They *are* making them. The dealers are not *selling* them. And if the dealers aren't selling them, they're not going to make larger quantities of them. And as I said, the dealers have every reason to *not* want to sell them. They don't make nearly as much money off of EVs on an ongoing basis, because they require far less service (fewer major malfunctions, no oil changes, fewer brake jobs, etc.).

Also, unionized car companies are under heavy pressure from the unions to drag their heels on EVs because there are fewer parts to put together, and the cars require less human labor to build, which means fewer workers. (Pedantically, they don't require significantly less human labor, but a big chunk of the labor shifts to the battery manufacturers.)

No conspiracy is needed. The car manufacturers have unions pushing them on one side to not make EVs and their dealer network pushing them on the other side to not make EVs. What possible incentive, other than being compelled to do so by law, could possibly get them to build more EVs that cost more (and by extension, will sell fewer units even in an ideal world) under those circumstances?

And of course, most newcomers to Linux will take the default desktop both because they have no idea which one is really best for them and because they'll figure that it's the default so it must be best. I'd bet that if the various DEs were listed in a random order not only would far less people would start out with Gnome, but few of them would migrate from one to another because in their own way, they're all good.

Same here, but I abandoned Gnome when I saw what Gnome 3 was going to be and I've never looked back. If they can't manage to raise enough cash to pay for themselves, maybe it's time for it to die.

Depends on the vehicle. Some cars stop doing that after a period of time, and some use a power threshold. There might even be some cars that don't do it at all, but I'm not sure.

For Tesla, as I understand it, the HV battery is used to periodically recharge the 12V battery as long as the HV battery is above 20% SoC. So for most EVs, the answer is yes, just because Teslas are... well, most EVs. :-D

To understand why, you need only look at what Tesla does with the 12V battery. When sentry mode is active, both the self-driving computer and the MCU are active (with the screen off), drawing as much as O(300) watts continuously. The 12V battery in a Tesla is a 33AH battery (around half the size of a typical ICE car's battery), which means that at 300 watts, it would completely deplete the battery in about 79 minutes.

There are, of course, various intermediate levels of consumption between deep sleep and sentry mode that have various levels of power consumption, resulting in the battery charging anywhere from frequently to rarely.

And of course, sentry mode is automatically disabled below 20% state of charge so that it won't kill your 12V battery. :-)

To be fair, half a percent is actually only slightly below the average for tech-sector stocks right now. AAPL is paying 24 cents quarterly on $170 (.565%), and the Fidelity Nasdaq Composite Index Fund (FNCMX) has a forward dividend yield of 0.64% annually.

Very little of an EV's weight comes from anything that's particularly rare.

The main components in a modern Tesla battery are lithium, iron, phosphorus, and oxygen. Lithium is the rarest, at about .002% of the Earth's crust. There's "only" about a third as much of that as there is copper. Now think about how much we use copper. Iron makes up 6.3% of the Earth's crust, making it the fourth most abundant element behind only oxygen, silicon, and aluminum. Phosphorus makes up about .1% of the Earth's crust (which is still 17x as common as copper, and only slightly behind hydrogen). And of course oxygen is the most common element in the Earth's crust.

The industry as a whole is built around a dealer network that depends on repairs and service charges to stay in business. Apart from stupid minor problems, EVs have far fewer major mechanical issues than ICE cars, so dealers don't really want to sell them. I would argue that there is every financial incentive for car dealers to ensure that EVs fail. Those dealers are the ones who help people decide what to buy, and if they're discouraging EV sales, you're not going to get any EV sales.

I believe that the word in all three cases is "won't" not "can't", for the reason stated above.

How do you figure? Tesla sold 1.8 million cars in 2023. And even in a really down quarter this year, they still made over a billion dollars in profit. That's not what I would call "struggling financially". Sales are down lately, but I think that's mostly the public's reaction to Tesla's really stupid and user-hostile design changes (e.g. no turn signal stalk, changing gears with the touchscreen, etc.) that they have made over the past few months, rather than because of anything specific to electric vehicles themselves. I love my 2017 Model X, but I wouldn't feel comfortable buying any car that Tesla is currently selling, and I doubt I'm in the minority here.

What efficiency problems? They're already vastly more efficient than ICE cars by any metric. Capacity problems? How many people routinely drive more than 300 miles without stopping? Endurance problems? Far fewer major mechanical problems than equivalent ICE cars also contradicts that theory.

EVs are already cost effective, and if Tesla would stop trying to be cute and f**king up their steering wheels in new and infuriating ways every year or two, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Also note that ICE cars also frequently fail to start when parked outside in cold temperatures. This isn't specific to EVs. If anything, EVs should be a lot less likely to fail to start, because they have a giant lithium ion battery pack with battery heaters to maintain its temperature, and that main pack periodically tops up the 12V battery when it gets low. Also, EVs tend to have active monitoring to warn you when the 12V battery is getting near the end of its life.

What's really sad is that it wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, we went to Canada and Mexico all the time, and we never had passports. The passport requirement wasn't introduced for travel by land until 2009 for Canada and 2008 for Mexico (and previously, in 2007 for travel by air to Canada or Mexico). You still had to go through customs at the border, but it was nothing like what people have to deal with today.

>National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities

How do you pronounce NERSMCEA?

Now, Congress has stepped back and allowed you to get a hearing aid from anyone.

And note how far the prices have dropped. Proof, if any were needed, that the big name hearing aid makers were gouging the public.

If I wrote that Bytedance was losing money, I miswrote. My intended meaning was that TickToc was unprofitable.

Yes, I have (by way of Cocoa Beach). And I've gone about 3/4 of the way several times. I'm familiar with Florida roads and their constant state of construction....

*shrugs* I usually got reasonably close on I-95. Maybe it's a time-of-year thing.

Either way, though, when you get to the other end, unless you live in Miami or you're going to rely on public transit, you'll still need to find a way to get a rental car, but you're no longer at an airport with car rental places, so you'll end up waiting for an Uber or Lyft or cab and going a mile or so to one of the car rental places, by which time you've almost certainly lost most or all of your time savings.

And even if it takes an entire hour longer by car and you're able to avoid extra delays that wipe out those savings, the cost is still exorbitant. Driving will cost you $20 in fuel for everyone in your party, versus $75 per person for the train. For a family of 3, that means the train costs 1100% as much as driving. That's a *huge* cost difference for such a small time savings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed that 4,600 people are riding it every day (which likely means about 150 people per train), but that's probably not even close to being commercially viable. They've already had to massively scale back their ridership projections because people aren't taking it nearly as often as they expected, which is likely because the cost is way too high for the amount of time saved.

And in spite of those high prices, the company is still losing money — on the order of $250 million per year, which makes the shortfall somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars per ticket by my back-of-the-envelope math. And they are already $4B in debt.

I fully expect them to go bankrupt. I hope I'm wrong, but I definitely wouldn't buy their bonds. :-)

Tomorrow it will be insulin prices or something.

I'd like to see them go after the prices of the interferon drugs used to control MS. My sister used to need to take one of them once a month, and before she was taken off of it the price had gone up to $1600/dose. The feds had put anybody using it on MedicAid automatically, but that's a huge, unreasonable price for something like that.

And hearing aids. Notice how you can now get them by mail order at about 1/10 the price the big boys charge? Wonder why they've always been so expensive until now? Well, here's the answer: "Everything the traffic will bear!" Congress should have stepped in with an investigation decades ago, but they were too busy pocketing campaign contributions to bother.

According to TFS, the company is losing money, but they're still fighting to hold onto it and would rather shut it down than sell it. This suggests that profit was never the main goal of its owners, and that propaganda or other intelligence gathering has always been its purpose.

If so, we shouldn't have the government pushing such immature tech on us.