I have not yet been in the market for a new vehicle when an EV would have been in my price range and otherwise meeting my needs, but I had done some basic research on defining the family needs. We concluded that an EV would need a 150 mile range on a single charge. This would be the equivalent to the range that around a half a tank of gasoline gives to most combustion vehicles. This would be enough range to from where we live to the extreme oppose edge of town and back, with around 20% battery to spare. Since we have friends that live that far away in town, and on occasion shopping or entertainment has taken us that far, this seemed like a reasonable range for one of the two daily drivers in the household.

This is in a city that is geographically massive. The vast majority of people do not commute more than sixty miles one-way, and likewise it's even rarer for both people in a marriage to commute that distance or longer regularly. Additionally many of the places where people do commute that sort of distance, commuter rail ends up becoming a preferred option simply out of difficulty trying to affordably park in the urban areas where their job would be located.

We're already at the point where over 80% of two-car households could manage with at least one EV. Hell my neighbor owns a general contracting business that does jobs all over the state, and he just bought a Silverado 4WT electric truck. He could have to visit several jobsites a day to keep tabs on the progress and even in a job as driving-intensive as his he was able to go electric.

If Honda had brought the 'e' to North America with a slight bump in range from 137 to 150, it would have been a reasonable candidate for a second vehicle in our household. But they discontinued it despite charging such a vehicle at home in a surburban setting being a pretty practical option. I suspect it would have been a good fit for a lot of people actually, but it never made it to our shores.

Plus it's generally against the law to sell vehicles under-recall. Even used car dealerships aren't supposed to, though without enforcement from motor vehicle offices they are not as inclined to follow those laws and to check for recalls before selling.

I don't buy Toyotas because I don't like paying a 15% to 30% markup for the same capabilities that other brands have, even with a reputation for better reliability.

As for these particular vehicles, I'm a little tired of the term "SUV". When I was young, an SUV was a Sport-Utility Vehicle, it was a high-clearance vehicle, usually four-wheel-drive, that was durable enough to leave paved roads for rough driving conditions. It was something that could go further off the beaten path than a station wagon or sedan could, even further rear-wheel-drive pickup trucks and full-sized vans could. That term started being misused the better part of 30 years ago and has become meaningless, applied to any station wagon of any ride-height and roof-height. Many 'SUV' models body proportions nowadays are almost more like interwar-period 'suburbans' and wagons, tall, sit-upright vehicles with comparatively low floors. There's no more special 'sport' or 'utility' about them in an offroad sense.

That's because Blockbuster's business model was effectively obsolete with the invention of the DVD, but both they and the customer base didn't realize it yet.

Video tapes were a pain in the ass. They took a lot of space, they were subject to damage if handled incorrectly, and they wore out simply by using them. They were not well suited to anything more than local pickup and local return. That meant that for temporary rentals, a storefront like Blockbuster was generally necessary. As an ancillary business such a storefront could sell overpriced convenience items like popcorn, soda, and candy, and rather than making two stops, someone could just fulfill their want for such sundries while picking up the video tape movies.

DVD proved successful initially through the mail, and later through rental kiosks that could be placed all over, and the process to reserve could be done with the new-fangled Internet. A potential customer could confirm access to a title rather via mail or through kiosk pickup without ever having to interact with person, more reliably than showing up unannounced to the storefront to find all the copies of the desired title sold-out, and if the rental kiosk was positioned next to a convenience store, the snacks and other sundries were usually less expensive than they had been at Blockbuster. If next to or inside of a supermarket then the sundries were realistically the best price one could generally expect to find.

And that was only a stop-gap, as on-demand and pay-per-view were already starting to become a thing through paid-TV services, and the Internet allowed that model to blossom, entirely rendering the brick-and-mortar video rental storefront obsolete. Blockbuster forgot that the product/service was providing the movie first and foremost rather than the experience of being in their stores, and by forgetting that and thinking that their stores had more value-add than they really did, they quickly lost market share profitability and closed before they had any hope of shifting their business model.

So for car companies like Toyota, where electric cars comprise only a very small portion of their total units sold, they're providing first and foremost personally-owned, private conveyance. At different price points they offer different experiences through different amenities and vehicle classes, but whether combustion or electric powered, the offering is still personally-owned, private conveyance. Their combustion-powered offerings are not obsolete in a business-model sense, even if electric vehicles have reached a certain threshold of technical maturity that would allow them to satisfy the needs of the vast majority of people in the developed world. The combustion vehicles too still meet that need, and manage to meet the needs of the few edge-cases where electrics don't yet offer viable solutions.

What would render Toyota to be like Blockbuster is if companies like Waymo manage to introduce car-services that become so prolific that private car ownership becomes obsolete, but even then the need to manufacture vehicles might keep Toyota and other traditional automakers in business. But I expect that where life is structured to allow for easy private car ownership, those Waymo-like services will take a very long time to be a larger part of the market than private car ownership is. It's going to be a very long time before Toyota is threatened with insolvency in the way that Blockbuster was, and it won't happen overnight where company executives don't have time to react.

That seems incredibly short-sighted. I could sort of see why there might be issues with some kind of active emissions system at ground level due to sheer noise at ground level, but up in the sky one would expect that any signals would be uncluttered enough to be incredibly reliable.

If they're governed anything like amateur radio antenna masts/towers are, the FAA only gets involved when the structure reaches something like 200'.

And regardless, the drone should not hit things. It needs to detect obstructions and avoid them. That it didn't detect a metal structure that was not moving says some rather bad things about the flight control system of the drone.

No. There are college students that are doing exactly what you say, but there are also college students that know they're broke and can't afford to continually party, or at least not where that partying costs money. There are students that know they're skating on thin ice and they don't want to fail. There are students that are super responsible in college just like they were in high school. There are students that are lost because they had a lot of coddling up through high school that are suddenly having to do everything for themselves. There are students that are actually feeling free because no one is coddling them telling them what not to do. And all other manner.

Societies seem to be fractal in nature, sub-groups reflect a distribution similar to the main group from which they come. I've seen this firsthand in several scenes. There are bullies and wallflowers and know-it-alls and nerds and jocks and tinkerers and artists in small groups that reflect a distribution similarly to the larger group that all are drawn from.

Yeah, the ivy-league and other upper-end schools tend to overperform in their graduates finding work in their fields after graduating, and the now-mostly-defunct ITTs, University of Phoenixes, and other trade schools that don't tend to have as much in in-person education and are there mostly to profit off of the student-loans programs for people who would never be accepted at even state-schools tend to have the worst placement after graduating.

This is admittedly a supposition on my part, but having sat through college courses where very conservative students tried to push their uneducated mentality that was clearly factually wrong and faced pushback from lecturers or professors with actual research behind their instruction, the act of education itself takes a student out of uneducated provinciality and gives them a more complete view. Someone that's uneducated is usually pretty provincial in their attitude and thinking, and if they perceive even learning about the wider world as change, they will attribute that to liberalism same as if a new attitude were brought into their little provincial area, even if it's merely giving them a more complete picture of what's wider than their scope of influence and experience.

The problem is that this is an outright reactionary approach, actively hostile to anything that requires the individual to do more than continue doing the exact same thing that has always been done. It's also foolish because it makes the individual less adaptable when other situations come along that require rolling with the change because it's happening whether or not it's wanted.

The little secret that people who insist on enforcing what they consider to be conservative values fail to get is that even in a society that is generally more permissive in a liberal sense than they want, generally nothing is stopping them from making the choice to live personally conservatively. One can even have incredibly liberal views and can still personally choose to live in a way that a conservative would find to be pretty normal and acceptable.

Mmhmm. Prior to the McDonnell-Douglas takeover, Boeing seemed to have generally been on a track of continuous development/redevelopment, working on new designs and working on revamps of their existing designs for subsequent revs even as in-development revs were approaching final approval.

Looking at the history of McDonnell-Douglas, they basically relied on the legacies of the DC-9 (1965) and DC-10 (1971) until even after the Boeing merger. The DC-9/MD-80 series/MD-90 Series/Boeing-717 and the DC-10/MD-11 were long LONG production, arguably even going back to before McDonnell was in the picture, they were Douglas projects.

The MD mentality of iterating on existing designs when they have to is what put the merged new-Boeing into this position now. It took around 25 years for this mentality shift to truly break the merged company. Arguably even though it was started around the time of the merger, the 787 was the last gasp of old-Boeing, having been kicked off after the MD takeover but before the MD financial attitude towards R&D had fully infected the operating company. After that we only see variants on existing designs in order to maintain type-ratings.

You're probably right. The app makes no money if the owners can't sell the data because it's already leaked.

Yeah. There have been productive uses of AI, like that protein folding project, but those generally are limited to very specific datasets, very specific objectives, and professionals who already know what the end goal is, they're using it as a tool and have the capability to discern quickly if what they're getting back is plausible and accurate.

But that said, there are still cases where professionals within a limited field have tried and failed to use AI. The most visible of these is the practice of law, where lawyers who don't understand how AI works used it to draft filings that were 'hallucinated' garbage full of fake citations and other things that the lawyer should have researched. I suspect that the lawyer didn't use a law-oriented AI though, just a general purpose LLM, and thus the AI was full of crap that had nothing to do with actual law. Hell, it might not have even had an index of topics specific to law and was consulting youtube comments or internet forums full of opinions that weren't based on actual law at all.

For AI to work it would have to be tailored, even siloed to specific subjects. It would need researchers maintaining its dataset. It would even need the skilled professionals using it as a timesaver to go through what it spits back at them to confirm that it's right. Recalling that law example, there's a whole lot of caselaw out there, lawyers and firms have typically had to employ armies of paralegals to do all of the research for precedent and interpretation. A law AI could help do that job if it sticks to real, actual law as-passed by legislatures and as-interpreted by courts, but even if the use of AI could reduce the labor needed to do all that research, it would still be necessary to review what the AI provided and to confirm that those citations really exist and really say what the AI thought they said.

That's about the only thing that such a centrally-managed setup gives, it forces a shift in the bureaucracy to make the oligarchy's mandate happen. The problem is that this may not account for things like environmental degradation, harm to the general population and other issues surrounding personal rights, etc.

Something of a compromise approach can be reached in democratic countries, but it requires all of the stakeholders from the federal officials down to the local building code inspectors during the construction process to be onboard.

What China does for 'the people' may well not be good for individual Chinese persons. Similarly to what the Soviet Union did for 'the people' was often quite harmful to individual persons.

The same goes for the size. It's pretty clear that scientists were ballparking its size in metric units, and converting the fractional units with that much precision was stupid. Calling it "about a hundred feet or thirty meters" would have been a lot better.

And this sort of thing happened long before AI was in the picture. People don't understand significant digits, and it's worse when it comes to estimates.

As for distance away, it would have been better to include something like its closest approach puts it around 3/4 of the distance to the Moon.

So there are two schools of thought on a premium product. One takes the mid-market product and cobbles-on a bunch of bells and whistles. The other designs the basic product itself to be of better quality even without bells and whistles.

I much prefer the latter. We bought a SubZero because the 40 year old SubZero that was installed when the house was built finally had enough rust developing in the housing itself that it was time to replace it when it had a cooling loop issue. If the new SubZero manages to go even twenty years I'll be quite happy with it. It's just a fridge. The only 'port' is an 8P8C tech/management port for troubleshooting, it doesn't do Ethernet, it doesn't do Wifi, it doesn't connect to anything in order to work, it just functions and lets a service tech get extended diagnostics while on site.

The trouble with the mid-market product that is turned into a premium product by cobbling on a bunch of crap is that it's ultimately still just a mid-market product underneath it all. When the stuff that was designed to the price-point for that middle-market position wears out due to those design decisions, it doesn't matter if all of the ancillary bolt-on crap is still working or not. It may well be due for the scrap heap because it's not worth the costs to repair it at that point.

So my advice would be to skip on the fridge with the screen and Internet connection. There's no point in buying durable goods loaded with commodity hardware and software.