klaff

They did become cheap for a very short time at the front of the pandemic. Specifically sales in the US hit a historic low in April of 2020, almost down to half the monthly volume a few months earlier and four or five months later. I remember this because a family member needed a new car and got a great deal. We were unsure if it was a good deal, because maybe things would get worse but they had a real need for a new vehicle so they did it and looking back were lucky to hit the low point. But your broader point is correct, that was a relatively short blip and arguably much of that missing consumption was just delayed until folks had confidence they would still be employed in the near future.

It is stupid to put a solar panel on top of a car.

1. The car's surface is small relative to charging needs. Both have fundamental limits (insolation and aerodynamics) that aren't likely to change much.

2. The car's top is not generally flat or even a simple curved surface, so you'll probably be compromising the aerodynamics.

3. If the car is parked in a garage, or under a tree, it will not make power. If you're buying the panels, put them where they'll see the sun as much as possible (rooftop, shade awning for parking, etc.) would be better.

4. The solar panel will get junked when the car gets junked rather than lasting longer as it would in a stationary environment.

5. If the car's battery is full, the panel output can't be used, but see point 1, this will only happen if the car is parked in the sun w/o driving for a number of days, even if it was parked at 80%.

I don't think Musk understands Musk.

I don't remember this much pain, but I was about 10 years old when I learned. On the other hand I've been learning guitar late in life and am wondering how much easier that would be if my brain had seen a few less orbits.

I learned Morse code almost 50 years ago. I distinctly remember how learning progressed through stages

- hear di-dah (sound), think dot-dash (printed symbols), in the table that's an A

- hear di-dah, think "A"

- hear dah, di-di-di-dit, dit, hear the word "the"

- add more and more words

Along with that progression, the mental buffer got bigger, as it has to in order for you to recognize whole words. If I was having a conversation near my speed limit, a good way to break me was to send a long unusual word

barbaric is society which has 1% of its adult population living behind bars

warranty assumes constant unchanging weather conditions

What on earth are you talking about?

LOL, 25 years ago my neighbors and I were setting off fireworks over a yet-undeveloped part of our neighborhood. We saw police pull into the neighborhood. My family were the cowards who went inside. Our neighbors had to pay a fine. If we'd hung around we'd have paid a fine too.

I don't agree. I think it's a choice that each area has made between law enforcement and local governance. Regarding the St. Louis area, it really depends on which jurisdiction you are in. St. Louis County has over 90 municipalities. The neighboring counties are also fragmented but to a lesser degree. There are areas (mostly more rural) where it is legal and loud, some where it's not legal but enforcement is lacking, and there are quiet areas in which I assume enforcement does happen.

When I was a kid we had a visible V8 model that let you see quite a bit!

The battery is warranted for 8 years or 100,000 miles and you are a simple internet search away from many articles on how long EV batteries are lasting (which is generally quite long).

Amen

I have the opposite idea after reading physiology books. The number I remember was 22%, for efficiency of a human being as a motor, driving pedals to create mechanical power. That's quite poor compared to an electric motor. And unless you want your fuel to be high-fructose corn syrup, your fuel is inefficient to make as well.

Do they claim enough reliability and peak power capability to delete the mechanical brakes? I know Brembo is working on electric brakes that would eliminate the hydraulic circuits and pistons. I don't know what they plan to do to make sure the electrical side is as robust as the split-diagonal brake system we've been using for 60 years or so.

you can integrate all into one hub (breaks, bearings, gears etc) and it weights pretty much the same.

You would get to delete about half the mass of the half-shaft but otherwise you are cramming a lot of stuff into the wheel volume and it all has to survive living out there. Now your HV wiring and any cooling connections to the motor have to flex with the movements of the suspension and probably need guarding against rocks and other road debris. I think all EVs now have the drive electronics tightly coupled to the motors - now that either has to be separated or made compact enough to fit and rugged enough to survive a much higher vibration regime. We do have small amounts of electronics on hub assemblies today (I'm thinking of electronic parking brakes) so there is some precedent but that circuitry is much less challenging than an inverter handling 100s of kW.

no loss on diff

I doubt there's much loss from differentials in EVs. They don't have the bevel gear of diffs used in longitudinal layout ICE vehicles and mostly the gears in a diff don't move relative to one another (unless you are doing donuts!), so the whole cage mostly acts like a solid gear giving whatever final ratio.

You've got that a bit backwards.

You just described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-tone_scale. Nothing stopping anyone from writing and playing music in such a scale, but it won't help you with nearly all the music you are likely to be familiar with.

We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.

Do you mean trying to teach all children perfect pitch even though society has no expectation of that? Unlike knowing at least your primary colors which is expected of everyone. I suspect that could be unnecessarily stressful for many.

Or do you mean as some kind of metaphor or analogy? If the latter, I think it would be quite confusing as there are aspects of vision and hearing that are quite different. Pitch classes have no analog in vision that I can think of. Color vision is roughly 3 dimensional but sound is not. The aspects of timbre don't map to color.

I think that understanding music theory does require work. It emerges from physics and physiology and a very long history including a bunch of culturally specific things. Did your ancestors make music with long skinny strings or pipes with nice integer-ish overtones? Here are some tuning systems for you (among them the set of C-D-E-F-G-A-B you mentioned). Did they use bells or gongs with decidedly non-integer ratio overtones? Here's a set of different systems for you!

Anyway, if you have a mapping/analog/metaphor you think is useful between music or sound and color I would be interested to hear it / see it!

There are fluid dynamic bearings which were used in VCRs and probably hard drives and definitely laser printer mirror motors - two sets of precise herringbone patterns cut into the ID of a bearing column and a tiny bit of oil that gets entrained between rotor shaft and that bearing column. As the motor speeds up the oil forms pressurized donuts. Only works at speed and generally only useful when there aren't side loads so applications are limited. Rolling element bearings are a quite developed technology and hard to beat in most applications.

It doesn't make that a good idea. Armature losses are proportional to torque squared - doesn't matter if it is radial or axial design. That's why all the EVs today have gear boxes with ratios like 13:1. Get rid of that gearbox and the steady-state losses go up with the square of that ratio. Then there are the issues of sprung mass, and where to put the mechanical brakes.

Yes. If you have a laser printer, that windup sound you hear at the start of a job is the polygon mirror motor spinning up thousands of RPMs - those are PCB stator motors. As were VCR head motors.

They are.

I am also curious! A few things I would like to play with but haven't made the time for yet - real time FFT/spectrogram visualization (I want to play with some spiral things for chord / harmony visualization) - synth / live coding stuff (like supercollider but in Julia)

I absolutely agree. They shouldn't be able to vote and they shouldn't have free speech rights. Corporations are a legal structure - a way to allow risk sharing to encourage investment that would otherwise maybe not happen if one had to risk everything in order to invest. But when we choose to allow that, and it is a choice, we should not give those entities the rights of people. It is simply absurd.

Is this rich person also voting in the place where they actually live? I'm not against a rich person voting, I just don't want them to get more than one vote. I haven't read the opinion to see if that's addressed.

In current events: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5892633-lutnick-...

(Lutnick donated $5M to House GOP super PAC ahead of Epstein deposition)

we started using the term obama for that just because we hate saying that other word

It's an interesting question. If we lived in a universe in which we weren't in fear of losing access to basic necessities of food, shelter, and healthcare, but had to work to have anything beyond those, what would happen? I don't truly know and I don't believe we have done the experiment anywhere. But I do know that the system we have not only produces innovative products but also corruption, oligopolies, and steamrolls over labor and the environment if not regulated.

I'm not naive enough to think communism is a magical answer (but Cuba is not some A/B experiment - the U.S. in particular has done a lot to make sure Cuba didn't succeed) - it ends up concentrating the wealth too. I would favor some form of democratic socialism, with leaders who can be kicked out if they abuse their power and limits on the influence of rich individuals and corporations.

On the latter, I think we forget that corporations are a legal construct intended to benefit society by allowing risk pooling - they are not people and should not be considered as such for things like free speech rights. Corporations should not be allowed to make political contributions in any way.

As one example see million dollar donations to inaugurations.

Anymore I think the question shouldn't be about some kind of economic fairness (the time value of money thing being discussed) but the idea that wealth accumulation is a disease that afflicts society. I don't think anyone should have the level of control or influence on others that having a billion dollars currently allows. If a millionaire gives $100 to a political candidate it probably doesn't require too much thought. It's impressive to note that a 10-billionaire can give $1M just as easily, and so we have a class of folks who can throw around influence, who can order a team of lawyers to do things, can employ their legion of sycophantic followers to harass people, or can threaten the employment of many people not-of-their-class because they can make decisions that threaten someone's employer's bottom line. And note that above I compared a millionaire to the 10-billionaire, but there are plenty of folks, especially around the planet, who economically live several orders of magnitude below the millionaire.

As a bit of an aside, "spending more time with family" is an often-used euphemism around someone being fired, but if you have more money than you know what to do with and you aren't using it to spend more time with those you love, then what on earth is it for?