itsmek

I'm trying to disentangle that EVs wear out from both usage as well as calendar time, you say it's usage "primarily" but you're assuming a certain use case there and re-entangling them. With zero driving, top of the line battery management, and doing everything right it's something like 3% capacity loss per year in hot climates. My point is empirical - in a hot climate a light user will have to spend $10k to replace their battery in 15 years even if they rarely drive, while an ICE will not if the transmission and engine were designed well and maintained. Your point is theoretical and what use are theories that don't match observations? I don't dispute that EVs are simpler and more environmentally friendly but there are many cases (too hot climate, too cold climate, too little usage, need for range) where they are more expensive, more disposable and generally inferior.

Saying ICE will be off the road in 50 years assumes technological advances that have not yet arrived despite massive research investment and may require the government to force people to do it to their individual detriment. I am an environmentalist so I wouldn't even be mad in that scenario (the US government already significantly harms the individual in this industry by banning BYD anyway) but I also want to be clear eyed about it. What you say about easy recycling may be true but when it comes down to it we don't have cheap battery swaps yet despite your ideal theory and much industry effort. Don't get me wrong I hope for all our sake that happens, I'm just objecting to your initial comment having the vibe that EVs are a panacea and that saving on oil changes is superior on net - to me this reads as penny wise pound foolish as a single battery replacement is the same as 500 years of oil changes. There's a lot of nice ideas in this comment but it will take seeing for me to believe - specifically I need to see a 10 year old car for $5k that isn't coming up on an expensive new battery that costs more than the car is worth. People who shop for cars like this are a significant part of the market that is way underrepresented on HN.

My 2000 Volvo (gas) had a fly by wire throttle. You'll have to go back to the 90s for a cable control.

I'll point out one area that EVs are inferior in lifespan - calendar life of the battery. I use a bicycle for day to day and take the car only on road trips so I only end up driving about 5k mi/yr or so, maybe 10k if I roam far. At that pace the 2% capacity loss per calendar year (even higher in hot climates) will total any EV I buy long before an ICE vehicle has age issues. ICE vehicles without defects do not creep towards engine failure or transmission failure little by little like EVs do, or at least do so at a pace far slower than EVs, as long as they are driven at least once a month to prevent issues ICE vehicles can get in storage.

Unfortunately EVs still have a ways to go to catch up to my use case of buying 10-15 yr old vehicles with 100k mi for $5k and taking them to remote trails where a 550mi range is useful for safety. Such vehicles can be screened for design defects and are therefore more reliable than new vehicles - see the Toyota V6 recall for an example that even a sterling reputation isn't as strong a guarantee as just waiting and seeing. Maybe the EV range will catch up in my life but I wouldn't expect the cost of those long range models to catch up for a long time, and by the time an EV is well-used and in my price range it will no longer be a long range EV what with the capacity degradation. See how this use case perfectly hits all the negatives of EVs? It's not that uncommon a use case in North America among us dirtbag wilderness enthusiasts. I don't doubt EVs are strictly better for many people though and am very interested to see how their long term reliability and cost fares as they trickle into the 10+ yr used market I participate in.

Btw my diy oil change takes 20 minutes and costs $20 all in and during that time I do an annual safety once-over which an EV would also require. So almost 0 net time involved and a negligible amount of money compared to things like tires which cost me 5x as much per year, a number that apparently is higher for EVs since they use tires more quickly afaik. Plus many EVs seem to be much harder (intentionally?) to do DIY repairs on - wrenchers probably won't move over for a long time either.

That 14% describes farebox recovery which is mostly low due to subsidized transit, not evasion. They say that number is "funded x% by riders paying fares" which is not the same as "y% of riders pay fares" that you interpret it as. The former is called farebox recovery while the latter describes fare evasion. 14% farebox recovery is not out of the ordinary in north america where we need to subsidize transit more than other countries due to car oriented development. If you subtract 33% fare evasion (from the article) from that 14% recovery you will still be at about 21% farebox recovery and that's on the low side but not out of the ordinary for western North America (it's better than most California systems for example where we usually get 10%). 20% farebox recovery is just fundamental to our transit and urban planning, nothing to do with fare evasion or trust level. Whereas 90% fare evasion would be highly highly unusual, which is why I wanted a source and now I can see where your misunderstanding comes from. In your defense I do think that article is intentionally eliding the two by not explicitly defining terms - maybe deceiving the reader makes the article hit harder. Anyway very few places have fare evasion over 50% since the majority of people will pay based on morals (and their income level) even against zero enforcement whatsoever.

I'm open to the claim that looting -> grocery store shutdowns, especially in bad areas, I just dispute it being "rampant" based on my lived experience, and I dispute that there's a causal link instead of correlation with a low income/low traffic/low staffing death spiral. I did not feel your source adequately supported this claim, and what you say here is a walked back claim from "rampant" to at least one store? I am not convinced Seattle has it worse than other metros (similar things happen where I live in California in bad areas too, and it's been shown to be stores that were underperforming and due to be closed regardless of looting), and I am not convinced this supports your thesis that Seattle has become a low trust society against my counter evidence from Pew.

Transit source seems fine I think you're just misinterpreting it. That first source says about a third board without paying, not 90%. The 90% number you're quoting is I assume from the <10% farebox recovery which is a different metric from fare evasion. North America generally has low farebox recovery (car centric development therefore transit needs bigger subsidies to compete) and the pandemic made it worse. Don't get me wrong the numbers aren't good but I don't think it's evidence that Seattle is an especially low trust society like you're implying, I think it just indicates a lack of enforcement - a third is in line with fare evasion problems in other places in the world when they lack enforcement. People in Seattle behave no different from people in other places - they estimate risk vs reward in a free ride and some fraction of people lack a moral compass or are so poor that the benefit is significant. There's a reasonable line of thinking that 0 fares are best for society as a whole and I've heard this promoted among PNW urbanites so it wouldn't surprise me if enforcement is intentionally low to make it a sort of sliding scale farebox recovery, in which case a high fare evasion is not evidence of low trust, just of a highly progressive political culture, and something opposing propaganda will not hesitate to harp on.

Theft rings are pretty common in bad neighborhoods throughout north american cities. The existence of a policy to help grocery stores in high crime areas doesn't support your thesis since it's going to be used on a vast minority of stores, not indicative of "rampant" (most stores in Seattle seem fine in my experience), and not indicative of a broader trend in trust.

And here is some data counter to your thesis https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on... It seems to me that Seattle is an especially high trust society by US standards (largely due to high income I suspect), and the things you're pointing at are evidence of the opposite of your thesis - more likely to be symptoms of high trust than low trust.

Including the cost of the batteries to make it stable over the day? Would need a source for that. My understanding is it comparable at best, but certainly not "much cheaper".

Source for the 90% number and rampant looting? This sounds like low-quality "information"/propaganda to me.

The fundamental difference is that suspending something heavy over a waterway incurs significant cost - more structure needed to hold it up, harder to clean, etc. No idea how that cost balances out against benefits, but looking at the photos it's clearly a much more expensive structure than parking lots or rooftop due to the long span required and more specialized construction. Solar in a field plus a cheaper lighter shade structure is a pretty natural comparison to decide if this is economical isn't it?

Very shallow answer to a valid question. The vast majority of people know that word btw, that's not some revelation.

As in programmer's "this"?

I'm just addressing the text of your comment of incredulity at Walmart's building footprint. The tone of this one is different so I'll accept that as concession.

Walmarts have more stormwater runoff than Costcos?

You're shifting the goalposts from an earlier comment that claimed they would be "all drain". But that's ok, maybe you could compare that money to what a strip mall would provide in tax? I would find that analysis more convincing than just saying "reduced rate therefore bad", and would probably more accurately illuminate why localities make the decisions that they do.

>Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs?

>I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear.

I didn't interpret the other post to imply only nuclear. I interpreted to mean "why do so many people think nuclear is better than battery". My understanding is that LCOS+LCOE for batt+solar is quite close to nuclear cost and will only go down further, plus it has the advantage of being safer in the catastrophic case.

Also a dead giveaway: >That's what matters

It's probably Florida or some other gulf state with weather risk. Could be California with wildfire risk but then they wouldn't have tax increases. In both of these states insurance is going crazy without the property value cause you mention. If it's a condo then insurance can single handedly explain HOA rates (since they buy insurance too) as well as HO insurance rates.

I don't know man, I'm just telling you what I see in the conversation:

OP: Complaint about taxation without representation

A: Acktually it's called suffrage not representation

B: This phrase has been in use forever and people use it interchangeably when they mean the other. It's a slogan, chill

A: I've had great representation without suffrage!

C: You're missing their point

A: Taxation without representation isn't an issue

I feel like I'm chatting with an LLM with a broken input box.

If you want to be genuine about investigating this issue you would obviously compare countries of equal wealth and economic power, but we all know that's not your goal. Could actually be a very interesting comparison if your reasoning weren't so motivated.

To be clear, their point is:

>The facts show that just like the amount of labor is not fixed, neither is the size of the economy (fixed pie fallacy) and as more work is done, the economy grows

Your reply is a glib thought-terminating cliche strawman that doesn't address their point at all. Interesting!

The person you're replying to knows this. You're missing their point.

The thesis of the person you're replying to seems to be that this is just another in the long line of mechanized crafts, and that it's hypocritical not to be equally anti-loom as anti LLM, for example. At least that's how I interpreted it.

While reading your rebuttal I was able to substitute LLM with loom and arrive at the same conclusions, mourning the loss of the artisan, copying their product for cheaper, etc. So you failed to draw the distinction that is necessary to rebut their point.

The only point you made that seemed on point to me was the first one, "it's not hypocrisy because people do protest looms", which I didn't find convincing.

It's not uncommon for free things to be higher quality than cheap things, especially when we're not talking about physical goods. Think hobbyist vs hack. Selective pro bono vs quantity over quality. The former describes old internet while the latter describes much ad-supported internet. I'm not saying cheap is better than expensive, and I'm not saying everything works this way, but I do think many things do, especially for pure information that doesn't have a major capital cost associated.

>The Math Your Finance Team Has Not Done >Pull out the napkin. This matters.

Nobody writes like this.

>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance. It’s not an evil drug per se

>Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis

>They were marketed and sold to consumers as safe, much more effective, and dramatically less addictive than it actually was. An industrial addiction machine ignored regulatory safeguards, built a 'pay for play' rewards structure to incentivize prescriptions, and a zillion other cartoonishly evil things

>I mean, states & countries that have completely state-run liquor stores still have alcoholism and serious alcohol problems though?

I tried to draw upon the main central point of each comment to this point. This discussion felt reasonably solid until this point where I feel like you failed to refute their main point. Your counter-example is still apples and oranges. State run liquor stores don't have the strong financial incentives to push alcohol and they don't downplay the addictive potential of their wares using fake science and they don't have authority figures give their patients official recommendations to take alcohol as a treatment with that fake science and financial motivation. Obviously people can and do still get addicted to all kinds of things without that scheme in place but I feel your initial example is pretty uniquely evil and not something we can learn generalizable lessons from, other than "don't do super evil stuff". Surely if your initial point is strong enough you can still make your case using other more generalizable examples.

Don't put too much stock in the ENSO models until the spring unpredictability barrier is over. That said there was a huge kelvin wave a couple weeks ago which tracks with the super el nino pattern. If you look at a map of pacific equatorial ocean temps this year vs past super el ninos at this stage of the progression they do feel like they track. So I'm not saying it's not going to happen, it's just that the models are very inaccurate at predicting the winter until we're into the summer. In the past such predictions like we see now have turned to duds.

Risk free banking past FDIC limits is not explicitly a cornerstone of the US economy, it is a thing that is sometimes done and sometimes not done depending on contagion risk. If it's so essential then we should make it explicit so that everyone pays the fair share for their deposit insurance.

Obviously, but their implicit point is that in your scenario you can win by bluffing as long as you can continue to credibly promise the moon and keep the bet rolling but in their scenario only the final outcome wins. Dude is famous for bluffing so it's a reasonable take.

I don't see how he's risking the future of his company by saying words that end up being false, he does that all the time and lying/exaggerating is probably an essential part of being an effective fundraiser these days. In my eyes an enforceable large bet would be much stronger evidence indeed than words.

If I'm building a warehouse and I say "this warehouse is going to house the worlds supply of x", am I risking the future of the company if that fails and I pivot to housing y instead?

Eh, they were kind of bailed out in that uninsured deposits were made whole. Not saying they shouldn't have done it (fighting contagion is like fighting fire, earlier is prob better and potentially cheaper in the end if your confidence bluff succeeds) but "bail out" is a flexible enough term that electing to cover uninsured deposits at the expense of uninvolved parties feels like it qualifies to me. Plus it has some of the same smells as other bailouts - weighing moral hazard vs systemic risk.

"The reason for the CA blend goes back to the 80s and 90s when smog was a much bigger problem. Better vehicle emissions standards since then as well as improvements in the blends the rest of the country uses have largely made the CA blend obsolete so CA is really paying $1+/gallon more for literally no reason"

California cities still struggle with smog. The valley geography capped by inversion layers are unique factors to LA, central valley cities, and some parts of the bay that really do necessitate unique solutions if we don't want to choke. There's sources that back this claim you're welcome to Google. Lastly, based on the overall tenor of your points, I'd invite you to question whether someone with an agenda is driving the incorrect facts you receive in your media diet.