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Crosby B. Alfred posted:He literally has a degree in physics and drives the direction of those companies. When his engineers run into tough issues it gets escalated to him and he has to make a decision. Some of those decisions have been good and others not so much. I get that he's a huge rear end in a top hat which is really sad because he's legitimately a talented dude and obviously his actions overshadow that but take a look at his interviews prior to ~2015. He definitely knows what he's talking about.
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Apr 23, 2023 16:15
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Owling Howl posted:Well define "meaningfully". You could argue it doesn't make a meaningful difference to cure 1 child of a given disease if 99 other children can't be cured. I would argue that anything that makes a positive difference is worth doing whether or not other, better options exist or it is meaningful or sufficient or adequate etc by whatever preferred arbitrary definition. To use your analogy, it seems to me we built a machine that gives children diseases, and rather than disassembling it in earnest we're just tweaking it here and there and acting like it's progress. In fact we cannot live without the child disease machine, to suggest so is an absurdity. However we are committed to making it give less diseases, as long as it doesn't interfere with the machine too much. Cutting the disease rate too much is bad for the machine though, so we're willing to make some of the diseases less awful. Course it's a slim margin, but we can definitely make some of the diseases more immediately fatal, so when we look at the spreadsheets there's less children suffering from disease (because they died faster). Innovation... progress.
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Apr 23, 2023 16:26
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Do you think not tweaking the disease machine at all will help get it disassembled faster? Cos right now we might be able to get it to give diseases to 20% less kids.
Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Apr 23, 2023 |
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Apr 23, 2023 16:31
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Taking a bird’s eye view, the fundamental fact is that our current social and ecological systems are starting to collapse, and the collapse will continue without extremely fundamental changes. Things like EVs can help a but around the margins perhaps, but we’re talking about a big dynamic instability here. It’s not something you can half-rear end a solution for and make it half as bad.
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Apr 23, 2023 16:33
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So the better solution is to do climate accelerationism, then? How is that going to happen?
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Apr 23, 2023 17:39
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cat botherer posted:Taking a bird’s eye view, the fundamental fact is that our current social and ecological systems are starting to collapse, and the collapse will continue without extremely fundamental changes. Things like EVs can help a but around the margins perhaps, but we’re talking about a big dynamic instability here. It’s not something you can half-rear end a solution for and make it half as bad. And replacing all cars with public transit was never even suggested in this thread. Obviously that is not going to happen. It is totally reasonable to prioritize the lowest hanging fruit instead of telling people they can buy their way out of climate change. We know that people who feel like they are doing some small positive thing will overestimate the effect of that positive, and often overcompensate in the other direction. Emphasizing electric cars isn't a first step that leads to public transportation, it makes it less likely! That's why I said it's misdirection.
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Apr 23, 2023 17:40
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Adenoid Dan posted:And replacing all cars with public transit was never even suggested in this thread. Obviously that is not going to happen. It is totally reasonable to prioritize the lowest hanging fruit instead of telling people they can buy their way out of climate change. Do you have anything I can read that supports these statements?
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Apr 23, 2023 18:09
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hooman posted:You know he didn't start Tesla right....? Yes. I do know that. And he made still made the decision to buy the company. Others didn't. Sure, he had advisors, money and a lot of luck but he's still the guy in at the head of it. Toyota, the largest automotive manufacture in the entire world thought EVs were a dead end and technology decades away even under best case scenarios. Hell, even oil companies didn't think it was going to work either! cat botherer posted:Elon acts like he is a super-smart scientist. I get how this can be confusing for someone who lacks knowledge in science. You're talking about a guy who acted like he could fix Twitter's problems by getting everyone to send him printouts of their contributions so he could do some company-wide code review by himself, despite not having really programmed since doing some C in the 1990s and knowing nothing about Git. He's a physical incarnation of Dunning-Krueger. Elon is a terrible leader for twitter. As I said, he's good at some things. Others, not so much. And really bad. Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Apr 23, 2023 |
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Apr 23, 2023 18:14
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Actually Elon sucks and supporting him makes you sound dumb, keep up. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Apr 23, 2023 18:15
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Clarste posted:Actually Elon sucks and supporting him makes you sound dumb, keep up. Actually people are weird and do both good and bad things. I know that's hard to understand. I try to keep the faith in humanity occasionally and give credit where due!
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Apr 23, 2023 18:19
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Mega Comrade posted:Do you have anything I can read that supports these statements? I don't have anything for you to read and I'm not the OP, but because states, cities, and municipalities aren't the US military and have to actually budget; the more that gets dumped into continuing to prioritize cars means less money to invest in expanding and improving public transportation.
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Apr 23, 2023 18:20
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It is relatively well studied. It's called the health halo effect in nutrition or just the halo effect but it pops up everywhere, for example: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2022.997590/full People are not good at individually evaluating the effects of their choices.
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Apr 23, 2023 18:23
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Child mortality is also an interesting parallel considering cars aren't only their #1 killer anymore because of American exceptionalism resulting in guns taking that spot since 2020. EVs will probably result in a retaking of the #1 spot as even sedans become as heavy as SUVs with twice the acceleration. In my humble opinion this is going to be a topic that gets heated but it's also one the thread can't avoid and still fulfill its promised purpose, so lets all stop taking personal swipes and just stick to refining our arguments to do the work of thrust and parry as was the way of the old masters of being unhinged but for a living with published works. Crosby if you want to defend the position that Musk is a secret genius as he's daily going out and making exactly that task harder and harder in exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons he's been considered an incompetent clown his entire life I can't help you there, good luck. Professor Beetus posted:I don't have anything for you to read and I'm not the OP, but because states, cities, and municipalities aren't the US military and have to actually budget; the more that gets dumped into continuing to prioritize cars means less money to invest in expanding and improving public transportation. The last few big bills have been disappointments in a lot of ways, but one thing they've had is a lot of grants for public transit expansion and service here as expanded as a result. It's been very nice and thanks to the labor crunch you can make decent money driving a bus, and it's a situation where full electrification both makes complete sense and is fairly trivial to implement. I'm honestly just hoping nobody ever notices who can put a stop to it because they just never think about public transit except like a political cartoonist would, as a mysterious and unknowable lifeway of the bottom of the social pyramid.
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Apr 23, 2023 18:29
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That's one wild interruption of my posts. I don't think he's a super genius but he's absolutely a smart if flawed dude. History is full of smart people catastrophically sabotaging themselves. As for EVs, safety is going to a huge issue. I would have totally wrecked myself if I had a car as a fast as a Model 3 at nineteen years old.
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Apr 23, 2023 18:33
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:That's one wild interruption of my posts. I don't think he's a super genius but he's absolutely a smart if flawed dude. History is full of smart people catastrophically sabotaging themselves. As for EVs, safety is going to a huge issue. I would have totally wrecked myself if I had a car as a fast as a Model 3 at nineteen years old. Historical examples didn't enjoy the idiocy broadcasting technology we have today. Now the whole world gets to enjoy the experience of being a close colleague of Richard Owen and not just someone trying to get an impression of him from 2nd hand accounts and marginalia.
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Apr 23, 2023 18:36
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Epic High Five posted:Historical examples didn't enjoy the idiocy broadcasting technology we have today. Now the whole world gets to enjoy the experience of being a close colleague of Richard Owen and not just someone trying to get an impression of him from 2nd hand accounts and marginalia. I don't disagree and it's probably not the end of it. Which sucks.
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Apr 23, 2023 18:42
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Adenoid Dan posted:It is relatively well studied. It's called the health halo effect in nutrition or just the halo effect but it pops up everywhere, for example: I'm sorry I'm not following the logical connection. They were given environmental statements and assumed ethical treatment ones. So the halo effect is a cognitive bias that takes one positive trait and assume other unconnected ones. Why does that suggest people switching to EVs makes public transport less likely to improve?
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Apr 23, 2023 18:43
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It's not just between types of judgments, it's also within. People guess the calorie content of a meal alone as higher than the same meal with a healthy side added to it. Or guess that owning 2 hybrid vehicles is no worse than owning one. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272494418304717
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Apr 23, 2023 18:49
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:He literally has a degree in physics and drives the direction of those companies. When his engineers run into tough issues it gets escalated to him and he has to make a decision. Some of those decisions have been good and others not so much. I get that he's a huge rear end in a top hat which is really sad because he's legitimately a talented dude and obviously his actions overshadow that but take a look at his interviews prior to ~2015. He definitely knows what he's talking about. This is accurate. Someone can be both incredibly talented as well as being an arrogant, creepy jerk. It is also true that being really good at one thing does not automatically mean that you are good at something else. Just as Ben Carson proved that being good at brain surgery doesn't mean you are good at politics, Elon has proved that being good at rocket science doesn't mean that you will be good at running Twitter. It is true he didn't found Tesla, it is also true that he is incredibly thin skinned, it is also true that the family owned an emerald mine. It is also true that he actually understands battery chemistry and engineering. Other manufacturers were making electric cars 10 years ago. The difference is that in a sea of compliance cars and half rear end attempts that were poorly marketed, Tesla under Musk produced elegant cars with usable range that people actually wanted to drive. You had a Tesla S on sale the same time as the Ford Fusion Energi, Mitsubishi MiEV, Chevy Spark EV. The Volt could have been a hit but it was never marketed and dealership training was spotty at best. Even in 2013 the Model S had a range of up to 265 miles, compare that to the Leaf with 77 miles, and with degradation caused from air cooling the battery, that 77 miles was aspirational at best. Elon also understood that people would need a robust network to charge them. The supercharging network is nothing short of extraordinary, especially when you compare it to the smattering of competing third party charging networks. That means that even today in 2023 when the EV offerings from legacy manufacturers are very compelling, anyone who buys anything other than a Tesla has to download multiple apps, deal with chargers that don't accept payments, don't deliver electricity, or deal with long lines when they do work. I say this as someone who is absolutely NOT an Elon fan boy and as someone who drives an EV that is not a Tesla. But I can give credit where credit is due.
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Apr 23, 2023 19:09
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Elon is a right wing troll who opened the gates for nazis..why are we talking about this moron in the climate thread? All his stuff blows up, mostly because of his insane micromanaging
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Apr 23, 2023 19:16
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EV Side Chat, I thought the second generation leaf was a freaking awesome car. If Nissan just even upgraded the cooling and battery slightly I am so drat confused why it wouldn't have been huge hit for those that live in cities and have small commutes. But what do I know.
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Apr 23, 2023 19:17
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It's basically impossible for casual observers and laypeople to objectively evaluate whether Elon is a "good engineer" because so much of his public shithead-persona is mixed in with everything, and all his mistakes and fuckups are widely reported and mocked (whereas the opposite never happens). Not to mention his frequent drug use and untreated Asperger's, and who knows what else. When it comes to rockets at least, he absolutely does know what he's talking about. Watch some of his SpaceX videos where subject matter experts interview him, and the way he explains technical concepts and carries on conversations is far beyond your typical "CEO memorizes some talking points and tech lingo for an upcoming interview to make himself sound smart" stuff. I don't know if he's a genius but he appears to possess serious auto-didaction skills and seems capable of intuiting his way around complex topics. cat botherer posted:Elon acts like he is a super-smart scientist. I get how this can be confusing for someone who lacks knowledge in science. You're talking about a guy who acted like he could fix Twitter's problems by getting everyone to send him printouts of their contributions so he could do some company-wide code review by himself, despite not having really programmed since doing some C in the 1990s and knowing nothing about Git. He's a physical incarnation of Dunning-Krueger. A lot of good engineers suffer from DK though. Hell, not just engineers either. DK is super common among doctors too, for example. That doesn't mean they are bad doctors. It just means that their success and the resulting confidence in their field of expertise makes them misjudge their knowledge and abilities in other areas. In Twitter's case, Elon is in way over his head, and thinks his few years of programming experience twenty years ago is still relevant. Combine that with his severe personality problems, and the media and everyone else fanning the flames, and the result is the trash fire we're seeing.
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Apr 23, 2023 19:28
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PhazonLink posted:didnt it come out recently that musk's degrees might be made up/lies? (disregard - not continuing this lovely derail) BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Apr 23, 2023 |
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Apr 23, 2023 19:38
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We have a Musky thread here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4000485&userid=0&perpage=40&highlight=launchpad&pagenumber=1505 I don't want to take up space here by making GBS threads on him too much, even if he deserves it, but to keep this on topic, I'd like to remind you that he pushed the hyperloop and the tesla tunnels, instead of, you know, trains and public transport. He's not going to solve climate change.
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Apr 23, 2023 19:47
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Musk has an undergrad degree in physics and another in economics. He's not an engineer. I don't give much credit to a CEO for fluency when he has access to experts to give summaries of everything going on. It's just another rich person hobby. I don't even think "genius" (as it's commonly considered at least) is a real thing. Science is done in community going back through time. Individual contributions are largely replaceable. Edit: Woops yeah not the Musk thread sorry
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Apr 23, 2023 19:47
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Vitamin Me posted:Elon is a right wing troll who opened the gates for nazis..why are we talking about this moron in the climate thread? All his stuff blows up, mostly because of his insane micromanaging Because this nazi sympathizing white supremist right wing troll has been a leader in the electrification of transportation. All the wishing that people should be walking, biking, taking public transportation everywhere is well meaning, the fact is that the with the places that people already live, the places they work and the infrastructure that connects places that people need to get to means that mass adoption of EVs is about the only thing that can happen on a time scale that matters. Yeah, I know that it sucks that you can't sort things into neat piles of good and bad. Thorn Wishes Talon posted:It's basically impossible for casual observers and laypeople to objectively evaluate whether Elon is a "good engineer" because so much of his public shithead-persona is mixed in with everything, and all his mistakes and fuckups are widely reported and mocked (whereas the opposite never happens). Not to mention his frequent drug use and untreated Asperger's, and who knows what else. I don't know if he is a good engineer or not, at this point it doesn't matter since the actual engineering is done by thousands of other people, I would be willing to bet that much of the actual engineering is done by others who also have untreated Asperger's. The guy does weed and shrooms, so?
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Apr 23, 2023 19:57
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Has the thread discussed How to Blow Up A Pipeline, now a major motion picture? Really great American heist film that packs a not subtle message into it's excellent script. The theme of the movie is that self defense is a rational and moral imperative, when someone points a gun at you one has the right to take the weapon and dismantle it. The cast is really great and the plot is perfectly paced. Highly recommend checking it out.
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Apr 23, 2023 20:33
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Leon Sumbitches posted:Has the thread discussed How to Blow Up A Pipeline, now a major motion picture? Really great American heist film that packs a not subtle message into it's excellent script. "If the government of the United States is calling us terrorists then we're doing something right." 
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Apr 23, 2023 21:09
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Zeta Taskforce posted:Because this nazi sympathizing white supremist right wing troll has been a leader in the electrification of transportation. All the wishing that people should be walking, biking, taking public transportation everywhere is well meaning, the fact is that the with the places that people already live, the places they work and the infrastructure that connects places that people need to get to means that mass adoption of EVs is about the only thing that can happen on a time scale that matters. Yeah, I know that it sucks that you can't sort things into neat piles of good and bad. Bolded is defeatist bullshit. The government has in the past and can still influence societal behaviors by using federal programs and incentives that encourage those things. If the government is capable of pushing EVs it's capable of doing the other things too. But we won't because even the party that's supposed to be good on climate is woefully inadequate and not up to the task of addressing climate change.
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Apr 23, 2023 22:24
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Professor Beetus posted:But we won't because even the party that's supposed to be good on climate is woefully inadequate and not up to the task of addressing climate change. The party that's supposed to be good on climate is petrified of telling the old people who still vote for them that they might have to make some concessions and compromises to their creature comforts. Surely the environment won't disintegrate in the next...10-20 years, right? And then, when the people who weren't quite "old" at that point are now old, surely the environment can wait ~another~ 10-20 years, right? 
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Apr 23, 2023 22:28
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Professor Beetus posted:Bolded is defeatist bullshit. The government has in the past and can still influence societal behaviors by using federal programs and incentives that encourage those things. If the government is capable of pushing EVs it's capable of doing the other things too. But we won't because even the party that's supposed to be good on climate is woefully inadequate and not up to the task of addressing climate change. We need a "yes and" mentality, not a "either or" mentality. "Either or" leads to doomerism and hopelessness because the changes you believe in won't happen fast enough or at all, or are still going in the wrong direction. I am very much in favor of trains, removing restrictive zoning that forces new housing to be built further and further out, multi family homes, pedestrian friendly areas, density near existing public transit. Any other ideas you have I bet I would be in favor of too. But as you point out, even the party that is supposed to be good on climate is not doing enough, or worse actively captured by a some of their constituency who fights apartment complexes in their neighborhoods. That would bring in the "wrong" type of person and degrade the quality of their schools, we can't have that. Recognizing this reality and the fact that the status quo won't change fast enough to matter is not defeatism. Say nothing about the millions of homes that have already been built. Someone who has a 50 mile commute today is likely to have the same house and job next year. What is also a fact is there will be a next car, I promise you that. What is not yet decided is if that next car will burn 5 gallons of gas every day, or instead use 20 kW of electricity every day. So do your infilling in areas that are already built up, but realize that we can go a long ways in electrifying as much as possible as quickly as possible and making that electricity without burning carbon.
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Apr 23, 2023 22:47
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Those coming battery factories are the end of Elon. Tesla’s got like a year and a half or two.
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Apr 23, 2023 22:59
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OK so we wave a magic wand. Somehow the absolute most insanely optimistic outcome that nobody is even attempting to argue for takes place and in ten years every single vehicle of any kind, private, public, commuter, cargo, whatever; each and every single last one of them all magically switch over to electric and every vehicle everywhere on land, air, and sea all become completely, 100% fossil fuel free never to add a single drop to the atmosphere again. Then what? Every oil well fracking away under someone's house and every oil platform in the ocean still exists. Every company invested in those things still exists, they still want money, and they still want to pump oil to sell to other people to burn for other money. That entire system still exists and no serious proposals put forth so far at any level are even attempting to stop it. There would be changes, market stuff would probably go berserk, consolidations, buyouts, more bonus checks to CEO billionaires because gently caress it that's how things work and it's just what we do, but if vehicle-based demand plummets while everything else still exists, suddenly it gets a lot cheaper to do all the other things that are done by burning dead dinosaurs. So a lot more of those other things will happen because now it's cheaper. Nothing in electrifying vehicles is going to the root of the problem and saying "Burning dead dinosaurs is going to kill everything, you need to stop it".
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Apr 24, 2023 00:06
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that post is a perfect circle i feel like you just did the rhetorical version of the meme where someone goes up to the whiteboard and swings their arm real quick edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNNWc4zUvqc
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Apr 24, 2023 00:23
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bird food bathtub posted:Nothing in electrifying vehicles is going to the root of the problem and saying "Burning dead dinosaurs is going to kill everything, you need to stop it". Eliminating internal combustion engines, which is what burns oil, seems like a good way to stop burning oil. The remainder of oil consumption is essentially plastic and I don't think plastic consumption is held back by cost or could realistically grow enough to pick up the slack. In any case it's a lot easier to ban oil if the cost to the average person is to do without cheap consumer plastics and not suddenly being stranded in the suburbs without transport.
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Apr 24, 2023 01:20
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Those coming battery factories are the end of Elon. Tesla’s got like a year and a half or two. What a dream come true, couldn't happen soon enough. Also don't forget about the coming Chinese EVs. Realistically it won't be the end of Tesla as a company, but it will be the end of a company that makes 2% of cars in the world, but yet is somehow has a market cap that exceeds the next 5 biggest car companies combined. Musk will still probably be a billionaire, but there is a difference between having a 10 digit net worth vs a 12 digit net worth. That would be enough of a drop to shut up the Elon fan boys and probably would force the sale of Twitter to someone more normal.
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Apr 24, 2023 02:25
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EDIT: Sry climate thread, not continuing the derail.
hooman fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 02:40
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 the interesting thing about road transport (the category of things that can be mostly substituted for EVs) is that it is simultaneously: 1.) the single largest category of thing that can be done 2.) only about 10% of the problem so the person who says "we need to completely replace all ICE cars with EVs at a bare minimum" and the person who says "that'll barely matter" are both right. MightyBigMinus fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 03:32
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MightyBigMinus posted:
Isn't energy use in buildings higher?
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Apr 24, 2023 03:48
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Leon Sumbitches posted:Isn't energy use in buildings higher? It's probably all a bit arbitrary in how you slice it anyway. But if we do two things: switch road transportation to EVs and decarbonize energy generation in parallel, we eliminate the majority of carbon emissions.
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Apr 24, 2023 09:00
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