77 karma · joined May 3, 2017
No one's preventing anyone from building a better solution and making it available to consumers. Not a monopoly
It would be great if they could be altruistic to let anyone use them, but altruism isn't really a good path to profits in our society
Not to say they shouldn't be cheaper, but they'll definitely get there. We're pretty close to price-parity as is (just not tons of options).
This is as of 2018, and one would expect that the grid will continue to get cleaner as time goes on, which means the BEV options will get cleaner as well.
Most "atomic resolution" EM images you see are actually images of columns of atoms, since the imaging mode is transmission, so necessarily the image is summed through the plane of the sample (so atomic resolution is only in the perpendicular plane).
The techniques used in this paper get around the dose issue by taking many images of very many presumably identical proteins (called dose fractionation) at very low dose. Computer algorithms are then used to stitch together a 3D model based on the low-dose individual images. Making it really cold also helps things from breaking down under the beam.
We chose moissanites as the primary stones in my wife's engagement rings and everyone talks about how pretty it is. It's a bit more "firey" or "sparkly" than a regular diamond (because of more birefringence), but I guarantee no one outside a very highly trained jeweler would know the difference (if that's important to you). It's worth it to spend the money on the higher quality ones though, since just like diamonds, the inexpensive ones will have yellowish or greenish tints. Even still, they're at least an order of magnitude cheaper than similar diamonds ($600 vs. $6,500 at my quick search for ~1 carat).
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
From my (admittedly limited) understanding, they would trespass on peoples farms and test their crops to see if they had any features similar to their GMO seed products (which could be present just due to the fact that your neighbors' farms use Monsanto seed, and pollen isn't exactly easy to control). According to the report cited in the article "Monsanto brought some 142 patent infringement suits against 410 farmers and 56 small businesses in more than 27 states." I'm sure some of that may be valid patent protection, but it's hard to defend yourself when a company as large as Monsanto decides it wants to challenge you in the legal system, and I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This is a separate from the (also unbelievable, to me) issue that a paid private corporation writes these annotations that are then referenced with the force of law by the courts.
Off topic, but I never realized until a couple years back just how racist South of the Border is as an idea in general. SC isn't even close enough to Mexico for it to make sense... Also, I'm not sure how they stay in business. Every time I've driven by, it's been completely empty.
Same here. I also grew up taking long road trips with my family, and took plenty of long trips when I had an ICE vehicle, and now take plenty of long trips in my EV, which is my point. It is eminently possible and practical to do road trips in an EV with access to the super charger network. That is the only point I was trying to make. The parent's comment was that road trips are more conveniently done in a gasoline vehicle than in a modern (Tesla) EV. I've driven the Model 3 up and down the east coast twice now (both by myself and with human/canine accompaniment), and do not feel as though I'm sacrificing any convenience when compared to previously doing so in an ICE.
> This is rather tone deaf. Not surprised. A car designed and priced for rich people, attracts rich people.
Ad hominem, not necessary, and not correct. You have no idea or right to assume my financial situation or what I may have or have not sacrificed to purchase a given vehicle. I'm simply relating my personal experience and it appears it does not agree with your preconceived notions about EV ownership.
I do not think it's that outrageous nor tone deaf to say that if minimizing time spent traveling is the most important thing, you will optimize that equation by paying to fly instead of driving. Some people enjoy spending the time on the road with their family, just enjoy driving, or want to (or need to) save money on airfare, and will drive instead of fly.
> But the value isn't there yet, for me to switch from ICE.
And that's fine. I'm not a sales person, and I'm not trying to convince you to buy a Tesla. We obviously have different value propositions and that's fine (such as the relative importance of "eco-friendliness"). I commented because I genuinely hope for a faster national transition to EVs for the sake of our air quality, energy security, and foreign policy. I become bothered when people who have no hands-on experience with EVs bemoan their shortcomings, so as a driver in a very happy EV-only household, I feel the need to help educate people that there are very few sacrifices to be made by switching. I believe that the vast majority of people don't realize that they could switch to an EV today and it would not significantly impact their daily lives, except they would have to plug their car in at night like their phone, and wouldn't have to go to gas stations ever again.
> gas is cheap anyway
To an individual consumer, yes, but as a society (as evidenced by your exact statement), we haven't even begun to account for the externalities of our fossil fuel-based economy, and I hope (perhaps idealistically) that we will soon.
I don't understand the point of this argument. Yes, in a ICE vehicle you can reach your destination marginally faster (we're talking about an hour on an 11-hour trip up the I-95 corridor, in my experience), but is that actually an important factor? For 99.9% of trips that are within a couple hundred miles of home, travel time is the same. If time is such an important factor on a long road trip, you should probably just be flying instead. I would venture that the number of people that want to drive > 5 hours, and have a requirement to do so "as fast as humanly possible" is pretty small. In that regard, the Model 3 is a BEV that requires practically zero compromises for both day-to-day and long road trip travelling, which is primarily due to the money and effort Tesla has spent on building the SC network. For that reason, I would not consider another EV besides Tesla until other manufacturers (or whoever) puts their money where their mouths are and builds out a fast-charging infrastructure that enables such long-distance travel.