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.

That's the thing, dealers make a lot of money on service — not just parts, but also labor. Dealers, therefore, have a perverse incentive to discourage people from buying EVs. The more they sell, the more the manufacturers will build. If they convince buyers that they really don't want an EV, then they never have to deal with them, and don't have to worry about that future loss of income.

So the answer to the original question is "No, car companies aren't sabotaging the EV transition. Car dealerships are."

For a few miles, anyway. And then they're back to being as noisy as an ICE car.

Almost half could potentially have charging just by installing it or having their apartment complex install it, statistically speaking. If you live in a place where "most people can't even get a parking spot", you should consider either A. moving or B. not having a vehicle, because charging is the least of your problems.

What the heck are you talking about? Key fob hacks happen on ICE cars all the time, and ICE cars have 24/7 tracking, etc., too. And no EV has to "approve" your trips. And no, the battery isn't an integral part of the frame. It's the floorboard. It is structural, but it is also pretty well protected against collision impacts.

To within the margin of error, ignoring the pre-Model-3 period when Teslas came with free lifetime supercharging, free charging has never really existed except when provided by specific employers to their employees. It isn't "getting less and less" common. The employers that provide it are generally still providing it, and in greater and greater quantities.

Umm... if it is doing everything an EV does (e.g. driving silently on electrical power), then you're putting strain on the grid.

So can EV chargers. Tesla temporarily deploys superchargers in certain places for big festivals, and those can either use diesel generators or giant battery packs, depending on how long it is going to be there.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. This seems like an incredibly bad idea to me for multiple reasons — high fuel consumption per watt, limited amount of power availability, extra wear on the car's battery, etc.

A lot of folks like to fantasize about situations like that, but having driven across the country multiple times in an EV, that just isn't reality. The places where there are long lines outside of charging stations are basically all in areas with incredibly high EV deployment, and the superchargers are filled up by locals. The superchargers on major interstates outside of the major cities are approximately never full, with the exception of one on I-10 south of Phoenix (and I can't find that one anymore, so maybe when they opened the bigger one across the street, perhaps they ripped it out).

A few hundred bucks to bore under the sidewalk, and it will be. That's an excuse, not a reason.

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.

2006 article mentioned at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure?
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Jorrit N. Herder, and Herbert Bos, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Microkernels -- long discarded as unacceptable because of their lower performance compared with monolithic kernels -- might be making a comeback in operating systems due to their potentially higher reliability, which many researchers now regard as more important than performance."

Would you cooperate in assembling a second robot dogs from parts if a first robot dog pointed a gun at you and barked an order to do so? And would you allow an armed robot dog to recharge from an AC outlet in your home if it threatens you with a gun? If you -- or someone else -- answered yes, then these dogs can be essentially self-replicating and self-powering.

Related Black Mirror episodes (BM is sadly all too darkly prescient, this is the third time I have cited a different episode in about a week):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

One way to transcend such disasters is for people to recognize the irony of the situation and, instead of creating war machines via tools of abundance, to use the tools of abundance to create abundance for all, as I wrote about in 2010:
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream."

https://theculture.fandom.com/...

Star Trek also has an aspect of moving beyond a money:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.co...

That said, I have written about five Interwoven Economies: subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft. Any society will have a culturally-appropriate mix of them.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Money is how people signal their needs in the exchange economy, and people without money may still have unmet needs which are otherwise neglected. So, a universal basic income softens the harshness of an exchange economy by allowing everyone to participate (even when they don't have anything of value to trade).

On your point on barter to replace money, I agree to an extent (ignoring the implication human needs could be ignored). US fiat dollars are essentially kanban tokens to signal demand (like tennis balls or 3x5 index cards in some factories or Bugzilla tickets or just plain emails in some software projects). Kanban is not quite the same as barter though, since is a broader concept that supports fine-grained signalling potentially across an entire network of controllers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Kanban cards are a key component of kanban and they signal the need to move materials within a production facility or to move materials from an outside supplier into the production facility. The kanban card is, in effect, a message that signals a depletion of product, parts, or inventory. When received, the kanban triggers replenishment of that product, part, or inventory. Consumption, therefore, drives demand for more production, and the kanban card signals demand for more productâ"so kanban cards help create a demand-driven system."

Some alternatives for when most human labor has less and less value include:
* strengthening the subsistence economy by developing self-replicating 3D printers (RepRap), or gardening robots (FarmBot), or solar panels and so on.
* strengthening the gift economy for free information (the web and Slashdot, Thingiverse, and the Internet Archive) and for free or very cheap material goods (FreeCycle, Craigslist to an extent, etc).
* improving the planned economy in various ways like to support open government (including through tools like IBIS for Dialogue Mapping of discussions about Wicked problems for public meetings or tools like Loomio for collaborative decision making, etc.).

All these different types of transactions can interact and overlap (like a government could plan to support the development of improved 3D printers using money supplied to researchers who then publish their results under free and open source licenses).

I am increasingly unsure if "exchange" transactions will ever go away even in some future post-scarcity society (at the very least at an interpersonal level of "you scratch my back and I will scratch yours"). I do think a healthy society will usually have a healthy culturally-and-technologically-appropriate mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned transactions.

One issue with current US society is an imbalance towards emphasizing exchange transactions to the exclusion of all others . This is reflected in relatively dismissing the value of participation in subsistence, gift, and planned activities by the mainstream while celebrating earning money and spending money. This emphasis on exchange (including by a shifting cultural norm of all US women working full-time over the past few decades) has lead to increasing precarity for most US American families including through "The Two Income Trap":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Warren and Tyagi call stay-at-home mothers of past generations "the most important part of the safety net", as the non-working mother could step in to earn extra income or care for sick family members when needed. However, Warren and Tyagi dismiss the idea of return to stay-at-home parents, and instead propose policies to offset the loss of this form of insurance."

When faith in the fairness or accessibility of these four types of transactions breaks down, then theft can emerge -- or even worse things like sabotage, violence, kidnapping, and organized warfare.

In general, a society where faith and trust in these four other types of transactions has been lost, daily life become very expensive because of the constant need to prevent theft transactions.

For example, there is the possible theft of copper in telephone lines and power lines which most people in the USA generally assume can remain unguarded -- and which would be very expensive to guard 24X7 everywhere. The cost of replacing things, defending things, and dealing with the consequences of their loss may end up costing way more than any possible value thieves gain from stealing them (so thievery is like a sort of fire that burns away infrastructure to little overall benefit).

Related (from 2008 by the FBI):
https://www.fbi.gov/stats-serv...
"Copper thieves are threatening US critical infrastructure by targeting electrical sub-stations, cellular towers, telephone land lines, railroads, water wells, construction sites, and vacant homes for lucrative profits. The theft of copper from these targets disrupts the flow of electricity, telecommunications, transportation, water supply, heating, and security and emergency services and presents a risk to both public safety and national security."

More details on all this and also some other options (collected by me around 2010): https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

It would indeed mean that IBM/Red Hat couldn't restrict the backports, that is true, but it would mean they could focus on any value add (which they could hide). So features they'd exclusively developed, and thus not in the main tree, would stay exclusively theirs and they'd be able to focus more attention on those.

This would be, as you've noted, a massive divergence from IBM's Linux strategy of late. (Back in the day, when they contributed JFS and the POWER architecture, along with a bunch of HPC profiling libraries, they were much less toxic.)

As such, it's highly improbable they'll bite. And, for that reason reason, Linux LTR reliability will inevitably plunge to Microsoft levels of incompetence.

Switching russian nat gas to north sea would do nothing to reduce CO2. However, cutting north sea production and then depending on imports was the mistake they made. And Europe, like the rest of the western nations, have continue to drop their emissions. Yes, Germany's went up. However, EU's/Europe's overall emissions for 2023, went DOWN. this shows that Europe/EU-27's emissions in 2022 increased (slightly).
Advanced economy GDP grew 1.7% but emissions fell 4.5%, a record decline outside of a recessionary period. Having fallen by 520 Mt in 2023, emissions are now back to their level of fifty years ago.
In fact,
Total CO2 emissions from energy combustion in the European Union declined by almost 9% in 2023 (-220 Mt).

So, even with killing off Russian nat gas and increasing in 2022, Europe/EU-27 continued to drop their emissions.
Impressive.

poor nations are NOT the problem, nor the focus.
First off, poor nations can and should STOP building new coal power plants. Sadly, China continues to push for that so that they have a place to dump their coal at.
Secondly, the issue is China. China continues to grow theirs. Just last year, they added 565 MT output to their previous ~14,000,000,000 MT of CO2 emissions. IOW, they added more than what all of the poor nations did. They added more than what western nations could cut.

China is the issue. They need to quit growing theirs. Most of the increase in global CO2 emissions comes directly AND INDIRECTLY from them. Why indirectly? Most of the poor nation's increases was because China pushed coal on them.

In fact, here is the real problems:

Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by 1.1% in 2023, increasing 410 million tonnes (Mt) to reach a new record high of 37.4 billion tonnes (Gt). This compares with an increase of 490 Mt in 2022 (1.3%). Emissions from coal accounted for more than 65% of the increase in 2023.

Emissions in China grew around 565 Mt in 2023, by far the largest increase globally and a continuation of China’s emissions-intensive economic growth in the post-pandemic period. However, China continued to dominate global clean energy additions. Cyclical effects, notably a historically bad hydro year, contributed about one-third of its emissions growth in 2023. Per capita emissions in China are now 15% higher than in advanced economies.

In India, strong GDP growth drove up emissions by around 190 Mt. But a weak monsoon increased demand for electricity and cut hydro production, contributing around one-quarter of the increase in its total emissions in 2023. Per capita emissions in India remain far below the world average.

This says it all, Total emissions increased by 490 MT. However, China's emissions increased by 565 MT, while India's increased by 190 MT. So, while the west continues to drop our emissions, China continues their massive march to not only being the world's largest polluters, one of the worst in emissions/$GDP, but heading towards worst in emissions / capitia.

The focus needs to be on stopping new coal power plants, and then replacing them with cleaner energy. Nat gas is better. Nuclear is superior. Adding in wind/PV to that energy matrix will lower emissions, but intermittant issues becomes the problem.

I wrote most of this in 2001 (hard to believe that is almost a quarter century ago):
https://pdfernhout.net/on-fund...
"Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
        We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process? ...
        Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better? ...
      There is a real question here of how our society will proceed -- mainly closed or mainly open. It is reflected in everything the non-profit world does -- including the myths it lives by. The choice of myth can be made in part by the funding policies set by foundations and government agencies. The myth that funders may be living by is the scarcity economics myth. How does that myth effect the digital public works funding cycle?"

A shorter version of that is here:
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

So, while you are right that *most* developers are focused on the end results and may not care about the training data and related design discussions and so on, the deeper societal issue here is not just how the results are used but how the results are created -- especially considering it has been mostly public money that paid for the original development of all this. For example, OpenAI was a tax-exempt not-for-profit, so they have been subsidized by citizen's tax dollars -- as well as building on a public literature of AI paid for directly and indirectly by yet more tax dollars.

Maybe we need to move past the idea that it is a laudable thing that when you add a drop of proprietary recent work to an ocean of public work that it makes the whole thing 100% proprietary?

Related on how the labor of past generations is responsible for most present wealth:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx claimed that labour creates all value. While Douglas did not deny that all costs ultimately relate to labour charges of some sort (past or present), he denied that the present labour of the world creates all wealth."

No. that is what America does to Europe. Even now, Europe has higher tariffs than America does. Though trump was the exception to that issue.

This is why I continue to say that we, esp. the entire western world, needs to put on a slowly rising tax on all locally consumed goods/services. It also needs to be based on what is the WORST part/sub-service in terms of that nation's/state's DIRECTION of emissions. Screw the levels. We no longer have time to dick around with that. Instead, by simply focusing on directions of several years of emissions, we can get all nations to at least stop growing theirs, and ideally, drop theirs. It will also lead to new power plants being clean, as opposed to being coal based.