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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.