Of that list, Melbourne has essentially solved it's problem with technology, money and good rainfall :-)

I've occasionally visited California and I was struck by the numbers of eucalyptus (gum) trees in the area. Gum tree have dominated Australian forests by their propensity to survive droughts, burn like crazy and then regrow faster than other species. Fire is their weapon for world domination. So I'm wondering how many of these fires are actually from burning gum trees? Is there are speculation about this? ie Is it actually the fault of introduced tree species?

If so we will finally have self-replicating robots and all that they entail...

Here you go.

http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclear...

The site is way out of date but the critique of Storm and Smith is valid. Sorry for being grumpy.

This calculation is absolutely wrong. It vastly over-estimates the costs of Uranium mining and the energy cost of nuclear enrichment. You have to dig into a whole pile of stupid formulas to find it. This is forms a part of the anti-nuclear echo chamber.

Here's a link to paper by Kharecha and Hanson showing the health benefits of nuclear power to 2012. 1.8 million premature deaths avoided due to reduced air pollution.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

In a nutshell, I can easily live without Apple as I use absolutely none of their products. I can easily live without Facebook. Amazon is useful but I can once again easily live without it. I need Microsoft Office for work, however if it disappeared it would be easy enough to switch to another Office suite with only a little pain. I use Google all day every day for my smartphone, gmail, calander, maps and other services. The integration provided is really useful.

Actually it's is quite conceivable they will overtake Ford on *just* volume of cars by the mid-2020's. If all goes according to plan, Tesla will produce 1 million cars per year by 2020. Note that they have over 400,000 reservations for the model 3. That is unprecedented in modern automotive history so it is likely that the demand for the Model 3 is present in the market. After reaching the million per year rate, Tesla will have to start replicating it's production plants and gigafactories around the world and move down manufacturing scaling laws. How well they will do depends on how good their Engineering team is. So far they seem pretty damn good.

Look at it this way. There is a Market for 100 million cars per year world-wide. By the end of the next year Tesla will be the only car manufacturer capable of producing 500K - 1 million electric cars per year. There is a lot of demand for Electric cars. If they pull off autonomous driving there will be an even bigger demand. Tesla is is far and away the leader in electric cars with a potential market over 100 times bigger than their projected volume in 2020. Is Ford going to grow their volume much above 6.7 million cars per year? Not much, if at at all. Will Tesla? They have the chance. Hence the Capitalization.

Oh come on.Tesla is about the geekiest company in the world and one that is doing a hell of a lot of interesting things. Of course we're interested! I was just googling yesterday to see if the latest production numbers were out.

The point about solar city was to put solar panels on your house. You charge your powerwall during the day and fill up your Tesla 3 at night.
Simple really.

"- I want wireless charging option."

yeah, me too. I have a great wireless charger in my car. I drop in my phone and drive. It is just so convenient. I don't know why they dropped the wireless charging feature. Looks like I'll be keeping my Nexus 5 a for another year or two.

I actually have a set of bluetooth ear phones (Jaybird X2) that I really like. They connect perfectly, sound great and have an 8 hour battery life. They're much easier to use than wired connection since I can carry my phone in a bum-bag while running or leave on the counter when cooking stuff in the kitchen. It's a much better experience.

"Just because Malthus wasn't right in his lifetime, that doesn't make him wrong. Malthus died in 1834: that's really not that long ago."

Malthus observed a historical phenomena that kept the population of Earth more-or-less constant since the agricultral revolution which in its time increased the population of the Earth by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Since the Industrial revolution and the era of economic growth all such predictions have been dramatically WRONG. Every time time humans appear to run up against a resource limitation, we've found ways around it. The most recent has been crude oil. Who talks about Peak-Oil now?

Our main problem now is that Fossil fuels are too cheap to give up without a global carbon tax.

I just ran the numbers of Melbourne's Desalination plant (http://www.melbournewater.com.au/desalination). As far as I can tell, taking account of the interest on the capital, it costs around $4.67 AUD per 1000 L of water. (http://www.kimwells.com.au/deception-on-water-desalination-costs/)

If you neglect the capital cost, it's $0.66 AUD per 1000 L of water.

Well gee, he went from 0 to selling well over 50,000 fully electric cars per year and an order book for an order of magnitude more. That's real hardware rolling around the streets not vapour-software sitting on a computer not being used.