But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.

Thanks for the analysis and insight!

I found at least one of the posts, and you’re right, that’s not really what impressed them. It just stuck with me because I’m a hardware girl.

I’d believe it because I remember the same being true for TikTok.

I don’t have the links on me right now, but I remember clearly that when tiktok was new, engineers trying to figure out what data it collected found that the app could recognize when it was being observed, and would “rewite” itself to evade detection.

They noted that they’d never seen this outside of sophisticated malware, and doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.

In hot weather, I use silica gel neck wraps, which slowly release water to keep you cool (if soggy). I really want to try making an equivalent out of sodium sulphate gel and see how it compares.

Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.

Yeah, this matches my experience.

A supercapacitor buffer will cost around twice as much and deliver around 1/10th the watt-hours of a similarly-sized lead acid battery. And lead acid isn’t exactly great to begin with.

Capacitors are useful, but only in applications where the total amount of energy stored is more-or-less unimportant.

Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.

Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not batteries.

Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.

Transportation is a necessity, and I believe every inelastic market deserves a nationalized alternative to prevent price gouging. Like how the USPS keeps UPS and FEDEX in line. With that being said, nationalization doesn’t fix this particular problem.

China is run like a giant capitalist cartel (in all but name), and appropriately, their ultimate weapon in their hunt for global monopolies is the provision of slave labor. The number of slaves in Xinjiang alone is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and their labor has been credibly linked to the production of cotton (face masks), polysilicon (solar panels), and aluminum and lithium (EVs).

It’s no coincidence that these are the industries being slapped with tariffs. No amount of subsidization or nationalization can level a playing field that’s been tilted by slavery. You don’t outcompete slavery, you either penalize goods suspected of involving it, or you go full John Brown.

Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.

A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That’s a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.

When a smaller nation aligns itself with a larger empire or coalition, it will gravitate towards that collective’s philosophy. Sometime’s it’s imposed through political or military pressure, or “encouraged” through subversion, but it can just as easily happen through the natural influence of a larger and more prolific culture.

Historically, there have been more socialist and/or communist states associated with the USSR than not. Especially when measured by population.

Exactly. Hertz vocally blames higher repair costs and long repair times for the Teslas that make up the bulk of their EV fleet. Other EV manufacturers don’t share those problems.