ZeroGravitas

For the earlier systems with the bass boosts, are the graphs showing what comes out of the cables or what comes out of the speakers?

I would assume they don't care about the very low bass because they were designed as a unit and physically couldn't produce those notes very well anyway. Hence the need to boost slightly higher frequencies to fake bass.

One of the sources cited in this article says that at 70% battery health EVs are useless and need replaced.

It seems to be a common misconception, maybe based on the limits set for warranty repairs and then a weird logical leap.

Even early EVs that didn't have great range to start with are still useful to someone when range is lower. To make a blanket statement that all 10 year old EVs are useless seems like motivated reasoning.

"Compliance cars" are cars that manufacturers need to sell to activate subsidies or avoid financial penalties.

As deadlines get close you got really good lease deals on these cars.

I feel we need a name for this weird practice of pretending a policy was a climate change policy and then attacking it for that imagined failure:

> Well, the catch is that mining the most popular rare-earth metal, neodymium, emits miles more CO2 than any other metal (which is ironic because they’re a key ingredient to most green technologies). So, it seems Western countries are choosing to outsource this pollution to quietly keep their hands clean of carbon. This policy naturally snowballed into China having a significant market dominance, allowing it to produce even less common rare-earth elements at an unbeatable cost.

Is there any evidence at all that rare earth mining and processing is concentrated in China because the West was trying so hard to be low carbon that rather than, I dunno, build well insulated homes or smaller lighter cars, they took a hard line stance on neodymium processing?

Batteries generally are holding up better than expected, but I'm interested in what happens when a problem shows up.

Are these dealers doing the test before they buy the cars? Do they have a formula for adjusting buying and selling price based on results? Is there any kind of guarantee associated with buying a tested car?

Is there a company that the dealers can take the failing cars to to get repaired? Does this make economic sense? Do they rip the packs apart to salvage the good modules for reuse?

Are the independent ratings accurate, and who rates the raters? Seems easy enough to compare them if there are multiple competitors, but is anyone doing it?

The power cuts the article heavily suggests are to do with renewables are listed as people digging into cables by accident or things being disconnected while upgrade work is done. And still resulting in a 99.9% reliability.

It then shifts to curtailment presumably implying just the "too much" renewables is the cause.

In the UK, they didn't move to a zonal pricing system, which is generally considered a good move, because the uncertainty of even a good change to the system would spoon investors and affect interest rates and so lower the amount of renewables built and increase energy costs.

In the US they are actively causing chaos with much worse impacts likely.

She has a couple of TED talks on this tech from several years ago.

I was aware of her from the OLPC project and the cool Pixel Qi screen tech from that, but haven't watched the talks.

EV mandates have one of the strongest divergences in opinion between the people whose job it is to run critical infrastructure and people commenting online.

Possibly some really effective bit of propaganda got released and no one fact checked it. The anti-EV lobby absolutely loved when California issued a standard demand warning a few years ago during a summer peak. I wonder if that's the cause?

Germany (and the EU generally) import 98% of their oil-derived products..

Before sanctions the leading import source was Russia.

EVs could have helped a lot more as China has demonstrated but people like the brum-brum noise and all the right-wing parties with mysterious ties to Russia and other fossil fuel producers didn't think they'd work for some reason.

The title is a bit non descript, so the blog post is exploring

> a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS.

Renewables are winning in the USA too. A few tens of billions in handouts to Trump's crony capitalist pals and general regulatory and legislative chaos (in renewables specifically but in everything else too) isn't going to change that.

And it's cheaper than coal in China and lets them put generation near the populated coast.

And linking the two the Chinese Mingyang Smart Energy just announced an up to $2 Billion investment in a wind turbine factory in the UK.

Clearly the word "paying" was too close to the simple truth and therefore deemed politically incorrect.

The author clearly understands the primary energy fallacy and yet deploys it anyway because it suits his purposes, then excuses himself by saying demand will grow anyway. Well that demand would grow under fossil use too and is irrelevant to the primary energy fallacy.

The discussion in comments about his figures for steel use makes a similar accusation.

I like his site and enjoy reading it but he regularly lets himself down when evaluating renewables, presumably because he wants to enforce "low tech" approaches (though electric arc furnaces appear to have been grandfathered in given this articles conclusion) rather than pursue low carbon or any other goal via whatever technology works best.

Ember do a good summary of their current trajectory:

> Australia’s largest source of clean electricity is solar (18%), which has doubled since 2020. Australia has the world’s highest solar generation per capita, over seven times the global average.

> Australia’s joint share of wind and solar (29%) is almost double the global average (15%), though it remains below peers like the United Kingdom (36%) and Spain (43%).

> Australia relied on fossil fuels for 65% of its electricity in 2024, with 46% coming from coal. Its power sector emissions have fallen by 21% from their peak in 2009 due to growth in solar and wind, even as demand has grown

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/australia/

Well Trump has just declared an energy emergency and allowed the government to override many planning rules with emergency overrides.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/decl...

But they don't believe in solar which means they accidentally are making their claimed emergency worse and helping their fossil donors to make more money. Like Trump expressly promised to do in return for their donations.

An industry being screwed and the oligarchs that run that industry getting government handouts are two different things.

Cyrano de Bergerchat.

I refer back to my original statement that EVs are clearly better and anyone claiming you can't do two things at once, like remove aquatic toxins from tyres, is at best deluding themselves.

Reason is a big part of how we got here. Billionaire funded climate denial etc. so they have big audience of idiots they've cultivated.

The article is mostly about coal and gas, which are more directly displaced by renewables.

However, even your article suggests growth in oil only for two more years before peaking and dropping slightly.

> some series and movies look too realistic, what in turn gives me a amateur film feeling

This comment that I replied to is almost a textbook description of the soap opera effect.

The interpolation adds more FPS, which is traditionally a marker of film vs TV production.

That is a crappy source, here is a better overview, which specifically calls out your source as being ridiculous and failing basic a common sense check:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electric-vehicles-...

> One study hit the headlines when it claimed that tyres emit ‘more than 1,000 times as much pollution as exhausts’. There are a few reasons why we should be cautious about this result. The first comes from a small sense check on the numbers [see the footnote for details].3 The second is that most of the particles (by mass) that are emitted from tyres are large, and large particles are less problematic for air quality and human health. It’s the very small particles – less than 2.5 microns – that we’re worried about. A much smaller fraction of these particles will be in that size range.

> So, I think the ‘1,000 times as much’ headline is too high. But, tyre wear is still significant and we need more research on it.

The main delay the last time was corporations being dicks about IP but the two main culprits have got on board this time.

This sounds like what is called the soap opera effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera_effect

Which is generally associated with excess denoisong rather than with excess grain.

It must be going well if the worst NYT can dig up is signs telling you not to fish under power lines, which are common around the world.

https://customer.nationalgrid.co.uk/advice-and-guidance/stay...

Yes, to generate cheap power at half the cost of coal.

It's impressive for an article about how bad cars are to directly address their impact on human health yet and magically not mention the pollution from combustion or even brake dust.

How does that even happen without the article being intended as an EV hit piece?

Replace cars and busses and motorbikes with electric equivalents. It's cheaper, cleaner, greener, quieter, safer.

You can do other things in parallel too. Anyone suggesting you can't is at best an idiot.

The article actually calls out sales of EVs in China as a growth vector.

But it's a Chinese company's platform they build on with Chinese batteries.

Kind of embarrassing really, that even when they sell EVs they can't build them.