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Once EVs are economically attractive the transition can be very fast. I live in Denmark so I have seen it, it took 7 years to go from ~5% to 90+% of new cars sold. Both EU and US are now relying on trade barriers to keep Chinese EVs away from consumers.

well China debate aside, where are they? i've been dabbling in electrics for over a decade now, on the lower range they are still 30% more expensive than gas cars. Surely someone, anyone outside of China could have done one cheaper by now? Leaf came out 16 years ago and they still can't get it under $30k?

I assume you are coming from a US perspective, because smaller economical EVs are available in europe and dominate in asia. America car companies have managed to make a 50k+ truck the average new car purchase. They aren’t going to kill that golden calf voluntarily. Instead they have managed to lock out the competition. Why Musk elected to build another truck instead of the promised model 2 is beyond me. Besides, with EVs you really have to consider total cost, they are still slightly more expensive to buy in the EU as well, but you quickly make it back on fuel.

Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too. Transmissions, fuel pumps, timing belts, radiators (mostly), fuel injectors, emissions systems, etc are all out of the picture in an EV. Servicing those things may be infrequent but is often extremely expensive.

I think this is the biggest thing that non-EV owners do not understand. Or perhaps they do but not the full scope because money is spent little by little over the years. the oil changes, brakes, belts, starters, alternators, whatevers… I have 2014 Tesla S and I literally spent practically nothing for 11 years. I had to put in a new modem, replaced 12V battery twice and that’s about it. Still on original brakes (102k miles) because with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brakes, I mean there is just nothing to spend your money on (I even called Tesla in the beginning of my ownership and was like “do I need to being the car in for something” to be met with “is something wrong with the car? no? why are you calling us then??!” :) ). I will never own a non-EV car again and neither will my kid or anyone in my family

I hear a lot of Teslas banging around corners in my town and it leads me to believe that EV drivers freed from annual dealer maintenance actually believe that tie rod ends don't need to be inspected and replaced.

I recently had to do some service (12 years to the day of the purchase) and mechanic, who worked for tesla for a decade and now has a local shop, told me exactly the same thing - you got shit that moves, you gotta lube it once in a while! but I own another EV and 47.5k miles later the car hasn’t seen a dealership since I drove off it.

> Don't forget maintenance costs in the TCO calculation too.

OK? Then don’t forget to add a replacement battery, replacement battery heating and cooling system, factor in a few extra sets of tires over a lifetime of the vehicle, you can also assume the suspension will wear out earlier, so at least ball joints if not also struts.

I’m an automotive EE, there is no free lunch.

I have a car we just got rid of in our research shop, in order to replace the battery the entire rear suspension and half of the interior had to come out. To an insurance agency, the car was literally totaled between the cost of the battery and the labor to replace it.


I think EVs today are intended to last shorter than the battery. There has been examples of model 3s reaching 250k+ miles on the original battery, a number most cars (ICE or EV) do not come close to before being salvaged. There are also startups re-purposing battery packs for stationary use ex. from old Nissan leafs. So I don't think you should consider battery pack replacement costs as part of owning a EV.

We have blocked Chinese EVs precisely because they are 1) super cheap and 2) would wipe out our automakers.

Looked this up yesterday:

Inflation calculator site says 45% inflation since 2011, USD.


Denmark has 6M people. The US has 289M vehicles.

And how many new EVs did China make in the last 5 years?

Actually I have egg on my face; I looked it up and it's closer to "3 Denmarks" than "1 USA".

How is safety and quality for Chinese EVs? There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal, where a toxic substance was deliberately introduced into baby formula for domestic market. Chinese food imports were curtailed across many countries.

Capitalism over there is at another level, and cars are so complicated with tiny changes can have huge problems. Look at the immobilizer chips that Kia dropped to save $5, which resulted in thousands of car thefts and the whole Kia Boyz phenomenon.


Electric cars are way way simpler than ICE cars. It's just market segmentation gone wrong when EU car manufacturers wanted to sell these cheaper cars as premium/luxury ones (i.e. greed) and therefore couldn't learn the lessons from producing them at scale on cheaper models. China had poor ICE cars and bet everything on EVs, scaled their production up, reiterated a few times, and now Nio/Xiaomi/BYD/Zeekr are better than anything built in the EU.

I think the fear of low-quality and dangerous corner cutting is a big reason Chinese evs have not been even more popular in the EU. However as some brands start to establish themselves for longer they gain trust. Also we have Euro N-cap tests which are pretty extensive and lots of Chinese cars have earned excellent scores.

China also picked up (from A123) and ran with LFP batteries which are inherently safer.

> There was the 2008 melamine baby formula scandal

That was in 2008, which was 18 years ago. Comparing China in 2026 to China in 2008 is like comparing Japan in 1978 to Japan in 1960.


Spotify is still bad for classical music because you can’t ex. search by composer or label of find alternative recordings of the same piece etc. If you know what album you want already its ok, but if you like classical you should really consider IDAGIO.

And if you want one subscription for popular & classical music, Apple Music is miles ahead of Spotify.

Music.app is already better than Spotify at handling the relevant metadata. But the dedicated Apple Music Classical app is roughly the same as IDAGIO.

(They bought IDAGIO's former competitor Primephonic to do it)


Isn’t fundamentally the issue that for any symphony by Beethoven or whoever that there are thousands of recordings of performances? So if I decide I want to listen to a certain one then I also need to pick a particular performance that a particular orchestra did a certain time?

Apple Music has a totally separate app for classical music. It was specifically designed to address exactly this.

For each composer, it shows all their well known works, and then you can tap on each to see all the recordings of that particular piece.

Smart move on Apple’s part, if you ask me.


As mentioned above, they bought Primephonic, which already had all those features. For myself, I used Primephonic until Apple bought it, then switched to Idagio, in order to minimize my connection with the Apple machine.

I love that app. They have Dolby atmos mixes which seem like overkill but I was completely floored putting on a double bass work and being completely immersed in the center of the sound. Obviously great for large ensembles but surprisingly awesome at solo works

And the play history integrates with the main Music app


I always wondered why there were separate apps, and this makes total sense.

building recommendation systems for classical music has a simple data problem- most recommendation systems (for spotify and others) are based on simple user listening histories that look at "people that listened to X also listened to Y".

this is a problem for classical (and jazz) for two reasons a) these genres are not particularly popular on the platform so there are few unique users and b) the songs are LONG so listening sessions contain fewer songs.

track cooccurance based recs work well for popular genres, but these other genres need a different approach to recs and that's actually where AI could do really well by digging into the unstructured data associated with the tracks (sonic analysis of the song, biographical information about the composer, details about featured soloists, etc) rather than relying on piles of user behavior.


Fully agree, but it is also the buffer based navigation approach that is just fantastic. I wish other programs would adopt this. Most applications use dedicated areas for various functions, instead of letting me just hit a key to bring the function to where I am currently looking.

Emacs has multicursor, lsp and treesitter so from just reading the helix landing page idk what you gain? Bat sounds interesting, thanks.

What I like about Emacs (which has made me switch from Vim) is the sheer amount of tools you have by default. Vim can have something similar, but you have to do a lot of config or install plugins to get them.

The Christian church has nothing to do with truth. Sure it might offer community, but it is a community based on dogma, on faith, not truth. Why was humanity banished from the garden? For eating from the tree of knowledge. Join a Promethean cult if you can find it OP.

Weirdly enough, the Christian search for truth is what got me to agnosticism.

They told me to seek truth, it was what God wanted... Oops.

Literally read too much.


Only there would have never been an Enlightenment without Catholic rigor.

Granted, but fortunately things have improved since the middle ages.

Profitability works because it is/was a good proxy for utility. This breaks as wealth becomes unevenly distributed.


Not really, sure it is easier to find your cursor but that is not very hard using an external tablet, and you get much better ergonomics plus you can see what is under your hand.


By a wacom bamboo, costs next to nothing and works without charging the stylus. Of course if you are using it on the go it’s inconvenient.


Do you mount it on a stand? my neck hurts just thinking about going through a full workday on an ipad.


I’m using the iPad Magic Keyboard which is also a stand. So it’s pretty much the same as using a MacBook. I do have the 13 inch. I tried the 11 inch but personally I found that too small to use comfortably like this.


Makes sense, in my head an iPad is 11”, I don’t think I ever saw the 13” version IRL.


Next up, “American science”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik


I think that's quite far away. At least 12 months.


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