Yes, they buy some, with roughly the same percentage of new car sales being EV. However, those regions have a significantly higher percentage of households with multiple cars, and they have overall a significantly higher fraction of ICE cars in service than do the warmer areas.
This means you can't really make deductions about EV performance in very cold weather in those very cold regions without getting data on what the EVs are being used for. It could be most of them are in households where they have ICE cars to handle things where they need long range or when they need to tow or haul things, and the EVs are just used for things where loss of range and capacity doesn't matter much.
Probably has a lot to do with the incentives—tax rebates for EVs, taxes for ICE cars, cost of fuel, availability of fast chargers, etc. I’m glad Norway is pushing hard for greater adoption (and the US should too), but these things don’t make for a meaningful comparison.
Well no, and I agree with you - but I think it's a fair rebutal to someone saying that EV's can't work somewhere where it's really cold, like the only reason people in the northern united states or canada don't buy EVs is purely because of the cold - that's a factor, sure, but I think there's a lot of other reasons other than cold.
I’m the person to whom this rebuttal was originally made, and I did not say that EVs can’t work in the cold (I own one and I live in a northern state—they work, but not flawlessly).
I was only disagreeing with another commenter who claimed the status quo was fine. There’s a pretty big gap between “not fine” and “not workable”.
I believe that they were responding to this specific part of your comment:
> But the idea that drones must keep track of which individual properties allow flight above and which don't, and try to navigate some around some kind of patchwork accordingly, is simply unpractical and unreasonable
Flying over public roads would be a way to avoid flying over properties that do not allow drones and would not be unpractical.
OK, but the point is, it doesn't fix any problems either.
But it does create them, if drones have to travel 2x as far by following roads, which wastes energy, limits range, and requires flying more drones to achieve the same level of e.g. deliveries.
The larger point is that property owners don't have a legitimate reason to ban drones passing 200 ft over their house. If they're bothered by noise, why are they going to be any less bothered because the drone is flying 50 ft away over the road at the end of their driveway? If they're worried about drones falling out of the sky, they're still going to be bothered about their car being hit during their entire morning and evening commute.
Probably not necessary, but it can be quite convenient.
In the late '90s a company called Kozmo.com was doing 60 minute delivery in several cities of some basic food and snack, games, CDs, DVDs, magazines, books, and some other things.
It was pretty nice one night when I started watching "Seven Samurai" on a basic cable channel, and about 30 minutes in got annoyed at the number of commercial breaks they were inserting. During the next break I popped onto the computer, ordered the movie on DVD, along with some microwave popcorn and some drinks. I then went back to watching on TV.
About 15 minutes later their driver showed up, and 5 minutes after that I was watching from the DVD and eating my popcorn.
What many people overlook is that, in Marvel terms, Epstein was not the kind of villain that Magneto or the Red Skull or Thanos are/were.
Epstein was the kind of villain that Wilson Fisk or Norman Osborn or Alexander Pierce are/were.
The former don't make any attempt to hide their evil.
The latter go to great effort to have public personas that do good.
Wilson Fisk for example was known to the public and most authorities as a philanthropic New York City businessman known for his major donations that the city and its institutions. Behind the scenes he was know as the Kingpin of Crime running a large organized crime, human trafficking, drug, and assassination operation. But only a few heroes (Daredevil and Spider-Man) and some officials knew or suspected.
To succeed in the latter kind of villainy it is essential that you cultivate relationships with a lot of respectable people who you make sure do not get involved in the evil side so you can keep the public persona's reputation clean.
Then be careful to never do anything that is interesting enough or important enough that it will become newsworthy, or write any books or articles on interesting or important topics, or even posting helpful things on social media.
There are a lot of people in Epstein's email history who are there because the above kinds of things caught his interest, and he wanted to discuss or recommend them to others.
> Drivers in the UK must be able to read a number plate from 20 metres away, according to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA).
Unless I've botched the math and/or what the internet tells me about the size of the characters on a UK number plate is wrong this seems to be a bit overboard.
The internet is telling me that the characters are 79mm tall and 50mm wide (except for '1' and 'I') with a 14mm stroke.
My eyes right now are about 250mm from my monitor. Something that is 79mm tall and 20m away would have the same angular size as something 250mm away that is 79mm / 20m x 250mm = 0.9875mm tall.
If I set the size to 75% in Chrome that is the size of the numbers on this page in the timestamps and the submission points and comment counts. It is about 1/2 the size of the numbers in the text box that I'm writing this comment in.
I've just taken a photo of that and will include a link to it to show how small that is [1]. In that I'm holding a ruler next to the left side of the text. The "180" up where it says "180 points" is what you have to be able to read to pass the test. (If you can't see the photo because Imgur blocks your country just grab a ruler, hold it vertically 25cm in front of you, and the apparent size of the space between the mm marks is the size character you need to read).
I have no idea what road signs and markings are like in the UK, but in the US in ~50 years of driving I don't think I've ever needed to read anything anywhere near that small.
I'm sorry to say your conclusion doesn't hold. I'm not sure where exactly you went wrong, without trying to do the math my best guess would be that you just can't properly simulate a far-sight task in a near-sight environment like that. Our eyes don't work that way.
But if you go outside and do a real world test, you'll (hopefully) find that a number plate should be readable from much further away than 20 meters. If you don't, please go and see an optometrist! I'm serious.
20 m is actually a very lenient requirement IMO. In my country, one should be able to read a number plate from about 35 m easily, and with good eyesight, 65 m and more shouldn't be a problem.
Someone with 20:20 vision can read a UK number plate from about 60m so the 20m standard allows for some eye imperfections. You're allowed to use glasses.
I have some experience because I got a macular hole in one eye which had surgery. With the good eye I can do about 60m, with the problem one about 20.
I've got an idea for a simpler approach, but I've forgotten too much math to be able to actually try it.
The idea is to consider the set A of all circles that intersect the unit circle.
If you pick 3 random points inside the unit circle the probability that circle c ∈ A is the circle determined by those points should be proportional the length of the intersection of c's circumference with the unit circle.
The constant of proportionality should be such that the integral over all the circles is 1.
Then consider the set of all circles that are contained entirely in the unit circle. Integrate their circumferences times the aforementioned constant over all of these contained circles.
The ratio of these two integrals should I think be the desired probability.
I like this reasoning. Define a probability distribution on all circles of (x,y,r>0) based on how likely a given circle is. Then we can just sum the good circles and all the circles.
And the probability distribution is simple: a given (x,y,r) is as likely as its circumference in the unit circle.
Reasoning: Let C:(x,y,r) a given circle. We want to know how likely is it that the circle on 3 random points are close to it, closer than a given value d. (A d wide ball or cube around C in (x,y,r) space. Different shapes lead to diffferent constants but same for every circle.) The set of good 3 points is more or less the same as the set of 3 points from the point set C(d): make C's circumference d thick, and pick the 3 points from this set. Now not any 3 points will suffice, but we can hope that the error goes to 0 as d goes to 0 and there is no systematic error.
Then we just have to integrate.
ChatGPT got me the result 2/3, so it's incorrect. I guess the circumference must not be the right distribution.
Maybe it should be the cube of the amount of circumference inside the unit circle, because 3 random points have to land on the circle for it to be chosen.
The thing that popped out to me playing around with that is that when you look at most of these things from the late '70s through now, many show some modest growth or flatness through the '90s, then grew a little more up through the 2010s or so, and have pulled back a little in the last few years to roughly 2008ish levels. This is for both math and reading and for both 9 year olds and 13 year olds.
Depending on what exactly you are looking at the places that it grew or was flat or declines change, but overall the big picture look gives me more "keep an eye on it" vibes than "we've got a crisis" vibes that some people seem to think are justified.
Careful looking at their graphs. If you don't keep in mind that they are showing changes you could get a wrong impression. For example on the page they link to to get data from every state, https://edunomicslab.org/roi-over-time/ , it shows the graphs for Massachusetts and Mississippi side by side.
In Massachusetts 8th grade math is down about 17 points. In Mississippi math down about 2 points. (I'm using 2022 scores).
That could give the impression that math scores are higher in Mississippi since the math line on the Massachusetts graph is way lower than the corresponding line on the Mississippi graph.
But the actual scores those years were 284 for Massachusetts and 268 for Mississippi.
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