Qwertious

>Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude.

The US has some of the best chemists in the world; light sweet crude is easy to refine but heavy sour crude is hard, so US refineries refining light sweet would be a waste of their talents - better to export it out for newbies to refine and buy the harder-to-refine and therefore cheaper heavy sour crude. But if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat.

An increased cost of inputs will always hurt the entire industry, but it won't particularly hurt the US any more than anyone else, and will probably hurt them the least - especially when they have plenty of domestic shale oil that will be financially viable to extract if prices go up.

Putin mainly benefits from the increased price of oil - black-market oil prices are a discount relative to standard-market oil, so he'll have a much healthier budget, even if his sanctions stay "airtight".

China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land, so their costs won't increase as much as the international market (unless Russia uses the leverage to absorb all the benefit, which I doubt), but more crucially: the alternative to oil fuel is renewables, and China dominates renewables so a spike in demand for solar/batteries will be a godsend for them.

And because Europeans have the most Neanderthal genes, it's all "Neanderthals are smarter than we thought!" and not "are Europeans the missing link?"

Fixed for metric:

>Class A: Bikes that can not go over 10mph (16km/h) via a throttle. And can’t go over 28mph (45km/h) with pedal assist. Or set the pedal assist limit at 20mph (32km/h) if you’re feeling especially conservative.

In Australia, the pedal-assist limit is 25km/h (~15.5mph). And frankly, that's plenty.

Is $$$ not an advantage? Motorbikes are at least triple the price AIUI, not to mention more regulated. The main advantage of an ebike is that it's basically a pushbike (in terms of cost) but it lets you be lazy and unfit while still using it successfully as if you were fit.

Yes, there's a few extra hundred bucks in cost, and there's an electricity bill for charging it, but frankly that's nothing. You can buy an ebike for 3 digits, and you could include the power bill in that figure and not notice.

Are ebikes not legally restricted to 250W-ish in most countries?

"hinging the decision on whether your legs or your wrist is turning is illogical"

No it's not, it's recognizing the psychology between "big push with foot makes go fast" and "pressing button makes go fast".

Besides, if the only thing that matters is speed, then logically you'd have to require normal pushbikes to register as well, once cyclists are able to pedal sufficiently fast.

There's not much difference between a throttle and a sufficiently powerful pedal-assist. Switch to your top gear, and the torque-sensor will say "gee that's a steep hill, let me give you a boost" the moment you start pedalling.

Banning throttles just makes manufacturers install token pedals on the motorbikes.

So's a turbine. Sometimes people don't want heating, but you still need to cool down the plant. And while I'm sure the nuclear plant will have a great emergency stop button (the type where paying $1k per press is absolute peanuts), the systems used daily to turn the heat up/down will either need a buffer, or have a delay on taking the heat up/down. That'll take up space. Remind me why power lines aren't an option?

I think a nuclear plant in Manhattan would cost far more than just building the plant in outer NY, and then running a big power line in to Manhattan. Sure, the power line would take up space, but so would the nuclear plant's cooling system.

Their subcontractors do.

>Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron.

Wait until you hear about H+

It's not that simple.

Batteries are inherently more aerodynamic, because they don't need to suck in oxygen for combustion, and because they need less cooling than an engine that heats itself up by constantly burning fuel. You can getvincredible gains just by improving motor efficiency - the difference between a 98%-efficient motor and a 99%-efficient motor is the latter requires half the cooling. That's more important than the ~1% increase in mileage.

Also, the batteries are static weight, which isn't as nightmarish as liquid fuel that wants to slosh around in the exact directions you want it not to. Static weight means that batteries can be potentially load-bearing structural parts (and in fact already are, in some EV cars).

The math leaves out a lot of important factors.

It's about maintaining exclusivity - if you sell your $100 T-shirt for $50 instead of $100, then it's a $50 T-shirt now. Even if they always cost less than $10 to make.

It's degenerate bullshit so I'm all for the EU banning it, but there is a business rationale.

Draining lithium reserves isn't that important - batteries don't use up the lithium, once the battery dies you can just suck out all the lithium and re-use it (and battery electrolytes are ~100% lithium, compared to lithium ore/brine being anywhere from 0.1% to 15% lithium - an order of magnitude difference). And since modern batteries are more efficient than old batteries with the same amount of lithium, we effectively increase the circulating lithium capacity over time.

In 75 years we won't need to extract more lithium - except the fraction needed to replace permanently-lost batteries.

Incidentally, you should be very careful when talking about "<resource> reserves", because the definition of a reserve is usually "<resource> that is profitable to extract" - and when we "run out", prices will go up and thus currently-unprofitable sources will become profitable, and POOF! Our <resource> reserves have increased, purely through the power of semantics.

Also, over the decades resource extraction becomes cheaper and thus more sources become profitable.

Personally though, I don't think any of that will matter -IMO the future is proton batteries, AKA Hydrogen batteries (which use an electrolyte of "ionic hydrogen", H+, which has 1 proton and 0 electrons - people claim lithium is the lightest metal, but it has 3x the protons of hydrogen). I think that the recent TABQ batteries, or something like it, will become commercially viable within 75 years (although who even knows what batteries will look like in the year 2101).

Car-centric transportation is not efficient. Not remotely. They have absolutely terrible bandwidth, and they balloon the size of cities apart the more you try to increase the speed to bring them closer together.

If you think Simcity and Cities: Skylines are realistic depictions, then ask yourself why Simcity famously has no visible parking whatsoever (or don't: the devs are on record saying they excluded it because it made the cities look terrible, there's no need to speculate here), or ask yourself why Cities: Skyline added car pokeballs (where drivers get out of the car and put the car in their pocket) or straight-up delete cars when traffic gets too heavy.

No mention of DRM. Shame.

AI isn't the only bottleneck - even if the software problem was solved today, a robot arm competitive with human arms simply doesn't exist (and the only ones that have a hope of competing cost $16k each) - it turns out all those degrees of freedom makes the arm super fragile, and the human arm is filled to the brim with sensors (e.g. to figure out the weight of the item you're holding, or to tell when the teatowel is slipping or if you're gripping it tight enough).

(Source: construction-physics, if anyone wants to comment with the link)

Tesla shareholders who fully believe Musk is crazy will either 1) be quietly selling their stocks and don't want to draw attention, or 2) factored in the crazy and bought in anyway. If the craziness started today then that would be a good question, but it's been years.

The DeLorean was a stupidly-expensive car that had a lot of maintenance problems, decided to use an unpainted stainless steel exterior and had corrosion issues as a result, but is remembered despite all of this engineering mediocrity due to its unusual stylistic choices.

I'm guessing Tesla's cybertruck will be the DeLorean of the 2020s.

The article basically says Tesla lost it's lead due to inaction years ago, so what you're saying isn't much different - "it's already dead, they're just pulling the plug" VS "they're committing suicide, which started several years ago".

More examples, please! Reusable rockets is the load-bearing example, I don't think that argument works without it. You could maybe squeeze in "he kickstarted the EV market".

>Losing a Microsoft email is an inconvenience in comparison.

Losing access to data is potentially worse than losing access to your bank account. I doubt Microsoft will let you grab a copy of all your emails after they block/ban you.

China is fine with dependence on other nations, it just can't rely on sea-based imports when the US could easily block them by blockading the strait of Malacca. That's why China has invested so heavily into their Belt And Road initiative (which is notably a giant land-based shipping route).

Once fossil fuels run out, most exclusively-fossil-fuel-based activities will simply cease to be economically feasible.

That doesn't contradict your statement, of course. But in the long term the fossil fuel niches will start looking more like today's rocket-fuel niches.

Existing wind turbines turbines are not recyclable - new wind turbines are.

Except, that's not even true. Some existing wind turbines are not recyclable.

Except that's not entirely true either! The tower portion of the turbine is usually steel, and easily recyclable! The nacelle, too. It's the base and the blades that can't be recycled.

Except that's not entirely true either! Existing turbine blades are made (mostly) of fibreglass, which is made of the fibre and the resin. The fibres aren't reliably as strong when recycled (which makes them not-very-useful when recycled), but the resin is just fine. And of course, if the blade is e.g. carbon fibre, then you can either re-use it or just burn it.

So, you statement should be that some (components of) existing wind turbines cannot be profitably recycled with current technology.

The wind turbine's concrete base doesn't need to be smashed up or ignored, incidentally - it can be re-used. Concrete is much sturdier than the e.g. gearbox.

It's not "written too slow" if you e.g. only get 50 users a week, though. If bots add so much load that you need to go optimise your website for them, then that's a bot problem not a website problem.

>The Kurdish separatists and militants allied with the wrong country

Which country is that? Last I checked, the Kurds were helping out the US a couple of years ago and got absolutely screwed.

The former is easier to remember. You can't forget the semicolon if there isn't a semicolon to forget.

Solid doesn't mean structural strength. Uncompacted snowflakes are solid, nobody builds things with them (igloos etc are compacted or ice).