sonori

sonori , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

TLDR: A study by Consumer Reports found that found that across the industry EVs tended to have higer rates of reported reliability issues compared to conventional gas cars. The authors contribute this to the large number of new EVs models that have come out in the last few years as well as new car companies, and doubt that it has much to do with the drivetrain technology itself.

Interesting they also found that hybrids were 26% more reliable than conventional gas cars dispite the addition of an electric drive train. Even more oddly with that information they found that plug in hybrids were the worst, at 146% worse than conventional gas, though note that the Rav4 plug in version was one of the most reliable vehicles surveyed.

“Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars,” says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. “It’s not surprising that they’re having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs.”

“While Tesla’s EV components are generally reliable, the company continues to struggle with the build quality of its vehicles,” says Steven Elek, who leads the auto data analytics program at CR. “Tesla powertrains are now pretty solid for the most part, but Tesla owners report a lot of build quality issues including irregular paint, broken trim, door handles that don’t work, and trunks that don’t close. All of these pull down the brand’s reliability score.”-

So TLDR of the TLDR, expect manufacturers new models to have teething issues, especially if not owned by Toyoda, Hyundai, or Kia.

sonori , 6 months ago

It’s possible that’s a factor, but is doesn’t seem to explain the larger differences between plug in hybrids and regular hybrids, or the vast differences between manufacturers. I tend to agree with the authors that it has more to do with manufacturers and teething issues than the drivetrain itself.

sonori , 7 months ago

Shocking few politicians have stopped using it however.

sonori , 7 months ago

TLDR: A bunch of ride sharing companies sprouted up in the 2010s built around no frills EVs they leased to employees and then most of them consolidated or went out of business a few years later, leaving parking lots of used vehicles. Expect them to be auctioned off to either be recycled or hopefully sold on to lower wage nations.

sonori , 7 months ago

Subsidies are by definition not a restriction on bad behavior but an incentive. There is no reason a company can’t ignore a subsidy if it doesn’t want to.

sonori , 7 months ago

I would argue that being horriblely disadvantaged by not getting free money is not in fact a restriction on the market.

sonori , 7 months ago

Why would three to four years be to long for a car to sit around without being scraped? Short of the batteries self discharging brlow limits, which admittedly might happen with the cheap ac-dc converters and other electronics you might find in a low budget EV, i can’t imagine there would be much more than a tire change.

sonori , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

The cars the article is talking about were clearly used in service at some point, as it would seem a bit strange to put up makeshift covid mask warnings in the windows of cars that weren’t functional and at least in so far as our primary source identified them tended to have a minimum range of 100km.

Manufacturers identified included Chongqing Changan and Nessan’s Chinese subsidiary, I didn’t see any mention of Kandi.

sonori , 7 months ago

Of course it’s not neutral, but we’re talking about wether or not it is comparable with unrestricted capitalism.

sonori , 7 months ago

Except your alleging that these cars were obviously built solely to defend the government simply becuse a different unrelated company did defrauded the government even though by all accounts these were legitimate, if poorly thought out, companies.

sonori , 7 months ago

Becuse that requires the government own them, which requires that they finish working their way though bankruptcy court. Some already have, and the rest should follow sooner or later.

sonori , 7 months ago

Because it’s kind of hard to eminent domain the subject of an ongoing legal battle?

sonori , 7 months ago

You will note that none of thouse things might involve repossessing things party members might own a stake in the same way that they would a failed company.

sonori , 7 months ago

But the government didn’t buy them to boost sales numbers in the other article here. If you actually read it it says that a bunch of ride sharing companies bought them, admittedly with some government subsidies, and then when several of thouse companies went out of business hundreds of their vehicles got stuck in a lot for a few years before they could be auctioned off. A wonder of capitalism that companies can be founded, grow, and then collapse so fast that they can’t even sell their hard assets sure, but hardly the government funding an entire industry.

sonori , 7 months ago

Much like with solar panels, the EU hasn’t invested in the factory capacity to meet demand and is now working to protect its own industry by being outcompeted by competitors who did. It’s also silly since the EU and US do the same exact thing.

sonori , 7 months ago

While there has been confirmed reports of smaller manufacturers faking the number of cars produced by claiming partly completed frames, why would BYD fully complete a car just to leave it in a field. No only is it leaving money on the table, but given the cost to build a car is far higher that the subsidy they’d be loosing money on every car.

I also sopose that serpentza confirmed that the cars were owned by BYD and completely unconnected to the fields of EVs left over when the Chinese ride share bobble collapsed and several EV ride share companies went bankrupt.

sonori , 7 months ago

Umm, Uber and Lyft don’t own thier own cars, and haven’t gone out of business, ao why would there be a few parking lots full of company cars left over after a bankruptcy in the US?

sonori , 7 months ago

Bad, very bad.

sonori , 7 months ago

Tesla has put out a lot of statistically questionable fluff about how thier “autonomous pilot” is safer than the average human driver, some people even believe it. Most of them don’t, but well as they say, picture in your mind the intelligence of the average american driver, then realize that half of them are even dumber than that.

sonori , 7 months ago

Now i know Australia has been having some trouble with conservatives recently and is overrun with emus, but i’m not sure the entire country counts as a bloody dictatorship yet.

sonori , 7 months ago

True, but the largest suppliers are democratic countries, and scale does matter in this type of conversation.

sonori , 7 months ago

Nothing stopping you from investing in moving up the value chain except a lack of government interest in doing so.

sonori , 7 months ago

I love it when techbros try philosophy 101, their so utterly disconnected from realty that any brilliant idea they had on pot must be the basis of the universe.

sonori , 7 months ago

Probably pretty good odds were not.

The laws of physics we observe have far to much unnecessary complexity at the small scale to be worthy simulating unless it mirrors the simulators reality, in which case it’s unlikely that you could simulate earth on anything less than an truly absurd collection of matrioshka brains, and even then it would be to expensive to do often.

Moreover, what would actually be the point of an ancestor simulation in the first place? Things are going to diverge so rapidly that the only things you can learn are very general statistics, which you could make good estamates of already and with far less computing power. These are also statistics that self evidently do not matter becuse if they did occur often enough to matter than the simulators would already know just by looking around their own universe.

Basically the only things i’ve heard that don’t require an intelligent civilization that could reach technology far in advance of our own but is comprised completely of people so psychopathic they’d create billions of children just to kill them off for mad science are things like your parents wanting to raise thier children in a simulacrum to the distant past or wiping your own memory for some roleplay or similar. In that case, where you are only simulateing a few rea people and a bunch of NPCs, why would you bother designing NPCs to being up the simulation in the first place?

Foreshadowing and getting you used to the idea maybe, but there are a lot better ways to do that, most of which involve an actual conversation.

sonori , 7 months ago

The best part of Open AI’s self professed goal to make an AGI is that the more we learn about LLM’s the more it becomes clear that they inherently can never bridge the gap to AGI.

One would almost think the constant complaining about mythical dangers of AGI might be a distraction from the real more mundane dangers LLM’s pose here and now like exasperating bias, making mass misinformation easy, and of course shielding major companies from accountability.

Or the other option is that it’s just marketing, look at how scary our totally real product is, look how fast it improved when we went from a medium sized dataset to the largest that will ever be possible, don’t ask questions like why would a autocomplete that has been feed the entire internet actually help our business, just pay us and bolt it on to whatever you can.

sonori , 7 months ago

Scripts and automation do what thier programmed to. There are bugs and mistakes, but you can theoretically get something programmed right. LLM’s generate text that looks like a human language. If they were just getting used to make up random bullshit it wouldn’t be a problem, but there are few applications where random bullshit is actually beneficial.

sonori , 7 months ago

Thouse all sound like things where it might be really bad if it injects untrue information, and with an LLM, by definition it has no understanding of what it’s summarizing. It could be especially bad if the people useing it actually trust what it outputs as facts about what was fed into it, but if they don’t and still check the source than what’s the point.

sonori , 7 months ago

I mean, the Australian mines are terrible for the environment, not like the nice and clean coal mines next door; and i mean, you can only recycle like 97% of the lithium with modern processes, not like gas where you can use it over and over again./s

sonori , 7 months ago

I highly doubt that Lithium mines have that sort of power. More likely there are either more mundane suspected downsides that aren’t being so breathlessly reported, or simply that it’s too new.

It takes time to switch production lines, and actual demand from battery consumers. Of Lithium Ion is good enough to meet thier requirements than why rush to something that hasn’t been proven in the field yet? If thier already struggling to meet demand with thier current output why risk taking a bunch of lines down to maybe see demand there?

sonori , 7 months ago

It’s worth noting that research tends to lead manufacturing by ten to fifteen years. Mostly just down to the fact that making a few kilograms of something in a lab is a far cry from making and assembling tons an hour. Research also tends to take time to move between technologies, as most scientists don’t like to abandon projects half way though just becuse someone else published something interesting.

Also, while I don’t watch the battery space to closely, from my understanding there has traditionally been safety considerations stemming from large quantities of sodium given its tendency to react rather hot and fast when exposed to water.

sonori , 7 months ago

Your standerd science article is written by someone with a half remembered high school science education rephrasing another person with the same background who has on rare occasion actually talked to the people who wrote the study. Both of these people don’t understand what’s actually happened but need to make it sound like it’s as big a deal as possible to get clicks.

We’ve found a incremental improvement in sodium ion that may do something becomes sodium ion is going to take over the world in very short order.

sonori , 7 months ago

Except it’s rarely the actual scientists who are hyping this sort of thing like that. At least in the media. It happens occasionally, but typically the hype and sensationalism comes from the article writers, especially the ones who haven’t even talked to the paper’s original authors, much less actually read the thing.

sonori , 7 months ago

Becuse it worked so well for Russia.

sonori , 7 months ago

I’d suggest that e-bikes have at least some advantage over traditional motorcycles in that you can take them onto public transport such as metro or rail. Or one might find easier parking for them at an enclosed stand af a nearby but out of walking range train station that helps you shave a bus and transfer off your commute in nice weather. The electric motor is definitely an advantage over unpowered bikes in convenience, and a major factor if one can’t or won’t shower when they get to work.

That being said i’d be amazed if it shifts the needle more than a percent or two at most. Proper show up and go metros take cars off the road by being so obviously better than having to find parking, but e-bikes don’t have the same end user benefits.

This is all to say nothing of rural areas, which often don’t have the density to support frequent transit becuse “why are we running empty buses, they aren’t turning a profit and that’s all that matters”, but amusingly most of farm country, at least in the US, was actually built around the idea that you would bike in to town if it didn’t require the cart. I mean it make that sane you would need to drop the 50mph limits on country roads down to 35 or so, and the sun will grow cold before any town politician survives trying that, but it was possible.

sonori , 7 months ago

I don’t exactly expect that a smallish internet fourm can fix the fetishization of high school children across the english speaking world, but we absolutely can effect this preticular lemmy community.

While I also have it blocked, it is really hard to say recommend lemmy to friends when even from beehaw you have “i can’t believe it’s not child porn” making up a bunch of /all.

sonori , 7 months ago

It’s worth noting that grid scale tends towards far better ROIs of 7 to 10 years. Home systems are a lot more expensive seeing as about half the cost of them tends to be in labor and markup as compared to the economies of scale larger projects. Still often worth it, but significantly more than a properly managed power company in a favorable regulatory environment can do.

sonori , 7 months ago

Weather or not the copyrighted data shows up in the final model is utterly irrelevant though. It is illegal to use copyrighted material period outside of fair use, and this is most certainly not. This is civil law, not criminal, the standard is more likely than not rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. If a company cannot provide reasonable evidence that they created the model entirely with material they own the rights to use for that purpose, than it is a violation of the law.

Math isn’t a person, doesn’t learn in anything approaching the same method beyond some unrelated terminology, and has none of the legal rights that we afford to people. If it did, than this would be by definition a kidnapping and child abuse case not a copyright case.

sonori , 7 months ago

Meh, their similar enough that up until 2019 Israel publicly funded Hamas to explicitly weaken the Palestinian government. Both sides want thier little far right ethnostate. The only distinction in their minds is which race gets it.

sonori , 7 months ago

The capacity to enforce thier ethnostate doesn’t seem like that much of a change when discussing thier idoligy. If Russia or Pakistan have Hamas a standing army and nukes tomorrow i doubt they would suddenly change thier stated end goals, simpley be capible of far more violence in furtherance of thouse goals.

sonori , 8 months ago

Hmm, this seems like the sort of addition where it might have been nice to have a bunch of world leading developers and designers hanging around. Seems odd to fire them all if this was the plan.

Indeed that does seem like the sort of mistake that someone who made the largest purchase of thier life after staying up alll night playing Elden Ring would make, but i’m sure it was really a cunning 5d chess move and not evidence that our overlords who are born into wealth are just as dumb as the rest of us.

sonori , 8 months ago

Really niche, but i can recommend the connections museum. Really nice breakdowns of how very easy telephone switches and networks worked.

sonori , 8 months ago

Words cannot express my gratitude. My solution up until this point has been just relaying them, but that’s obviously kinda annoying. Thank you so much.

sonori , 8 months ago

Friendly reminder that nearly all currently operating coal plants have been built scine the sixties, as before that it was often unprofitable to use for electricity production.

That’s right, we could have gone straight to nuclear and created the economies of scale necessary to bring down costs if we haven’t needed to find jobs for all the miners and poor lobbyists who had mined coal for home heating and industrial use.

We’ve also settled the science about the whole carbon killing us thing since the seventies, so there should have been plenty of time in the last fifty years to get rid of them.

sonori , 8 months ago

Remember, the ocean is going to get a lot hotter and more acidic even if we meet the 1.5c goal, which we definitely won’t. At what point do we just accept that coral can’t survive in the wild for much longer and work to save what we can in aquariums?

sonori , 8 months ago

Clearly, the only answer is AI. I don’t know how an unreliable autocomplete will help with this, but I am willing to pocket a massive amount of taxpayer money in the attempt./s

sonori , 8 months ago

Friendly reminder that the us already spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation.

There is no amount of money that you can throw into this god forsaken system of insurance companies and for profit hospitals that will make it to the people themselves. A company will charge what people will pay, if you subsidize what they can pay, the company will raise prices until it returns to where it was and pocket the rest.

It is not that the US healthcare system is underfunded, it is that for profit healthcare is incompatible with financial reality at it’s very core.

Besides, the EU is the one loaning Ukrainian money, the US donations are in end of life military equipment, and as much as i think we should pay our doctors in anti tank missiles i don’t think congress is going to ok that solution anytime soon. After all, that might actually fix things in a decade or two.

sonori , 8 months ago

Generally it’s a combination of a lot of the headline equipment being 90s era, and the systems themselves being sent in order of oldest first. While yes, these were very much a part of our arsenal, and yes we often them stockpiled for a reason, sometimes that reason is just that the US military rarely throws anything away until it absolutely has to. When it’s actually being replaced however, it’s generally because those parts of the stockpile are meant to be used as a stopgap. Production lines tend to take a long time to spin up and so we keep a reserve supply of things on hand to cover the gap between when a major war might start by surprise and when the new assembly lines to supply it are finished.

It is however worth noting that most weapons built in the last fifty years use would fuel propellants with a limited shelf life before they become to dangerous to handle. As such, if you want to keep a constant stockpile you must constantly be building new rounds and decommissioning the old ones at the end of thier life. Moreover tech has actually advanced between now and then, and many of these new versions are more effective, if expensive, than the old and so need to be replaced a way.

In some categories we are indeed sending more than we normally decommission, and so need to increase the rate of production to even things out again, but that’s not how congress has been primarily budgeting things. Instead the headline figure, when not double or triple counted, is cost to replace old system with an brand new equivalent worth of old system irrespective of wether or not it was due to be replaced anyway.

All of this is a bit harder to separate from general defense spending however because we were already beginning to pivot from counter terror operations towards the asia pacific in order to provide a credible deterance around Taiwan since China has been rapidly expanding the PLA and PLN while many politicians have been using increasing imperialist rhetoric to distract from domestic trouble.

So anyway, that’s my guess as to why people thing were sending old stuff we found in a stockpile somewhere.

sonori , 8 months ago

Aw yes, the imperialism is when US do stuff abroad. That’s why when an hyper capitalist dictator invades and annexes its democratic neighbor for resources and land under the justification that said nation used to be part of its empire, it’s the US that’s being imperialisitc by not letting the dictator add to his imperial empire.

This makes sense. This line of reasoning makes sense.

As to the other thing, you realize that the US defense budget had gone down the last two years right? That these aid packages are explicitly labeled in the cost to replace with modern weapons, even if they were going to be replaced anyway, so i don’t see how it will suddenly be multiplied two to three fold.