>Really? You're using the spectacularly dysfunctional American healthcare system as an example of capitalism _working well_? Really?!

It should be an example of socialism working really poorly, considering that over 50 cents out of every healthcare dollar is provided by some level of government, either the Federal, state, or local.

I think Ford and GM will be VERY surprised to hear that. In 2015 worldwide SUV sales were approximately 20 million units. If you think that is a niche market, you have a very curious definition of the term niche.

It's a moot discussion because any reasonable semblance of a fully autonomous self driving car that could be sold to the public in volume is still quite a few years off. (meaning a car that technically doesn't need a steering wheel or a human to touch any controls ever) At least 10-15 in my opinion and probably more in reality. That said, self driving tech is going to work its way piecemeal into regular cars driven by humans. This has already happened. Lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, self parking, and lots more are already technologies in day to day use today. More are coming and eventually they will push humans out of the drivers seat or at least mitigate some of the worst failures of human drivers.

This is ultimate result of abandoning things lofty things like beauty and truth as foundations of society and replacing it with what... consumerism? Capitalism? I've spent my whole life as a hard-core republican but lately, the old free market this and libertarian that mantras just leave me feeling empty and dissatisfied.

Yes, it's hard to justify futureproofing. But any company which isn't insolvent should have a vested interest in doing it, because it will reduce costs in the future.

>Well, most capitalist companies also have their finite life time.

Everything has a finite lifetime, including the observable universe.

The question is why are co-ops unable to scale in effectiveness once you get past the local?

Mozilla had to remove XUL to make the browser properly multiprocess and multithreaded. If they hadn't done that, you would be telling that the browser is slow and insecure.

As if this will just be Pepsi. It will be PepsiCo for 6 mo, until their contract runs out, then Verizon, then Visa, then Amazon. Then we'll have 40 other companies, like CBS Outdoors launching their own cubesat program. Can't wait for the political ads -- to light up the night skies.

Snort. Large vehicles are far more dangerous in weather.

Cars don't even have frames any more, they have unit bodies. Even some full-sized SUVs now use unibody designs. Large vehicles like trucks and buses are still built on frames, though. They have flat sides and lots of surface area, so they tend to be highly affected by wind. When's the last time you heard about the wind blowing a car over? It happens to big rigs all the time. And in the snow? They have less contact patch per pound than a smaller vehicle, even when they have more wheels, and once they get going they're vastly harder to stop. Just the snow building up under your vehicle will stop a car from sliding, eventually. Heavy vehicles tend to have much more trouble stopping. And if they slide into you, they do much more damage.

This is why cars should stay on the road in a pileup, and let the heavy vehicles go off of it.

>Well, perhaps if the GOP stopped demonizing a social safety net, perhaps the term wouldn't be so muddled.

Well, if the left stopped using the social safety net as a way to buy votes and enrich their Wall Street buddies by slaking off government inefficiencies, maybe we would.

I mean, isn't it amazing how after the Affordable Care act was passed, that most publicly traded insurance companies saw their stock prices shoot through the roof? Isn't amazing that most people who already had insurance saw their premiums actually go up and their choices go down? That's the leftwing safety net experience for most people. Yeah, 10 to 15 million people at the bottom may have benefitted from it by getting access they didn't have - but the overall societal cost was way too high.

I'd love to see this. It's a pretty neat technological achievement if it works. So yea, I say do it. Show the world what it's capable of so we can all see it. I think it would be pretty damn neat to see.


Then ban the shit out of it at the international level and force them to de-orbit their sats, so we don't have to ever see it again. Once was plenty.

Well I know about the NRA, but who's PETA astroturfing for? It looks like a bunch of genuinely incompetent vegan nutballs.

Name one EV that VW currently sells to the general public that is remotely competitive with anything Tesla sells. Or name one that sells in numbers competitive with Tesla. I'll wait....

...Crickets...

That's what I thought.

Yes VW makes cars. VW has made a handful of shitty, short range, compliance car EVs that almost nobody wants to buy. They've promised a lot and delivered approximately nothing to date. Maybe that will change but until it actually does I'll take Tesla's (admittedly spotty) record on EVs over VWs any day of the week.

Just say no to Neckbeard cola! As if Mountain Dew and Doritos didn't have a big enough share of the neck beard market, now comes this 'gamer' cola to market further to neck beards and ruin the nights sky worse than a neck beard ruins the night of poor waitress who waits their table. Next if Pepsi can get into selling anime porn and fedoras they would be all set with the neck beard set.

You probably buy a lot more stuff from PepsiCo then you realize.

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

Now that's interesting - Should I just take your pronouncement on faith, or do you have some good analysis to back that up?

My family does not drink artificially infused sugar water. Do we have to watch it? Or the mug of a hell bound presidential candidate.

This is sounding like trolling less and less as time goes on. I bailed from Facebook. I don't ever talk to anyone else about deleting theirs. That's my decision. And, it's theirs.

...you go off and do one of the nerdiest things in human history?

Oh yeah. That'll keep Ogre at bay.

Sure screw up the night sky with some gawky advertisement to advertise their new drink aimed at neckbeards. I'm sure Pepsi will be the first company on board when they broadcast ads into your dreams like on Futurama.

Soundcloud obviously has a ton of fake accounts, more than any other platform. I sometimes put up sound captures there, for example a capture of fan tone shapes as part of my fan reviews, or a comparison between microphone sensitivities, and once I upload such an audio capture, I very quickly receive notifications that someone liked my track. There isn't anything to like, really, these captures are not art.

Couple weeks later, those users are gone (accounts no longer exist).

Notification looks like this:

If the account is still up and I check its likes and tracks, there are always no tracks from that account but a bunch of random likes unrelated to each other (from an artistic or audio domain perspective).

I had to upload a pic of my driver's license to Facebook to start an account. If the cops are able to avoid doing so, there's a reason.

They'll happen but it's going to take time. The good news is that batteries are already more than good enough that we could switch many/most cars from ICEs to EVs today with only modest changes to habits and infrastructure. Basically if you have a garage and don't need to routinely travel longer than 200 miles in a single trip, you can switch to an EV today.

I don't think ICEs will ever go away completely but I can see a day when they are a rarity or at least a minority. That's going to take a few decades to get to however. There are some use cases where ICEs just make more sense than pure EVs. But even the ICEs that remain I think will mostly be electrified because it will make economic sense to do so.

You are measuring the wrong thing. What matters is usable energy/power per kilogram for the whole drivetrain. You are making the mistake of comparing the energy content of a volume of gasoline with the energy content volume of a battery but that's a flawed comparison. Gasoline is useless without a very large and very heavy engine to turn it into useful work. Just using the volumetric energy content of gasoline doesn't tell you anything really useful because the liquid does nothing by itself. You need to know how much the whole system weighs, how efficient it is at turning that energy into useful work, and how much it costs to do that. While there are some limitations and caveats, existing EVs today already have substantially better fuel economy for a given power and weight output for a wide variety of use cases. My Chevy Bolt EV has more torque than my pickup truck, vastly better fuel economy, comparable range (about 238 vs 275-320 miles) and only weighs about 300kg less. A Telsa Model X actually weighs more than my pickup and has more power, more torque, FAR better fuel economy, comparable range, etc.

And the good news is that battery technology is going to continue to get better. ICE technology is close to as good as it will ever get. An ICE produces more heat than it does useful work and there is no way to change that. Given that EVs are already matching or exceeding ICE performance in many cases and have lots of room to improve as battery tech improves, the future seems dim for ICEs in the long run.

"Baby jails" is a highly emotive term used to demonise the people enforcing the law.

Would you rather they throw the children on the streets?

And there's the simple fucking audacity to put that goddam advertising shit right in everyone's faces.

They do that already with billboards and LED signs, and I think most people don't go outside and look up at night, anyway.

Now, if they could arrange to get that shit on my ceiling ...

I'm in complete agreement with you. Luckily we have a handy list of products to avoid. wiki list of assets

I know that's why Musk says he did it, and Tesla deserves some credit. But it's always Tesla getting all the credit, when actually have been able to buy a new Renault Zoe for 20k and do 180 miles on a charge (motorway driving) since before the Model 3 was available.

Any affordable EVs available today were more likely influenced by Nissan and Renault than by Tesla. I doubt VW would have released the eGolf and eUp if the Leaf/Zoe hadn't proven they were viable and in-demand. Ditto the Ioniq, which set a new standard for EV efficiency that is even better than the Model 3.

And there's a solution to the anti-social behavior you rail against, the misplaced anti-conservative complaint you have.

Exercise your freedom to live where you want. While you can.

Perhaps you would be happier in Los Angeles, or Seattle, or more likely in a small town in Illinois. A suburb in Maryland.

You see, freedom that includes the freedom to avoid what you want to avoid, if possible*, is precious. Not like living in some other nations where you will be required to adhere to customs and rituals you have no belief in, or will be required to accept as neighbors some people who, literally, want to kill you just because of where you were born.

* - Some things cannot be avoided if you participate in modern urban society, and diseases are one of them. Unless you're wearing effective respiratory filters, engaging in proper handwashing on a nearly continuous basis, and a few other measures that make life distressingly uncomfortable, you're at risk of contracting any of several communicable diseases. And actually, even in a small town, you're at risk. You've lost. Living in the woods exposes you to a variety of disease organisms waiting patiently for you arrival. Living in the desert just leaves you exposed to fungi that are patient and long-lived.