You are talking nonsense. A Tesla Model Y battery is 1700 pounds, whereas a full gastank of a typical sedan is less than 150 pounds

SIGH.

First off, none of the battery packs in the 3/Y are 1700 pounds. The SR pack is 350kg / 772 lbs, while the LR pack is 480kg / 1058 lbs. This includes the charge cabling.

Secondly, unless you drive around in a vehicle that is nothing more than a gas tank or a battery pack, you're kind of forgetting a few things. Let's help you out.

ICE engines typically weigh 150-300kg (~330–660 lbs), and high-performance engines can exceed this. On top of this, the transmission usually adds another 70-115kg (150-250lbs). EV powertrains are light. An entire Model 3 drive unit, including gearbox, oil pump, filter, etc is ~80kg / ~175lbs. And actually this plays it down, because except in the performance Model 3 - which matches up against quite powerful / heavy ICE powertrains - they're software locked, so they're actually well oversized relative to what they're allowed to deliver.

ICE exhaust systems add ~25-45kg / ~50-100 lbs. Obviously absent in EVs.

ICE fuel systems (pumps, lines, etc) add another ~15-20 kg or so (maybe 30-50 lbs)

ICE vehicles, due to their inefficiency, require much larger radiators, coolant reservoirs, hoses, etc (again, another ~15-20kg extra over EVs).

The battery pack in an EV makes up the floor pan. Again, that cuts mass by a couple dozen kg.

The battery pack is a stiffening element, and eliminates the need for many dozens of kg of extra stiffening mass.

The needs of an engine block impose a lot more difficult design constraints on an ICE car, including a larger front end, a higher centre of gravity, a less compressible front end in an accident, etc. The need to compensate for these things also adds significant mass.

ICE vehicles have all accessories driven by the engine, and all electrics on low voltage (heavy wiring). EVs do it either with a DC-DC converter or direct HV, saving many kg again here. New EVs are also ditching the low-voltage battery altogether.

I could go on and on. The simple fact is, while EVs add (significant mass) in the form of one part, ICEs nickle and dime the car for mass all over the place. ICEs still win out mass-wise, but on a class-and-performance comparison, like-to-like, the mass differences just aren't that much (again, unless the designer is just bad at their job or doesn't care - *grumbles again in Hummer*).

(Also, re: serviscope_minor above: You don't compare vehicles by length; it's not a very useful metric. For size, you can compare by interior space specs - trunk / frunk volume, driver/front passenger head/leg/shoulder/hip room, rear passenger head/leg/shoulder/hip room. Length isn't a good proxy because it ignores packaging; a 1960 Chevy Corvette might be "long", but has very little interior space. Interior space and overall profile are often included as part of the category of "class" (for example, the Model 3 and BMW 3-series both have very similar interior space metrics and profiles). Also part of "class" is perceived / marketed luxury, though people differ over what counts as luxury, so it's not a very clear-cut metric. Performance is another axis, as higher performance cars tend to be heavier and/or have less interior space relative to their footprint (though EVs suffer a lot less on this than ICEs).

You can't get sunburned from far-UV like you can with normal UVC. It doesn't penetrate deep enough to reach living skin cells (e.g. the (dead) stratum corneum is 10-40 microns on most skin, up to hundreds on e.g. palms and soles) - in human tissue, 222nm penetrates only a few microns, with most of the energy deposited in the first micron; the deepest any degradation was seen in one study was 4,6 microns (for 233nm, it's 16,8 microns). As mentioned earlier, the only cells it can kill are the outermost layer of cells in the eye (corneal epithelium), but they're constantly being shed regardless (the entire corneal epithelium is 5-7 cells thick and has a ~1 week turnover, so on average just over 1 day per cell on the surface).

The comments about material degradation probably are also not true with far-UV. It's certainly ionizing, but again it doesn't penetrate deeply into surfaces . Paint is generally many dozens of microns thick (a typical two coats of interior paint is ~100 microns), while epoxy is typically millimeters or more, so you're only going to be affecting the extreme outermost surface. I doubt you could even tell.

Also, contrary to popular myth (and indeed, our pre-COVID medical understanding), most common communicable diseases (influenza, COVID, most cold viruses, etc) spread by direct airborne transmission, not fomites (surface transmission). So how well surfaces are cleaned has no bearing on this primary means of transmission. That's not that surfaces don't matter - said diseases still *can* be transmitted from fomites, and some other diseases (esp. fecal-oral route ones like norovirus) are still believed to be primarily transmitted via fomites.

Again, honestly, the only thing I would have concerns about are plants. Most plant cuticles are only like 0,1-1 micron thick. Xeriphytes (desert plants) can be thicker, though, like 1-20 microns, and are in general adapted to more UV exposure, so might be able to deal with it. But I'd think a plant with only a 0,1 micron thick cuticle and a 0,1-0,3 micron thick cell wall will get its leaves pretty badly burned by far-UV. I'd expect any epidermis and stomata exposed to the light to be almost entirely killed. But if you had a cactus or plant with really waxy leaves, it might be fine.

That we should be cool with them blowing through billions of our taxpayer dollars so that they can throw shit at a wall and see what sticks.

SpaceX has saved the US government an immense amount of money. What are you even talking about? Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy is by far the cheapest launch system out there, and is also, FYI, the most reliable launch system out there. And it go that way by exactly the process above. And that process cost far less than NASA spends to develop its super-expensive launch systems.

Tesla has been at approximately mass parity with its closest class/performance competitors from BMW (with a full tank of petrol) since 2017 (the 330i vs. the SR, the 340i vs. the LR, etc). This "EVs are super-heavy thing" is a myth. I mean, sure, if you're terrible at your job you can design a really heavy EV (*grumbles in Hummer*). But usually, if the designers did their job right, the weight difference is small when matched up on class/performance competitors.

And beyond what others pointed out - that PM emissions are only a fraction of pollutants, and that they come from both brakes and tyres, and EVs have far lower brake emissions - it should also be pointed out that tyre PM tends to be mainly *coarse PM*, not fine PM. Both are harmful, but fine PM is significantly more harmful per amount produced. Brakes have a higher ratio of fine to coarse than tyres do, exhaust is higher still.

Cars also have air filters which capture PM. Generally well less than is produced, but I've seen a proof of concept where they amped up the air filtration so that the car was net negative. If you really wanted to, nothing is stopping you from mandating that. Still, economically your best bet is surely on taxing tyres (esp. studded ones) to incentivize people to choose durable ones and ones that don't wear down the roads, to limit hard accel / braking, etc.

ED: Looks like it's 24(!) hives per beehome, and they charge $2k delivery ($83/hive) plus $400/mo ($400/hive/yr) for maintenance.

Clearly not something of use to amateurs, and I'm not sure whether you can make that economics work out for professionals, either. I guess it depends on how truly independent it is, vs. your local labour costs.

There is little correlation between "presence or absence of pollution" (what a general term to begin with...) and CCD. There is a strong correlation with the presence / absence of varroa. And this system treats varroa.

I've been thinking about getting into beekeeping (I first need to increase the accessibility of my ravine where they'd be), and had been thinking about a sort of high tech solution, with electric blankets, heat-exchanging baffles, a flow hive, and maybe some mass and/or noise sensors for monitoring colony health. But this is WAY more high-tech than I envisioned, and honestly I'm scared to even look up the price ;)

The best correlation between the presence and absence of CCD is varroa. CCD is probably not single cause, but if you had to pick only one, varroa is that one.

And glyphosate is probably WAY down on the list. At least pick an insecticide as your culprit.

Not with far-UV (~222nm) you didn't.

Leaders aren't there out there e.g. building the rockets or doing the vast majority of the engineering. Musk doesn't get credit for that. But they do set the culture and direction for their companies. And in this regard, the "build quickly, launch quickly, fail quickly, learn quickly, and iterate quickly" culture developed for SpaceX happens to be very effective. Musk gets credit for instilling that. Another thing he should get credit for is the broad design strokes such as "focus on designs that are cheap enough that they can be mass produced, gaining you economies of scale and the ability to iterate quickly during testing, but are still capable of being reused" (this differs from the two previous predominant paradigms, either super-expensive low-volume reusables, or cheap high-volume disposables).

I don't like the guy, but absolutely, credit where it's due.

Except that Musk is allowed to show up at work or not whenever he feels like it, so he's a giant hypocrite who forces everyone else to do that which he himself is not willing to do.

I think a lot of people miss the fact that SpaceX engineers know very well that what they're doing might fail spectacularly, and that this is the cost of speed.

A random example: autogenous pressurization.

It's beneficial to have a rocket's engines pressurize the tanks themselves rather than to haul up pressurant tanks and a separate pressurant. But it's surprisingly tricky. For a methalox rocket, you ideally want hot methane injected into the methane tank, and hot oxygen into the oxygen tank. But hot oxygen is very difficult to work with in an engine, as it tends to eat your engine.

If you're still working on reliably producing hot oxygen, there is a hack available to you, but it's not pretty: just inject exhaust into the oxygen tank; after all, it's not combustible. BUT, it is water and carbon dioxide. Both can settle out as frosts or plated ices, and in the liquid, the water ice will float at the top, while the CO2 will form a snow at the bottom. Frosts / ice plating can block e.g. your RCS jets. The CO2 snow will kill your engines. You can put in filters around their intakes, but it'll clog your filters. You might try expanding the filters, and maybe that'll work for a while, but then you rotate the rocket, the snow rushes ti one side, and a bunch of engines die from clogging. You may put some big mesh plates across the whole tank to keep the snow off the bottom, but they can cause their own problems with fluid flow and still sometimes clog or let snow through during maneuvers. Etc.

So then comes the question: put Starship on hold while working on getting the engines to reliably produce hot oxygen, potentially for years, or forge ahead with a hack solution that you know has a reasonable chance of killing your rocket?

To SpaceX, the question is obvious. You cannot afford to give up years of critical flight data just to avoid some booms. The decision is immensely lopsided in favour of "put in the hack solutions and launch, while you work on the proper solutions". Because you learn SO much from every launch that can be used to evolve your design. And you also learn so much from every rocket that you build, whether you launch it or not, so you might as well launch it.

To be clear, you don't want to lose rockets due to doing stupid things. Like, for example, if it turns out that some SpaceX engineer installed the wrong COPV and caused the recent pad explosion**, basically the only thing they would learn from that is "have tighter controls on your COPV processes", which isn't at all worth the cost of the explosion. But in general, if you launch and it clears the pad, you're getting good, important data from it, it's worth it even if it blows up seconds later, and it's on to the next evolved version of the rocket in your production sequence with both production- and flight lessons learned.

** It's clear that the recent explosion was from a COPV failure, but it's unclear why. Some claimed leaks state that a COPV may have been coded to a higher pressure than it actually was during production, so when they scanned it it checked out as being the right tank, but actually was not designed to handle the needed pressures. But I'll wait for official confirmation on this. SpaceX only makes some of their COPVs, usually not the smaller ones - ones that have washed up ashore were made by Luxfer. So this could be a supplier problem, like the strut failure on a 2015 Falcon flight. But again, too early to say.

"What am I missing?"

That the author of this article is an idiot.

Yes, humans went to the moon in the 1960s. It also consumed a huge chunk of the federal budget. Adjusting for inflation by NASA's NNSI inflation index, the entire Lunar program cost $288,1B. If the US were to prioritize a project to the same degree today as then, accounting for GDP growth in inflation-adjusted terms, it would be $702,3B. NASA's annual budget is around $25B.

The cost of access to space today is a tiny fraction of what it used to be, when accounting for inflation. And keeps pushing lower. No, it's not "easy", but it absolutely is being done.

Yeah, I once looked into them and got sticker shock :P That said, the prices are coming down. The research seems to continue to show that they're safe for humans (although from the data I've seen I doubt they're safe for houseplants; their cuticle is much thinner than our skin). But for us... it can't penetrate dead skin, and while the outer layers of our eyes are alive, the cells there are constantly being shed and replaced.

It makes sense. Clavascidium laciniatum forms a biological soil crust in harsh areas like Joshua Tree. And it's incredibly slow growing. So the rate at which it accumulates UV damage versus the rate at which it can repair itself is super-high. Hence it's been under intense selective pressure to develop good resistance to the ionizing radiation damage caused by UV.

When the British were regularly poaching our waters, we pushed them back incrementally in a series of three "Cod Wars". We didn't just sit there and allow it to happen.