That's perfectly reasonable, but I would take a gamble on a Chinese EV versus a Big 3 gas car any day. The gas car has annoying and expensive maintenance built-in already.
I'd counter that with the Big 3 gas car you generally know what you're getting yourself into when you buy it. Additionally, while the maintenance could very well be annoying and expensive, it would be very unusual if either the spare parts or someone to do the service wasn't available for 10+ years after you purchased the car new.
If I decide to buy a Toyota Camry and keep it for 10 years, my biggest risk is dying of boredom. If I decide to buy a Xiaomi EV and keep it for 10 years, I am risking it becoming a brick after 5 or less. If you want to take that gamble, I am all for it - I get to learn from your experience.
Norway has abundant hydropower. But like you've mentioned, this transition will happen in Australia and US, it might just take longer due to incentives.
Particularly for the Southern US, I feel that the costs will continue to drop until the transition will be very sudden, and there will be a rude awakening of sorts.
What are the returns for a landowner leasing a solar farm vs passively growing pines? My state has a lot of land to use and a good portion of the rural part is pine. Some landowners harvest pine trees on unused land.
For pines, not great. Timber farming was so heavily encourage for so many years that there is a glut and prices have stayed about the same in real dollars for decades.
Solar panel leases are so long (50 years on top of the decade to interconnect), so they come with additional negatives as you are often signing up the next generation for a relationship that they had no say in.
The US would lose its superpower status before that happens, the awakening won’t be so drastic because we would have already started sliding into being a much poorer country than we are today. It’s already started at any rate.
I should say, a surprise for anyone who is completely unaware of the developments around the world, which a lot of people in the US are.
I don't this requires the loss of "superpower" status really. Already, if you dropped all EV, solar, battery tariffs in Florida, I think people there would be blindsided by how fast things start to take over.
I guess, but I doubt it would even happen before American unambiguously lost its #1 status. They simply won't allow those products into the states until they acknowledge that they actually need them.
At least the rest of the world is going to get richer in the meantime.
Its not a safety issue, it is an inconvenience issue. You are severely increasing the amount of time it takes to recharge while someone else receives no benefit whatsoever.
Is the issue you're seeing that a 400V car is taking up the space that an 800V car could use, so the 800V car has to wait longer for the 400V car to finish?
If all chargers are 800V+ that would become a moot point to a degree.
We also need to keep in mind that most people will ideally be charging at home. So these public chargers would be for people taking a trip or for people with parking situations that can't accommodate home charging.
The problem with these is they aren't all 800V. People will accidentally use the wrong (800V) charger when they can only take 400V. All things considered, that's a minor problem.
Considering the slow adoption rate of EVs in the US, I don’t think it’s a problem. It’ll all be replaced in five years with state of the art from China.
No, automation doesn't reduce jobs, i.e. doesn't reduce consumer spending, as consumer spending is determined by output, which automation boosts.
The savings from automation in a particular sector are spent elsewhere — wherever services are more costly (in labor). That's the dynamic behind Say's law, which shows that spending on less automatable jobs like barbers and physical therapists increases as automation reduces costs in other sectors of the economy.
I understand this is a well-developed economic theory and I am complete uninformed, but this doesn't make intuitive sense at all.
If 1 million prep cooks are replaced by robots, will food become cheap enough that those prep cooks can all get jobs as barbers, and the money people spend on food will shift to haircuts?
Will the food be so cheap that all those prep cooks can afford to learn to cut hair?
Also consider the money velocity of a human vs a robot. A human is probably paycheck to paycheck spending everything they earn. Robot earnings go back to company, which makes the stock go up, 90% of which is owned by billionaires who just keep hoarding and hoarding.
A general drop in services, yes. A drop in the services being provided by the robot, probably not. I doubt if many Prep Chefs are regularly eating at the restaurants they work at. When the robots are taking
millions of jobs in all areas of service, there might be a problem.
Humans who aren't skilled require training regardless of how "unskilled" the task is.
Humans that are chronically unskilled also don't learn well, somewhat as a rule.
Humans that don't make much money have a high turnover rate from burnout. Additionally, those that can learn typically leave for greener pastures.
The bar isn't terribly high. Efficiency of scale in production will solve this eventually. I think the likely outcome is robots building themselves first.
Almost all developed economies are running into a fertility crisis right now, with labor shortages already appearing in the frontrunners of the trend, such as Germany.
Human work is going to cost more in the future, and immigration from countries such as Thailand or Vietnam is already slowing down. Even a mediocre robot will be sought after if it is the only choice you have.
I understand that. It's my personal opinion that one of the causes of low birth rates is that we continually choose to have robots solve our problems instead of choosing a human.
I think we could increase birth rates by making a taxation scheme in which the most marginally effective way to solve a problem is with a human, paid a wage which allows for that occupation to be a lifelong career.
They’ll be bought/leased, providing direct profit. Also, there’ll be maintenance revenue. I think they’re expected to cost around $30K.
In the case where they’re replacing a low-skill human worker, they’ll pay for themselves in 1-2 years…plus no sick days, no drug use, no theft, and they can work 24 hours a day, less any recharging time.
Once large swaths of the planet have been rendered uninhabitable from human activity, we'll require them to continue extracting profit from those areas. (this is a downer comment but also realistically the first thing that came to mind when trying to think of a use for them).
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