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> After each attack, the museum must close for a while

This was the National Gallery in London, which I believe doesn't charge for admission because it's a public institution. But ... did the National Gallery actually close after these incidents, when just one painting was attacked and not actually damaged? That would seem to be an overreaction. In any case, I think a lost revenue justification for the damages along these lines seems kinda silly.

Rather the judge seems to have believed that the damage is to society overall:

> our culpability is at level A. You did reconnaissance and planning and talked to a journalist. Your harm is at category 1, which means extreme harm to society.

> There is nothing peaceful or nonviolent about throwing soup. Throwing soup in someone’s face is violent.

I think the problem with a legal system that treats throwing soup as violence and not damaging a painting as causing damage is that this flattening perspective only incentivizes activists to go big or go home. If you're going to be sentenced as if you did damage even when you did not ... then you may as well try to destroy the painting next time. If you're going to be treated by the legal system as if you committed a violent crime when you threw soup at an enclosed painting ... then maybe next time you should actually commit real violence. Note, it sounds like being convicted of battery in the UK only gets you up to a maximum of 6 months. So you could physically accost people and get a much shorter sentence than these soup-throwers.

https://criminalinjurieshelpline.co.uk/blog/punishment-sente...


> maybe next time you should actually commit real violence. you could physically accost people

This just reinforces the idea that the 2 years are fully justified. Better stop it now.

> being convicted of battery in the UK only gets you up to a maximum of 6 months

If you keep committing batteries each weekend, I bet that the next time the situation will change.

All civilized societies agreed that recidivists should receive harsher sentences than one-time offenders. Here we have a criminal group --organized-- to deploy a chain of senseless attacks on a campaign of harassment of --innocent-- museums targeting artifacts of huge cultural value for western culture. Without showing any sign to stop or symptoms of regret. Legally there is no point into treating each case as an isolated act because it isn't. They are steps on a bigger crime scene.


> did the National Gallery actually close after these incidents, when just one painting was attacked

Don't know. Wasn't there.

The museums work like a computer memory pile. There is an endless stream of people walking in. To keep the system running the same amount must walk out. To keep the system efficient, the flux must have a direction and only one. The tourists must walk the pile until finding the other extreme and walk out. The same door shouldn't be used to enter and exit.

If a museum is famous for a particular painting, it is assured that the stream of visitors will be directed towards that room, so nobody miss it. It will be placed most probably on a noble room with a door for entering and another in the opposite side to continue the visit.

If this area is blocked, suddenly the incoming flux of people can't go out. The museum needs to find an alternative route ASAP to release that flux pressure before the people start being crushed.

Most modern places will have planned that possibility, but architectures don't allow a secondary route everywhere.

What I mean is that, as long as the visit is arranged in the traditional way, to close a big museum just by the attack to a single painting is not impossible at all.


i can say that observationally, this just-do-the-crime reasoning is real.

over the past couple decades, many american activists have realized that demonstrating certain political positions is dangerous, even if the demonstration itself and each individual participant is lawful.

so now there's a broad activist culture that encourages independent militant action against productive capital, general infrastructure, administrative facilities, retail outlets, and personal homes!


Though, I guess to ground this a little:

I can say that observationally, this just-do-the-emissions reasoning is real. Over the past several decades, many industrialized individuals and groups have realized that pushing certain harmful chemicals into the environment is lawful almost regardless of the amount. So now there's a broad emitter culture that encourages independent destructive action against productive ecosystems and planetary systems, threatening the long term viability of public infrastructure, administrative facilities, retail outlets, and personal homes!

The scale of destruction from climate activists is many orders of magnitude less than the destruction of what they're railing against. These soup-throwers are being charged, but Exxon/BP/Chevron are never charged with manslaughter or even reckless endangerment when a heatwave or hurricane which would not have happened but for climate change claims its many victims.


> The scale of destruction from climate activists is many orders of magnitude less than the destruction of what they're railing against.

two wrongs don't make a right. "Bob shoot at me, therefore I can rape Lisa?". Sorry, but I'm not buying that BS.


No one is claiming two wrongs don't make a right.

I'm certainly not saying these activists should have no punishment (and they know that they're risking prosecution when they undertake their actions).

But we should also be keenly aware that the emitters that causing a giant and growing crisis which has already killed a bunch of people and will kill many more in the future are not facing any punishment, and this should be at least as significant a story as 2 people getting 2 years for throwing soup.


Museums are NOT the emitters. As I said before this is just a silly excuse to attack valuable objects from western culture.

your metaphor has the timeline backwards. bob has an obligation to defend lisa from assault

im fucking the planet, therefore bob can shoot at me


Don't argue the metaphor (specially if you aren't understanding it: Here Bob "oil company families" is funding the rape of Lisa "museums" by a third. Bob and Lisa aren't related at all).

Stop-Oil need to be in a special class of ignorant to not even understand that old painting masters had none relationship with Petrol companies. They painted using only 100% sustainable vegetable oil taken from agriculture.

Would they have a tenth of a brain, stop-oil should be promoting the use of sustainable alternatives to fossil oils. They should be helping museums, not assaulting them.


> “The overall diagnostic is that the patient, Planet Earth, is in critical condition,” says Johan Rockström

The planet as a patient is a problematic metaphor. What does this mean? A human patient in critical condition is at risk of dying. But the planet is not going to "die", though many species will.

We need better ways of talking clearly (not with hyperbole) about the current situation and the stakes. Even with serious and aggressive policy changes, we'd still be on a track for key measures to get worse for some time, and we're bad at discussing "under costly policy A, X will be k% worse than today with expected outcome Y, but without adopting policy A, X with be (k+l)% worse than today expected outcome Z." So people end up saying "we're doomed regardless, so why should I have to pay/change/act?"


Why does this argument always come up? We all know the planet won't die. Humans might though. That's why we're concerned. This is always presented as some "ackshully" very smart argument. Yeah, it's a big fuckin rock, of course it won't die. That's not the concern.

So what does it mean? A lead person with the project said it, and it was the only quote from that person that made it into the article. The boundaries are explicitly said to not be known tipping points, so we don't know that some new mechanisms become dominant outside of them. We're only told that leaving these bounds is "higher-risk" and that inside the bounds is some "safe zone" but the actual risk or the meaning of "safety" in this context are not communicated.

This is a leading science publication reporting on an apparently notable finding about how serious the current situation is, but the actual information presented is either vague or hyperbolic.

Note, I'm not saying the situation isn't serious, or that drastic action isn't warranted. I'm saying this piece, discussing this work, is at minimum sloppy and unclear, and I think this is at the level of being counter-productive. When the situation is serious, try speaking clearly rather than in shrill metaphor.


For example, if they had said, "given this trend in ocean acidification, we think the combined die-offs in coral reef ecosystems, kelp-forest areas and reduced reproduction rate of these family of plankton, the rate at which marine ecosystems sequester carbon will decrease by k% in 10 years, which would be equivalent in impact to <list of countries> abandoning their 2050 emissions targets" that would be a clear way to explain the scale of one dimension of the impact. Or "the decrease in marine biodiversity on <whatever measure> over the next decade would be equivalent to k times the losses from commercial fishing over the past decade".

Or something more concrete than "we're headed to a bad state."


It will probably take a lot to make humans die out at this point. Humans will die, but not humanity. Technological society might collapse, although I think our adaptability will ultimately save it. And it will continue to destroy the conditions for other species to survive, as we collapse and then grow again - until we figure out how to not do that.

There only one resolution to this big conundrum and that is to make technological society to not compete with the biological ecosystem of earth.


only poorer humans will suffer and die. the rich will be fine.

Certainly it's true that kids can get a lot of joy out of something that to an adult seems really small or boring. But the flip side is kids can get totally emotionally distraught or enraged over tiny things.

Are these two sides of the same coin, and come from having just a smaller world, where small things can feel very big to a developing brain? Or as an adult with a fully-formed brain and access to the larger world, can we separate them and find that kind of unrestrained joy in the small stuff without also being swept away by small disappointments?


I think many adults also get distraught or enraged by tiny things - it is an emotional regulation problem, not an age problem (but adults can and should be better than children).

Curiously enough, not a lot of those adults still find joy in the tiny things.

An analogy I've heard in the past is that emotions are like a button fixed in a box with a ball in it. When you're younger the box is smaller so the ball hits the buttons more often as there is less free space. As you grow, your box grows too, so your ball has more space in the box and more empty space on the walls for the ball the bounce off of, making the buttons less likely to be pushed.

That analogy seems a bit contrived, but the "button pushing" reminds me of something.

At a recent dentist visit the Lidocaine local anaesthetic was accidentally injected into a (small) artery. That's when I discovered that it's a mixture that includes adrenaline, which contracts peripheral blood vessels, preventing it from dispersing too fast. Unless.. it goes directly into an artery, sending it straight into circulation.

To this day I can't come up for a better explanation of what happened, other than it felt like someone had simply pressed a button in my brain labelled "panic".

The dentist explained what had happened, I fully understood everything, I'm not at all afraid of dentistry, and I'm not easily frightened. None of that mattered. The button had been pressed, and now I was panicking for no discernible cause. Just... naked panic. Panic, panic, panic.

I had to cancel the appointment and walk home, slowly, listening to calming music the whole way and trying not to sprint down the sidewalk to escape whatever I felt like was chasing after me.


Although probably not great at the time,.. I can imagine it would be an interesting experience.

Did it change how you much control you feel you have in regards to being in charge of your own thoughts and emotions?


What a great question!

Thinking about it… yes, I suppose it did change my perspective.

It made me feel a lot more empathy for the “lone woman in a dark parking lot” scenario.

It made me realise I’m a meat computer running on chemicals and I’m not as in control of my emotions as I previously liked to think.

I realised that strong feelings can occur without an apparent matching cause. Feeling good without a success, feeling bad without hurt, etc… Emotions exist in and of themselves and can be directly triggered.

Etc… probably too much to write here, and things that are probably obvious to most readers but wasn’t obvious to me until that incident.

PS: It reminds me of instinct: we humans don’t have many that can override our conscious minds, but we do have some. The feeling of drowning for example can trigger completely involuntary actions. Unless you’ve experienced something like this, you just don’t know what it’s like to have biology overrule your thoughts.


This "ball and button in a box" analogy is precisely the one that people told me about when I was processing grief.

Right after the traumatic event, the "ball" hit the "button" nearly continuously, but as the months and years progressed, it's gotten farther and farther apart.


>But the flip side is kids can get totally emotionally distraught or enraged over tiny things.

Oof isn't this the truth. The tiniest things will drive my son into full meltdowns right now.


From what I've read, children's brains haven't fully developed the capability for emotional regulation. So not only are they less experienced, they might actually be physically incapable of managing their own emotions. Keeping this in mind helped me survive the toddler years. :)

When you're a kid, so many experiences are new, so the emotional response is higher.

A kid might fall off their bike, get a minor scrape on their knee, and cry because while the pain is pretty minor, it might actually be the greatest pain they've ever experienced in their life.

As an adult, you're probably not experiencing a lot of new things, and the new things you're experiencing are likely variations of things you've already done.

Though uh...I've seen my wife's boobs thousands of times, yet my brain still reacts like it did the first time. >.>


Yes. Basically kids can have strong emotional reactions to seemingly small things.

They naturally take all the space they can get, learning their limits. Issue is, they don't hear "no" often enough early on, to know that there are limits.

I don’t think it’s an either or. They are two sides of the same coin in that “kids experience stronger emotions”, but my experience leads me to see multiple reasons for that.

There’s the external trigger and how it fits into their life experience. Something that may be a 6/10 fun for you may literally be the most fun the child has ever had because they have less life experience. Something that’s a 2/10 pain might be literally the most pain they ever remember experiencing.

Which plays into how much practice they have managing these emotions. You get better at dealing with pain and frustration with practice. But no amount of practicing dealing with a paper cut will ever prepare you for being stabbed. Curling a 5lb dumbbell every day won’t get you to curling 100lbs.

But this is also impacted by the options they have available to respond to these emotions. As an adult if you’re frustrated you have the practice, fully realized autonomy, and societal trust to make real changes to address the issues in front of you. You don’t need to deal with this entirely internally. As a child, often your options essentially boil down to “deal with it”. And even as they expand, it takes time to practice with the new options available to you.

So an adult will experience the emotions less heightened and they also have more practice and better tools for handling them. The child will experience a stronger emotion, have little practice in managing the emotion, and few other options to address the overall situation.

Which can easily get into a negative feedback loop. Something is frustrating. The emotion is strong and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s frustrating. You can’t fix the situation. That’s frustrating. Now you’re more frustrated, GOTO 10. Pretty soon the emotions have compounded into something overwhelming.

And a child, much like an adult that hits this point, is going to have a meltdown. I don’t think adults are much better equipped at handling themselves when they are experiencing overwhelming emotions, it’s just much more difficult for them to get there in the first place.

As an adult, I think you can absolutely learn to find more joy in the small things. We have to, by necessity, filter some of the small things out of our days so just being an adult doesn’t become overwhelming. Making a conscious effort to be present and aware can go a long way. This is, I think, what’s happening when people have these mundane experiences with children and find them magical—simply having the child there to point things out and force them to be aware can bring back a lot of that small joy. It will never rise to the same level as the child’s because you come into it with a greater range of experience and it often lacks the novelty, but it can be made into much more than it normally is for you. And you will certainly be dragged down much less by any negative parts of the experience.

Anyway, my two cents as someone that spends a lot of time thinking about this both in terms of managing my own emotions and happiness as well as being a dad… And someone that’s trying _very_ hard to procrastinate right now.


Also in the 'solution to shop-lifting makes me shop elsewhere', there are two locally-owned independent hardware stores in walking distance from my home.

One has a 'buzz to enter' vestibule with two doors whose locks are controlled by the cashier. You ring the exterior bell, the cashier buzzes you through the first door, and only after it closes will they buzz open the second door -- so you're trapped. The same is true on the exit. No one can run out of the store with an expensive power tool they didn't pay for. But even though I'm not stealing anything but I find the whole experience so deeply unpleasant that I've stopped going there at all.

The second independent hardware store now has multiple security people at the front, and a mandatory bag-check policy. Except the bag check line is the customer service line, and I've literally waited 30 minutes total to drop off and then pick up my bag, stuck behind people with elaborate customer service requests. They have a bunch of staff on the floor, but they often don't actually know where stuff is, whether they carry X, etc. It becomes impossible to make a quick purchase of a single item.

So more and more, I'm apt to buy whatever it was online. I don't want the extra amazon packaging. I tried going literally out of my way to buy at the local independent business. But they made it such a crap waste-of-time experience.


If they really trap you (and there is no manual override, which could have an alarm), this would be a violation of fire codes in the US.

> but they often don't actually know where stuff is, whether they carry X

That's the standard at all of the Home-Depots / Walmarts / Lowe's around here. If you ask the location of something the associate just looks it up on their devices.

If you ask a question about an item the associate reads the description on the website and can't provide an answer, because I just read the description... and couldn't find the answer. That's why I asked the associate.


Meanwhile my experience at the Lowe's and HD's around me they'll know what you're asking down to the bay. Often even "bottom right of bay x on isle y".

And the kids love the kits on the first Saturdays at HD.


Just FYI - at least through the HD website, they will tell you aisle Y bay X (though it may not say "bottom right"). So the assistant at HD isn't adding a ton of value.

> So the assistant at HD isn't adding a ton of value.

They are, in that then I don't have to pull out my phone, wait for the app to load, wait for the app to interrupt my workflow to flash up the latest sale ad, wait for the search to time out a few times, then realize I'm in the store so it reloads to show the in-store experience, then go back to the search and have it not remember the history, then have to wait for the search to go through, then scroll through the list to find a version of whatever item that's actually in the store I'm at, then wait for the item to load, then finally get the isle and bay info. Pulling out the app is often my last resort.

Or I just ask the person standing next to me "hey where are replacement blades for utility knives?" and instantly get a response.


> But even though I'm not stealing anything but I find the whole experience so deeply unpleasant that I've stopped going there at all.

You're offended just for being buzzed in and out? Why?

That's about the least offensive thing a business can do.

If they were selling jewelry instead of hardware, everybody would consider it a mark of being upscale.


I'm not offended. I'm uncomfortable being trapped in an enclosed box in which I'm reliant on another person (who clearly distrusts me) taking 4 separate actions for me to enter and exit. The article points out that shoppers at Walgreens would rather go to another store than ask and wait for for a staff person to unlock their razor cartridges or whatever. This hardware store has effectively wrapped their business in such a barrier, and I would rather go to another store than ask and wait for a staff person to unlock 4 doors for me.

Also, implicit in all of this is that:

- you are submitting yourself for judgement based on how you look for them to decide whether you're likely to be a paying customer. I doubt whether any set criteria are used, but I fully expect that race, age, gender, and a range of class markers are involved.

- though they the business are distrustful and unwelcoming of you the prospective customer, you the customer are forced to be entirely trusting of their staff. They start the interaction off by broadcasting the presumption that you may be a threat, and establishing unilateral physical control to restrain people on entry or exit. I read this as both hostile and inequitable.


And this gets at why the availability of AI doesn't necessarily lead to prosperity and abundance. If you have to subscribe to an AI medical care and benefits advocate, and your insurer buys an AI service to automate the generation of reasons to deny your claims, and you see your doctor for 5 minutes at a time during which they push you towards a drug recommended by an AI Prescriber Assistant app provided by the pharma company ... then we can all be using AI in misaligned ways that leave us no better off.

Complexity breeds complexity.

When bacteria developed more complex ways to fight off viruses, viruses developed more complex ways of infecting bacteria. Now a few billion years later we have insanely complex multicellular life because of it.

If AI can manage complexity better it can create complexity better and us lowly humans will all be screwed by that.


Can you expand on the "greatest technology" half of your comment?

I can see plenty of clear reasons why bureaucratic collective action is in need of investment, but I'm predisposed to suspect that's because currently it's pretty bad.


I believe the claim is that we have no more powerful technology for the coordination of human action at very large scales. If so, I wouldn't disagree.


Yeah pretty much. If an extinction level asteroid pops up tomorrow it’s not going to be rugged individualism and entrepreneurial spirit that saves the day, it’s going to be the ability to efficiently coordinate millions of people to achieve a goal.


in that particular scenario i'm sure SpaceX will be a big part of the solution so... probably a mix of both. A weapon of mass destruction developed by a nation and a space vehicle developed privately by an individual tired of the status quo.


Developed "privately" only in the rather facile sense this can be said of anything done with the necessary support of massive federal funding, yes. It's bureaucracy that allocates and disburses that money.


I suppose by greatest I mean: increasingly important as we scale.


How important is this, though? Apparently though it's a growing contributor, air travel contributes roughly 2.5% of overall emissions. Even for academics who "need" to attend conferences in person, how many conferences does the average academic fly to per year?

I tried one of those online carbon calculators which spat out 1.4 tons CO2 for a round trip west coast to east coast trip (SF / NYC). The average American emissions are at like 10x that, so while it's significant, depending on how many long-haul flights you have per year, it may still matter less than your day-to-day transportation, what you eat, heating your home, etc.


Don't you find it interesting that when looking up the overall CO2 emissions of flying you found the number 2.5%, barely relevant, but when you looked up the emissions from a single long haul flight that ended up being ~10% of the average American emissions (already much larger than the global average).

How can those two numbers be combined? Most of the worlds population never fly, and that's why it's a relatively small fraction of global emissions. But it's still a very sizeable portion of the emissions of people who do fly, and that makes it relevant.

It's the same as saying: is it really important that people in Belgium cause large CO2 emissions? It's such a small country, barely 1 % of global emissions, there's no point to them reducing their emissions. But that's a fallacy (obviously). All emissions can be decomposed into small sets and dismissed as irrelevant.

The important question is: how much benefit does these emissions cause compared to alternatives? And, would these emissions fit in the global co2 budget?


You're arguing against a straw man. No one is claiming that the emissions from academics flying doesn't contribute to total emissions or that there's "no point" in reducing them. That's just silly.

But is it academics flying to conferences important? And is viewing academics as being somehow "accountable" for work-related emissions useful?

Certainly a minority of people on the planet fly. But the people that fly regularly also are likely to live in a way that overall uses more carbon -- eating more meat, owning/driving personal vehicles, using AC more etc. Even for them, even if you believe that professional travel is the responsibility of the individual, perhaps their biggest opportunity to reduce is by a change of diet, or something else. Again, it would help to have figures on how many conference-flights per year the average academic is doing.

Is it important to the rest of us? From quick searches, it sounds like ~12% of air passengers are on business travel, so talking about personal and tourist travel seems close to an order of magnitude bigger opportunity than reducing work travel. And even then, of work travel, how much is from conferences vs e.g. sales people and consultants going to meet with customers?

Is the implied alternative to traveling to conferences doing everything online? Then how does stopping conference travel compare in emissions to doing all instruction online and dropping the commutes of university faculty on a day-to-day basis?

This article seems more like a "gotcha" than a valuable insight. A lot of people think emissions need to come down sharply, but we're all stuck in systems that make this quite difficult. Academics are not special in this regard, and I am not convinced that conference travel is even the most important source for that small group.


Regardless of how much impact it has, it makes them look like hypocrites. If climate change is truly an issue that threatens millions of lives then maybe don't contribute to it unless you absolutely have to.


> then maybe don't contribute to it unless you absolutely have to.

We don't "absolutely have to" do anything. Our comments contributed to climate change, but we did it anyway. Living contributes to climate change, but we don't stop. All of us are choosing some acceptable threshold for our lives.


Perhaps a really naive question: what can you do with a solar sail in orbit?

I've always heard these as mentioned in the context of very long distance trips (heading away from the sun). But if you're orbiting the earth, how do you take advantage of this? In general, how do you use a solar sail to do anything other than head away from the sun?


The sail doesn't have to be oriented directly perpendicular to the sun. By angling it, you can gain momentum in other directions, just like a sail on a boat doesn't have to push you directly downwind.

When in orbit around earth, thrust in the direction of your orbit (prograde) causes you to gain energy and altitude, and retrograde thrust does the opposite.


> just like a sail on a boat doesn't have to push you directly downwind

I'm not a sailor, but doesn't this rely on the force of water on the keel, to avoid being pushed laterally?

> When in orbit around earth, thrust in the direction of your orbit (prograde) causes you to gain energy and altitude, and retrograde thrust does the opposite.

For station-keeping purposes, when should you prefer a solar sail as versus PV panels and an ion drive?


> I'm not a sailor, but doesn't this rely on the force of water on the keel, to avoid being pushed laterally?

The analogy with sailing is actually kind of weak.

Since you get elastic collisions with photons on the sail, you can (approach) applying force at 90 degrees from the direction of the light. Unlike with actual sailing, you can never have an "upwind" force component.


Huh, now that I think about this, it makes me realize solar sails might be able to be used to drop material directly into the sun? Angle it for maximum retrograde acceleration in a solar orbit, and twenty years later the cargo impacts the sun? That's normally a very difficult task.


My intuition is failing me here. How does that work since there is no body of water like a boat has to push off?


It's true that the mechanism is different, but this still works (to a limited extent) even without any external object to transfer momentum to, just using the momentum of the photons themselves.

I can't be bothered to draw a diagram, but imagine that the sun is to the "north", and the solar sail is at a 45-degree angle running NE/SW. Incoming photons heading south reflect off the sail and leave to the west. So the photons experience a net momentum change to the NW, pushing the sail to the SE, which is not directly away from the sun.


Thanks, that makes complete sense!


The sail is a mirror. Subtract the momentum vector of the incoming light from that of the reflected light and you have the momentum change applied to the sail.


Is there any indication of how much thrust/acceleration they expect from this, and over what time scale?


625 micro-newtons [1]. Total weight of craft is 16kg [2]. That works out to 3.4 m/s gained per day.

[1] The "Solar Sail" wikipedia page says 800m x 800m is about 5N. This is 80m^2.

[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20210017923/downloads/Sm...


Interesting data. This[1] seems to suggest that this relatively small solar sail would be able to reach the moon from earth's orbit after ~3 years (I could be horribly misinterpreting this data!). That seems impressive, given how "simple" this method is.

However, it strikes me as difficult to use this the deeper into space we go. I would assume the further from the sun you go, the less thrust you receive from the sail. Also, how do you slow down and stop? Maybe you don't...

[1] https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/5Page26.pdf


Sure, the amount of acceleration you get decreases as you get further from the nearest star, but that’s ok. Remember that you keep all the velocity you gained along the way, when you’re in space. You can be going pretty fast by the time you turn your sail to face the star at your destination.


Raise and lower your orbit, I guess. Any unbalanced force on something in orbit will do one of the two.


One of the image captions just says:

> Each new component for the vehicle is custom-made.

... which to me is kinda shocking. Both in terms of the cost of components and the labor needed to figure out each vehicle's specific conversion, this seems expensive, slow, and perhaps is a source of quality/safety concerns.

While I love the idea of being able to convert existing vehicles, more cheaply and with fewer resources than building all-new EVs, I'd think that you'd want:

- standardized components

- standardized math on safety implications (e.g. for the amount of increased mass, how do the breaks need to change to keep a reasonable stopping distance? Given some assumptions about driving speed, where does the center of mass need to be to avoid increased chance of rolling?)

- a slowly expanding database of specifics for each model and year, so if you're converting a previously-converted model, you can just follow a pre-compiled list of steps


As others have said, the article kind of exaggerated the situation -- EV conversions tend to use a lot of fairly standard parts. However, how those parts all fit together varies from one vehicle to another, and there's usually at least some parts that have to be custom made. Battery boxes, motor mounts, adapter plates to mount the motor to the transmission (if the original transmission is kept), and so on.

It'd be great if there were standard EV conversion kits for common ICE vehicles, designed to just bolt in with no fabrication required, designed to the same engineering standards as the original vehicle, and cheap. Something a typical mechanic could install in a week or less. That basically has to exist for EV conversion be a thing that happens on a large scale and not just a difficult and expensive weird hobby project. It's a shame EV tax credits don't apply to conversions -- it could absorb a substantial chunk of the cost. (Maybe some country somewhere does this, but not the U.S. anyways.)

Ideally dealing with extra weight and so on could be a relative non-issue as long as the battery pack is kept fairly small -- which is often the case on EV conversions because a) batteries are expensive and b) it's often hard to find a good place to cram them all. If the batteries are kept low, then center of gravity shouldn't be a problem. Probably better than the original configuration.

I've heard that having more than 50% of the weight on the back tires can be dangerous, as it's much harder to correct if you lose traction. The tendency is to spin out. So, putting all the batteries in the trunk is probably a bad idea in many cases.


There are off-the-shelf standard components for all major parts of the EV drivetrain.

The custom work is mostly in wiring that up, and building a battery cradle and motor mounts that can be installed without compromising car's original structure.


Well, you're in luck! Most components for converting an ICE vehicle to EV are, in-fact standard.

For example, check out evwest.com - they supply parts and kits to convert ICE cars to EVs.


> Both in terms of the cost of components and the labor needed to figure out each vehicle's specific conversion, this seems expensive, slow, and perhaps is a source of quality/safety concerns.

We are speaking about countries where that sort of labor costs between $0.5 to $3 per hour. The parts used aren't factory-new and the cost of labor is minuscule in comparison to the price of the vehicle.

There is no money for safety. You make do with what you have.


Another poster mentioned after taxes vehicles cost 1.5-2x of the US cost. There'd be more money for safety if they weren't so busy taxing the everliving shit out of car buyers.


Geometric relationships between engine mounts, engine itself, and engine output shaft into the transmission varies between each models. Trying to "standardize" that will be like trying to design a one-size-fits-all laptop motherboard; no two models are the same, so it won't work.


> ... which to me is kinda shocking.

I think they try to avoid this...

> In 2021, the Chilean transport ministry passed legislation banning the retrofitting of all used passenger vehicles.

Unless there are major problems, leave the legislation until you have a plan or draft regulation ready. It's 2024 now.


https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pakistan+engine...

you should take a look at how things get done in developing worlds.


... should companies be nervous about this also though? Is the decision for their payroll info to be visible to unknown buyers an intentional, well-considered one? Is this effectively leaking potentially strategically important info?

Like, I haven't seen this happen, but could a recruiting team buy the compensation data on staff at a competing firm, identify those that look like a good deal, and poach them starting with a "we'll offer you k% more than your current employer"?

Could market analysts use this data to notice when a company starts firing more people, or starts giving fewer/smaller raises? What if the next time your company showed up in a Gartner or Forrester report, it came along with a caveat "however given decreased investment in staff, their pace of product development or quality of client services may be at risk."


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