It's eternally fascinating that people can't or won't grasp that the cars cost far more to produce than they could put them to market for, instead deciding that it was a big conspiracy.
It took until ~2015 for batteries to become practical for expensive mass market cars.
I am not an expert but I believe that US regulations require that manufacturers make a range of vehicle types to sell on the US market. You don't need to sell a lot of, say, compact cars - but you need to offer a compact car in order to sell your cash-cow large trucks.
CAFE didn't work like this, it was a lot dumber. Basically it weighed the fuel economy for vehicles under 6000 pounds between two categories: passenger cars (sedans, coupes, wagons) and light trucks (vans, SUVs, crossovers). Passenger cars had an MPG target of ~8 MPG higher than light trucks. Car manufacturers that couldn't get their MPG (weighted between sales of the two categories from that manufacturer) below the targets were fined. Essentially this incentivized car companies to sell fewer passenger cars and more light trucks so their target MPG was lower. This is why crossovers have basically taken over the market in the US. Car manufacturers modified their designs to count as light trucks (lowering the MPG by 1-2), but since the target for light trucks is 8 MPG lower than passenger cars, they look more compliant on paper. We've gone from passenger cars making up ~50% of US car sales in 2000 to ~20% of car sales today.
I use the past tense because the Trump admin has gotten rid of the fines for this regulation so it basically doesn't matter anymore (one of the few good moves it's done). It'll be interesting to see if small cars are able to make a recovery in the US, or if it's too late.
CAFE wasn't 'dumb', it was designed to prevent the 'big three' from manufacturing (new generations of) small cars outside the USA (i.e. in Mexico), with non-UAW labor. CAFE was not designed to protect the environment or reduce emissions; that was just a PR veneer to make it more palatable. You're completely correct that it led to strange designs, perhaps most notably the PT Cruiser (which was classified as a truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_PT_Cruiser).
And it killed a bunch of useful smaller truckish vehicles because they scored poorly. The Ford Ranger, the Chevy Astro, the Crown Vic and every other sedan with a big ass.
I am sure it'll be a few years as manufacturers will worry that a future admin (if we get such a thing lol) could un-remove the fees - but it would be wonderful to see actual small trucks again.
And even now, the fantasy of the $30,000 EV hasn't really been realized. In the US, your only option right now is the Leaf, but good luck finding one for under $32,000.
If that was the fantasy even 6 years ago, the fantasy should have been updated for inflation to a $40,000 EV. I don’t even mean to exaggerate — that’s how much inflation we’ve had since 2020. We have plenty of sub-$40k EVs.
It's kind of a yes both. A base Model 3 is in the same price range as decent hybrids that will be more convenient for many owners given current highway adjacent charging infrastructure.
Of course there are also new vehicles that cost quite a bit less than a base Model 3, but they invite a discussion of not being all that comparable.
Sure if $37k is a lot for a car I’ll agree with you. Then I think Tesla is now just joining Rivian and Lucid by being too expensive. The infrastructure would be besides the point then because you don’t care about that if you can’t even afford the car.
37k with 20% down payment means you borrow $29k at say, a 4.79% interest rate for 60 months so... $556/month. I know we're on HN with high salaried tech workers but c'mon, that's a lot of money and doesn't even include insurance.
That and their base model 3 is RWD which makes it a non-starter for anyone who drives in snow/ice. The AWD model starts at $47k.
A Honda CRV Hybrid for example starts at $35k (Accord Hybrid is 34k) and that's a pretty common vehicle here in Ohio. We could debate the capabilities and such and what you get for your money, but I'm just not in an agreement that $37k is a lot of money for a car.
I've owned a base model 3 RWD and live in Ohio where we regularly get all of the weather, sometimes the same day even. I would rather drive that than an AWD Honda or Toyota or similar. The weight and center of gravity, especially with the right tires, makes it a very nice vehicle to drive in adverse conditions. Those "average" market SUVs aren't very good in snow/ice either. At least in my experience.
Well, speaking as someone who is moderately price sensitive, I'm probably going to shop for a used car.
I'm not sure people are reading my comments above as making 2 comparisons. I used "decent hybrids" as a group of cars that are roughly comparable to the Model 3, but more convenient in areas where chargers are sparse (in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, you pretty much have to plan your route to the available chargers).
And then I noted that there are cars that are available for quite a lot less, so anyone that is price sensitive probably isn't going to be shopping for a new electric vehicle that costs nearly $40k.
Yea I think we got side-tracked here in discussing what is affordable. But my point was that the big 3 EV makers in the United States: Tesla, Lucid, Rivian are either politically uncompetitive (Tesla) or financially uncompetitive (all three if you are also arguing Tesla is too expensive) and because of that the charging infrastructure isn't relevant if you are already thinking the car itself costs too much.
As an aside I've been to the UP and it's lovely up there. At the time (2020) there weren't really any charging stations except Maciniac City where there was a Tesla Supercharger and Marquette where, my wife and I found ourselves for about 12 hours charging our car in a parking garage. But Tesla has built a few new Superchargers in the area and they are to varying degrees open to other EV manufacturers.
This makes total sense to me. There is no monolithic “culture”— there are multiple related cultures, differing little in essence but differing greatly in the details. And each individual is usually only partially ignorant anyway.
Culture changes, too, and asymmetrically. So the “done thing” may be done be very few anymore.
For some reason, you're reading things into the original statement that are not there. "An etiquette exists in a culture" does not mean everyone has to follow or even be aware of it.
If mentally adding an "s" to the original comment enables you move past this issue and actually consider the comment as it was intended, then I would say that is well done and worth the effort to get to this point. :) Have a great Sunday!
I feel like there was a brief period when middle class came to existence and started mimicking customs of the upper class, which were very complicated because the upper class was mostly bored and had invented this shit to kill the time. Then two things happened:
1. Upper class stopped being formal because formality stopped being a signal of upper class.
2. Middle class stopped having social gatherings in general.
So, like, "it is a part of the culture" in the same sense as traditional outfits are a part of the culture - most people have very vague awareness, nobody really cares.
This is unnecessarily flippant, trivializing, and reductive.
The upper classes had the time and position to refine manners. I think one mistake people make is to think manners are arbitrary nonsense. But manners, when fitting, honor the self and others with conduct that suits the dignity of the human person and functions as a sign of that dignity. You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.
I’m not one for stiff artifice especially when slavishly applied, but I don’t think manners as such are arbitrary. That nobody cares would explain why so many people look like slobs and behave like boors.
If we begin with human nature and then view the virtues as perfections that actualize the fullness of that nature, then it becomes clearer that some behavior is more fitting and honored better by certain practices.
This phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because what one considers basic etiquette another considers a theatre. The end result is often that people gather in order to perform the spectacle of manners rather than use manners to facilitate a social gathering.
One of the true markers of being upper class is that you can get away with literal atrocities (see Epstein and co) as long as you're discrete enough and/or polished enough when talking to underlings and wannabes.
The upper classes in the UK regularly practice tone policing, where legitimate dissent is waved away as uncouth, even though what they say and do is far worse in private, and sometimes in public.
If you're looking for human dignity, I don't think this is its natural home.
> You cannot tell me that a man hunched over a table cramming food down his throat gaping at a television is no different than one who eats according to the above custom of etiquette.
Cramming is the only real problem there because it implies not experiencing the food. Seating position does not actually affect dignity or honor, and "gaping at a tv" can be worse or better than the alternative depending on the purpose and mood of the gathering.
And the rules applied to utensils in particular are a waste of thought.
Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan, but since the language is difficult to learn and frankly speaking nobody cares about Poland, barely anyone even knows this.
Also lots of corporations prefer "american style" approach of just refering by name (even to the CEO), so this dissapears.
Probably could write few pages about this, but nobody would care to read.
I'm interested in learning more about this! As a Finn I love Poland and have been there multiple times (most recently just two weeks ago). I don't know the language, but details like honorifics reveal interesting tidbits of the culture and society. I guess I should prompt an LLM about it.
If you are a Fin in Poland and a lot into nerd stuff, in Polish language some words are spelled with letters "h" and some with "ch" - where both have the same pronouciation now, but supposedly 150 years ago there was a difference.
Supposedly in Finish language you retained this difference and it can be heard in some words e.g. "raha" ("money" in Finish?).
Personally I never "heard" it - sounded as a regular "h" sound for me.
>> Poland has honorifics that are probably on par to those in Japan
> I'm interested in learning more about this!
It's very simple, actually.
For strangers, you use the third person and the title « Pan » or « Pani » (Sir or Lady). You avoid pronouns, « The Lady has forgotten the Lady's purse on the table ».
For friends, you use the t-form ("ty", thou), and use a diminutive rather than the full name. « Johny, you've forgotten your bag on the table ».
For work colleagues, you traditionally use « Pan » or « Pani » with the full form of the first name. « Mister John, the mister's bag is on the table ». This is perceived as old-fashioned, and is increasingly being replaced by the t-form.
The v-form has fallen into disuse, as it was promoted by the Communist regime.
(The old-fashioned honorifics still exist, but they are only used in administrative correspondence: the only time when you're "the respectable gentleman" is when you need to pay taxes.)
Calling someone Sir or Madam also exists in English and is nothing special.
You left out most of the interesting things.
For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing. Someone from Finland can actually understand this topic, since Finnish has multiple cases - more than in Polish language (meanwhile English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two).
> English has one case and if we try very hard we can squeeze something similar to a case - so let's say it has two
This isn't a correct way to describe English grammar. You can either say it has no cases or four cases with no inflections (because it definitely has subjects, objects, indirect objects, and possessives).
Presumably your native language doesn't inflect in the nominative or something like that and your English teacher once gave you your statement as a convenience fact, but the vast majority of native English speakers have never heard of grammatical case (ones who have, have typically studied inflected foreign languages). In Linguistics, it might be used to describe English and other uninflected languages (it depends).
> You left out most of the interesting things. For example the vocative case is partially dissapearing.
The grammar is changing in many ways (for example, the inanimate masculine is being replaced with the animated, kroić kotleta), but this was about honorifics.
It's possible in Polish to use "pan" in vocative "panie" form with strong vocal emphasis not followed by name or last name, to give it more rude sounding - but it won't be an insult.
Yes, true, I've heard that, it's like putting emphasis on the fact that you want someone to pay attention or something like that. A bit like the guy saying 'Sir!' in the Blues Brothers restaurant scene but not quite the same.
There's nothing more humiliating than a Warsaw taxi driver who looks at you as you try to work out how to operate the door handle and says "Panie!" with a left-bank accent.
While historically Polish honorifics are one of the most elaborate in Europe because of its noble culture, I wouldn’t say they are as elaborate as the Japanese, at least not in the same manner.
I wonder what will become of our honorifics in upcoming decades. Our language changes so much under influence of English, imported sociopolitical trends that surely made some of our bards spin in their graves.
On a side note, I find interesting is that Czech language still naturally uses that plural form we abandon due to popularity of pan/pani forms.
You could probably do a comparison between jurisdictions where police homicides are common and jurisdictions where they aren't common. Assuming that there are cultural factors anyway.
Like sure, areas with higher rates of criminal violence will probably have more police homicides, but it's likely enough that you can pair things up based on rates of criminal violence.
To get a naval fix, you usually define an "area of uncertainty" around the last confirmed location of the ship. The area is usually a circle with the radius being the maximum distance the ship/group could travel at full speed.
So, you don't exactly "know" where the ship is, but you can draw a hypothetical geofence around where it's likely to be, and scan that area.
So the satellite can know where the ship is, because it knows where it isn't? Then it's a simple matter of subtracting the isn't from the is, or the is from the isn't (whichever is greater)?
I suppose owners will be motivated to have the thing do the driving (and so seek defeat devices and such), but at least the software can have "do nothing" as a safety mode if it manages to detect that the vehicle is not configured as expected.
And maybe the software can be designed to be coupled to a vehicle dynamics model that can be updated.
Really, I'd prefer not having policies that tend to push up housing prices or discourage people from moving, but here we are, those types of policies are common.
As a homeowner, I want cities to be livable and affordable for those who want or have to live there. I don't care if the value of my home changes one cent. It's honestly kind of useless, because it's not like I can sell the house and buy a nicer one. All the houses are more expensive so it's always going to be a lateral trade. It only helps if you sell and move to a lower cost of living area.
It's kind of a sham that we have been conditioned to treat housing as an investment. Housing is where people live, it shouldn't be a commodity to be hoarded.
You can arbitrage markets for retirement, which is largely why people want their home values to increase. Their home is another form of 401k, and those mortgage payments aren't going to the bank or a land loed, they're going to their future.
It's a minority of people who are ok never capitalizing on their home value.
I read it as presenting the reductionist side of the argument. Not saying that you personally believe it's good or right, only that it is what the majority of homeowners would think.
In that sense I agree with the current state of reality.
But what I am saying is that if we want to change that reality -- and it most certainly is possible to change -- it will take people rejecting the status quo. And there at least some of us who are already there.
As a home owner in Austin, I want my friends to be able to afford homes too and not feel like they have to move to have a yard and a family. Bring on the new construction.
As a former homeowner in Texas, I wanted the number to go down for lower property taxes. Taxes accounted for almost 1/3 of my monthly mortgage payments by the time I sold, and are a significant barrier to affordability of homes when values tend to vastly outstrip the rate of inflation leaving typical households struggling even with the homestead tax exemption.
The only people in the low income neighborhood I grew up in that could afford to weather this wave of out-of-state and investment banking homebuyers were those who were of retirement age and had their property taxes “frozen” at an affordable level.
Growth and fewer restrictions on what can be built makes your land more valuable. Apartment buildings in place of detached houses means rent prices can go down while land prices go up.
It's eternally fascinating that people can't or won't grasp that the cars cost far more to produce than they could put them to market for, instead deciding that it was a big conspiracy.
It took until ~2015 for batteries to become practical for expensive mass market cars.
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