Correct. It was never going to be a mass-market vehicle; it was an early adopter's product. Those products can still succeed, and their success proves the market and drives further innovation.
this[0] page makes it seem 500~1000 cycles till 80% starting performance is common. So if you were charging it every other day from a 40~50 mile round trip commute, after 3~5 years you'd go to charging it every day.
As described there, this assumes slow overnight charging, and latest generation of batteries (not sure how viable that was the time of EV1).
Even LiOn batteries have charging patterns as the blocker to adoption, which means that practically, you'd get cars with less than 50% capacity by 2 years.
Also, not like it just keels over and dies, that's just the 80% performance criteria. Most people wouldn't need to replace the batteries at that point.
> Mobil and other oil companies are also shown to be advertising directly against electric cars in national publications, [...] Chevron bought patents and a controlling interest in Ovonics, the advanced battery company featured in the film, ostensibly to prevent modern NiMH batteries from being used in non-hybrid electric cars.
> car makers engaged in both positive and negative marketing of the electric car [...] In later days it ran "award-winning" doomsday-style advertising featuring the EV1 and ran customer surveys which emphasized drawbacks to electronic vehicle technology
> the federal government of the United States under the Presidency of George W. Bush joined the auto-industry suit against California in 2002. This pushed California to abandon its ZEV mandate regulation.
> A portion of the film details GM's efforts to demonstrate to California that there was no consumer demand for their product, and then to take back every EV1 and destroy them. A few were disabled and given to museums and universities, but almost all were found to have been crushed. GM never responded to the EV drivers' offer to pay the residual lease value; $1.9 million was offered for the remaining 78 cars in Burbank, California before they were crushed.
You're the reason why the author's assertion that there is a huge untapped market for this in the UK is probably wrong; most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.
There might be some market for a simple point-to-point device sold by the likes of Argos, zero config and including all the right cables already, aimed at people who can't or won't upgrade their cabling but want to enable their kid to play Fortnite.
But... there is no clear patent protection available, so as soon as someone successfully creates and markets that device, the Tiktok Shop clones will appear.
Pulling cables through walls is really easy for some construction styles and really difficult for others.
Can involve taking up floorboards and drilling horizontally through beams, plumber style. Or cutting slots in masonry with angle grinders. Sometimes there are existing wires you can tie to and pull through, sometimes the existing wires were stapled to the walls.
On the bright side everything about the ethernet wires and connections is trivial. Like demo to a friend in 20 minutes and let them walk off with the toolbox and they'll be fine wiring their house, if the construction style is amenable.
Agreed. I tugged on each phone wire a to see if they were free. And I got lucky on all of them.
One of the problems I had was a kinked conduit where concrete was poured on top, or at least that is what I assumed. Was a bit difficult to get the “knot” (where the phone wire was connected to the CAT5E) through that spot.
The twisted pair (should be two but one pair is broken...) installed in the 60s in my home are so stuck you will never, ever, get those out without ripping the wall apart. Originally the coaxials should have gone through the same pipes, as there should be enough space, but there is so much gunk in there it was impossible and they layed out a new tube though the floors and ceilings in the corner. For fun and because institutional knowledge is for suckers, they tried the same with fiber and simply gave up so now we are in limbo because computer says we have fiber but we don't.
most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.
"Technical" isn't the issue. 200 year old stone houses are the issue. If you can't punch through it with wifi (and thus have this issue), I expect you're not going to be able to poke a cable through either.
For an example, to get from my house router to my office, you'd need to punch through a 3 foot cobble & mortar wall, trench across 30 feet of poured concrete (and tidy it up somehow), punch through another 3 foot thick stone wall, then "pull cable" up to the office. There's an old phone line from A to B that went in 30 years ago when the place was first renovated, but you can tug on it all you like and it's not going anywhere.
If I'd seen this article a few years ago, my life would have been a lot easier.
Yeah, it'd have to be something like that, and nomatter how well you did it, it'd be noticeable.
Fortunately, (as I mentioned in another thread,) I got a powerful enough point-to-point wifi connection to blast through the stone walls and get decent results.
The holes are already made if there are phone cables going in every room. The idea is to reroute ethernet cables through the same holes and guides and replace the sockets.
It is the same when fiber is installed in an old house, you usually reuse tv antenna/phones entries/guides and exit holes.
With old houses you may also have restrictions on what you can do. BT send some to my friends' house every so often to upgrade to FTTP. They say they are going to drill through walls etc. until its pointed out the building is grade II* listed and there are rules and permissions needed at which point they go away.
> most of the people technical enough to set this up are also going to be technical enough to pull new cables.
It's really not that simple when you realize that the average UK flat has 3+ sockets and the average house has 5+ sockets (speaking from my own experience). Some daisy chained and some direct.
Besides, a lot of people are renting and cannot touch their wire.
> a lot of people are renting and cannot touch their wire.
Nobody's going to complain about a backwards-compatible upgrade (you can put phone sockets back when you leave - nobody has to know there's cat 5/6 behind it).
One of the big problems with pulling cable in the UK is the abundance of solid internal walls. Running cabling in my house involves lifting floorboards or drilling through multiple 2ft thick stone walls. It’s worth doing while you’re there but so destructive if you’re not
Have you tried disabling GPU temporal dithering via BetterDisplay or StillColor? I had a similar problem with a different brand of monitor, and this has been the only reliable fix.
This article is about the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which aims to increase the security of critical assets, and to strengthen breach reporting requirements.
It's puzzling to hear those steps described as "authoritarian." What makes you feel that way?
If this is about protecting third parties from being scraped, why does Google have an interest at all? Surely Google won't have the relevant third-party data itself because, as you say, Google respects robots.txt. So how can that data be scraped from Google?
I don't think this suit is actually about that, though. I think Google's complaint is that
> SerpApi deceptively takes content that Google licenses from others
In other words, this is just a good old-fashioned licence violation.
It's often interesting to observe the different ways that privacy is approached in the US and Europe.
In Europe we often accept pretty grave restrictions of our liberty like the UK's Online Safety Act, which would never fly in the US, and we do so without much public comment.
On the other side of things, organisations in the US happily expose datasets like this one, which would give a most EU Data Protection Officers a heart attack, and nobody bats an eyelid.
In Lyft's defense, they are providing it anonymized under the NYCBS Data Use Policy. They also aren't providing the exact GPS routes, which is why OSRM is used to calculate the shortest path instead.
> Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door
In the UK at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, a solid proportion of groceries are now delivered to the door. But, that doesn't mean that supermarkets have closed; if anything, they seem to be busier than ever.
Instead, we have a hybrid market where convenience for the consumer is the ruling factor. The same is going to be true for most of the other situations you mention.
In parts of the US, even low-crime areas, a significant amount of the items at grocery stores are locked up in glass cases. If you want them you have to track down an employee and beg for access (and in some stores they won't let you carry the items to the register). That part of the store might as well be closed to visitors, replaced by vending machines.
Hah. In my Safeway, the ice cream and half the frozen aisles have a lock on every door. I can’t imagine how much inconvenience that causes everybody. The employees openly say it’s ridiculous and you regularly find a queue in each aisle waiting to be individually served by an employee with a key unlocking and re locking each door they want something from.
People often say that the problem with string theory is that it doesn't make any prediction, but that's not quite right: the problem is that it can make almost any prediction you want it to make. It is really less of a "theory" in its own right and more of a mathematical framework for constructing theories.
One day some unusual observation will come along from somewhere, and that will be the loose end that allows someone to start pulling at the whole ball of yarn. Will this happen in our lifetimes? Unlikely, I think.
The problem is that once, a long time ago, String Theory was something that made concrete predictions that people just couldn't calculate.
Then people managed to calculate those predictions, and they were wrong. So the people working that theory up relaxed some constraints and tried again, and again, and again. So today it's that framework that you can use to write any theory you want.
That original theory was a good theory. Very compelling and just a small adjustment away from mainstream physics. The current framework is just not a good framework, it's incredibly hard to write any theory in it, understand what somebody else created, and calculate the predictions of the theories you create.
I am old enough to remember when string theory was expected to explain and unify all forces and predict everything. Sadly, it failed to deliver on that promise.
And there is no known single real world experiment that can rule out string theory while keeping general relativity and quantum mechanics intact.
More accurately, string theory is not wrong (because it just cannot be wrong). Because it does not predict anything and cannot invalidate anything, it does not help to advance our understanding of how to integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.
It should not be called theory - maybe set of mathematical tools or whatever.
You can't really show it's wrong because there are dozens of different theories but using the Wikipedia definition "point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings" it's possible that particles are not strings. I guess it would then be like fairies at the end of the garden theory. Good from a literary fiction point of view but not reality.
I was planning to make a similar comment. Conjecturing that some theory in the string theory landscape [0] gives a theory of quantum gravity consistent with experiments that are possible but beyond what humans may ever be capable of isn't as strong of a claim as it may first appear. The intuition I used to have was that string theory is making ridiculously specific claims about things that may remain always unobservable to humans. But the idea is not that experiments of unimaginable scale and complexity might reveal that the universe is made up of strings or something, it's just that it may turn out that string theory makes up such a rich and flexible family of theories that it could be tuned to the observed physics of some unimaginably advanced civilization. My impression is that string theory is not so flexible that its uninteresting though. There's some interesting theoretical work along these lines around exploring the swampland [1].
Or, that day will never come, because string theory isn't reflective of the actual world, or because there are so many theories possible under the string theory rubric that we can never find the right one, or because the energies involved to see any effect are far beyond what could be reached in experiment.
It isn't completely implausible that a future civilisation could perform the experiments to gather that data, somehow; but it is hard to envisage how we do it here on Earth.
Your implicit point is a good one. Is it sensible to have a huge chunk of the entire theoretical physics community working endlessly on a theory that could well end up being basically useless? Probably not.
There is not a "huge chunk" of the theoretical physics community working on string theory, and their never was. For one, it is far less common a topic of research now then it was earlier when it was more popular, but even then "huge" was really "a lot of universities had a grant for string theory investigation because it looked promising".
It mostly hasn't worked out and now people are moving on to other things.
The single worst thing that happened though was the populism: a small group of people with credentials started putting out pop-sci books and doing interviews, well in excess of what their accomplishments should mean. People are like "so many people are working on this" because there were like, 3 to 5 guys who always said "yes" to an interview and talked authoritatively.
Huge is a subjective term, but go and count the number of participants at Strings 2025 [1]. Then realise that is just one of many conferences [2]. It's still a very big field.
A meaningless statement if you aren't going to introduce any points of comparison. But I would hardly call 735 conference participants a huge conference. Like, that's big but there are lot more then 735 theoretical physicists.
Claude tells me that there are about ~5000 theoretical high energy physicists actively publishing as tracked by INSPIRE-HEP (the de facto search engine in that field). If we estimate that about a third or half of string theorists take part in Strings in a given year -- because there are other big conferences like String Pheno that will be more relevant for many -- then we have something like 30-50% of high energy theorists working on string theory.
I agree that people should be "moving on to other things," but I'm not seeing the evidence that they actually are.
> the problem is that it can make almost any prediction you want it to make
In logic this is either the principle of "contradiction elimination" or a "vacuous truth". Depending on how you look at it. i.e. given sufficiently bad premises, you can prove anything.
The absolute worst thing is to trim at any angle other than 90 degrees -- doing that creates a small knife.
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