Am I being a moron or are the weights only applicable to trucks? The lowest rung is 7.5tons.
But of course it's absurd how big cars have become. If you're a 50kg woman why do you need a 2.7ton SUV to go from stop light to stop light? Get a grip people
When it comes to increasing revenue, nobody really knows how the userbase is going to adopt a product. Look at Vine vs Tik Tok. Same exact format, but one died and one took off like a rocket ship.
When companies can invest money, they do so without concern for long term in the hopes that they can just bruteforce project with manpower and make something stick. If you don't participate in this, you risk missing out establishing a product that has long term staying power and thus long term revenue.
So it figures that when these costs start running high, things get cut. And when everyone is downsizing, and you don't and instead choose to invest, you risk losing money on a failed product that you could have spent later on something profitable.
I read through one of the papers and a key assumption that the energy mix powering the grid will more halve its co2 output over the next 10 years and cites Germany as the baseline trend. This is a crazy optimistic assumption to make
I don’t think that year figure changing really matters though.
Let’s say Germany halves its CO2 output in 25 years instead. What does that mean? Does it mean we should all stop buying EVs now and just buy combustion engine vehicles for eternity? Nope.
The biggest environmental concern always cited for EVs is the source of electricity, which has a decent chance of being renewable, going forward. Fossil fuel ICEs have zero chance. They will always be dirty.
The second biggest concern is mining for the lithium used in EVs, which hopefully soon will be a much smaller concern as Sodium batteries become the norm. Again, there is a risk we could still be mining lithium in 20 years, but it's a risk rather than a certainty.
It might mean the switch to EVs are insufficient if it bakes in unrealistic expectations of future benefits. The cost and subsidies to EVs might be better spent elsewhere. I’m not making a comment on pro/against EVs only that the cited paper makes an assumption I believe to be overly optimistic
Germany halving its CO2 output would be commendable, but likely not enough to offset even a moderate increase of CO2 production by China, India, and the growing economies of Africa and Asia. They just can't afford switching to electric processes unless solar / wind plus storage, or nuclear, is a clearly and significantly cheaper option. (Which it is not yet.)
While the Chinese threat to Taiwan is not something to be dismissed completely, the article doesn’t mention just how incredibly vulnerable China is to possible sanctions targeting their food supply. China imports most of its food and as their farmland is quite poor, its hugely dependent on fertiliser to feed itself. Sanctions targeting these basics would be devastating so I really struggle to see a convincing case for the CCP risking national suicide and its own existence over Taiwan
They probably assumed that sanctions would not be all that severe, given their pivotal position in the world economy. Perhaps they'll reconsider after seeing the level of sanctions against Russia.
>>> ...the article doesn’t mention just how incredibly vulnerable China is to possible sanctions targeting their food supply. China imports most of its food and as their farmland is quite poor, its hugely dependent on fertiliser to feed itself. Sanctions targeting these basics would be devastating...
>> Also they import about 90% of their oil.
> They probably assumed that sanctions would not be all that severe, given their pivotal position in the world economy. Perhaps they'll reconsider after seeing the level of sanctions against Russia.
Why? Russia has successfully bypassed most of those sanctions. There have been many articles about that.
Sanctions like that will only work if the entire rest of the world lines up behind what leading western nations want, and the Ukraine war show that probably won't happen.
Russia's big exports also happen to be food and oil...
> Exactly. Russia is able to withstand the sanctions because they are major exporters of food and oil. China is in the opposite position.
I think you missed my point: there's synergy between the West's two pariahs. Russia can provide the food and oil China needs, and China can supply manufactured goods to Russia (and Africa and all kinds of other places that won't fall in line behind whatever the West wants them to do).
Ah, I did miss that point. There are some practical difficulties for oil at least. Russia doesn't have pipelines that connect all their oil facilities to China; the facilities that do connect to China are pretty high-tech, have depended on western companies for maintenance, and don't have a lot of spare capacity. To get the oil from other regions, they'd have to rely on ships, either from China and Russia or any other countries willing to flout sanctions. (This is according to Peter Zeihan.)
> Russia doesn't have pipelines that connect all their oil facilities to China; the facilities that do connect to China are pretty high-tech, have depended on western companies for maintenance, and don't have a lot of spare capacity.
I believe Russia is already working on building new pipelines to fix that. The Chinese also know how to build things fast, so that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem.
> To get the oil from other regions, they'd have to rely on ships...
Is that a problem or just a small inefficiency? Because it doesn't look like a problem to me, short of an all-out war where you've got submarines attacking commercial shipping.
The US would blockade the strait of malacca and the rest of the chinese coast to enforce sanctions. China does not currently have the pipelines to russia they would need to import enough fossil fuels over land.
I find it funny how much we in the west demonize China while we have attacked them, colonized them, consistently tampered with them, didn't recognize the PRC till the late 70s.
China has never laid a finger on the west, we did, yet we keep demonizing them, meddling in their own business (HK, e.g.) all while we fight wars all around the globe, spy everyone and overthrow governments left and right.
The west has its own problems, but today's China is not yesteryear's China. China is doing and has done plenty of things in other countries. They are installing mass surveillance systems in Africa, building out African infrastructure as a sort of diplomatic capture by dept, literally stealing land from Nepal and others by building Chinese centers for villages on the edge but making sure they annex bits of land each time, literally stealing land (in the most literal sense possible) by digging up sand in Taiwanese islands, harassing Japanese islands, stealing other countries' fish such as in South American waters, stealing the worlds' intellectual property, literally cutting Vietnam's internet off, etc. They are not the "ah shucks, we stick to our borders" country they say they are.
There's so much to debate in your list, it's just not worth it.
Do you know where Italian fisheries are all of the time? North African and turkish coasts. African debt? We're kings of it as of stealing every african resource and abusing those people. Spying, really? You even barely aware how far we go with that?
The problem with modern geopolitics is that very few lead by the example.
The PRC did send troops to Korea during the Korean war, the result of which is the north Korean dictatorship that abuses it's citizens and threatens nuclear war. It also drove out the KMT, which was part of "the west" in the sense that they were the principle Chinese Allied faction combating the empire of Japan during WWII. That and continued violation of territorial waters of surrounding countries. "China hasn't laid a finger" is quite the understatement.
I’m always curious how different insurers cover the use of hands-free driving. Would anyone still buy the FSD feature if people thought insurers would reject accidental damage claims? It feels like its sitting on sketchy ground
How exactly is the ECB supposed to provide cheap energy via interest rates? And what exactly is the thinking here? Energy bills have more than trebled and people are going to be thankful to central banks for paying 3x more for their mortgage? The best thing central banks can do is sit on their hands for now
It’s not about insurance, it’s about the definition of level 3 automation. It requires the vehicle to have very high confidence that it can drive without mistakes, because a human is not monitoring the driving.
Level 2 systems can often work in more conditions because they have a lower requirement for reliability. They are permitted to make mistakes without realizing it, because the human driver is required to monitor and override the system.
I price motor insurance for a living and in my models the absolute worst 'insurable' risks (ones that pass underwriting scrutiny) will have some sort of impact every 3rd year. If we filter that to more severe cases where there's bodily injury it moves out to 8/9 years.
What this means is the absolute worst drivers will go ~100k miles between causing serious accidents so the threshold between good, bad and awful drivers is really far out into the tails of the distribution. Without actual driving data to work from we don't know how safe FSD is and youtube videos are purposefully selected for views. Even so the sheer number and 'randomness' of fails is concerning because nothing like alcohol, speeding or inexperience to point to.
Yes thank you. I was literally thinking "the worst driver I know has been in two accidents in the 20 years of our friendship, that must be pretty close to 99.9% safe."
I don't have very strong intuition about risks this small. I do know the thing that ultimately lead me to being able to beat nethack at will was internalizing the idea that "something that's 99% safe is almost certain to kill you over the course of a run." Feels similar.
This, as someone in tangentially related industry I see the very same issue - you need a LOT of tail events to be able to train the models on them and obviously tail events are rare by construction. So it will be all smooth sailing until you hit the 1/1e9 and kill someone with your model3.
- Gas in an open space is the main one. It would need to be very potent stuff to be effective and something that potent in tiny doses is almost certain to be highly toxic
- Getting the gas widely disbursed in a built-up area may only be effective by destroying the buildings (so we're likely back to square one)
- Logistically a challenge as your own troops/transport would need to be quite close to take advantage (whereas dead people tend to stay put)
- Even if you could solve 1-3 it probably takes way too long to zonk someone out and it can be easily stopped by putting on gas masks or retreating.
Fair enough. These are good points. A solid analysis! I think we could try some other vector, but they probably suffer from similar issues.
Ultimately, maybe the best one is some sophisticated EMF-activated "latent agent" that you've somehow managed to "infect" the population with, ahead of time, in some arbitrarily long "preparation" step. And then, "zap", when you roll into town with your army of hippy-love-trip-party parade (actually invading force), you can broadcast the frequency that "activates" the latent agent, and induces the desired compliance. But that sounds like some high tech that I haven't seen any papers published about...
But of course it's absurd how big cars have become. If you're a 50kg woman why do you need a 2.7ton SUV to go from stop light to stop light? Get a grip people