That does say something about how much the people who currently own them value them.

Except the employers know this and tequire more work. Anecdotes are of people writing prompts that mostly specify a handul of testcases and to have the agents self prompt with the output of the compiler, linter unit tests etc. until it passes. Then they verify the tests cases are still right and move to the next ticket never even looking at the code, commiting the prompts into git. I've tried this with cline and a corporate hosted mistral. it works. My employer doesn't know it works yet but at some point we'll all just be writing prompts and verifying tests as fast as we can...

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.

None of which has fuckall to do with the conversation everyone but you is currently having.

Go ask Mummy for a cookie and some milk, and go to bed. The grownups are talking.

No, it really isn't.

You still need a 50% increase in the amount of electricity being generated, in an era where it is more and more difficult to build new generating capacity, and an comparable build out of grid infrastructure to support it. The only difference is that you concentrate where it needs to go into smaller areas, the equivalent of gas stations, rather than home chargers. It's still a massive, multi-generational project. It's taken a hundred years and more to build what we have now, a 50% increase isn't happening in 10-15 years.

20 minute charge times seems to be state of the art in the real world, which is about 7 times as long as gassing up a ICE car. So your magical battery swap station would need 7 times as many chargers as the average gas station has pumps to service the same number of cars. The average gas station has 6-12 pumps, so let's say 9. 9x7 is 63, at 7kw each, that's half a megawatt circuit. Per station. There are 600,000 gas stations in the US.

What works China, with its lack of environmental concerns, doesn't work in the US, where the environmental lobby will do, literally, everything it possibly can to prevent building any more generating capacity, and won't scale without that huge increase in capacity and grid infrastructure.

It can be done, and possibly will be, but not by 2035 (when current law in California bans the sale of new internal combustion vehicles).

178 units is a small complex. There are, BTW, at least three larger complexes within a block.

No, It's pointless in southern California, this close to the beach.

Irrelevant, since if there were AC, it would have been part of the original construction, not retrofitted.

178 would round up, and is certainly over 1 MW. And again, 178 units is a small complex.

There are complexes in LA with thousands. There are three complexes within a block that are larger.

So yes, 178 units is small.

It also ain't something the landlord is going to pay for without raising the rent, which is already obscenely high. (My rent on a small one bedroom apartment is twice what my sister's mortgage was for a four bedroom house in Nebraska.)

Or you have no clue what you're jibbering about.

Your own numbers add up to exactly what I said. Your delusion is that 178 units isn't a small complex when, in fact, it is.

I'm not.

So now we've added solar panels? Plus, how far the electricity has to travel has very little effect on the cost. Or the amount that needs to be generated.

I was referring to mass transit in Los Angeles.

Try to participate in the same conversation as everyone else.

Rented an Ionic last year and it most definitely defaulted to lane keeping being ON.

Rented a VW earlier this year and it also defaulted to ON.

Suggesting that you just keep fighting the correction to stay to one side is a hilarious way to over correct and end up off the road. Yes it will eventually 'defer' to your inputs if you want to CROSS the line but now you have to manage your extra push with how fast the car stops pushing.

I'd wager it has it's own data connection you're unaware of.

The energy density of liquid synthetic fuel is far greater than a battery ever will. Plus such fuels would take advantage of existing infrastructure, whereas BEVs are requiring the development of new infrastructure. We've really missed an opportunity to explore the creation of carbon-neutral fuels by picking BEV as the sole, obvious winner. The future will involve both BEV and carbon-neutral fuels.

It's the "and fuck the rest who should go away and die" part that's killing all efforts to get people to switch.

A) How many apartment complexes have electrical outlets in their outdoor, non-enclosed parking - and how many of those will let the tenants use them? Because if there are any, they aren't metered, and most complexes have separate meters for each apartment. Do you really believe the complex is going to pay to charge everyone's cars? Even adding a 120v circuit to the meter of each apartment is a very expensive project.

B) You're still increasing, significantly, the amount of electricity being used. To replace gasoline entirely with electricity means about a 50% increase in the total amount of electricity being generated, and a massive increase in the grid infrastructure to distribute it, whether it's to 30 megawatt circuits to "gas" stations or additional 120v circuits to each apartment.

And fuck the rest, they should go away and die. When you're ready to address the needs of everyone, maybe you have something to say. Until then, you're just another delusional leftie loon whose parents are worth enough that you aren't worried about being one of the ones turned out to die.

Public transportation works in, say, NYC, where residential areas and business areas are both pretty concentrated. In Los Angeles public transportation means bringing a towel along to wipe the urine off the seat from the homeless guy who was there before you. It's been tried and tried and tried, and it simply doesn't work. LA built out instead of up, so the population isn't concentrated enough to support busses or trains at residential point of origin or the business destination. Neither can even break even, or come close to it, when they run at 5% capacity because 95% of the population can't use them. The closest it gets to mass transit here are park-n-rides, where you can concentrate the riders at the point of origin, at least. And the "park" part means you still have to have a car.

  (And that's aside from the fact that mass transit projects in southern California are, from start to finish, graft and corruption for the unions, with almost nothing ever being built. Other than subways in wet, geologically active sand barely above sea level.)

The plural of anecdote is not data. Your personal experience does not define reality.

About 1/3 of those in the US live in rentals, over 40% in California where you literally cannot hold down a job that pays enough to have a home without a vehicle. Most of those people live in apartments. The cost to provide chargers for the small complex I live in would be over a million dollars, plus the cost of tearing up the street for months to bring in a multi-megawatt circuit to feed them. Rent in Los Angeles for a one bedroom apartment is already more than 100% of the pre-tax income of someone working full time for minimum wage. Good luck getting apartment owners to pay for all that without raising it even more.

Or are you one of those stereotypical entitled lefties who figures "poor people should go die somewhere else so I don't have to look at time"? Cuz that's what you're suggesting for 1/3 of the population.