It's not just a knowledge and effort thing. New Shepard is 20,6t dry mass. Falcon 9 is 22,2t dry mass and could lift an entire New Shepard to LEO using 5 times the delta-V. It's such a different difficulty level that they're not even playing the same game; New Shepard is just a carnival ride.
I would imagine there was something wrong with that specific vehicle, but also, Teslas just aren't made that well. Nobody expects them to last. But then, nobody gets to expect any EVs will last yet, because so many of them don't and none of them are all that old.
The financial world runs on "antique" software. Banks don't like to lose money so they keep using decades old code for a reason, it works. It's well understood and vetted. Sure move it all to python, what could possibly go wrong?
Meaningful things in space are not like this, they're like this. Getting "to space" is the easy part - the X15 got "to space" just by going fast and then steering up. It's orbital velocity and the energies involved that are the hard part.
It's kind of pressing now because fuel prices are so high here. I drive 26 miles to work, and my '08 Versa's 28 combined (pretty accurate actually) is unsatisfying. I really wish I could just take light rail. The rail line is sort of there from here to there, though it isn't really, but it makes me sad every time I drive over it.
Last time I checked most of what comprises a vehicle can burn.
All of what comprises a vehicle can burn, with enough oxygen, but that information isn't really useful.
All it will end up being is just another stupid institution like minimum wage that just ends up being a constant game of chasing ones tail against inflation while itself doing nothing but adding to it, and everybody who depends on it will always insist that it isn't enough in perpetuity for exactly that reason. All this shit ever does is penalize saving, exactly the opposite of what the government should be doing.
Walmart pays people as little as possible and encourages employees to sign up for government benefits to make up the difference. Walmart isn't stupid. You and me are subsidizing Walmart employees through taxes.
UBI is a fantasy. Capitalism is the one system that has consistently worked to raise people out of poverty.
Capitalism has never raised anyone out of poverty without controls on who can profit. As we have weakened those controls, capitalism has become less of a force for lifting people from poverty and more of a force for keeping them there.
UBI isn't anti-capitalistic any more than taxation. Both are ways to make the system work sustainably.
People are not going to be out of work. Old jobs may disappear, but new ones will appear.
That is not a cleanly managed process with working social systems to handle the overlap. The social safety net payout amounts are all based on a federal minimum wage which is not sufficient to maintain a reasonable standard of living in any state. Some of the numbers we still use today to determine eligibility, benefit amount, share of cost etc. are from the eighties, while others are from the sixties.
Each major disruption has improved life, and AI will be no different.
Each major disruption has literally caused people to die because there has not been enough management of the transition. If you say that AI will be no different, and you also say that the change should be celebrated, then you're saying we should celebrate negative effects up to and including deaths.
The Democrats differ from Republicans in important respects, but few of them are economic. The differences are mostly in the area of human rights. They are united in selling out our future for kickbacks from profit today. Democrats crowing about how well "the economy" is doing when the wins are all for the ultra-wealthy is typically on brand, but the Republicans do the exact same thing so that doesn't illustrate any difference between the parties or any reason to vote for one over the other. Those reasons are all somewhere else.
So what exactly does it take to become a "think tank"? Fill out a few forms?
Hire some people that people will listen to, and release some articles telling people what to do.
You will find it helpful to have financial backers, and of course you will only find those who can profit from what you intend to say...
You live in a town small enough to barely have street lighting but also with small lots. This is pretty unusual, I reckon.
It's common throughout the parts of this county that aren't way out in bumfuck, or IOW, the parts which have any significant number of people in them.
Sodium vapour lamps are pretty efficient. Not as good as modern LEDs with good drivers but there's likely less difference than you expect.
But that's where the available capacity is supposed to be coming from. Otherwise they'd have to run new wiring. The LEDs are a lot better focused (sometimes excessively so) so you don't need as many total lumens output, which also reduces the power consumption.
What percentage? Given the average daily drive and average range, people don't need to charge daily on average.
They do if they're doing the low-level charging we can get from streetlights without a project to retrofit the wiring, increasing the cost of the installation. And there isn't the money to do what we could do without that. The state is running a deficit right now, so there's no state funding available. The federal funding available now is only for installation on interstates. So it's flatly just not happening.
Tesla has been running at a loss to grow the company. Most of their vehicles are profitable, cybercrap notwithstanding. That dumpster is a huge fuckup, though, there's no way around that.
If it weren't for that, I'd be 100% in agreement with you; open the doors to competition so long as they build in the USA and let the existing manufacturers compete or fail.
The door is already open for that. Biden's protectionist tariffs are on imported vehicles and batteries (and other stuff) so e.g. BYD could still open a plant here, just like all the Japanese automakers have done.
Of course, it oversimplifies things to make it out like this was all some villainous plot.
It was literally a villainous plot.
The concept of private vehicle ownership sounds good at first glance.
The conspiracists bought up profitable rail transit systems and destroyed them. Clearly people thought what was destroyed was good, because they were using it.
Maybe Jeff Bezos should stop working from home and get back into the office if his communications require that much secrecy.
"The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain." -- G. Fitch
