ICE with hydrogen has some racing applications, but that's about it. It's taking something that already has efficiency issues compared to batteries and making it even worse.
Fuel cells use hydrogen to generate electricity to spin a motor. There are issues with that, as well, but there's no future in ICE either way.
You jump through all sorts of hoops with gas cars. We've all made it part of the habits of our lives and don't think about them, but they're absolutely there.
It's not going to work out. Battery connections need to be standardized across manufacturers, which is a lot more complicated than standardizing a plug. The garages to do swaps are a lot more complicated than chargers. It forces certain decisions on battery placement, which cuts out things like integrating the battery into the frame to save weight.
Charger deployment has raced ahead. We need a lot more of them to support the EVs we already have, and need even more for the EVs that are going to be purchased over the next decade. Switching over to swapping would send the EV market into whiplash that just isn't necessary.
Motherboard standardization is not even close to comparable.
You have to standardize the dimensions and unlatching mechanism of a huge battery out from under the car and latching a new one in. It has to support a battery that weighs around 2 tons. This isn't just a matter of scaling up a AA battery connector. And then you have to convince all, or at least most, of the manufacturers to do that in order for network effects to help the process. Since we've had to do a lot before manufactures settled on a plug design, we're not likely to do the same for batteries.
There's also expected future battery improvements to consider. We can't make a useful battery-powered airplane right now that could do passenger service from LA to Sydney. EV long haul trucking is also in its infancy at a barely feasible level for a limited number of cases. Then there's heavy construction equipment like cranes. All of which are cited as niches that hydrogen would be useful.
Thing is, our battery tech tends to improve--about 5-8% capacity by weight each year, at the higher end of that over the last few years. That's a doubling every 10-15 years. We're not at theoretical limits yet, money is still being pumped into both fundamental research and large scale deployment, and we have every reason to believe this trend will continue. That's going to squeeze out the niches where hydrogen is useful.
One thing expiring for the middle class is the home office deduction. Up until Trump's 2018 tax changes, W-2 employees could take the deduction, but that changed to contractors only until 2025. Who would have thought that in between those two years, we'd have a pandemic that moved a lot of people into work from home? It's something that a lot of people got swiped away from them and they don't even know it.
There's a lot of talk about inflation and its causes. Is it corporate greed? Supply chain issues? One clear base cause of inflation less talked about is having an inflationary currency supply. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat...
Rich people are affected by inflation. If your return on investment is 4%, but inflation rose 8%, you lost money.
The detachment of productivity gains from average wages is a much stronger argument. They more or less matched up through the 70s, but then a stark difference settled in as the extra money made from things went to the investor class rather than the working class.
A bank isn't giving away loans for less than inflation. Especially not in a year's time. They're looking at the fed rate (itself set according to inflation), adding one or two percent, and taking that. Yes, even for low risk loans with full collateral. Higher risk loans set it at fed rate plus 5 and go up from there.
The loudest anti-inflation voices over the past 40 years haven't come from the left. They're right-libertarians railing about "Audit the Fed". You should ask yourself why those temporarily embarrassed billionaires don't like inflation. It's definitely not because they have a sudden care about the working class on this issue.
If inflation doubled in a single year like that, and the bank didn't set their interest rate to at least double, then the bank lost money. Banks aren't in the habit of losing money.
If the currency loses 8% of its value, one would expect the share of Apple stock to cost 8% more currency. So if my “return on investment” is 4% but the currency is worth 8% less, that means Apple’s value has changed in addition to inflation happening.
If APPL goes up 8% and inflation increased 8%, then your real rate of return is zero.
a pleb holding cash lost 8%.
This is not how it works. The working class does not "hold cash". They spend their cash, and their wage (hopefully) tracks inflation over time. It mostly does over the long run; we're in a period of high inflation, which is why it's on everyone's mind, but we're also coming off a period of remarkably low inflation since the 2008 financial crash.
Or like I said above, it hopefully tracks with productivity gains rather than inflation, which would far outpace inflation over the last 50 years.
I'll also copy a bit from another comment I made in the thread:
The loudest anti-inflation voices over the past 40 years haven’t come from the left. They’re right-libertarians railing about “Audit the Fed”. You should ask yourself why those temporarily embarrassed billionaires don’t like inflation. It’s definitely not because they have a sudden care about the working class on this issue.
Sure they can for, for a good reason: the Fed is not run by idiots who ignore how this all works. Banks don't need to worry about the year to year variation, but rather the average over the term of the loan. They can count on the Fed raising rates when inflation goes up, and letting off with inflation goes down. Even the dreaded pit of stagflation has solutions (painful ones, but solutions).
I keep waiting for someone to lay it out and explain how the companies are actually benefiting in some subtle way from this arrangement. As far as I can tell, no, this is just what they decided to do.
Ever see a standup comedian try to repeat a joke when people didn't laugh at it in the first place, and figured they just didn't get it the first time?
If a whole lot of people are collectively deciding it's not funny, stop trying to make it work.
It would probably work just fine, but it needs a huge ship. It could get up to a few percent of the speed of light.
FWIW, nuclear test ban treaties are considered to outlaw it. I think we're more likely to solve the technical difficulties of antimatter propulsion than we are to get over the political difficulties of nuclear bomb propulsion.
The sun gives you around 1500W per m2. If sun shines at maximum brightness for 24 hours, you get 36kwh per day. That's enough to fully charge a small EV every day. That's a spherical chicken estimate.
Bringing this to numbers that exist in the real world, the sun will only give you about 20% of that over the course of the day, and the panels are around 20% efficient. You'll get more like 1.4kwh per day per m2. You can double or triple that, depending on how much surface area you can cover. An EV can get around 3 miles per kwh, so tripling that number will get you 12 miles. Considering the extra costs involved (both in buying the panels and adding weight), it's not even worth it as a supplementary source.
There's some possibilities for RVs, which have a lot of roof space for panels, tend to sit in one spot for days or weeks, and have other power usages that are a lot less than driving. Otherwise, put the solar panels over the parking places and roadways, not on the cars.
It's also a three-wheeler, which gets around US safety regulations. It gets registered as a motorcycle or autocycle (depending on how your state handles it). However, it's still an enclosed metal box. There's not a lot of good data, but it's arguably better to be sitting loose on a motorcycle with a helmet and safety gear as opposed to being crushed inside a sardine can.
There's a certain point of shrinking cars where you have to ask "why not use an e-bike?", and this is that point.
Just as an observation, there was a time when everyone on the Internet was gaga over the idea of Project Orion, and you didn't dare speak out against it lest you get a hail of downvotes.
It'd work fine in deep space. It's not a good idea to launch from Earth this way. But again, we'll probably find something better once we're at the stage of needing it.
You know how the Internet made fun of Stockton Rush for using carbon fiber in a sub, which is a compression structure? Similar thing going on here. Carbon fiber is a great material for tensile strength and lightweight. It can be used in compression structures, but it needs more careful engineering to pull it off. The benefits do not always outweigh the costs.
As a more general issue, if a car the size of a Geo Metro or smaller can't be safe on roads, then motorcycles and bikes can't be, either.
Implosion-type nukes are all but impossible to make go off that way. They need a whole bunch of small explosives to go off very precisely to squeeze the core in just the right way. A short circuit or a crash won't have the necessary precision. This isn't entirely safe, either--it can still cause a small explosion with a flash of fallout and radiation--but it's a manageable problem.
Gun-types (Little Boy was one) are easier to go off on accident, but the US retired its last gun-type design decades ago. I don't think Russia used them much, either. They're only good for smaller bombs, and their safety issues make them questionable for any use. Smaller nuclear powers aren't bothering with them.
I don't think these problems should be dismissed out of hand. There is guidance out there on how to take back a shitty union.
The UAW has long been neutered with poor leadership, and sometimes leadership that gets thrown in jail for good reasons. They've recently rebuilt and are making huge gains.
Low testosterone can be a real issue. It'll reduce energy levels and limit bone and muscle strength. The right wing nonsense around it is obscuring some actual issues.
It’s not the end of history (in other words, a final end state of human society). People of the past commonly held opinions that are crazy conservative measured by the average today, but society still progressed.
This is it. There is no end goal. Conservative ideology needs an outside group to keep the masses from noticing how they’re being fucked. If it doesn’t have one, it will need to invent one or die.
Long form journalism is where it’s really at these days, IMO. It has managed not to succumb too much to clickbait, paragraphs of filler before getting to the headline’s point, and other enshittification that’s all over the regular news feeds.
As a side point, I’m not sure long form journalism even exists on the right. Some centrists places, but not to the right. Project Veritas, maybe, but that barely qualifies as journalism.
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Don’t forget putting a lot of money in control (not own, but control) of a few investment companies. Vanguard and Blackrock could shift the entire market by choosing how their indicies get allocated. Most of that money came to them by way of 401k ETFs.
Now, if you have a 401k, putting it in an ETF is invariably your personal best option (for the proportion invested in stocks, anyway). But there are implications here when everyone does it.
That’s how it works from the perspective of an individual. Now think through the implications when everyone is feeding the same ETFs from two or three investment firms.
This will probably happen as the sunk cost fallacy of existing office space goes away. They have these big office spaces leased out and they’re contractually stuck with that cost. Those leases will expire over the next few years, and a lot of them will decide they don’t need them anymore. Until then, they’re paying for something that isn’t getting use, and there’s mental pressure to force the issue.
This will coincide with a collapse of the office rental market. The places heavily invested in that market see it coming, are dreading it, and are driving headlines saying how much better office work is.
It apparently would have been a direct follow-up to “A Piece of the Action”, the gangster planet episode. Which is probably the one Star Trek plot that would make sense for Tarantino.
There are consulting companies that specialize in preventing unions from forming. If the law allows it (most US states do), they’ll get everyone to watch anti-union “training” videos. That’s not even getting into the historical violence that companies have inflicted on striking workers.
Companies would not do these things if they thought unions were no big deal.
Sunk cost. No matter if they buy or lease their building, it seems like a waste to have it empty all the time. But that money isn’t coming back whether employees come in or not.
Hold out a couple more years for leases to expire. Office real estate market hasn’t seen its bottom yet.
xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas ( xkcd.com )
Alt text:...
A Tax of 5% on The World’s Multi-Millionaires and Billionaires Could Raise $1.7 trillion, Enough to Lift 2 Billion People out of Poverty ( medium.com )
We shouldn't have to work 40 hours a week to afford a basic life. We do because our currency is constantly losing value. This is by design.
There's a lot of talk about inflation and its causes. Is it corporate greed? Supply chain issues? One clear base cause of inflation less talked about is having an inflationary currency supply. Any other inflation caused by supply chain issues, corporate greed, lack of market competition, etc is just added on top of that. Fiat...
Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less ( www.forbes.com )
xkcd #2932: Driving PSA ( imgs.xkcd.com )
https://xkcd.com/2932...
xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas ( imgs.xkcd.com )
https://xkcd.com/2929...
What kind of institutional gaslighting is this? ( i.redd.it )
I can think of a hundred bigger crimes ( sopuli.xyz )
Alt Text: post that says dripping testosterone levels in men since 1980s is the biggest crime of the century.
xkcd #2898: Orbital Argument ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2898...
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Quentin Tarantino's 'Star Trek' Movie Would Have Been a "Balls-Out Hard R" Movie ( collider.com )
Unions work. That's why the corporations don't like them. ( lemmy.world )
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Return-to-office orders look like a way for elite, work-obsessed CEOs to grab power back from employees ( www.businessinsider.com )
White-collar workers temporarily enjoyed unprecedented power during the pandemic to decide where and how they worked.