"Applications" was in common enough usage as early as 1990 to where it was one of the default program groups in Windows 3.0. I remember seeing them occasionally referred to as apps as well, although mostly as an abbreviation on BBSes and things for the category rather than something we used verbally.

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.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that the The Foreign VPS Incentive Act will cause domestic VPS vendors to lose business?

Ford has always been the 'more bling than sense' option, at least as long as I've been alive. Some are very nice vehicles, and their interiors are top notch for an American vehicle (vs like, a Land Rover), and they're often the vehicle most purchased by people who aren't smart enough to connect the dots or pay attention to their environment enough to not buy a vehicle which is obviously not well built. Case in point - middle aged Karens buying gutless Mustangs. Their reliability is even worse than VW.

No, Ford is bad at it. They're bad at it because FOrd isn't good at making reliable vehicles. Ask anyone who's had to get work done on their Ford's, or a Ford mechanic.

The engineering culture at Ford is such taht they design things to be sold, not maintained. This is true for all Fords, with things like having to completely disassemble large parts of the vehicle to do basic maintenance being commonplace, even on ICE. Little things change sometimes multiple times per year on the same model year, so you're never sure if you need parts from one year or the other until you try to fit them. This leads to some really horrible QC, with vehicles often failing straight off the lot. I've known 2 people in the last several years to have their brand new Ford have major mechanical failure, and heard a number of other anecdotal stories from others.

If you need more anecdotes, just hop over to Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist and look at the used price and condition of Fords vs comparable Chevy, etc. vehicles. Pick one - Ford trucks, midsize/small cars, SUVs, hatchbacks. You'll pay significantly less for the Ford, which will likely be in "better condition" with fewer miles, than the comparable vehicle for this very reason. Case in point: old Broncos vs Ramchargers or K5 Blazers, or trucks in general. There's a definite pecking order and it is largely based on the reality of overall vehicle quality. A 25 year old rusted out Toyota with 250k+ would go for 8k, where a similar truck from Chevy S10 $4k, but the Ford Ranger - which may not be rusted out or have any visible issues - sits around at $1500-2000 for months unsold. (I say this as someone who buys, repairs, and flips old vehicles.)

Now imagine those problems when you add software computing parts to every component in the operation of the vehicle...

Economies at scale don't work when you're operating at a loss - as all EV production has until very recently (to the exception of some Tesla models). Every other manufacturer has to subsidize their production with increased costs for their other models.

"New" at it? Do you consider the fact that Ford produced one of the first commercial EVs over 100 years ago, or that they've been in continuous commercial production of EV and hybrid vehicles since 2011 - likely designing them for many years prior to that (probably around 2008, like every other automaker, when the gov't started pushing massive subsidies in that directioN)?

Tell me, do you consider a "tech startup" that's 13 years into funding and on Class K funding to be "new at it"? Come on.

Most of the EV vehicle costs are material costs - the batteries, copper for the motors and wiring, and so on, are a huge part of this cost disparity. The bulk of the vehicle weight is in rare earth minerals, and that weight is not insubstantial.

How many decades does a technology get a free pass for being 'new'? Tesla is 20 years old. There other motor vehicle companies which have come and gone. The industry as a whole (EV vehicles) have massive governmental subsidies at every stage of production, and regulatory burdens are almost completely absent. There is every financial incentive to succeed.

If Ford (5th biggest automaker in the world) can't make it happen, and Toyota can't and won't make it happen (#2), and VW (#1) clearly can't make it happen (link), and the ones who ARE making it happen are still struggling financially even with these subsidies after 20 years, there's either a larger economic problem at play, or the technology simply isn't suitable for mass production of consumer cars.

Can you imagine Chrysler, Ford, Chevy, etc. having these kinds of problems in the 1930s and 1940s, 20+ years after the beginning of mass production of a technology, competing against horse drawn carriages? Just silly.

Fundamentally, EVs won't be cost effective or desirable for most people until they solve the energy efficency problems, the capacity problems, and the endurance problems. That boils down to finding a better energy "source" than lithium charged by diesel-powered Superchargers, at a minimum.

This is like saying that the car that slows down after crossing the finishline first, is slowest.

Apple has US phone market dominance, the only thing that's decreased is the percentage of new activations. That means they're reaching market saturation, if anything.

Add to that the fact that 5-8 year old iPhones are still perfectly functional and useful, in most cases, in contrast to Android devices which are lucky to get updates after the first year or two...

Most of the people protesting technology putting people out of work do so because they know the same people saving big with the tech will fight tooth and nail to make sure we do NOT adapt the economy. They want the displaced to go die quietly somewhere that is not in their back yard. Unless/until that changes, every displaced worker brings us that much closer to an ugly social uprising.

We need to look at UNDER employment as well. Especially on the west coast, a number of the homeless are, in-fact, employed. Some full time. But because our job market is ruled by supply and demand (rather than needs), a glut in supply has resulted in employed people that can't even afford a shitty apartment.

Many of the homeless I see are doing the "thorazine shuffle", a gait that comes from years of treatment with major tranquilizers/antipsychotics. So for those, mental health issues is a good bet.

The last time I needed any sort of "advanced" support from Comcast, the person in India had no way to escalate other than mark it on the ticket and hope someone called me back in 24 hours (they did NOT).

It turned out someone assigned half of my already assigned block of static IPs to another customer.

So step one, give the AI a way to ring tier 2 at least.

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. :-)

Well, yes, there are trades. But the data shows that non-degree workers *as a whole* are earning about 25% less than they were in 1980.

In your example you described the phone that needed replacing as "Ancient".

When you get to "Ancient", it doesn't really matter whether its apple or android. It's out of support on either, and yes, app support starts to fall apart at that age too.

My brother in law just updated from a Galaxy S5 this year (10 years old).