Everyone looks out their window and thinks that's "most of the planet."

Most of the planet thinks EVs are amazing, because they're cheap, require almost no maintenance, charge with solar panels, and take them the very short distances they currently travel more comfortably than the bus, motorbike, auto-rickshaw, or their feet. Most of the world doesn't drive right now. EVs are way more practical for them than gas cars.

And China is going to eat that whole market, because we're not in a position to compete at all. The closest the West has to competing with China is some EU automakers -- France and eastern Europe.

They have a lot to protect: GM, Ford, Exxon, Shell, and a bunch of military suppliers, and the money those folks contribute, so protecting them protects politicians jobs.

But I'd buy one or more of the cars you're talking about, too.

Yep. You can last some time doing that. You know best whether you want to store enough for 100 miles or 100,000.

But with solar panels, you can drive around for a lifetime. And they don't burn your house down or take up space in your bunker.

I have written a few comments here with multiple paragraphs, and included numbers, explained how things actually work, etc.

You summed it up in 3 (4? one's hypenated) words.

Nicely done.

"So getting a large user base in Japan is not going to happen." -- correct.

"The number of public chargers in Japan is fairly limited compared to the US." -- this is completely irrelevant. All you need for an EV is a 120v plug. With a 240v plug, you're completely set. People with EVs rarely use public chargers. People in Japan, who don't drive city to city (they have a great train network) and wouldn't need public chargers, ever.

Do you realize in the US the markup on electricity at public fast charger is like you paying between $30 and $60 per gallon of gas? (Based on Chicago electricity and gas pricing -- the range is wide because you can pay a fixed kwh cost, or go on a charge at night lower-cost plan.)

There's not going to be a big market for EVs because Japan doesn't have a huge number of personal garages. If you don't have a garage (or at least a parking area where you can run a power cord to your car) buying an EV is STUPID. It's brilliant for suburban people with garages. If you're in an apartment building where the owner either doesn't provide a plug, or provides one but puts a markup on the kilowatts, you're better off with a gas car. (Unless your workplace offers free charging, which thankfully is getting more common.)

The big area for EVs in Japan is delivery vehicles. Businesses will demand them, as they watch other businesses pay pennies on the dollar both per mile and on maintenance.

EVs are magic in places where people have single family homes (and thus garages or predictable parking by the house). They're amazing for farms. They're fantastic for fleets, where there's a central parking hub. They're perfect for last mile delivery. They can be OK f the government is somewhat socialist and mandates rules about electricity provision and cost. In dense urban settings with highly capitalist societies, they don't work and won't be seen much, until gas cars are considered dirty, expensive, archaic, and unsafe by society. There's a tipping point there. We're definitely not there yet.

It's possible they wouldn't be able to make money on EVs. It strikes me as a classic entrenched, old, calcified business problem. They say they can't make a profitable EV people want because they don't really want the market to change: they don't care what the customer wants, they want to make the same stuff they've been making because the executives are comfortable with that.

But whether that's true or not, they have slit their own throats. The US will be protectionist, at least for a while. Japan will be protectionist. But those are small markets compared to the rest of the world put together, and will seem incredibly small as wealth expands in all those areas of the world where China can sell cheap EVs which cost so much less per mile. Wealth will increase for the society, and the number of vehicles bought will increase in a snowball effect. The only place using gas cars will be the US and Japan, and both nations consumers are going to get really pissed that they're forced to spend way more on EVs which are crap compared to other countries' EVs, and forced to spend so much per mile because they're only really being sold gas cars, when the rest of the world drives for practically free in EVs.

Small EVs get more than 5 miles per kwh now. That's getting down to a penny per mile. And as renewables take over electrical production, the cost of a kwh is going to drop drastically after the initial capital expenditures -- Solar, once bought, just makes essentially free electricity, and that's happening everywhere.

Companies not working to make EVs cheaper and better will find they cannot sell gas cars, and yet will own a bunch of factories aimed at making gas cars which nobody wants to buy from them. They will have nothing of value. They'll go bust, and be laughed at for their shortsightedness, like we laugh about how Detroit could have bought Toyota out of their petty-cash budget, but just ignored them and continued to make huge, unreliable cars.

This is just the opposite of correct. When things break down, gas is hard to get. Solar means you can charge your car no matter what. You can always charge an EV with a gas generator, but you can't make gas when it's not being shipped around.

It makes sense for some... But it makes the car really complicated. All the parts for an ICE box and also the parts for an EV.

I think a lot of people would be better off with an EV, renting an ICE car when they need to do their once--or-twice-a-year road trip.

This is a business class. The class would have been negligent not to teach the students about screwing people, and would likewise be negligent not to hit the students with stuff written by chat-gpt, which they'll be seeing all the time in the workplace. Lord knows we all do.

The final should have been just one question:

1. Did you try to blackmail/extort a grade, cash, or a recommendation from your professor over the clear use of AI generated text and graphics?

If they say yes, they get an A. If not, they fail.

We need more leverage over Fox news than Trump has.

His approval rating is already fairly low. We need it to fall drastically low -- so low all his political helpers will abandon him and make sure people see them as fighting him. And the only mass media outlet which the target audience watches and believes is Fox news. They have to criticize trump carefully. But they can EXCORIATE anyone he appoints. And after taking down a bunch of the idiots he appointed, after the audience has cheered a bunch of people being brought down, they can slowly, slowly turn the anger towards the man who appointed them.

They won't do that, of course. Someone who wants that to happen needs to step up and buy it. That work could be facilitated by others. It's a publicly traded company. The Murdoch family owns such a large portion though, that it would require targeting their other individual source of income to force them to sell to a holding company which can be controlled. They need to be extorted. That again, requires leverage -- the family's other sources of income/holdings would need to be targeted. However, with the EU, the UK, and Australia working together, or even appearing to get ready to work together, I suspect someone with a commitment and deep pockets could become the majority stockholder. We're not talking about that much money here (though it's a lot for me) -- The whole company is worth less than $20b (you see multiple numbers, some as low as $11b). So getting a majority stake would cost less than $10b, and that would have a return on investment. Possibly, with smart management, and by moving its audience into a less destitute situation by providing actually helpful information, it could have an increased ROI. (Obviously, it needs to stay Fox news to some extent, playing on emotions, not logic, etc. but it can work towards pushing the emotions towards things which help the audience, not hurt them, so long as it moves slowly and keeps the audience by not making sudden changes. A slightly wealthier Fox news audience means more advertising revenue, fees for including it in cable could increase, and opposition to bundling it would evaporate, etc. A Fox news which is news for less-educated people rather than Fox news as enemy of progress would find its path smoothed in many ways.)

That would help massively for the current situation. It would also defuse an enemy to America which has been causing deaths and costing the population as a whole an incredible amount of money by fighting action based on science for years.

Yes, of course that would help. But that would require them to be something other than themselves. Surely there is a some other way?

In this case you're killing your own army, so the analogy doesn't work.

You can say here the army you're killing had no value, but that's the opposite of your kill-them-all-without-evaluation concept.

On some levels I agree. I have worked with some really bad H-1B folks being run by these consulting companies. But I have also worked with some who were awesome. The H-1B process is incredibly exploitative, and resembles indentured servitude.

The right solution here is to make popping someone talented out of H-1B easy for an outsider who spots quality (because the consulting firms won't do it of course), so talented folks get stripped out of these companies and turned into real Americans, as opposed to limbo-state Americans who wind up being here at least a decade before getting citizenship.

That would both quickly end the body-shop consulting firms and improve the American workforce through immigration, which is what the US has always been about.

We were active in wars where a lot more people survived with serious wounds than in past. We have gotten very good at stabilizing people in the field and getting them to medical facilities. So we have a higher percentage of damaged people who need help. We had a rough period where there wasn't enough help for the initially wounded. But their health problems need maintenance for lifetimes, and those number only increase until we have a prolonged period of peace -- so long that people die of old age. The VA was understaffed, and hiring was necessary.

All of this is spot-on.