Knowing and acting on it will have grave consequences though. The US's main allies will stop buying American military equipment for one, trade will go down and the largest economic block in the world will align itself closer to China (who does not directly threaten them with invasion). What a self own.
As a European who's been as continue to be against Chinese authoritarianism, I have to admit that China looks like the better partner going forward.
What I find almost satisfying to watch is how the US throws away the soft power it spent nearly a century building for very little benefit in return.
The thing is that soft power is extremely effective. Many other countries, including China, try hard at acquiring a fraction of the soft power US naturally had.
Trumps administration, sooner or later, will pass. Whether it is voted away, or if it turns into a form of dictatorship, at some point in the future it will not be there anymore. The US won't be able to return to "how things were" when that happens. New trade deals, new alliances, a different ordering of things will be in place.
Trump not being a factor will help, but this whole ordeal shows that Europe cannot count on a reasonable person always being in power, and a single bad president can cause this level or mayhem. Even if the next administration backtracks on all this and apologizes profusely, it's too late.
Exactly. This administration has exposed the fragility of the very structure of the US form of government, and building a new, better structure is, in my opinion, practically impossible without revolution.
It appears to me that the US will continue to iterate downhill.
I'd prefer it weren't the case, but that's what my intuition is telling me.
And if it can start to restructure on the fly, it's going to be a long, difficult process. But it's still better than revolutionary structural / regime change.
i am not sure about the OP or the motivation and I am not a Streak runner/mover myself, but I do see the appeal of it, that will keep someone moving and exercise more or less consistently. Overall maybe the bad it is doing on bad days, is compensated with the good it is doing on good/average days. It is a long term motivator. For me now that i was cycling about 2-300km per week last year, going to nearly 0 this year so far because life and stuff, makes it pretty hard mentally to get back into the saddle, because of reduced performance, fatigue and just the general feeling of what it felt like to be in a faster group ride that I would get dropped from and i need to work my way back up there in performance and endurance. Having a streak going might have helped with this.
The way I see it is this: maintaining a run streak can be hard, but what is even harder is taking rest days when needed and every time get back on it. The (amateur) runners that impress me the most are those that keep running for years, decades, not through some neverending streak but through determination. The skill to abort a long run streak without quitting running is admirable.
I am not describing my own motivation, nor am I telling you what to do. I am only describing what to seems to be the most difficult thing to do. It matches well the expressed view that "if I break the streak I might stop running for good".
whatever happened to printing the passwords qr code.
The tech might itself is interesting. My first thought was archival though. Storing whatever we have on paper archives.
Raising the bar is good but there are people who will exploit the feelings of people who perceive to be disenfranchised (and will cherry-pick some aspects where they are really worse off now compared to the past) and they will inflate their anger and may lead to destroying the actual progress that has been made.
We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life. No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.
Being a rich person in the renaissance period seems like it'd be nice if you only look at paintings glorifying the lifestyle. But when you sit down and think about the nitty gritty daily life, it would suck compared to an average modern lifestyle. Yet the rich back then were surely quite comfortable, just like the rich today are. And the rich centuries from now will look at the mega rich today and be amazed that they lived such quaint lives without food teleporters and instant cancer zappers and weekend trips to the balmy shores of Ganymede.
Saying the poor can't be dissatisfied with the inequality in society today because "things were worse in the past for the poor" can really be extended to anyone and anything. There's always something in the past that was worse than a typical bad experience today. But the past is full of horrors that we should learn from and not repeat.
Have you ever been in a castle? Thermal mass is highly underestimated from my experience.
I suggest the likes of Foix in warm southern france in the peak of summer.
Walking into one of the lower rooms where the doors are wide open and such is like walking into a fridge.
> No AC in the summer, no proper medical care and the possibility of dying from a mild tooth problem, only having access to food that's in-season, zero running water, needing to have your poop hauled away in buckets, needing to spend all day just to travel 15 km, being blamed for a random crime and executed days later with no real evidence.
I think this is greatly exaggerated. Actual royalty had access to vast amounts of physical and mental labor that only the billionaires of modern society could rival.
No A/C? You can pay people to bring ice into your house and cool you. No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that. Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
Modern world has conveniences, but so many people cannot afford any labor at all. Royalty had leisure time that most modern people can barely afford.
Where are you getting ice from in 1500s Italy? You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection? People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day. You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados. Get bit by the wrong mosquito? You're possibly dead from malaria, and no doctor can treat you. (People still die today, but you're much, much more likely to survive) Get syphilis? Your body is going to slowly rot away. Having a kid? Better have a few backups, because even the children of the rich dropped like flies.
Labor was cheap in the ancient world. But the reality is that machines and technology do a lot of work better than a human hand. No matter how many people you hire, nobody is cooling and preserving your food as well as a typical $500 refrigerator. And nobody is cooling your house as well as a $500 AC either. Air conditioning revolutionized the world because it made lots of places that were borderline inhabitable habitable. It doesn't matter how rich you were, life in Saudi Arabia wasn't as comfortable as it is today. Vaccination, antibiotics, windows, and AC made tropical areas much more habitable for everyone.
The Romans had ice available even for common people. They harvested it from the mountains. Ice can be stored a surprisingly long time if kept out of sunlight and packed correctly. I know less about 1500s Italy specifically, but obviously the technology existed if people wanted to do it.
> You get an arrow pulled out of your skull, but what are you doing with the resulting infection?
An infection was bad news, but by no means guaranteed. Soldiers frequently suffered horrific wounds and survived, assuming they weren't on an interminable hell campaign with no chance to recover. It's actually quite surprising how resilient people are.
> People bring you food from far away, but there's no refrigeration and it's hauled at 15 kilometers a day.
Where are you getting the 15km number? Of course it depends on the topography, but also the mode of transportation.
> You can pay someone a lot of money to bring avocados from 1000 kilometers away by foot today. But you won't want to eat those avocados.
It really depends on what you are eating. Trade did bring all sorts of exotic food items hundreds or thousands of miles.
What other mode of transport did you have? ships was all. even if you used an oxcart (not a horse - they eat too much for this work) it was slow.
okay 15km is too short. Average walking speed is 5km/hr and you would expect to walk 10 hours a day. So movement would have been more like 50km per day.
You ignored my point that however you slice and dice it the royalty could afford ample leisure time that modern day people cannot, even the upper classes spend more time working than almost anyone from nobility.
There are massive numbers of people who simply don't work at all today. There are plenty of people with inherited wealth doing nothing, just like royalty before.
A child of a movie star today is living a much more exciting and relaxmaxxed life than a typical prince 500 years ago. And they don't have to march out to battlefields sometimes, get massacred by their cousins or constituents, or die of being inbred. Guarantee you that you could take any prince from centuries ago, show them first class on an airplane and beach resorts in French Polynesia and they'd 100% prefer "settling" for that over slow carriage rides between cities.
> We can look back on people who were royalty in their time, but by modern standards, they would've been living a poor life.
But now you have shifted the goalposts to say the modern day royalty lives better than hundreds of years ago royalty. That is obvious, and not what anyone was claiming otherwise.
>No medical care? You could have a surgeon invent an implement to pull an arrow out of your skull and save your life, just because you are important enough for that.
...and die 2 weeks later from an infection because antibiotics haven't been discovered yet
>Only food in season? You could pay people to bring you food from other places far away lands no one has ever seen in such seasons.
The lack of air freight means even if you can send some guy to get it, by the time it arrives it'll be rotten.
It would be nice if instead of the fast charging problem the focus would be shifted to standardized battery packs, that can be field replaced. I don't really want to own 50-100kwh battery. I just want to use the charge in it and happy to pay for that.
I remember reading an article somewhere which explained why this was an impractical issue. I forget the details, but I think issues like weight, ending up with a battery pack that doesn’t hold its charge well, etc. were all big concerns. Weight seems like it would be a huge problem given that the battery is the largest component of the EV drive train and it’s usually kept along the floor of the EV for weight distribution.
They also have 2% ev marketshare in China, because its still an expensive and complex feature that has downsides that the previous comment mentioned. Like these high energy batteries are dangerous as the can burn quite spectacularly, so I personally would not want to take and remove one from my car every charge hen I can wait a few minutes at a regular charging station that is much more common than a replacing station.
I think swappable batteries may be a more practical solution for heavy trucks rather than cars. They have the advantage that they are already built to carry heavy things loaded by forklift, unlike cars.
I agree, but there are aggressive subsidies around electric vehicles and general graft. Similar things happen in most countries but in dictatorships things can go to absurd levels when it aligns with the current policy.
Realistically, this is a pipe dream. China has had a few that are trying this NIO being the most well known.
To me, it's not really viable. The 3 main problems are - The extra costs in a vehicle to allow swapping within say 5 minutes is non-trivial. The physical space required to house X number of batteries ready, X number swap ready is a lot at any moderate volume. Last, Batteries are not universal and now you're constricting either the design of all cars or you have to go to a specific swap station that houses your battery, related to the physical space. I would not accept a battery w/ less volume.
Time will tell if I'm wrong; NIO might do it, but I'm a naysayer for sure.
The main obstacle is battery swap is capex heavy, hence PRC might do it, but most other places, less likely. It's pretty easy to extrapolate PRC auto parking / self driving cars sneaking out during low congestion to hit their battery swap queue. But that is a fairly significant logistics / infra issue when most countries would be lucky to get sufficient fast charging piles in place. Battery volume is probably not an issue since batteries will be rentals for minimum XYZ capacity. And algo might eventually bid for price, i.e. discount rental for partial charge if it means your car go for a swap by itself a couple days earlier.
NIO has a battery swap station in my city in Trondheim, Norway. It has not been that popular. You might say that installing a fast charger is complex and costly, but a battery swapping station is also very costly and complex. The difference is that you can put out more fast charging stations at various locations. This means that you often have to choose between driving 20 minutes to a battery swapping station to do a 5 minute swap, or drive 5 minutes to do a 20 minute fast charge. The added complexity of a swapping station just is not worth it.
Would you do it if it was cheaper per kwh? Say you have an EV where any battery you get from the swap station is better than 90% degradation, and you pay $0.40 per kwh for the electricity in the battery- but you get the option to take a battery between 80% and 90% degradation, in which case you get the battery all filled up, but only pay $0.35 per kwh for the electricity in that battery.
Like Henry Ford tried on the Model T: The Model T was offered in three fuels: Gasoline, Electric, and Alcohol. It only took I think less than a year to make it Gasoline only.
There were issues with charging, motor driving, and batteries.
For converting from ac to dc for charging you had either a dc generator or old school selenium rectifiers or vacuum tubes ones. I used to have an old 60's battery charger with selenium rectifier. First car I drove had a DC generator. So wasn't until the 70's you got cheap high quality rectifiers and thyristors.
When I started my career in the 80's it was all coming together. Robust power electronics shows up then. By the end of the decade inverter controllers for motors were becoming common. And the mid 90's is when Toyota starts working on their hybrid drive. The battery they used was a nicad battery.
And then there are batteries. Before 1980 or so you're options were lead acid or nicad. The former have low energy density and the max output current was low. Nicads were expensive and also low capacity, but had higher output per weight. Which is why the Prius and the EV1 used them.
Late 80's I got a hold of some lithium primary cells they could put out a few amps at 4.1V. I did a calculation if you put 5000 of them at $10 each into an EV the battery would weigh 600lbs and put out about 250 hp. Weeee! And at $15 each the battery would cost $75k. Cause primary batteries it's $250/mile. 1 years later you had rechargeables with similar specs and cheaper.
I feel that in the 1910-20s when gasoline won the electric technology just wasn't there. People wanted electric cars to succeed buy the economics and performance wasn't there.
When cars where new they didn't go very fast and ICE efficiency was very bad. It just turned out that it's a lot easier to improve ICE power output and tank size than to improve batteries.
The gas piston engine didn't just power cars, it also powered aircraft, armoured vehicles, and trucks. Anyone using electric vehicles by the time World War 2 broke out against a gas piston enemy would've been constantly outmanoeuvred and outgunned. And the logistics chains to bring men and materials to the front of the enemy's front lines would've been far faster then any electric trucks at the time. Especially without the modern day micro controllers that make modern battery management systems possible.
Tesla tried battery swapping in 2015 and abandoned it due to a lack of customer interest (and also due to various problems that made the process less straightforward than you'd think). Both the Model S and Model X were designed from the outset to have swappable batteries.
The battery swap feature was implemented only to maximize California clean energy credits. Only enough infrastructure was built to claim the credits.
“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.”
Premature reject. It's working in China, it would work in trucking. "Tesla tried" doesn't mean jack. No car manufacturers want to do this because it means loosing a point of innovation. It has to be regulated to happen at scale. It won't happen but not because it can't work. After all... look at 12v car batteries
Horrid quality video and not about the trucking you mean (i think), but these [0] electric dump trucks are a very welcome sight everywhere in Shenzhen, China.
Battery swapping for trucks is far different from cars though. Trucks are reasonably standardised, they commonly have predestined routes and purpose built depots to operate from. If you're say Pepsi and you've got a fleet of trucks going between your warehouses you can build the infrastructure around your route.
If you look at old mobile phones with removable batteries, you'll notice that there is usually a lot of space taken up by the plastic around the battery which is designed to allow a user to replace it repeatedly. A car battery that's rapidly replaceable would need a large, strong structure around it to allow it to be replaced but also to hold together in the event of a crash. If batteries had to be swapped out, you would lose more cabin space and structural rigidity. Then you get to standardised connectors and mountings, data protocols, the list goes on. And that's before you think of the automated equipment to actually swap the batteries.
In a world where we can charge a car today from 10-80% in 10 minutes, it doesn't seem like a worthwhile engineering challenge.
Well it's patented and Tesla doesn't own the patent. But that aside, you trade a different set of problems, specifically what happens if the pack that is put into your car is damaged and as a result of that damage catches fire when it is discharging? That isn't something that happens with gasoline.
I keep hoping flow batteries can overcome their issues as replacing depleted electrolyte with charged electrolyte is much more like 'refueling' in the current sense of the word.
Contaminants in fuel can cause damage to cars. I don't know if retailers tend to carry insurance for this but typically they are responsible, although proving it may not be easy. I imagine the risk would be quite rare and fairly well handled with insurance.
What's patented? Seems like a ridiculous patent if it entirely covered all practical manner of swapping batteries to recharge an EV.
A battery can weigh up to half a ton. Because of the weight, you want to keep it at a low position in the car. That is not easy to swap. By contrast consider that you charge your car. For a daily commute, the most practical is to charge it on your driveway or at the office. In my case that means I only have to consider public charging on vacations and longer weekend trips. Now this means my net travel speed is lower then. But I can adjust to that.
It is actually practical position for an automated swap. You drive to the position, the door on the ground open, the robot pulls the old battery and installs the new one, no hassle.
no hassle unless the door has to cope with rain, salt water drizzle and daily freeze-thaw cycles. then it suddenly starts to cost like half a spaceship
I absolutely do not want that unless there are guarantees around the condition of the batteries.
I can't imagine much worse than being on a road trip and quick swapping to a new battery that you discover, after driving away, has significantly degraded performance and range.
Now think about a field you know. Maybe laptops or phones.
Would a standardised battery block in laptops work? The same battery would work in a Frame.work, System76, MacBook air, MacBook pro, a Lenovo Thinkbook and whatever gaming monster there is from Asus.
Sounds stupid, right? It's just as stupid for cars.
And if laptops had battery swapping, would you swap your brand new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station? Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
I am not sure it is the same. First of all the limitation in usage for a phone/laptop reduces the utility, but for a transportation device it is way worse. On phone/laptop you can use the main functions while charging, but tethered. On a car the main function is the only thing you cant use.
There does not have to have a single battery standard, could be s/m/l, like coincell, aaa, aa etc.
> Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
Do you trust random utilities/charger manufacture?
> new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station.
Would you care if it is within regulated thresholds and you can get another one any time you want?
Yet standardization across manufacturers is a huge hurdle... Like every automaker has different battery designs, voltages, and cooling systems optimized for their vehicles. Plus, swapping stations require massive infrastructure investments and a steady supply of charged packs, which means even more logistics and costs.
is that infra more expensive than preparing for the holiday events when half the nation decides to relocate to somewhere else and they need on the go charging? Not just the charging stations, but grid usage etc.
It's one of the best tools to troubleshoot packetloss on the internet and generally routed networks. It gives you way more information than ping or traceroute could potentially give.
If you run it in TCP or UDP mode you can even nail down the physical interface that's erroring in a LAG/LACP bundle due to being able to manipulate the 5 tuples very well.
I'm also curious about the flags you used for ping and mtr that showed you this discrapancy.
mtr -i 0.1 1.1.1.1 gives 80% loss for my router (ok not the same as 100% loss as I stated earlier, but I just rerun to experiment), which is deprioritising ttl exceeded packets, but a ping -c 1000 -f 192.168.0.1 (my router) yields 0% loss. The per hop loss indicator is not only incorrect but also isn't useful even if it were accurate since end to end loss is what matters, not a phantom per hop loss that doesn't have any effect on end to end loss.
Right, so control-plane packet rates are rate limited (to some definition of sane), but they are applied to all applications, traceroutes, pings alike.
An argument could be made for a device configured as such to show loss on ping but not on mtr if you configure the rate limits so that the icmp reply rate is lower than ttl expired rates. Which tool would be wrong than? Would you blame ping for producing misleading results?
The running counters and the ability to pick out the obvious rate limiting when the loss doesn't cascade into the hops to me is akin to traceroutes * * * output. It doesn't always mean that the packets are blackholed, connectivity is broken, it just means the tool is producing an artifact due to network configuration or network characteristics. Further investigation is needed to figure out what's going on.
MTR imho is giving you much more insight into the network than traceroute or ping separately. It doesn't resolve the usual firewall/rate limiting artifacts, but gives you way more information about paths if you know how to interpret them.
> Right, so control-plane packet rates are rate limited (to some definition of sane), but they are applied to all applications, traceroutes, pings alike.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but in this case control-plane packet rates are different for generating TTL exceeded vs Echo Response, where one is giving 80% loss and the other is giving 0% loss at similar rates. Gripe #1 why are we even testing control plane in the first place, it's a useless metric that doesn't have utility at measuring end to end latency/loss.
> An argument could be made for a device configured as such to show loss on ping but not on mtr if you configure the rate limits so that the icmp reply rate is lower than ttl expired rates. Which tool would be wrong than? Would you blame ping for producing misleading results?
Sure that would be a problem, but any combination could be misleading if the data path is yielding 0% loss for high rates of ICMP end to end. This is why it's not a very particularly helpful metric and can be downright misleading (usually not to me, but I've seen plenty people make incorrect inferences from bunk MTR results because the tool isn't intuitive).
> The running counters and the ability to pick out the obvious rate limiting when the loss doesn't cascade into the hops to me is akin to traceroutes * * * output. It doesn't always mean that the packets are blackholed, connectivity is broken, it just means the tool is producing an artifact due to network configuration or network characteristics. Further investigation is needed to figure out what's going on.
Sure that's great, not particularly helpful to the masses who misunderstand the tool. I worked as a network engineer for a decade receiving bunk MTR reports where people freak out because they're seeing "packet loss" which was inexistent on the data forwarding plane (you know the one that actually matters).
> MTR imho is giving you much more insight into the network than traceroute or ping separately. It doesn't resolve the usual firewall/rate limiting artifacts, but gives you way more information about paths if you know how to interpret them.
Time shouldn't be wasted measuring the control path and then investigating to confirm it is the control path and not data path. You cannot make these mistakes using traceroute and ping separately because traceroute doesn't have a notion of a "per-hop" loss indicator and ping doesn't involve intermediate hops (unless an intermediate hop generates an ICMP diagnostic for an echo request).
> Sure that's great, not particularly helpful to the masses who misunderstand the tool. I worked as a network engineer for a decade receiving bunk MTR reports where people freak out because they're seeing "packet loss" which was inexistent on the data forwarding plane (you know the one that actually matters).
Understanding can be improved. Bunk MTRs are easy to spot. You tell them this is not an issue because .... . Than they will learn and usually that customer will stop sending you bunk MTRs.
I'm pretty sure that the people that are opening tickets with providers/network teams because they have nothing better to do is nearing 0. The fact that they ran an MTR shows that they were doing some troubleshooting and at the end of the day a problem needs to be solved. It may not be on your end but that needs to be investigated but the same would apply for a crappy iperf throughput test. IMHO Any clue/information into where that problem is, is helpful. You may need to filter relevant from irrelevant.
But if I get to pick one out of 2 problems, one has a crappy iperf results, the other has an MTR that has a loss that carries over, I would probably pick the second because that at least gives me indication on whereabouts should I start looking.
> Time shouldn't be wasted measuring the control path and then investigating to confirm it is the control path and not data path. You cannot make these mistakes using traceroute and ping separately because traceroute doesn't have a notion of a "per-hop" loss indicator.
traceroute does have per-hop indicator, it's the * in the output, it's just so often off that nobody pays much attention. You can't really catch issues that are related to route-flaps or reroutes with traceroute. with MTRs it becomes pretty clear if a reroute happens in the middle of your test. I guess you can keep running traceroute but I will leave it to you to sift through the output of that nightmare and than it effectively became MTR, with worse output.
There are also many options available in MTR that is not there in traceroute (to trigger these packets by tcp or udp packets), fix local or remote port etc. Even if you just run it with 3 packets per hop, you will have way more options. You don't have to use it as a continuous monitor to indicate packetloss but can give you the traceroute level information in a much cleaner format and you have more options to choose from.
> ping doesn't involve intermediate hops (unless an intermediate hop generates an ICMP diagnostic for an echo request).
ICMP echo requests and replys can be subject to different QoS treatment as TCP/UDP traffic, so that also doesn't necessarily gives you the right idea when testing for end to end connectivity issue.
Iperf imho is the best bet, and if you want to be really accurate you pick the src/dst port for client/server just to be sure you get into the same Class as your problematic traffic.
As a sidenote MTR packets are also ride the data-plane until they reach the TTL=1.
Todays matle.io had a few positions that were inconsequential to the mate itself and could be a lot of pieces other than the solution that could be reached through normal game so it's pretty much a guessing game.
