in Germany, it is already the case that you have to get permission from the electricity company to install a wallbox for charging, I can imagine it's the same in most places.
What's going to happen is that at some point having a car gets slightly more expensive. Some people will put off buying a car for a little while. And they'll vote for candidates who promise to build more power infrastructure, or public transport. When people are moving the next time, they'll take the infrastructure into account in their decision, and move preferentially to cities with more capacity.
It's not like we are going to put 100 million EVs out there tomorrow. Some places will become marginally shittier, some will become better, and there will be plenty of time for everything to equilibrate.
Are you purposely forgetting the billions in state and federal charger subsidies, and the billions in residential solar subsidies being paid out? Total US energy consumption right now is at the same level it was in 2007.
Many companies choose not to take subsidies/grants due to the restrictions they come with. Many areas of the country also have lobbyists preventing things like selling excess capacity back to the grid. The subsidies will also lower over time; the govt isn't going to pay people to use solar in 2040.
> we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too.
> Basically there are so many thing sthat can go wrong in the next 18 years ...
There has to be a name for this particular kind of response to change (usually positive change[0]). Please don't read this as crapping on your points -- they're all valid.
The problem is that it's identifying problems that "may occur in the future" using what technology we have, today, to solve them. It also presents those in a vacuum and ignores the unknown of what the world could look like after new vehicles sales gradually transition to 80% electric. We can speculate more easily on the negative, but it's a lot harder to predict the positive -- at least, the "societal changing positive effects".
Consider that newer EVs can power your home during a power loss, or integrating EVs into the grid, itself. Reliance on traditional automobiles and how we rely on them is changing, as well. My driving habits, due to the vast availability of fully-remote work and the purchase of a OneWheel have been drastically reduced[1]. I went from ~20 gallons/week to ~10 gallons/month of gas. I've done the math a few times and it's stupid for me to own an ICE vehicle. I own it out of a desire of convenience that could probably be eliminated with Uber and when my kids are out of the house, I probably will no longer own a car. Until then, however, my car could basically be filling in that 30% gap (or whatever the gap happens to be at this very moment).
Articles that recently hit the front page of HN related to Geothermal conversion of Coal Plants[2], the myriad of posts related to companies attempting the modern-day alchemy called "Nuclear Fusion", there's a lot of energy/money being spent in the space, much of it having nothing to do with reducing climate change but providing for an increasingly electricity dependent future.
Even the incredibly slow-moving electric companies have made some pretty serious progress. I think back on my short life; I happen to currently live in the city I grew up in -- losing the power for a few days in the summer was a "normal thing", as was losing it during every miserable thunderstorm. The price of whole-home generators and the hardware to integrate it were so cost-prohibitive that few people owned one. I still do not, however, I've lost power maybe four times this year for under ten seconds. I've lost power once in three years for over an hour (still restored in under four hours).
[0] I'm thinking something succinct like Hanlon's Razor.
[1] 2,800 miles and going since I bought it. I grocery shop with it ... it's a good upper body workout carrying 6 bags back 1-3 miles.
[2] Filed under "I'll believe it when I see it" but still.
This reads like fossil fuel conglomerate propaganda. The first sentence posits an unproven alternative with a complex, expensive and almost entirely hypothetical infrastructure. Hydrogen is not addressed further, and fear-uncertainty-doubt tropes concerning battery powered vehicles are liberally applied. Many of the bullet points on this laundry list are disputable. Just take 'batteries take too long to charge' -- I drove a Nissan Leaf as my main vehicle for 8 years. Even given its tiny 24Kw battery pack, I was able to use home charging for 95% of my driving needs. For the last 5 years of service, I even used 120V 'trickle' charging during the evenings and it was sufficient. Now I have an electric vehicle with significantly higher battery capacity and a much faster charging network, as well as a 240V home charger. It is even more flexible and I am freer to take long road trips. When charging the car during such trips, I get out and exercise, play with the dog. It is a small adjustment that occurs infrequently during the life of the car. Most of these bullet points can be addressed in a similar manner. Enough of the propaganda!
It is fully plausible that the poster meant: "hydrogen based technology looks like deserving more attention - especially given that alternatives are imperfect".
Those speaking of a successful experience with home charging describe a very personal experience: many people do not have any "home charging infrastructure" (the car won't do the stairs), nor the same «driving needs». The statement «batteries take too long to charge» deserves referential (and even reverential) noticing of the current standard, which is "I refill within one first minute on the clock".
Charging posts are sprouting up all over the sidewalks of some cities (Paris comes to mind), "home charging infrastructure" isn't insoluble even for apartment dwellers. And they don't have to be fast chargers if the car's going to be sitting there for 12 hours, which means they can be somewhat easier to install.
But a very large percentage of people do live in detached homes, in which case, all it takes is a standard wall socket and a 14/3 extension cord (in the case of a US standard 120v 15 amp circuit).
"Not «insoluble»" does not really define the smiling world of shining white sweaters strolling in the streets (it is not "problem solved"). I doubt that the coverage will be easily doable. There are apartments in remote places in the countryside (at least, it is very normal here). And in streets dense with parking need, which implies many aspects of space management. Moreover, if I had to imagine charging posts every, say, two spots, or basically every spot, in every inhabited street with the possible exception of villas with internal space for cars, I would immediately wonder of the infrastructural costs (which would be rotated to the final individual user as a component of the per-kWh, hopefully, but still worth noticing).
About the «very large percentage of people do live in detached homes»: interesting, I see data around that seems to confirm this (to Statista.com , in North America they should be 85% of the total this makes too little sense in consideration of urbanization: I would believe it more easily if it were 85% /in rural areas/). Other easily accessible data states that in Canada «55.3% of the population lived in single-detached houses [in 2006]», but with swings such as "7.5% in Montreal, 58% in Calgary". It reminds me of those infographics that show how compact and traffic efficient Barcelona is when compared to Atlanta (same population, 1/12 of the urban area, 1/6 of the transport related carbon emissions) - I suppose that a staggering amount of population living in single-family detached homes must entail that cities are affected (instead of being made of mostly buildings for apartments), which must mean "more Atlanta than Barcelona" as a concept.
Those who have this mysterious "85%" as set in their mind should be aware of this piece of info from Eurostat:
> In 2020, 46.2 % of the EU population lived in flats, more than one third (35.8 %) lived in detached houses and close to one fifth (17.0 %) lived in semi-detached or terraced houses
Hydrogen fuel cells are more expensive than batteries, because they either work at room-temperature and they need expensive catalysts using platinum-group metals, or they work at high temperatures and then they have a short lifetime, requiring frequent replacements of most components.
Also the efficiency of a cycle of storing energy into gaseous hydrogen and then recovering it is limited by fundamental reasons to low values.
For cars, it is likely that batteries will remain the best solution, due to the high efficiency of a charge-discharge cycle.
For long term storage of energy, further improvements of fuel cells might make them the best solution for recovering energy stored in chemical form, but not using gaseous hydrogen for storage, but other more appropriate substances, e.g. hydrocarbons, alcohols, ammonia or solid carbon.
There are fuel cells for the other fuels mentioned above and the only advantage of the hydrogen fuel cells is that they currently have the greatest power density, i.e. the speed of reaction of the hydrogen per area of electrode is for now the greatest (leading to the greatest electrical current density), but only either at high temperatures or when using expensive catalysts.
The mitochondria from all the cells of our body are a demonstration that it is possible to make a very high efficiency fuel cell using hydrocarbons as fuel and without using any rare or expensive materials for catalysts.
While the solar cells already exceed the efficiency of plants at capturing solar energy, the artificial fuel cells have a long way until becoming competitive with those used by the living beings.
Much of the fear about battery degradation was from projections and warranty terms at the very beginning of modern EV deployments.
Real world observations have shown the battery packs maintaining >85% of their capacity after 150,000mi/241,000km.
Also, battery components aren't rare. They're called "rare" because they are not found in large centralized deposits but rather spread somewhat uniformly throughout the earth. They are actually some of the more abundant elements on earth. For every two atoms of silicon on earth, there is almost one of lithium, which makes it much more abundant than hydrocarbons. If battery component extraction was subsidized to the degree hydrocarbon extraction is, they would be much less expensive, and more available on the market, than hydrocarbons.
>-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle
The battery makes up approximately 1/3rd the price of a new EV. As anyone who has had to pay for auto repair can attest, labor is almost always the main cost. It is inconceivable to me that replacing a battery and motors is more costly than an engine, except due to a shortage of qualified personnel commanding higher hourly rates. There is a video on YouTube of an elderly wheelchair-bound man completely rebuilding a Nissan Leaf battery pack in a workshop so I have no doubts that it is a skill that can be taught to any able-bodied person who is willing to learn.
If in the next five years electric battery vehicles become a very big pain, then I suspect you will hear about fuel cell cars ... or whatever the perceived pragmatic replacement is.
That we don't hear about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles actually suggests to me that they are not a viable option.
I presume, stupidly perhaps, that there are bigger thinkers than me (or certainly people in positions that have a lot more to lose or gain in this field) that have already counted the beans and still see the electric (battery) vehicles as the current future path of least resistance.
At the very least, swapping batteries for fuel cells seems to be a fundamentally simpler step than swapping ICE for electric. Going to electric cars generally, regardless of the source of power is a big move for the auto industry.
How the h... did my simple comment, based on my PERSONAL opinion on the subject got into this witch-hunt?!
Enough with the torches and forks!
This is not propaganda! It's MY PERSONAL conclusion on everything I've read! - the word -PERSONAL- is the key here.
If any of you think I don't like electric vehicles you are wrong! Anything that does not pollute is welcome(to try to undo the shirt we all did)!
But I have to say it: ATM - personal view, again - to me, electric vehicles based on batteries S-U-C-K!!! And they SUCK big time!!!
I don't see them as decent alternative!!!
Sure! Environment-friendly it's the best we have! But they suck!
And hydrogen has much more promise!
Not developed enough? Yeah! It's not. But then again... Let me say it again: electric vehicles based on batteries suck.
And unless they get at least the first 3 points fixed you won't be changing my mind!
50.000 for a car that takes 25 min to charge and that if, for some reason, the battery goes the way of the Dodo I can expand ALMOST another 50.000?
Sorry, I'm not payed enough for that.
You guys must all have big pay checks every month...
But I don't!
>-Batteries are terribly expensive (and prices are not going down as fast as expected)
Not really.
>-Batteries degrade too fast
No, they don't, at least not the well-temperature-controlled ones. Larger EV packs should outlast most ICE cars.
>-Batteries take too long to charge
They really don't, unless you have no way to charge at home - the vast majority of charging happens overnight even on a 120V plug. We only visit chargers when on roadtrips.
>-Electricity prices are already going up terribly fast to take advantage of the boom (and blaming the war, and everything else to justify it's rise)
Not really true, at least in our corner of the US. I think we're sitting at ~$0.14/kwh, which works out to around $0.04-$0.05/mi, or 20-25 miles per $. And any rise in methane prices is going to hit hydrogen harder, given that most H2 is produced by cracking CH4.
>-Batteries pollute a lot more than previously though
Source? What kind of pollution? More than the steel that goes into making a car?
>-recycling Batteries is hard
Not really? Tesla claims a materials yield of 92% on their packs, and 100% of the packs recycled. Recyclers are willing to pay quite a bit for broken packs, which should tell you something.
>-Batteries component materials are rare
Newer chemistries are better about this.
>-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle
Yeah, Teslas aren't great on this front, even wrt the bodywork. But battery pack replacements don't cost nearly as much as a new EV.
Gaseous hydrogen has a lot of problems, and you'd need to build a whole distribution network. Which we already have with electricity...
Biggest problem with hydrogen is the lack of refueling infrastructure. With electric, there's an electrical grid to build chargers on top of and worst case you can charge in your garage etc. With hydrogen we would need to create tons of new gas stations designed for hydrogen as well as the delivery vehicles, refineries, etc. to supply them. I've got a relative who works for Toyota (who are making significant investments in hydrogen) and he said most of their current efforts are on semi truck fleets where they only need hydrogen stations at a few locations along a pre-determined route.
Charging in your garage isn't really the worst case scenario. For most drivers, it's actually the best case scenario, because your average commute won't even come close to depleting the battery, and can be trickle charged over the course of a night, extending battery life over fast charging.
The only reason a person should ever need to charge at a station is on a long haul trip, and that problem is getting better all the time.
I think this has been discussed to death, the TL;DR is that H2 is fundamentally really difficult to store safely and efficiently at reasonable densities and temperatures. This is not something that is likely to improve with technology or scale (it's not like it's an underfunded area), they literally squeeze past other atoms and nothing is smaller than hydrogen.
I do however agree that existing battery technology is _still_ severely disadvantaged, not only in terms of efficiency and density but the rare materials they need to manufacture (same for H2 solutions).
It's annoying because ICE engines are not great (big, heavy, complicated with related reliability issues), yet they consume an easy to transfer high density liquid fuel; Electric engines are fantastic (small, light, simple, highly efficient, powerful, great torque), but they consume electricity which is hard to efficiently transfer with no where near the energy density per unit weight or space storage solutions.
However! ICE exists, all of it's issues are mitigated by mass adoption, and in the short term it's not environmentally responsible to ditch 1 billion cars. I think the best plan I've seen so far is to scale up synthesising hydrocarbons from solar... electric cars can continue to be developed and we can find more reasonable electric storage solutions without undermining the purpose of switching to electric by forcing the world into an immature solution and throwing away 1 billion ICE vehicles and all related infrastructure (manufacturing EVEs has an environmental cost).
We like simple to understand solutions, but the solution that minimises environmental impact must not underscope itself - the whole picture has to be considered, costs of manufacturing and switching are not external to planet Earth, which means there is some ideal conversion rate that must be determined.
One small nit: Nobody is advocating "throwing away 1 billion ICE vehicles".
If you have a car that works, the environmentally responsible decision is -- unless it's an absurdly inefficient vehicle -- to keep using that car instead of purchasing a newly-manufactured EV. Even EV advocates acknowledge and proclaim this.
The point of the EV transition is to provide a more environmentally responsible solution for those people who are already in the market for a new car, as an alternative to manufacturing another billion polluting ICE cars.
True yes, i was exaggerating, but there is a pressure to accelerate the transition, and a perception by the general public and policy makers that the faster the better.
Even with the ideal EVE battery solution the environmentally optimal solution may actually be to prolong ICE use with synthetic fuels to minimise manufacturing impact while eliminating green house gas emission. I don't think as many people realise this as you may think. Minimising manufacturing and consumption is also anti-capitalistic which is an extra complication making it unpopular.
Actually the current state of the art of H2 is fundamentally safe so to say, e.g. it's wrapped into some sort of oxide. But the most important cars on the market (of which there aren't many types) still use the 1st gen approach which is a bit unsafer.
I think there are solutions to the show stoppers of H2. But the package isn't very appealing, at least not for individual transport.
Also what makes EVs appealing, they've reached a state of convenience that makes them feasible for most use cases. And for the rest it seems some hacky solutions are possible.
Of course the waste of switching from ICEs to non-ICEs will be incredible. But well, hard to see any alternative..
The current world of electric cars is sort of like every smart phone before the iPhone came out. Then iPhone/Android hit, and the world was off to the races.
> Can we bet a little more on the most abundante substance on the universe?
One of those problems is there is no abundant source of hydrogen in isolated form here on earth. You have to use a catalytic agent or an energy-intensive process like electrolysis to get usable hydrogen for your fuel cell.
I'm not particularly knowledgeable, but my impression is that hydrogen might work for specific applications, but we don't have a very efficient of generating it. It still takes substantially more energy than if we just store the energy in batteries.
Steam reforming of methane from natural gas to product hydrogen is in fact very efficient (up to ~85% iirc). It is not, however, carbon-neutral. At a system level, the weak point is the fuel cell and they can be about 50% efficient. So you have an overall efficiency of a little over 40%.
Batteries can be very efficient but that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. You have to get the energy somewhere. Good solar systems are about 30% efficient. Turbines are about 30% efficient.
Energy efficiency isn't the problem with hydrogen and fuel cells. They have other problems.
The cost of storing energy in batteries is truly enormous when talking about large amounts (for example two weeks of U.S. total energy usage); this would probably costs trillions of dollars. But instead if you stored this in caverns or convert it to ammonia or another fuel... the storage cost will be a small fraction of this.
All of these are illusions. The currency is propped up by the government because it's not freely exchanged anymore. Europe is making a massive turn away from Russian energy despite the medium-term pain. The Russian military has achieved very little in five months of warfare. And China genuinely doesn't care about Russia. If the Russian Federation were to balkanize into smaller states, the Chinese leaders certainly wouldn't mind.
Europe is working hard on getting their energy from other sources. And once they've done that, they're not going back to Russian gas. In the long term, this is absolutely a loss for Russia.
Germany will not build any new LNG terminals when in a few short years they can just resume buying from the cheapest seller, before the first new terminal has even finished being constructed.
Simultaneously Russia is not stupid enough to completely cut off the gas and trigger a total crisis. They are pulling on the chains but they understand the risk to the relationship just as well as you do. Don't forget all the gas supply shortages to date have been justified in terms of required maintenances and problems due to western sanctions. That's paving a route for resumption of normal relations between both parties at a later date with no loss of face for either party.
Russia controls the most valuable portion of Ukraine right now. Going after Kiev was a win/win for Russia because it allowed them to capture the southern coast and maybe even gave them the country (it didn't).
Unless Ukraine retakes the southern coast, Russia will have achieved their main objective.
> If the Russian Federation were to balkanize into smaller states, the Chinese leaders certainly wouldn't mind.
There's some territory there that the USSR took from China back when China was weak. Once those roles are reversed, who's to say China won't start looking in that direction?
They have shown themselves to be blackmailers with energy - no one will trust them again. The war will make Europe less dependent on Russian energy.
Steady gains - I wouldn't say so as they had to retreat from the whole northern Ukraine. In my opinion, Russia lost the war after first week or two. They bet everything on quick collapse of Ukrainian army and now that it did not happen, they are in a war they want to fight with peacetime army against an 40 million country that is fully mobilizing. It's a losing fight for Russia.
How much aid did China send to Russia? Answer is very little to none.
Reason why I feel Russia will collapse is that usually after major defeats, empires fall. We have various factions already jockeying for position and I bet that people like Kadyrov wouldn't mind carving their own part of Russia (independent Chechnya). After Russia depletes their army and manpower in a futile war against Ukraine we can see various other national movements come up. Especially if/when Putin dies.
> Their currency is stronger than before the war (despite internal fragility)
Stronger than before the war, but weaker than some years ago. Russia is declining for a long time now, this war is just a last struggle.
> They have the entire continent of Europe by the balls on oil/gas
No, they have not. They lost them. Everyone is switching to new suppliers, while speeding up their movement to alternatives. And this did not happen because of the war. Moving to greener technology happens for some time now, 2019 it got a new boost, and the war only gave it another boost. With more than half of their export being a dated resource, Russia had an obvious problem pending on them.
> They've made an absolute killing in the energy sector this year due to the fear and scarcity they have created.
They made a short term win by burning their long term gains. They paid very hard with all the restrictions they received, and all the trust they lost.
> They're making steady gains in their war in Ukraine
You mean, steady gains backward? They are losing the war. They lost most of the territory they gained in the early days, and have now barely more than they had before the war.
> They have the ear and economic heart of China
Having an ear without the backing is useless. They can't push nearly as much to China than they sold to Europe. And china is switching to greener energy too. Russia's other products have little value for china. Not enough to compensate for the loss. Though, maybe enough to hold the country alive.
The thing is, overall economical, Russia is an old country with a dying market. A dinosaur who failed to adept to the future. And they burned every ground with those who could help them transform into a better form. But truly, a collapse does not depend on economy alone. Russia seems to have a population accustomed to suffering, and indoctrinated with Putin's nonsense. So quite likely that the country will remain as it is for the moment. But until some significant change will happen, the country will remain in a very stressed state, with a chance for collapse always being around.
I fear this is a definite possibility, and it's terrifying. Because the main thing that Russia has, their only real claim to being a major power, and the only reason why they've been able to get away with their invasion, is their nukes. And if the country really collapses, who knows what will happen to those nukes?
I don't mean to upset anyone, and I think the chance of collapse is small, but it's not zero.
The fear is not that they will use nukes during the collapse, but that after the collapse, there will be multiple smaller nations, each with their own supply of nukes and unpredictable governments.
This was also a concern during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the US government worked closely with the USSR government to make sure that all nuclear weapons remain within Russia. In particular, Ukraine was forced/convinced to give up its nuclear arsenal.
They didn't, but those nukes did end up in various member states. The last couple months people have talked a lot about the 1993 deal between the US, Russia and Ukraine that got Ukraine to give up its nukes in exchange of (now apparently worthless) guarantees of territorial integrity.
If Russia collapses, there's going to be mostly tribal territories in Siberia that have nukes.
IMO Russia is just a pawn in this game with China. US is in two win-win scenarios with both Russia and China. Currently Russia has its hands tied and cannot interfere or support China if the Taiwan thing gets bigger. Also, irrespective of Russia winning or loosing, Europe will increase usage of American oil and gas.
If China wins in a Taiwan takeover, the semiconductor industry will double up in America and if loses, then America will have military dominance in the region.
Unless something really crazy happens, US will come out on top again and crush both Russia and China and also increase exports to Europe.
Don't bet on it. Russia has been totally screwed up for 800 years and will be totally screwed up for another 800 years, but thru it all, ya still got yerself 1600 years of Russia.
I think the poster assumes that identification of trends reveals basically greed. And makes a plausible point in noting that the purpose of engineering is to alleviate and improve quality of life. Only, the tone is not really appropriate (and less so the assumptions).
I’ve used CUE a bit and I’m underwhelmed by it. In most cases it’s just another unneeded level of abstraction, it also doesn’t go far enough, most API based tools need to support imperative methods
You don't want computability in your config, and CUE is useful beyond APIs.
You can already use CUE within other programs when you need imperative, there is also the scripting layer where this is possible. There is also a plan to support a WASM runtime so you can have imperative subroutines in the scripting layer, written in any other language.
My problem is generally the config is a part of a larger data model, which often needs to define imperative methods on resources. Having stuff in Cue means yet another layer and language I have to learn and use for this part of my API, and then copy that into a full API language.
How are you defining that model and methods today? Are they already in the tech / lang you use or are you using some translation like protobuf or openapi?
(curiosity as I'm building a tool on top of CUE that combines it with notions of data models and code gen, and I'm always keen to learn more about the things people do today)
yes, while it is gaining adoption, there are still a couple of major tasks before it really takes off, namely dependency management and structural sharing.
Many heavy hitting tech companies have developers using and exploring it, mainly because it augments rather than replaces. It's very easy to add validation while not changing anything else. Lots of users around Kubernetes applications.
Didn't realize people still used Wikipedia for things besides for "facts" since its descent into the political / opinion battlegrounds. It's been years since I used it
Again, who's actually using it? All I see is Salesforce and two no name companies. It's supported by Netlify which is something, but I wouldn't say "hard hitting companies". Netflix and Amazon are hard hitting.
If it doesn't have a Wikipedia article, there's a very good chance it isn't very popular in the industry. At least in terms of open source standard technology, which this appears to be reaching for.
Google, Amazon, Tesla, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance are in the list, not all are on a website. It's not like a company mandate, mainly individual contributors checking it out and building things.
It's not widespread because it is just starting to get going, but it is definitely popular (well liked) among its users.
It's about as necessary as your comment stating facts about the future. :)
In any case, I apologise - my comment was indeed unnecessary and didn't bring any value to the discussion. Had it been made to me I might not have been as good a sport as you have so kudos to you!
First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.
Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.
Remember, you read it here first.
EDIT ... a few typos