I think you greatly overestimate how many 8-10 year old EVs will actually require replacement batteries. Barring a few models with poor engineering choices, most cars will still have 80% of their capacity after 10 years and won't have the downsides of having a 10 year old ICE engine with a variable record of maintenance.
Is an EV with 80% battery still usable? I ask because phones with 80% batteries are practically e-waste, or urgently needing a replacement. It's not a fair comparison but that degraded battery in a phone is a problem, because the phone still requires a certain amount of power that the battery now struggles to provide and overheats, in many cases, causing secondary damage to other components (like the display).
Phone batteries have relatively little margin. If it lasts barely a full day at full capacity, going down to 80% means you can no longer reliably say "I'll charge it overnight".
A car battery that lasted 300km new but now only 200km is still entirely adequate for a commuter with a 25km typical commute, and occasional 75km days out.
EVs that are 10 years old now will have a lower range than current models, AFAIK, so 80% of that might still be limiting. They will also be slower charging.
Do the vast majority never drive a long distance? If you use a car purely for short journeys maybe. Is this common in the US? Everywhere I have lived most people do atleast some long (i.e. an ICE car needs refuelling at some point) some long trips.
The way this was dealt with historically, for better or for worse, was to put the cheap housing under the flight path. The proles were left to deal with the noise. The Harlem neighborhood of Kansas City North is a good example of this. It sits next to MKC and has a flophouse motel, a car repair shop, and little else.
When aircraft got significantly faster, heavier, and larger with the advent of jet airliners, it became less of a noise issue and more of a safety issue. You can tell people to put up with noise, you can't tell them to put up with a huge airplane falling out of the sky onto their homes.
Merchants aren't going cash only to sell your data, they're doing it because it's expensive to handle cash and makes their taxes a whole lot more troublesome too.
Nothing, and if it were subtle enough it could be effective at making it drift around. Lots of ways to get a rough fix though, and you don’t need very good absolute accuracy offshore, using a compass and log to DR your way around. Even better if you have a wind vane and anemometer. The majority of your drift will be wind driven.
I think the whole trackpad idea is stupid and unusable (like anything that needs software correction for physical layout idiocy) and I blame Apple for its prevalence. Apple could make an entirely worthless product and within 4 years everyone would have to copy it.
Agreed… but really only for macs. That’s where it’s beautiful.
I even use their larger external trackpad with the mini. But on work supplied machines and such I use a conventional mouse.
It’s not even because everyone else's trackpads are fucking garbage (they are). It’s that systems that aren’t macs just weren’t built around using one.
Some of the slightly-less-trashy bits of 3rd party software try to bridge the gap, but it’s not the same.
> It’s not even because everyone else's trackpads are fucking garbage (they are). It’s that systems that aren’t macs just weren’t built around using one.
Not to support the idea that good touchpad is apple’s monopoly, but I and most people I know stop having wrist pains by giving up the mouse. If we’re talking about a stupid idea that’s both inefficient and a health hazard, the mouse is it. All the other pointing devices (trackball, trackpoint, rolling mouse etc) make sense one way or another
Needing a 3rd hand for a peripheral is naturally a flawed idea. The only
reason I prefer the mouse over the palm trackpad is because it can't interfere
while probably still having to use it occasionally. The track point and
trackball were better interfaces than both but they weren't a great platform
for making Apple look innovative.
the 3rd hand wasn't event what I meant by inefficient, it more that you need an extra surface to move some pointer and do the least possible amount of HCI data transfer. It's so... lame in this age of mobiliy
I'm not sure about the overall argument.. But I think arthritis of the fingers manifests eventually for most people who work with their hands and finger movement combined with any compression on tendons exacerbates carpal tunnel syndrome. Ergonomic I/O makers are essentially experimenting on the population, but less ethically as their bias is in using a bunch of nonsense to further a dialogue that supports whichever patents they obtained.
Personally I don't believe anything requiring 3 hands could be adequately tested given the freedom of movement given to the subject. I think only 2 hand home row keyboard use with specific additional positioning requirements has a flake of scientific rigour. (This is why I could only honestly support the track pointer in the home row as the least risky of the choices as it is the smallest deviation from something with a foundation.)
The difference being Swiss watches are elegantly engineered pieces of art whereas internal combustion engines of any kind are essentially just rube goldberg machines that we have collectively normalised as a society.
I think you’re underselling the amount of sophistication and refinement that goes into a modern ICE, which is the backbone of a big part of the global economy.
That doesn't change the fact that they are worse at what they do than an equivalent electric motor. There's zero reason we need ICE. We have better technology, we just don't have the will (at least in America) to fully adopt it.
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