flexie

That' almost 100 trillon litres. In a few hours it is.

So 1 with 14 zeros after. A cubic meter is 1,000 litres. So we are talking 100 billion cubic meters. Or the same as 100 cubic km.

Or the same amount of water as in a deep square lake which is 10 times 10 km wide and 1 km deep.

Or a square lake which is almost 32 km on each side and 100 meters deep.

Or a shallow square lake which is 1 meter deep and roughly 317 km on each side.

So 'Trust me, I can't say why, but they are okay'.

FTC applies US rules, the EU Commission applies EU law. You can stay clear of one while still violating the other.

It's very consumer friendly, but generally speaking it's also not that bad for corporations since they don't have to fear frivolous lawsuits in Europe.

European consumer law is full of mandatory rules (rules that you cannot derogate from in contracts or in your terms of service). Half of the clauses in your standard American terms would be tossed out by a European court.

European consumer law is far from perfect but I wouldn't trade it for the US system (and I represent corporations).

In the EU you cannot bind consumers by such arbitration clauses: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A3...

Consumers can usually sue corporations at a court in their own jurisdiction. Many European countries also allow class action law suits. Yet, we have few law suits against corporations. There are other reasons for this:

- consumers are not awarded punitive damages,

- court fees are higher (usually a percentage of what you ask for),

- if the consumers lose they pay not only their own lawyer, but (to an extent decided by the court) also the lawyer representing the corporation,

- many European countries have consumer "watchdogs" / ombudsmen, i.e. public entities that have the authority to start cases against corporations,

- many European countries have a variety of consumer complaint boards that handle small claims efficiently and at low cost.

Few who know consumer matters in both the US and the EU would trade the European system for the American.

Many people including other journalists before her. I honestly don't think anyone before this incident would think it involves any danger at all. A subway dive with a well educated, white middle aged man who is regularly in the media is not your typical crime scene.

You forget charging at home. There are currently around 100M home charging stations in the US, most of them completely underused :-)

So every home is a charging station and if the range for EVs keep increasing 10 percent per year we will reach 400 miles in 2 years, 500 miles in less than 5 years. By then, road side charging stations will be for people driving more than 7 hours in a day and for the very forgetful.

I drove more than 300 miles in one day once this year, and I still haven't driven more than 400 miles in a single day this year.

Even if you commute 30 miles to work and 30 miles back, you would only have to charge your Tesla model 3 in the weekends. In 5 years you could drive 100 miles a day and still only charge your EV every weekend.

Maybe the amount of geniuses grew proportionately, maybe there are more geniuses per billion capita today.

My guess is that there are vastly more geniuses today but that they are spread out more geographically and to many more types of art.

Today, maybe Beethoven would be making techno in Rotterdam. Goethe might be making movies in Hollywood or computer games in Copenhagen. Who knows.

I think it's because it is both hard to understand and hard to explain cryptocurrencies at the moment. It's like discussing email or social networks based on papers and ideas without really ever having seen it in action. We tend to get a bit aggressive or impatient when we find it hard to explain something.

Also, crypto skeptics realise that the crypto fans literally have money at stake so they are not unbiased. Maybe crypto skeptics are also a bit worried that perhaps there is something they didn't get. Perhaps they miss out on the next big thing.

I expect the opposite.

Manufacturing, farming, fishing, etc were much more common industries for those who are now 85 than it is for those who are now 55.

There is a huge difference between retiring from manual labor at 60 after having worked from you were 15 and retirering from a desk job at 65 after having worked from you were 25.

Then take into account that they used to work Saturdays, that they used to work more hours per day, that fewer had recognized disabilities, that fewer received welfare, that they had much less vacation, that women had more pregnancies and that those of them that worked had shorter maternity leave.

The 'lucky' old had worked more and physically harder at 60 than we will have at 70.

I love the Prius but it's a hybrid, not a full EV. Now when we've seen that full EVs can have long range why would we bother with internal combustion engines at all?

Let's see. I hope they will become competitive. They know how to produce quality combustion engine cars at scale, that's for sure.

But that the world's largest car manufacturer has to team up with another of the large manufacturers just to get a viable EV competitor on the market doesn't bode well. Right now they really don't have any decent EV on the market, any of them.

Toyota hopes to introduce a solid state battery type at some point in the early 2020s. Check it out here, where you can also see their latest EV concept car for ride sharing: prototype:https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/25/toyota-future-ev-battery...

At that time, Tesla's Model 3 will have been on the market some 3-7 years. Will they be able to catch up? I am not sure - To me it seems like the usual traditional car company in denial thinking it needs to make weird cars for weird EV fans. This is Mazda's much better looking concept: http://www.stuartsgarages.com/web/mazda-electric-car-planned... No vital specs such as range has been provided, though.

Both the Asian, European and American competitors will not only be 3-4 or even 5-6-7 years behind. They will be hundreds of millions of miles behind in terms of autonomy, and thousands of charging stations behind. And so far, they are still stuck with the old structure of dealerships when accessing the markets; dealers that in many of the markets used to make a good chunk of their income on repairs and spare parts, both which is likely to be less important with EVs. And a large part of their manufacturing infrastructure and employees can only be used for combustion engine cars.

For each of them, if they flunk their first serious attempt at launching a competitive EV, you can add another 3 years or whatever the developing to production cycle is for vehicles. Right now, I have seen no-one - not a single one of them - with specs and design for even as much as a concept car that compares to the long range Model 3 now in production.

My bet is that those of the traditional combustion engine manufacturers that flunk their first attempt (and right now they all look as if they try to fail), will suffer huge losses from 2020- 2025 and that some of them may never recover.

Charge cycles are important but energy density is king at the moment. EVs need longer range. The 500km(300mi) of the larger models S, X and 3 and are the absolute minimum if you want the broader consumer market to consider EVs as viable alternative to combustion engine cars. It might be sufficient if the supercharger network is expanded.

But most EVs currently on the market have half that range. It's simply never going to be something people are willing to buy as a primary car (and most second cars are old primary cars that the family demotes to second car).

As for charge cycles, you could swap the batteries once in a while like you swap tires, if they are cheap enough.

Whether Tesla survives or not, these billions are some of the best spent money on the planet in the last 50 years.

What are the accumulated losses so far? $5-10B? Even if Tesla were to spend another $50B and go bankrupt, I would still maintain it's great.

What Tesla has achieved is so important in the long run for the environment, for ending the strategic dependence on oil dictatorships, and for renewing the belief in technology. And the cars are really nice too.

Speculating, as some do, that the EV revolution would end with a Tesla bankruptcy is silly, not just because Google and Apple (and probably other companies) would be more than happy to take over before or after a bankruptcy, but also because consumers and the the auto industry have now been shown where to go. None of us can unlearn what Tesla has taught us. There is no way back now. Tesla has already won.

"smaller players like Hyundai"

With around 5M cars every year (8M together with Kia), Hyundai produces more cars than Mercedes (2M) and BMW (2M) combined. It's hardly a smaller player. Hyundai/Kia is actually the 4th largest in the world, only some 25% smaller than VW and Toyota (10M each).

German car makers don't have infinite money. They run huge operations on tiny margins and cannot afford to cannibalize the sale of their upper-end cars with cheaper electric cars.

The Model 3 is comparable to the C-Class in both price and size but vastly outperforms the C-Class on driving performance if the reviews are to be believed. The bling-bling leather, chrome and wood of the German high-end cars is more luxurious, but is not for everyone.

Let's see. My guess is as good as yours but I think the Germans will bleed if they don't transition to EVs very fast. If Tesla has the market for itself in all of 2018-2020, it might be too late for VW, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

Right now, they have plans and talk, but not a single competitive EV on the market, no fleet of hundreds of thousands of self driving cars recording and learning, no network of superchargers, no thousands of talented EV and AI engineers, no remote update, no battery factories.

I sure hope they wake up. Competition will only be good for us consumers.

That's some accusation. Maybe the poster just didn't spend as much time reading HN in the last few days.

in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is the king.

Move to McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX.

Ok, so let's say there is 350 km in an almost straight line. A great tunnel boring machine excavates around 20 meters per day in average (80 m on good days; next to nothing on other days). So that's 140 meters per week or 7 km per year. With 10 of those he could cover the distance in 5 years. For one tube. If he wants 2, 3 or 4 tubes, which would make sense on such busy stretch, he would need 2, 3 or 4 machines more. Musk claims the Boring Company will drill faster than traditional tunnel boring machines. If he could go twice as fast, he could do with half the machines.

It's doable, I guess, but I think the regulatory obstacles, archeological excavations, etc would slow it all down more than the machines.

Most is more than 50 percent. 'Most all' means almost all which sounds like what you meant :-)

Really?

While WTO negotiations in the Doha round largely failed, China perfected its firewall.

When Turkey's negotiations with EU failed, Turkey tightened its firewall.

When it becomes increasingly likely that Britain will crash out of the common market, British censorship emerges.

Whether a firewall is justified by concerns with pornography or terrorism or something else, those concerns tend to be kept at bay as long as economic forces wanting to keep society open are stronger. When those economic forces collapse, political forces that want censorship find it easier to prevail.

Also, import regulation consist of many measures and countries don't just impose those measures on products that compete with domestic products. Countries impose tariffs on wine even if they don't produce wine or competing liquors themselves.

These firewalls are traditionally viewed as censorship from a free speech perspective. And I don't disagree with that. But I have started to wonder whether the Great Chinese Firewall, the Turkish one, and what seriously looks like a budding British firewall shouldn't also be viewed as import regulation like any other:

China wants to sell cars in the US: The US imposes import duties on the cars. The effect is that the US automobile industry is protected, survives and can develop.

The US wants to sell web or smart phone applications (often really advertisement) in China: China blocks it. The effect is that the Chinese IT industry is protected, survives and can develop.

Whereas I don't like trade barriers, there is an unbalance in the way trade in bytes crosses borders without tariffs and the way goods are subject to import duties, taxes and sometimes outright banned due to policies deemed vital to the importing country such as environmental concerns, health regulation etc. We also protect our industries through government subsidies.

The US East Coast and Northern Europe would completely dominate search, social media, email etc. all over the world and not just in the Western world, if it wasn't regulated. That would be fine if our part of the world opened up for the goods and services they produce in Asia and Africa. But we don't.

We are quick to throw around accusations of censorship, but for billions in the developing world, access to our markets would probably mean more to their life and to further democracy than the opportunity to like kittens on facebook or read nightly tweets from Trump.

No doubt sovereign firewalls are often used by regimes to repress free speech. But let's also not forget the financial part of it. In the Western world we exceedingly sell bytes. We cannot expect for the developing world (of which the UK is not part, I know) to allow our software if we don't allow their hardware.

And an equal wealth being destroyed for the 2-4 most immediate neighbors

Isn't that better than a couple of private companies, Visa and Madtercard, holding the information (and taxing you meanwhile)?

We have had a related rule in the EU for a decade and a half: If a consumer buys an item from a professional, and the consumer complaints about a defect within the first 6 months from the purchase, then the assumption is that the defect was already there when the item was purchased.

So in other words, the burden of proof is on the seller to show that the defect was not already there when the item was bought. See article 5(3) in this directive from 1999: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:319...

I think it has worked really well. This kind of rules are a great innovation in consumer law since they make it really easy for companies to know what they "are up against".

I quite enjoyed the writing style.

Thanks!

if you have stayed abroad for a few years, and you wish to stay abroad and you don't mind losing the greencard, do you have to file anything to renounce it or is it enough that you just 'overstayed' abroad?

On the contrary, in the other thread I see people mainly being supportive of the decision to fine Google for the abuse of its dominant position.

This is not about Google having a monopoly but about Google abusing a dominant position.

And even if it were about monopoly, whether or not you are forced to use a product or a service is not what determines if it constitutes a monopoly.

Absolutely. Next up, the Adsense and Android antitrust cases. How do I know? I googled it: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-antitrust-idUSKB...