You don't need that analogy as the normal use of a automatic gun in war is not to kill, it is to suppress - stop the enemy from moving. If you are hit by a gun in automatic mode it is your own stupid fault. When you want to kill someone you switch to one shot or maybe 3 round bursts.
The only important thing to know is they're loud and thus impossible to conceal. Maybe someone out in the open would be hit if one starts firing unexpectedly. However, the vast majority of cases, the purpose of an automatic gun in war is just to put oatness stream of bullets so that everyone on the other side knows it's stupid to show your head and this allows your own people to move in relative safety because they know where your automatic weapon isn't going to be firing and the enemy, of course, isn't going to be able to respond.
Western courts have a different perspective since they pretty much universally don't have the larger issue of the Chinese manufacturing as a consideration.
Which is to day you can go to any western court and have import stopped at the border.
That depends. When I'm working on a 1 in a million race condition in some multi-threaded code, the agent needs hours to figure out what is going on. (I would probably need weeks - I don't know as I've given up on some of these before I could point an agent at it)
Battery technology is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. I'm not an expert in battery technology, but I trust those who are to know physics and chemistry. We are likely asymptotically approaching a known limit. Perhaps someone who is an expert can tell us where those are.
- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!
- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!
- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.
- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
> A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!
unfortunately burning things results in a lot more energy than the processes a battery uses.
> Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum,
Well... We do know how to make gasoline from the atoms - the same process that we use the make synthetic oil can result in gasoline as well. Of course this would case about 4x as much so nobody does. There is more energy in synthetic diesel some races use that since the energy content is part of winning. (generally though race cars use a gasoline engine running an alcohol because they can get more power and don't care about fuel economy).
> Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
Yes and no. Technology is getting better. The laws of chemistry and physics tell us the limits of this technology, but not how close to those limits we can achieve in the real world.
> johnea 39 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them b...
Thank you for raising this point!
It calls for a couple of specific responses:
- A battery doesn't have to be set on fire to get the energy out of it!
- Energy can be put back into a battery, allowing them to be used over and over again!
- Electricity for putting into batteries can come from many different sources of generation. Gasoline only comes from one place: petroleum, the extraction and burning of which is a very dirty process.
- Battery chemistry is not one thing, there are very many, and the energy densities of different chemistries are increasing rapidly. This leaves a LOT of room for battery energy density to be increased via technical innovation.
- Gasoline has a fixed chemical structure that contains a fixed amount of energy. Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
Utterly false. Octane is a specific molecule with a fixed amount of energy. However gasoline is many different molecules with different energy content. The total is all close enough to the same that we don't normally think of this, but there are variations that we can measure in the lab.
> Unlike batteries, there isn't much innovation that can occur to change that energy density.
There is, but that would be a lot more expensive (see synthetic gasoline above) and so
we don't. More importantly, even accounting for the losses in a ICE, gasoline is still a lot more energy dense than we expect a battery to ever reach.
And if you want to get really exotic, antimatter is about 83.2 billion times more energy dense. We're not going to be running into fundamental physics limitations for energy storage anytime soon.
Though maybe it's a little unfair to call either of those things a "battery", they seem like fundamentally different technologies to me even if in theory they could fill exactly the same role.
While we don't know everything, what we don't know must fit without the things we already know. It seems highly unlikely there is something significant in this area we don't know.
Not belief, things we have exponentially observed. Either you need to explain why the observation was actually incorrect. Or you need to have a theory that explains the observation. We believe relativity is correct because we have lots of experiments and observations that show that it's correct. That doesn't mean relativity is actually correct. However, it means that if it's wrong, whatever actually is correct must somehow encompass what relativity predicts in the same way relativity currently does.
For high volume routes rail is best. For lower volume automated cars on the highway are more efficient than flying by enough that only the rich will fly - just like today. You can book a helicopter flight home today if you are willing to pay for all the fuel. However even at 1/10th the energy cost, a car will be vastly cheaper and so what most people will choose. We also will continue to use trucks to move freight for many of these trips, so the roads will exist either way.
There is one other issue with flying: it often isn't legal - for good reason - to fly and land where you want to be. For a 300km trip flying to an airport is fine (if there is one close - they are not evenly scattered around), but at 50km you may as well drive the whole way instead of transfer at the airport - unless you live very close to the airport (which you won't because of noise)
> Layoffs are a strong signal that a business is not investing in growth and is just trying to wring more profit from the same thing. If investors were rational, they'd walk away.
Not always. A buggy whip maker in 1920 should be laying off people. No amount of investment in buggy whips will bring that market back.
A layoff is saying that the investment will not pay off. So long as the company is cutting the right things they are good. Many layoffs are not done with a proper cut of the work do be done and so are bad, but that doesn't mean they are always bad.
Yes! Not every business is worth investing in, even if it's currently a cash cow. Often it's better to return money to shareholders, so they can decide how to further deploy the resources.
The economy has always had ups and down. While that is no guarantee, it is a strong sign. Inflation means that rent will get cheaper in real terms just staying the same. Things will be bad - again - for a few years, not that is nothing unusual.
Of course real estate is very local. There is a big difference between property in a growing city and land in a rural small town.
Except we have the entire commerical business districts of small and mid sized cities destroyed from these practices and there is often no bouncing back from that. Oops.
Even in the best of times you will have empty places so they have to ignore unrented places since there is no formula that can tell the state of the economy from just current rent. Real estate is always local so even in the worst economies there is always some place booming
The bank knows but they maintain the fiction that they don't because their books collapse too if they count those. Banks make money from loans.
Don't forget this is typically a short term things. When the economy improves the building will be rented again. So they need the books to look good today to get through.
And commercial loans are NOT like your home mortgage. One you got your home loan, the bank no longer cares (or even can care) about the value of the house, only if you’re not actively destroying the property and maintaining insurance and paying on time.
Commercial loans are often shorter duration and roll over and highly tied to the valuation of the property or properties, and often have clauses allowing them to call the loan if valuation dips too much (think: margin call).
> Don't forget this is typically a short term things. When the economy improves the building will be rented again.
In my experience in many cases this is not true. The shift toward online shopping, for instance, has meant that a lot of retail properties have no realistic chance of recovering to previous values. The accounting shenanigans described in this thread are just a way for various people to play make-believe that their properties haven't already lost value permanently.
There have always been shifts in where people shop. However retail overall is still doing very well. Downtowns as a place people go to shop is mostly dead (in the US, not elsewhere), but people still go out to shop someplace and the new places will recover.
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