olivermarks

@harmmonica I do. we prefer to use Waymos in SF but Uber has been a lot cheaper in the last six months or so regardless of time of day... Also saw some Zoox self driving boxes on the las vegas strip last week but no one seemed to be using them.

Waymo ride costs are getting really expensive in SF.

LI batteries would burn regardless

Would be good to have a formal notification on glass stating 'this window/screen/etc contains a camera that may broadcast your image'

I think anyone with an ounce of common sense is aware that EVs are analogous to the steam era with similar dangers. Coal power is used to create and force tremendous amounts of trapped energy into batteries, which like a steam boiler is highly stressed with the added danger of explosion, thermal runaway and toxic chemical fire that can't be extinguished.

Where EVs - heavy, tire and road shredding devices requiring enormous amounts of largely unrecyclable materials in their batteries etc - have virtually no regulatory burden (why is there not legislation requiring mechanical door locks for example?) ICE vehicles, which are now highly sophisticated and efficient, are subject to endless meddling and restrictions.

An entire airport car park burnt down last week, which is an unprecedented event masked by a compliant media who are obsessed with selling the concept that EVs are our future - all just because a bunch of bungling politicians have tried to legislate change.

It's all a terrible mess compounded by encouraging people to abandon common sense and buy into the hallucinatory idea grids and the planet can support EVs within a few short years

Automakers blast US plan to hike fuel efficiency rules

The US is on track to completely destroy the western world's automotive industries, with a huge knock on effect in Europe. Millions of jobs will be gone forever and in the near future we will be completely reliant on areas of the world that don't care about pollution control for (probably mediocre quality) vehicles.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automa...

I gave up my subscription to the New Yorker years ago due in large part to this 'sophisticates' problem

There is actually no way to 'put out' thermal runaway Li-ion batteries chemical fires. They have to be left to burn out which can take days and produces immense heat and toxic chemicals.

There is speculation that batteries undersides were scraped as the EVs were loaded onto the boat, damaging a battery underside.

A useful youtube shipping channel and discussion of this latest incident:

https://youtu.be/lEsO--Z2d2E

Reminds me of the Theranos scam crash - discredit the figure heads when it all goes wrong with increasingly bizarre 'they were nuts' stories. Meanwhile the board members and backers are subjected to zero scrutiny.

Ford is bleeding to death on purpose so they can get more tax payer EV subsidies

https://youtu.be/5MZeTeqdsTw

>Catastrophe as in many possible earthquakes, if the hypothesis is correct?

No, wiping out the entire electrical grid and all electronics

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

Why is 'sunspot activity driving changes in the Earth's dynamo that then kick off earthquakes' a loopy idea?

We are hours away from coronal mass ejection catastrophe right now as solar cycle 20 builds in intensity. It seems reasonable to me that the complex relationship between the moon's gravitational pull and massive sun activity could affect our tiny little planet

@hef19898 Not 'better' just different culturally. The US installs ivy league types at well funded startups just as the french install their ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites in their state funded 'startups' but somehow the French dynamic doesn't work nearly as well as the US one.

I think my point is that ENA / Ecole Polytechnique people are arguably harming French innovative abilities. Many US entrepreneurs are grass roots college dropout types...

French innovation is quirky but brilliant IMO - minitel was years ahead pre internet.

For some reason French innovation doesn't spread much beyond France. Concorde (I love that plane so much) was an Anglo French project. A lot of my friends parents in the UK midlands were involved with at massive project, but it never scaled to fleets and eventually withered away after an astonishing amount was spent developing it in the '60s ($2.8 billion in that era's valuations).

Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just don't think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are practical or competent in understanding how to exploit and build on great ideas by their countrymen.

I read this by Dana Blankenhorn this morning which I think a few people in France need to read.

This AI Boom Will Bust | The Slope of Enlightenment is Coming

https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/this-ai-boom-will-bu...

'In the end today’s AI boom is an evolution. It evolves from the huge databases built by the Cloud Czars, from the technology used to search those data stores, and from the ability of Graphics Processing Units to turn out results quickly.'

The French like to go in early in tech, minitel is a good example, but they almost invariably get leapfrogged by subsequent waves.

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

In the AI era who owns the data and data sanctity is an upcoming legal quagmire that the big players will win. I don't see France ever being a big player in this world.

I know quite a bit about Anchor, who used to be an SF institution. After the new Giants baseball park was built in 2000 Anchor as an independent local company were going to build an additional brewery there in 2013. https://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/Anchor-Br...

Sadly this never came to fruition due to the big beer bust a few years later. Lagunitas sold out to Heineken, Anchor to Sapporo etc - there was a big drop off in sales due to all the endless 6 month lifespan craft IPAs that split the market (many of these went bust too).

Lagunitas and Anchor are now a shadow of their former selves after cost cutting etc. Keith Greggor's innovations when he was running Anchor are now a distant memory. The recent mediocre rebranding of Anchor is an indicator of how out of touch Sapporo are with the market.

'Phytoplankton are responsible for most of the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the ocean. Carbon dioxide is consumed during photosynthesis, and the carbon is incorporated in the phytoplankton, just as carbon is stored in the wood and leaves of a tree'.

The air we breathe is processed by Phytoplankton

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Phytoplankton#:~:....

I know people in the Sierra foothills who used to work in the logging industry until the bureaucrats made it impossible. I also know people in the same area who are fire fighters. When loggers used to find diseased trees they would isolate them by felling all the surrounding trees so they wouldn't infect them and spread. This practice was outlawed by the academic bureaucrats and is one of the reasons for the subsequent severe spread of dying trees that are the large scale fire fuel we see today.

At this point in history there is illegal logging going on to create fire breaks around properties, such are the state restrictions on trees. We have lost sight of the forestry management practices that worked with nature, not against it.

THE IMPACT OF CALIFORNIA’S CHANGING

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ON

TIMBER HARVEST PLANNING COSTS

(2005)

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Sierra is processing imported lumber mostly

https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=....

@ixgr Exactly. Thank you.

Environmental fashion became obsessed with trees as 'the lungs of the planet' despite ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath.

We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.

We really have to get back on track with controlled burns after the environmentalist 'save all trees' experiment that started in the 1960's has put us in the position we are in now.

Canada used to have many controlled burns throughout last century until the last quarter - Nova Scotia is a typical example (1979 paper):

https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031

California is dangerously behind on forestry and therefore fire management compared to earlier decades. Fuel has to be removed or fire and smoke will cause massive damage and have a very serious psychological and economic impact.

Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...

There are no saw mills left in Northern California and strict rules about not cutting trees down. Wood is imported from Canada at massive expense, driving up the cost of housing. we seem to have lost the plot a bit here.

Tata Steel own jlr now, most 70s 80s jags used Bosch electrical components, typically shared with the various German brands. They definitely skimped on wiring quality in the late 70s, it nearly killed them until Ford rescued them.

The issue with the current recall appears to be with LG Energy Solution South Korea batteries and the jlr Battery management code rather than a hardware issue. Who knows imo modern vehicles are far to complex

Atkinson is a pretty heavyweight knowledgeable car guy and as he says in the article has a university degree in electrical and electronic engineering, with a subsequent master’s in control systems.

I think the problem with some BEV owners, (probably due to the endless virtue signalling high pressure guilt sales models) is their almost complete lack of understanding of the issues Atkinson discussed here, or in some cases an almost wilful refusal to accept basic logic, physics and alternatives.

He didn't bring up fire risks which I consider a rapidly escalating problem as more BEVs are sold. (Jaguar are having to recall their ipace SUV due to battery fire risks this week as the latest example)

These official figures don't account for transients and illegal aliens.

Newsom is blasting out endless climate hysteria while lying about forestry management. https://www.capradio.org/articles/2021/06/23/newsom-misled-t... I'm in NorCal too and an unhappy registered democrat