What is energy, actually? (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/energy-and-us/what-is-energy-actually/ <comment><USER2> The argument is based on looking a the world as a whole.

In developed world energy intensity of GDP is decreasing even when you take into account imports. Post-industrial economies can grow while decreasing energy use.

What the author is suggesting is that the developing world should stop growing. I can't agree with that. They need their electricity and washing machines.

GDP per unit of energy use (constant 2011 PPP $ per kg of oil equivalent)

EU: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?lo...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?locations=EU)

US: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?lo...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD?locations=US)

<comment><USER3> They need their electricity and washing machine, but do they need exotic vacations and long commutes in powerful cars? Do they need clothes that are made to be worn for a very short time? Do they need technology that's cheap to the point of it being wasted without an afterthought?

<comment><USER4> > [...] long commutes in powerful cars?

People in developed countries don't need that either. Commuting being a hard requirement for modern life in an industrialised country is both a fallacy and perpetuated cargo cult.

Most people working in offices today effectively wouldn't have to commute but they still do because employers require them to do so, basically because "that's the way it's always been".

Doing away with lengthy commutes will be key to addressing many of today's problems, including climate change.

<comment><USER5> So are you in favor of government telling people where to live and work? I've seriously heard your position many times but no one ever puts forward a solution to making it happen other than the government forcing people to do it. Sounds like a dictatorship to me. and no I don't think employers are all gonna just let people not "come in" to work.

<comment><USER4> No, that's not at all what I'm saying. I argue for people to change their inveterate, cargo cult ways of thinking about what constitutes work and the conditions required for it.

We need a new mindset not new government policy. That change can't and must not be mandated but has to come from each and everyone of us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion:

1\. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law.

2\. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it.

3\. Investors demand growth because they want a certain minimum return on investment.

4\. Investors need to invest money in instruments with a certain minimum ROI because if they don't, inflation will erode their savings.

5\. This continuous growth requirement forces companies to compete for larger and larger portions of market share, which in turn forces their competitors to compete harder in response.

6\. The end result is a sort of "Red Queen" effect where everyone is forced to compete harder and harder just to maintain his/her existing standard of living.

7\. We know that the more extreme a competition becomes, the more ruthless the participants become, often to the point of acting immorally.

8\. Therefore, we should focus on curbing inflation to curb the pace of overwhelming growth, and thereby restore some measure of social justice.

<comment><USER7> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. People demand growth because they want to get richer, regardless of the prevailing conditions.

I would also like to point out that if there were to be no growth _and_ no inflation (edit: and a static population level!), then the only way to add a dollar to your pile is to permanently make someone else a dollar poorer. That seems likely to accelerate the lethality of the billionaries vs. hungry poor conflict rather than de-escalate it.

> inflation will erode their savings

> compete harder and harder just to maintain his/her existing standard of > living

These are two different things. Savings are a _stock_ , "standard of living" is a _flow_. The distinction matters here because GDP measures flows; the two are related through the money equation "MV=PQ".

<comment><USER8> > Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West.

pet theory: Inflation is way way more than zero almost everywhere (prices of services and rents reflect this), but high inflation is masked by increased supply chain efficiencies, cheapening (in some cases worsening) of products and other factors, which keep prices of physical products relatively stable.

<comment><USER9> Inflation is the opposite of cheapening, so I don't see how that can be.

What you may be feeling though, and what isn't calculated in any numbers, are the increases in volatility, which is itself a cost. The volatility of not living in the few economically burgeoning regions, the volatility of having to keep moving up the ladder or else falling behind, increased years of education and loans for what may or may not be a lucrative career, etc.

<comment><USER7> Parent is probably referring to "shrinkflation": rather than charge 10% more for a box of cereal, make it 10% smaller for the same price. Or otherwise reduce the cost of inputs.

> volatility

Definitely worth having a discussion on this, although we need to define the reference period - volatility was high in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Arguably it was only low in the ""end of history"" period between the fall of the Berlin wall and the 2008 crisis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very impressed to find Jancovici here. I've been watching his intervention for 6 months and I found he has one of the most rational approach to our coming world. It is bleak but not desperate, although his main message is : technology/economy (based on our consumption of fossil fuel) will not have time to catch up on the coming catastrophies and the inevitable pic oil. We have shaped the world to our convenience now we have to adapt to it and the illusion of infinite resource needs to end or it will end us.

</comment><comment><USER3> French speakers, don't miss Jancovici's appearances on Thinkerview. Along with Bihouix, his talks are clear and enlightening.

<comment><USER11> And his recent (2019-11-07) interview on France Culture [https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des- matins/tr...](https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/linvite-des- matins/transition-energetique-avons-nous-encore-le-temps)

<comment><USER12> Also his whole course on climate change on youtube. I'd never imagined JMJ linked here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's easy to say from the First World, where they already traded our (global) environment for (local) gains. But what are the people in poor countries supposed to do? Just stay poor forever?

<comment><USER14> The problem of excessive energy consumption isn't caused by the people in poor countries though.

<comment><USER15> And who defines excessive? If you happen to be talking about CO2 emissions, the level in the UK (1% of total emissions) has been reduced to that last experienced in 1890. Aside from CO2 what's the problem with energy consumption in itself? There are plenty of people in the UK who have a financial problem in keeping warm in the winter. I see a figure of 4 million from 2016. That's not at all likely to get smaller as renewables push up from providing 22% (inc. non carbon) of the energy demand in the UK at present. [https://gridwatch.co.uk/](https://gridwatch.co.uk/)

<comment><USER14> > Aside from CO2 what's the problem with energy consumption in itself?

I agree with this entirely. Some countries managed to reduce CO2 emissions from their electricity production. However when you look at primary energy consumption, including heating, industry, transportation, no country manages to reach a low-CO2 energy profile.

> There are plenty of people in the UK who have a financial problem in keeping > warm in the winter.

There are plenty of people in the UK who live in old, precarious buildings with very poor insulation. Mandatory paid-for insulation in these buildings would reduce energy consumption, CO2 emissions and increase comfort of living. That's part of the measures pushed forward by Jancovici.

> And who defines excessive?

That is, indeed the key question of our times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of charts and napkin math to reach an obvious conclusion. Better discussion would be, " _A) Why do we worship GDP, and B) how do we stop?_ "

My own answers (shared as a starting point rather than a destination) would be:

A)

\- old westerners are really attached to the pensions they promised themselves

\- marginally-skilled people prefer the illusion of agency offered by employment over being total dependents of the state

\- people who have never experienced certain products and services attach much more value to them than those who already have--new toy vs old hat.

\- plutocrats are very interested in keeping the machine well-oiled so that they may enjoy their lives in peace and keep the guillotine at bay.

and B)

\- short of civilizational collapse, I'm not sure that we can.

<comment><USER17> The elephant in the room is the continual neglect or the downright (intellectual) hate shown to anyone who had dared mention Malthus in the last 25-30 years (his thoughts had a bit of intellectual resurgence in the 1970s, but that was pretty much it). It seems like in the last 2 or 3 years we have tried and tried to reach his same conclusions in very convoluted ways, ignoring his very existence.

The good thing at least is that some of us have at last reached the conclusion that some sort of planet-wide environmental growth limits have been reached, even that wasn't the case until not that long ago, when any mention of a possible limit was met with "we'll technologically surpass that, we always have".

<comment><USER16> Malthus is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many "forbidden charts" that people can lose their jobs over these days!

Outside of global warming--all we plebes get are Pinker-nuggets on how everything is just fine.

<comment><USER18> Curious. Care to give some examples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is so much wrong with this.

> from 1880 to 1975, when energy per capita is strongly growing, the world > undergoes just one major economic crisis, in 1929.

> since 1975, after the rate of growth dramatically decreased, there has been > a crisis every 5 to 10 years: 1975, 1980, 1991, 2000, 2008, 2012, and it > would be no surprise to have a new one in the coming years.

These statements are just totally wrong. There were many more economic crisis between 1880 - 1975 and often those were worse then those since 1975.

These statements are just 100% opposite of every history of economics I have ever seen.

It seems he gets the causation totally backwards.

> and recurring recessions will become something normal in our economic system

Recessions are absolutely not linked to energy supply.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm mostly commenting here to be able to find this guy again later.

But now that I have listened to him he is 100% spot on about most things.

The only problems this guys has are:

1) He's biased for nuclear because it feeds him. Nuclear cannot be built without hydrocarbons and toxic nuclear waste is not something you can dig down into the ground without hydrocarbons, even if the radiation is only hazardous for 1000 years, we're not going to have enough energy to handle the waste.

2) He does not understand money enough yet. Fiat money cannot have value without hydrocarbons. GDP is 99% debt because today money is 99% debt and therefore neither has value. Money is something humans have arbitrarily invented without being inspired by nature, it does not exist!

3) He does not understand that some things run and use energy whether you use them or not. For example the routers on the internet because processors are synchronous. The solution is async. processors, but our economic system doesn't encourage energy saving research, at least before it's too late, which is now.

That said, if the energy density of uranium is 1000000x that of oil, which in it's turn is 1000x more than batteries; this guy for president?

</comment><comment><USER21> Great discussion. My favorite definition of energy is that it is a replacement for the labor and time of human beings. Energy gives us freedom to choose how to live our lives because it does stuff for us that we don't want to do. This is why so few of us are farmers. Energy leads very directly to high quality of life.

As such, per capita energy usage isn't just linked to GDP, but also to Human Development Index (a composite index to quantify quality of life that includes GDP).

Here's what HDI vs. per capital electricity usage looks like: [https://i.imgur.com/8otdGxP.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/8otdGxP.jpg)

Bubble size is proportional to population. While correlation does not imply causation, it's quite clear that as quality of life improves, so does energy usage, to a point.

The striking thing is the knee. The knee is mentioned in the parent article from a GDP point of view but I think that's only part of the story. On the low-energy side, you can see that a little bit of energy can dramatically improve your quality of life. At the very low end is where people are cooking with indoor stoves and dying to the tune of 3.8 million per year from indoor air pollution.

Then you see for places like the USA, we could cut our per capita energy usage in half and probably not be affected from a quality of life standpoint. We're saturated.

There is a worldwide moral imperative to increase per capita energy usage of people at the low end of this curve for quality of life reasons. They deserve the ability to choose how they spend their time. Doing so requires about a 2-4x increase in total world energy production.

Energy sources that can enable that kind of gain without causing more air pollution deaths and without causing climate change are well-known. Here they are as a function of carbon emissions (equivalent) per kWh generated: [https://i.imgur.com/8LQFVMO.png](https://i.imgur.com/8LQFVMO.png)

</comment><comment><USER22> It is ludicrous how few economists are willing to take thermodynamics as a limiting theory to the economy when it's so critical in finance and science.

Not as crazy as the fact ISLM doesn't capture private debt, but still a huge problem

</comment><comment><USER23> It would make far more sense to massively increase energy efficiency across all segments. This will further decouple GDP from emissions.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean "further decouple"? It has never been decoupled in any real sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy- inte...](https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-energy-intensity- gdp-data.html)

Yet, reduction of energy use per unit of GDP is not impossible. In the last 28 years there has been reduction by 35% overall.

</comment><comment><USER25> > The term "GDP per energy unit" is nothing else than the energy efficiency of > the economy: the more efficient the economic system is, the more GDP is > produced with the same amount of energy. In other words, when this term > increases, it means that for the same amount of kWh (or BTU!), we can have > more furniture, glasses, cars, frozen peas, buildings or coffee machines.

FWIW, i want to point out that this is an often-overlooked leverage point for improving our situation. Our systems today are grossly inefficient. For example, something like 30%-50% of the electricity we generate (okay, _transform_ ) is lost in the grid on the way to the consumer. Much of it is lost after that too.

<comment><USER26> > For example, something like 30%-50% of the electricity we generate (okay, > transform) is lost in the grid on the way to the consumer.

I don't think it is that much.

Plus electricity is not our main energy consumption.

And most of our machines have actually a decent efficiency. And/or it is hard to optimize. ICE for example have not even progressed that much in several decades. One or two dozen % maybe? And they will also not improve much in the future.

So we can not sustain by merely efficiency improvements. Because we are talking about reducing the energy consumption greatly. Like x2, 3, 4. But of course efficiency is crucially important, and part of what will be required.

<comment><USER25> > I don't think it is that much.

I can't find a good reference, and I think it's gotten better since the 70's, but yes, depending on who you ask and how you do the accounting (and which nation or region you're talking about) losses are from about 10% to as much as 70%.

I'm glad you're not against improving efficiency but you should check it out, the scope for improvement _just_ in efficiency is great.

I. e., ICEs emit streamers and blobs of unburned fuel (not to mention other still-useful chemicals that instead become pollution). You can install a spark plug in your tail pipe and send 5m flames shooting out the back. People used to do it for kicks, I'm given to understand. There's a whole cottage industry of fringe-tech gadgets to atomize fuel more finely to improve cars' fuel efficiency.

Or consider the refrigerator, it opens like a cabinet spilling cold air on the floor every time.

We can get 2x improvement in energy consumption _just_ though greater efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We make more things, but we consume less resources to do it today than ever before. That was the essential point of Andrew McAfee's book and his discussion on Econtalk the other week.

[https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from- less/](https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/)

That appears to be backed up here too; this article reports that the $GDP per kWh is increasing over time.

Does this then mean that reducing GDP will have disproportionately LESS of an effect on energy consumption than it will have on value? I.e. we will have to take a much bigger hit on value produced to effect energy consumed.

<comment><USER28> You are conflating KWhr with KWhr/production. KWhr is increasing because production is increasing faster than efficiency is increasing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think there is only limited correlation between physical energy and money. Money is directly tied with human work: wages for time and effort. Physical energy can vary widely depending on the specific work, even when the price is the same.

The cost of fossil fuel is low because the human work necessary to extract it is very low- it's a problem for the ecology due to no (immediate) human work cost for the Co2 damage. The cost of solar is even lower (which is why it's disruptive)- once you have the solar panel, you don't need any human work.

<comment><USER30> labor that are still uneducated and do physical work like mining are plenty. so there is not shortage of labor and that keeps wages low. When something is produced on a mass scale, the costs gets lower and that explains why panels are cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In a market economy there is a lot of deliberate inefficiency. Commercial economies are driven, primarily, by transaction quantity, which is most typically exchanging end goods/services for money. Exchange quantity goes up as wages go up and unemployment goes down. Therefore it is in the interest of companies and government that people are employed, as many as possible, even if each person does very little to substantiate the wages earned. This line of thinking falls apart when an economy enters a correction.

Likewise, people will require less energy when wages shrink or disappear all together. Energy consumption is one of many indirect parts of the market economy. When people have less money they will travel less and shop less, which decreases the need for fuel and manufacturing.

\---

Reducing energy consumption is a very bad deliberate goal though. Energy efficiency is a natural goal from the collision of increased demand versus fuel cost. The economic desire to increase energy efficiency does just result in lower prices but also cleaner fuel sources. This has trended true over the last 150 years far before people became aware of environment consequences from rising fuel consumption.

Since rising demand, a product of rising consumption rates, drives technology interest in fuel efficiency it is healthier for future economies, and the environment, to encourage greater fuel consumption at consequence to the economy, and environment, at the present. That statement will remain true only so long as up scaling increase of efficiency outpaces up scaling rates of consumption over time. So far the difference in scale has shown true since the start industrialization and there is no indication that the difference in scale will decrease.

Another way to think about this is energy equivalence. As energy sources become cheaper, cleaner, and more available over time they allow greater access to energy by people with less purchasing power. A poor third world economy can grow in ways it could not before because less investment is demanded to achieve growth independence. These new and emerging energy sources and distribution methods are not created for humanitarian reasons. They are created from expensive investment to satisfy expensive first world energy demands. The people who benefit most are those with the greatest need in developing economies under high market pressure without the luxury of expensive investments in infrastructure or logistics. An under-developed economy with high market pressure is one where there is huge demand for raw goods/resources but that economy lacks the finances to invest in itself, such as Ghana under the cocoa industry.

</comment><comment><USER32> How do these ideas of energy relate to things like google search and software in general? I know server farms use a ton of energy and I also am pretty sure the human brain is by far the biggest consumer of energy in the human body. Maybe it is just that different forms of value creation take different amounts of energy. I suppose it takes much more energy to create a car than to add a new software user.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why do we need public companies?

<comment><USER34> I'd more ask why we need corporate charters sponsored and endorsed by the government. They solely exist to exonerate private persons from responsibility for harm done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In the not so distant future, energy could become abundant thanks to solar energy. On the other hand, physical resources (rare earths but also the molecules contained in oil) are limited. I think it is more important to seek better recycling, reduce waste than to reduce energy consumption.

</comment><comment><USER36> All countries in the world pursue growth. Forcing them to reduce their energy usage, is a non-starter.

Your best bet would be to reduce the energy consumption of things and have more power sources that have no CO2 emissions like hydro-electric and nuclear.

</comment><comment><USER37> For millennia, there was no growth because available energy was strictly limited. GDP of a country was a function of its population, itself strongly related to its agricultural capacity.

Read ancient history; you'll see that empires, for ages, relied entirely upon pillaging their neighbours for their own enhancement. The world economy was a strictly zero-sum game basically forever.

The political constructions of the past reflected that state of the matter. There was no social mobility because resource scarcity commanded that as a son of a mason, you couldn't be anything but a mason. And of course, 90% of people had to work in agriculture, anyway, just to feed everyone. There was no way out. _Of course_ society was driven through rigid hierarchies.

Then at some point some guy discovered America, and a strong, growing influx of riches began pouring into Europe. People discovered absolute, continued growth. Then as this trend continued and England had cut down all its trees, they started using coal, and the movement accelerated itself, and went on until now.

As Jancovici remarks, we _always_ went from some energy source to a more powerful, denser, more reliable one: hunting to agriculture, windmills and hand pumps to coal, coal to oil. We never went the other way around, but at some time we'll have to. How to cope?

Now let's talk for a minute about GDP. I had quite heated argument with people with economics background. Basically, they say that GDP can grow eternally because GDP is related to _value_ , which has no physical existence. So though GDP generally implies some form of materiality (be it in the form of ore, grain, industrial goods, or services) it's not _mandatory_ because you could for instance build a better car using no more materials than the previous one.

However it seems to me that this quickly wanders into philosophical territory: what is value? In economics, it seems related to human satisfaction. As the number of human beings on earth is physically limited (we could be 10 billions, 100 billions, but not an infinity), at some point that implies that individual satisfaction can increase indefinitely. That's a stretch, however you see it. That would mean that two humans exchanging a given set of resources in a closed room could increase indefinitely the satisfaction they get from their relationship, and so any arbitrary small country with as few inhabitants as you want could have an infinitely growing GDP, and reach individual nirvana and beyond. BTW I fail to see the point of free trade at this point... Standard neoclassic economics are full of such logical holes.

</comment><comment><USER38> Unless births are also somehow limited, limiting GDP growth will eventually cause large amounts of poverty.

Nobody wants to admit that the only real way to limit energy consumption is a horrible dystopian future.

<comment><USER39> Birth rates have plummeted around the world, the reason we have a growing population is people living longer.

The only exception is Africa but even there the highest emitting countries like South Africa have a birth rate barely above replacement levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> If we entirely give up growth the world's standards of living will freeze where it is.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm very very unconvinced by this, why can't we have a green jobs revolution and sensible environmental protections and growth! These are not exclusive, just caused by a lack of imagination.

<comment><USER39> They may well be exclusive:

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Kind of amusing that this idea is posted here on Hacker News, the center of people seeking jobs and companies that are the definition of growth.

If you didn't have growth, you'd all be waiting for your promotion at the power plant when someone dies and frees up a position for you.

<comment><USER43> > _Kind of amusing that this idea is posted here on Hacker News, the center of > people seeking jobs and companies that are the definition of growth._

But that's the _good_ kind of growth, you see?

I'm being sarcastic, of course. The ironic (and to me: annoying) thing about the really vocal moralists is that the concept of self-reflection seems to be entirely foreign to them. The problem is always with _other_ people, and those other people just need to change, no matter at what cost.

<comment><USER44> It _is_ the good kind of growth, the dematerialization of the economy is a major factor in the lower energy elasticity in developed countries...

<comment><USER43> What dematerialization? Facebook's entire business model is advertising, in other words: getting you to buy things. It used to be Google's and Amazon's entire business model, too, until they diversified into cloud services.

It's the exact opposite of dematerialization.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not at all against these things. On the contrary. My point is that among those people most vocal in demanding (sometimes radical) change from others, I frequently see a complete lack of self-reflection.

<comment><USER39> It doesn't really matter whether the people calling for radical change are hypocrites or not. That has no material affect on whether there really is a need for radical change. It does make them rather annoying and gives those resistant to change something to criticise them over but it doesn't alter the facts of the situation.

<comment><USER43> It affects the discussion of the situation and, by extension, the politics surrounding it, and thereby ultimately the one force that might actually effect the necessary change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is misleading in that it's not exactly the conclusion the article arrives at.

The article has it quite the other way round: Once energy consumption doesn't grow anymore we either need more efficient means of growth (i.e. less energy consumption per growth unit) or we have to forego growth.

It's pre-Industrial-Age Malthus all over again: Barring paradigm shifts that allow for more efficient production planet Earth can only sustain a maximum number of people (roughly 1 billion around Malthus' lifetime).

However, Malthus' theory has been disproven time and time again precisely because there have always been such paradigm shifts that allowed us to sustain more people with fewer resources, in others words to increase GDP/NRJ as well as NRJ/POP.

If NRJ/POP becomes stagnant either GDP/NRJ will have to grow rapidly or there won't by any GDP growth - and by extension population growth - anymore.

I just don't get the seemingly recurring obsession with artificially limiting growth. Yes, thermodynamically the energy available ultimately is limited but that doesn't mean we should start to behave as if we've already reached thermodynamic equilibrium.

What supporters of artificially limiting GDP growth often don't acknowledge is that placing such a limit also places a hard limit on population growth or even necessitates a reduction in population.

In fiction, one staunch proponent of such an approach is Avengers villain Thanos, who doesn't want to decimate half of the Universe's population for a lark or because he's simply evil but because he's on a mission to free the Universe from growth and overpopulation.

I suggest that instead of obsessing with the NRJ/POP term in the equation we focus on GDP/NRJ instead.

<comment><USER45> > If NRJ/POP becomes stagnant either GDP/NRJ will have to grow rapidly or > there won't by any GDP growth - and by extension population growth - > anymore.

If i'm not mistaken that's a non sequitur. How do you link GDP growth and population growth? Why would an ever growing population even be a goal?

> there have always been such paradigm shifts that allowed us to sustain more > people with fewer resources

No, paradigm shifts have allowed to sustain more people with more resources. Sure resources per people were smaller (eg more efficient processes), but global resource usage has always been growing (apart from recessions and other "bad" events where people actually died from stuff not working). This efficiency / resource usage counter-intuitive correlation is known as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox).

<comment><USER46> Resource usage per capita has never been _higher_ , because the goal is not to do the same work with less, the goal is always to achieve more with more (or at least the same).

Achieving "the same with less" at a macroeconomic level is actually impossible. Because if you reduce your inputs, you are by definition reducing demand for someone else's outputs, leading to ultimately less demand for your outputs, i.e. a recession.

The "way out" is for the increasing output to be more ecological harvested, less polluting, and more recyclable than before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> They can't. Capitalism can only exist in growth. To give up growth you would need to give up Capitalism.

You should do both.

Edit: Do people who downvote me disagree that Capitalism necessitates growth to function? Or do they disagree that we should get rid of it?

</comment><comment><USER48> Give up population growth. This really is key but too often overlooked.

<comment><USER49> Not necessarily.

Africa, with 1.+2 billion inhabitants, has a tiny carbon footprint compared to the US (which as less than 1/3 of Africa's population).

Source: [https://unfccc.int/files/press/backgrounders/application/pdf...](https://unfccc.int/files/press/backgrounders/application/pdf/factsheet_africa.pdf)

<comment><USER48> They have a tiny carbon footprint because they are overwhelmingly poor compared to the West (granted, the US have a particularly large footprint).

So either we tell them that, sorry, but they have to stay dirt poor and also to stay away from their rain forests even if they starve, or the aim is to eradicate poverty on the planet, but in that latter case their resources footprint (this is more general than carbon alone) is bound to increase.

That's why the global population is a key factor in fighting climate change and protecting the environment.

<comment><USER50> Only a (smallish) portion of the western carbon footprint is directly correlated with having a decent life.

Yes, the entire world cannot buy larger cars than what we need them for, we cannot fly around the world on vacations, we cannot throw away half the food we produce, we cannot buy clothes to use them once, and so on.

Such needless things, often more related to consumption culture than living standards, is responsible for a large portion of emissions.

Not only that, but we live in societies with an enormous capital in infrastructure built up from previous emissions.

I think westerners should at least start thinking about not emitting CO2 just for the fun of it, before telling others to not have too many children.

<comment><USER48> I would dispute your claim that our resources (again, it's not just about carbon) footprint is not directly correlated to basic standard of living.

But the key issue with your reply is that this is not 'us' doing this versus 'them' doing that.

 _We_ must reduce CO2 emissions and _we_ must stop population growth. Both 'we' mean humankind as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is silly. You will not convince most people to abandon technological progress.

</comment><comment><USER52> "To reduce energy consumption, stop growing your net worth. Stay poor".

It is exactly the same on the micro level.

</comment><comment><USER53> Funny how it's always private spending that's being targeted by the people who want us to become poorer to save the environment.

And yes, becoming poorer is what giving up on GDP growth means for most of us, since the population is growing.

How about we started cutting the fat in the public sector? All that debt- fuelled overspending western governments engage in has a massive climate impact.

<comment><USER54> Yes! I think it is a no-brainer that we immediately cut all defense spending to a small fraction to what it is now. If we do, we can decrease the total public spending and at the same time provide good education and health services to everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I calculated that I use 3000kwh per year (only direct electricity+gas)

If everyone use such amounts there were no global warming. But humans always have not enough stuff...

<comment><USER56> Do you have an idea of your share of the embodied energy of all the items you use in the course of your life?

<comment><USER56> To give you an idea, if you have bought a new laptop and phone, that's around another 3000kWh already.

<comment><USER55> I have 10 years old pc and bought new phone after 3 years. So 3000+3000/10+3000/3=4300

+products, so it will be 5-6k in total. Still not much.

<comment><USER56> Excellent. Now do the same for your house, your furniture, your mode of transport, what you do for work...etc etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Humans Account for Less Than 40% of Global Web Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2014/02/12/human-bot-web-traffic/

<comment><USER2> Or less than 10% if you believe the logs on my server.</comment>


Why Apple Won't Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/11/adobe-flash-on.html <comment><USER2> Apple would be crazy to allow Flash. There's two possible outcomes that would come from full Flash compatibility, and neither is good for AAPL:

1\. Flash is slow and clunky and sucks battery life -- much like it does on a full-powered Mac.

2\. Flash works great and developers use it to sidestep the App Store, bypassing both Apple's stewardship and profitability.

I've never seen any indication whatsoever (outside of hungry-for-pageviews rumormongering) that Apple is in the least bit interested in letting Flash on the iPhone.

<comment><USER3> >Flash is slow

Wrong. Badly coded flash content is slow.A bad developer churns out bad resource hogging code. Its not Flash's fault.

<comment><USER4> I don't care whose fault it is. The flash plugin is the only thing that ever causes performance problems for me when browsing, and it happens _all the time_. If it's purely a flash developer problem I'd say every single flash developer out there is bad and churns out resource hogging code. Either that, or it's the fault of Firefox and Chrome.

Whatever the reason, the flash plugin is a nightmare and I cannot wait to wake up.

<comment><USER5> The real problem is that Flash is a gateway for a lot of graphic artists wanting to make something more powerful on the web. A lot of copy-pasting and poor practices being executed on a powerful engine with a very steep learning curve.

By comparison, JavaScript is abused less because it's less appealing to beginners (it lacks the wow-factor).

<comment><USER4> I hear you but seriously, my instincts after years of troubleshooting this kind of crap is that the problem is the plug-in itself, not the particular developers that use it. I've seen bad javascript, hell I've seen HTML that can cause performance problems. What's happening with flash seems to be related to the underlying technology.

Some users are affected far more than others, and I have noticed very little correlation between particular sites and performance problems. The only constant seems to be: if the site uses flash (and most sites do), there's a high chance browser CPU usage will spike to 90%+ and stay there until it is killed. I think it happens less-often with firefox only because I've got adblock set up and it stops a lot of it from ever being loaded.

I really don't think the symptoms would be like that if this was simply a case of developers misusing the platform. Some sites would rarely have issues, others would fail all the time. It's mostly a gut instinct at this point and I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

<comment><USER6> There is a great distinction to be observed between the words "me" and "us".

It seems as though your experience leads you to your conclusions, but I'd bet rather confidently that your conclusions are conjectural rather than empirical with respect to the experiences of everyone else.

<comment><USER4> You're absolutely correct. I do not mean to say otherwise. My experiences in this regard may not be common, but they are almost certainly not unique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The iPhone has to be concerned about power consumption, and as a general rule unleashing interpreters is risky because it allows "unnecessary" amounts of computation to consume power.

Consider Flash video. While it would be nice, is it the most power-efficient way to display video? Ditto for games, or anything else that Flash is used for.

There is also the very real problem that Flash is abused for things that people don't want. Pointless intros, advertising, expensive animations...all consuming CPU in a way that is largely beyond the user's control. From the article: "websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won't work on the iPhone"...fine by me, I have _never_ seen a site that did Flash navigation in a way that was more useful than default web navigation (instead, it was just...flashy).

<comment><USER8> It is unlikely that power consumption has anything to do with the restriction. For one thing, you can write wasteful code just as easily in a compiled language as in an interpreted language, and I have never heard of Apple rejecting an application because it computes in a wasteful fashion.

And interpreted languages can run nearly as efficiently as compiled ones for many user-oriented tasks, because most of the time the application is in an idle state waiting for user input. This is why there is interpreted Java bytecode running on _nearly every other phone_.

And the phone already interprets Javascript, which is even less efficient than Flash. If Apple is willing to let the user choose whether or not to waste their cycles browsing Javascript-heavy pages, why not give them the same option to run wasteful applications?

No, this is entirely about controlling the routes of execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if this limitation (not merely banning Flash, but banning interpreters) will turn out to be the weakness that allows a competitor to one day beat the iPhone.

There are cases where you really do want to ship code-- not merely to get around a license restriction, but because that's the right way to build something.

<comment><USER10> That's going to be true exactly up to the moment when Apple reveals they've been a button click away from enabling Flash on every iPhone, thus killing that differentiation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is what the Apple commercial said:

"This is not a watered down version of the Internet, or the mobile version of the Internet, or the kinda sorta looks like the Internet Internet. It's just the Internet."

Unless Apple allows all plugins freely, the commercial was a lie, and Apple is liable for misleading viewers.

If Apple is concerned about resource hungry apps burning away battery life, they should have an inbuilt mechanism which warns users of every such instance.The choice of avoiding Flash and saving battery life should belong to end user.

<comment><USER11> Flash is in no way the internet. Browsing the web without flash is actually a pretty cool experience. The only thing missing is some video, which should be fixed with the new <video> tag.

[http://ajaxian.com/archives/html5-media-support-video-and- au...](http://ajaxian.com/archives/html5-media-support-video-and-audio-tags- and-scriptability)

(I don't know if the iPhone supports this yet, but I'm guessing it will).

<comment><USER12> Which codecs? That's a key question.

<comment><USER13> H.264 seems to be the way ahead for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Don't hold your breath waiting for the iPhone to support Adobe's Flash software: Apple's terms-of-service agreement prohibits it."

That is probably the most trivial issue preventing Flash from running on the iPhone. Companies negotiate and renegotiate agreements all the time.

<comment><USER14> The point they're making is that it's not a technical problem, but it violates Apple's fundamental strategy with the iPhone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If this is truely their approach then the iPhone is going to start looking like a pretty lame platform within a few years. There will be too many cool and interesting new things out there that just don't work on it.

<comment><USER12> This is why Android is such a big deal. Yes Apple delivered some real innovation in UI, particularly multitouch. But by trying to enforce lock-in they are eroding the value of their offering.

<comment><USER16> Agreed.

Everyone else commenting seems to be pointing out the technical hurdles / problems with a flash installation, but they are ignoring the huge business problem with NOT implementing it: customers want it.

Eventually, phones are going to come along that allow free apps, your own music, flash, similar browsing experience, and a real keyboard... and smart people will start to switch back.

In other words, the technical hurdles here are less important than the business ones. This is Jobs trying to have his iron grip, but in the long run, I dont see it working out.

<comment><USER17> They might not sell apps/games...but that's better than not selling the phone in the first place!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the iPhone..."

"Adobe's recent announcement that it is working on a version of Flash for Windows Mobile..."

Which phones currently support Flash? I know a certain amount of phones support Flashlite? And I openly welcomed Flashlite when I was dealing with terrible mobile browsers and MIDP app development. Now? I don't particularly care for it...

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmmm what about the Youtube player on there already? Maybe that should be made available for other FLV video sites

<comment><USER6> Youtube re-encoded a ton of their videos for iPhone viewing. Perhaps Youtube could offer re-encoding in the cloud or something. A proxy that does this would probably solve the iPhone/Video argument, but it would be expensive to implement and use in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How about just flash video?</comment>


Ask HN: Accessibility best practices for web apps? - <AUTHOR> This question has been on my mind for some time and the recent post on here about Slack's apparent disregard for blind users prompted me to create the post you're reading right now.<p>I'm working on a social network and I've been testing in Chrome for their Lighthouse feature and fixed some accessibility issues. However, I'd like to know if there are other great references that y'all can recommend me. <comment><USER2> Chrome has made significant improvements but has several support issues when navigating the web using assistive technologies (ATs). The Lighthouse feature is good for looking at the accessibility tree and testing though. For your testing efforts, I would focus on IE and Firefox for Windows as that is what most users of ATs will be using. Freedom Scientific, the makers of the JAWS screen reader, suggests using the ESR version of Firefox until some bugs that were introduced last fall are resolved ([http://blog.freedomscientific.com/mozilla-and-freedom- scient...](http://blog.freedomscientific.com/mozilla-and-freedom-scientific- working-together-on-firefox-compatibility/)).

This link might be a bit intimidating but you can review the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) content to see what is required for digital accessibility support.

[https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING- WCAG20/](https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/)

If you want more concise Best Practices that map to these standards but are a bit less intimidating, check out the Best Practices on webaccessibility.com.

[https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php](https://www.webaccessibility.com/best_practices.php)</comment>


Engineering the Simple Postcard with Twilio - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/2016/04/engineering-the-simple-postcard.html <comment><USER2> I thought the first one was free - I got lucky, it turns out!

I'll definitely be sending another one, my parents really enjoy these kinds of things.</comment>


California lawmakers introduce plan to end surprise ER bills - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2019/2/24/18236482/zuckerberg-hospital-surprise-bills-california <comment><USER2> I spent a night once in the ER for observation. I never got anything but Tylenol, though I think the concern that led to the overnight stay was reasonable. The bill was $16,000.

This was certainly a defensive, risk-averse treatment, but I think it was a reasonable decision. I think my insurance paid about 8,000. The magic words on the bill were "Patient is nor responsible for the difference between the amount paid by insurance and amount billed". This is because I went to an in- network hospital with a contract.

I talked about this with some of my physician friends, and they told me this is typical. In fact, the original bill doesn't represent what they expect to be paid. It represents an extreme position taken to start negotiations with an HMO or other insurance company.

Here's the trap: if you don't have insurance, you are not just hit with the high bill that represents what the hospital would pay an HMO, you're hit with he wildly inflated bill they send to an HMO in anticipation of being paid much less.

So if you don't have insurance in the US, you're doubly hosed. I know I'm supposed to hate my HMO and all, but to me, this is a bit like belonging to a union. As part of a powerful group, I have someone not just paying the bill but knocking it down for me. I may not like being part of a group plan, but on my own, I'm toast.

Unfortunately, this story shows that you can still end up on the wrong side of this billing practice even if you do have insurance, because some hospitals remain out of network for all insurance, and if you're incapacitated or simply don't have the plan in front of you and a couple hours to research the billing practices of various hospitals as your head is bleeding and you're being taken to the ER, you can end up in a similar situation to an uninsured person.

It turns out that it may in fact be impossible to insure yourself against ruinous bills. Nicely done, there.

<comment><USER3> If you don't have insurance you can negotiate your bill. The problem is that people don't understand that, that Americans hate negotiating, and that negotiating the price of something _after_ you bought it (or even after you need it) stinks.

<comment><USER4> Why aren't there services that negotiate people's medical bills, for a fee?

<comment><USER5> Because "negotiating" the blank check that you already signed does't work.

Yes, it works if they have actually stuck you with a bill that exceeds your net worth and expected income, but in that case you can't afford and/or don't need a negotiator -- you just default. It also works if you've stirred up a media frenzy, but you can't turn that into a business model for obvious reasons. The only place it does reliably work is in the imagination of those looking to downplay the severity of the current state of affairs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      Second, the bill would regulate the prices that the hospital could charge for its care, limiting the fees to 150 percent of the Medicare price or the average contracted rate in the area, whichever is greater.

Seems like this will start to solve the chicken and egg problem. Hospitals charge more because insurance will pay more. Insurance costs more because hospitals charge more.

<comment><USER3> "150%" smells like a made-up number. Unless providers have some freedom to _raise_ Medicare prices (which they don't), this effectively means that Medicare sets prices for everything. I'd rather see laws that strengthen consumers control over their insurance options (improving the power of the demand side of the market), including price disclosures, than pushing the rope from the back end without any competitive market forces influencing prices.

<comment><USER7> Have you ever tried to be a conscious consumer for health care? How about for serious health care for a life-threatening of life-changing issue like cancer or childbirth? I never understood the desire to offload any of this cognitive load to the consumer, many of whom are going through the most difficult times of their lives.

<comment><USER8> The weird thing is that, even though a lot of policy is oriented toward making you a conscious consumer (high deductibles, coinsurance) in many cases you just can't do it,at least not very well.

My wife got an allergy test at a local allergy clinic, but she had 20% coinsurance so we tried to figure out how much it would cost. Everyone there treated us like garbage. Even when we called the billing department in advance they told us there was no way to know in advance how much the basic allergy test would cost until she saw the doctor. So we went to the clinic (stupidly), and the nurses just acted like we were crazy. Finally one did tell us what the bill would be:$12k. I had researched these tests online and was floored; that's way more expensive than it should be, and the doctor who gave her a referral had told us it would be a reasonable price. So we were in the awkward position of just leaving the appointment. The doctor then basically talked to us somberly like we were the poorest people on earth, and said "listen, most of the test is for allergens that don't exist in northern California." If I just give u the local ones it'll be like $1800." I started laughing. Later on I read an NPR story about a lady who had a$48k allergy test from there. Just a complete scam, much worse than a car dealer because at least there they will tell you a price and they will not sell you ten extra useless cars evenif you don't explicitly say "don't give me ten superfluous cars for no reason." Anyway, we got the limited test, and at the end the doctor said "listen I'm not supposed to do this, but given the financial hardship I'll make an exception. If I don't put the results in the system you'll only be charged for the visit." And he just wrote the results on a yellow notepad paper and tore it out for us.

Tldr we were treated like annoying busybodies for asking the price at an in- network facility, and then treated like indigents when we balked at paying way more than anywhere else charges, for totally bs procedures.

<comment><USER9> This is a pretty good anecdote that supports why I don't go to doctors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally, we see legislators doing something good for a change: ""These practices are outrageous," says Chiu(Assembly member David Chiu) , who represents part of San Francisco in the Assembly. "No one who is going through the trauma of emergency room care should be subsequently victimized by outrageous hospital bills."

So, they introduce a bill that will reduce patient billing abuse in CA.

Based on the article, it seems like Zuckerberg Hospital was especially egregious in abusing it's patients with billing.

I hope they can continue to crack down on Hospital overbiling.

<comment><USER11> > Finally, we see legislators doing something good for a change:

Come on, we don't need this invective. Sure, I can find a reason to be outraged every day by some legislative decision someplace but in the main, we still have roads, air traffic control, health and safety rules etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And that happened to people with private insurance (SF General was "out of network" for the two examples.) But upwards of $20 thousand for very simple things is outrageous,

This has to become a national effort to curb these exploitative and unfair billing practices. It's simply outrageous.

<comment><USER13> San Francisco General Hospital is focused on serving the public, i.e. those without private health insurances. Per Wikipedia:

About 80 percent of its patient population either receives publicly funded health insurance (Medicare or Medi-Cal) or is uninsured. SFGH also cares for the homeless, who make up about 8 percent of its patients.

They effectively use the high rates for privately insured folks to subsidize their public mission. Of course this all speaks to a really broken health care system, but it's not like uninsured people would have been charged even more than $20k.

<comment><USER12> This the Robbin Hood approach to a problem. How on Earth does a public hospital think it's ethical to exploit people like this and think it's okay to do because I'm helping someone else?

<comment><USER3> It's price discrimination and it's how most businesses operate because that's the only viable option in many industries.

<comment><USER14> It's only a viability issue because everyone does it.

Regulation can help here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Negotiating the cost of life saving treatment, checking in-network vs out- network, vs in-network with contract, shopping for different insurance providers.

The amount of mental energy that Americans spend on health care just seems absolutely nuts to me. How much productivity does your country lose because people have to spend time even thinking about things like this?

<comment><USER16> It's beyond ridiculous that the richest country in human history cannot even ensure health treatment to its citizens, when countries with 1/20 of its GDP/capita manage that. Goes to show that "economic growth" by itself means nothing, if it does not even translate into something so basic as health care.

<comment><USER17> which country has universal healthcare with 1/20th of US GDP per capita? genuinely curious

<comment><USER18> I think he's talking about Cuba.

<comment><USER19> Most likely. Cuba's kind of an outlier in having an extraordinarily good medical system relative to its GDP, but it's proof at least that, given political will, it's possible.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Cuba)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some years back, the California legislature passed a bill which limited what hospitals could charge uninsured patients to the Medicare reimbursement rates. Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

<comment><USER21> CA has been under single-party control since then. What's the barrier since then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I kinda feel bad for Mark Zuckerberg. He donated a massive amount of money to the city-run hospital in a bid to improve his image (like Mark Benioff did with the state-run UCSF Children's Hospital), and it turns out they are even more rapacious than him and now his name is being dragged further in the mud thanks to them.

This incident does illustrate how corrupt health care is in the US, and public institutions are just bad as private ones.

<comment><USER23> Well, or he could have done some research before donating that money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> California protections against balance/surprise medical billing are not enforceable when an employee is covered by a "self-insured" or "self-funded" employer plan. California doesn't regulate that plan, and also cannot intervene in the billing between the provider, patient and insurance. Most medium to large employers are using such plans which means that employees are not protected from such billing.

[http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/110-health/60-resou...](http://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/110-health/60-resources/upload/AB-72-Fact- Sheet-Consumer_Protection_for_Surprise_Medical_Bills-rev2.pdf)

"Does the New Law Apply to Everyone? The new law applies to people with health insurance policies or plans regulated by the California Department of Insurance or the California Department Managed Health Care that were issued, amended, or renewed on or after July 1, 2017. It does not apply to Medi-Cal plans, Medicare plans or "self-insured plans.""

</comment><comment><USER25> Preventing attempts at collections (like this law does), insurance reform, "medicare for all", etc, etc. are nice but they don't address the root problem. Costs are out of control. Until we find a way to control costs we will still pay way too much. All that changes until then is who pays what amounts and the point at which payment is made. The hospitals are just going to shuffle around who pays what in order to make up for the income they're not getting from surprise bills unless there's something (actual competition, a government payer who won't put up with that crap, etc,) to stop them.

Sure this is a step in a good direction but there's only so many band-aids you can apply to a gunshot wound. While unscrupulous practices like this bill takes aim at should be weeded out it strikes me as hopeless in light of the bigger picture.

<comment><USER26> The problem is two-sided. Yes the costs paid by the hospital, and the cost of the techniques and tools used by the hospital are all too high, because the system does not properly incentivize finding lower cost solutions that may be equally effective and safe.

In this case the problem is exacerbated by the way that privately insured patients are being exploited to subsidize publicly insured patients;

"A hospital spokesperson initially told Vox that the hospital's focus is on serving those with public health coverage, even if that means offsetting those costs with high bills for the privately insured."

It should be illegal to charge two different people different prices for the same procedure at the same hospital. At a more granular level, it should be illegal to price discriminate on anything that can be itemized.

The middle and upper class patients are exploited to pay for publically insured patients who get service below cost which the hospital can't legally turn away.

<comment><USER27> > It should be illegal to charge two different people different prices for the > same procedure at the same hospital

I think you're close to a solution with minimal regulatory intervention (Which so far has only made things even more expensive: ACA for example).

I'm curious how this would be reconciled with insurer networks though. A cost savings to insurers IS to have networks and discounts.

<comment><USER28> Two comments: 1\. The ACA has by all accounts kept the growth of healthcare costs in check. Yes they have gone up, but at not nearly the rate they were going up before it, let alone the increased rate that most expected. If you start getting into the details this makes a lot of sense, but those details often get lost in the conversation about mandatory coverage (and the subsidies to make that possible on the low end).

2\. This sort of cost savings to the insurers is more moving the costs to other people, thus negating most of the cost savings incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What about just eliminating medical bills entirely?

</comment><comment><USER24> These laws don't apply to employees covered by employer self-funded plans, which are predominant. California can't enforce them in most cases.</comment>


Debunking the claim that higher income-tax rates reduce GDP - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2245781/

<comment><USER2> I hate how they equate progressive taxation with justice. It only works if you think justice is when people get equal outcomes regardless of if they deserve it or not. It would be unjust to penalize Warren Buffet and the other titans that drive our economy with 91% marginal tax rates. They don't deserve that kind of treatment, and frankly, I trust them to do much better good with their excess cash than the government ever would.

<comment><USER3> Shouldn't he at least pay as much as average joe? He himself conceded that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does.

<comment><USER4> > He himself conceded that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her > income in taxes than he does

Buffet is himself a redistributionist, and was comparing his capital gains tax rate (where essentially all his "income" comes from) with the earned-income tax rate his secretary pays. In other words, Buffet was indulging in a bit of FUD, to be blunt.

Many economists believe that taxing capital gains lower than income is a Good Thing to encourage investment and savings, even if it results in strange outcomes like Buffet's in edge cases.

<comment><USER5> Remember when dealing with capital gains you are risking money whereas with normal income you are not. So any taxes on capital gains need to factor in that when you lose, you loose 100% and when you when you only get the return - taxes. If the taxes are too high then the amount of risk/reward becomes lower.

<comment><USER6> This is untrue. If you are a small business owner, your earnings are taxed as salary, even though you take as much risk as any venture capitalist.

This is true until you sell your company; at that point the proceeds of the sale are taxed as capital gains. Personally, I think this rewards short-term planning over long-term planning. It's also essentially a subsidy on publicly traded companies that us little guys don't get.

<comment><USER5> It depends on the type of small business -- how it is incorporated. And yes I agree small businesses have it hard because of regulations and taxation, but I'm in favor of lowering all taxes.

But to claim that capital gains are the same as income is incredibly misleading. In the special case where you are a small business owner that works at the business then yes you are taxed as an employee. The money you invested will be recouped just as venture capital would -- when the company is sold or by paying dividends.

<comment><USER6> dividends don't help us, as to pay out dividends, I first have to pay corporate tax, which is usually lower than personal tax, but in California, I think, not lower than personal tax plus capital gains which I would have to pay on the dividends.

Sure, I recoup all the money I put in as well as my 'sweat equity' when I sell, and I pay the low capital gains tax rate on that, but like I said, this encourages short-term thinking. Hell, I could happily run my company for another 10 or 20 years. But the capital gains taxes being so much lower than the income tax I pay on money I take out without selling that it might make sense for me to sell out once I'm not doubling twice a year. It's sad, I think, as I think I'd be happier running the company, and the company would probably be better off with someone with a long-term view running it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One obvious issue with this argument: The claim that higher tax rates can reduce GDP is from Arthur Laffer and his Laffer curve -- and relates to the total tax burden, and not the marginal rate.

<comment><USER8> One obvious issue with the Laffer curve: Nobody actually knows where the peak is.

<comment><USER7> No, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Most social sciences (including economics) can't very well be exact for the lack of experiments, much less controlled experiments.

<comment><USER8> If you don't know where the peak is, you can't argue that raising taxes will reduce GDP because you don't know if you're going up the hill or down it.

<comment><USER7> And that's fine, because that's not the purpose. The purpose is to argue that the relationship isn't linear (as might be intuitively expected), but curved (I don't know what the shape is called).

It's impossible to accurately model the economy of a society, but theories like this can help politicians better judge the impact of their policies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing like debunking a political debate by writing an op-ed favoring your side of the argument.

</comment><comment><USER10> GDP growth in the US in particular can be misleading, owing to population growth. Growth in GDP per capita may be better.

</comment><comment><USER11> Considering the pace of chance in the last forty years, comparing the 1960s and 1970s to today doesn't seem like sound methodology. I suspect, for example, that it's now considerably easier to vote with your feet.

</comment><comment><USER12> I read somewhere _[citation needed]_ that the reason that you don't see a real correlation is that the rich effectively tend to pay somewhere around a 40% tax rate. As tax rates go up, it starts to pay to look for tax shelters, and get non-taxable benefits from their company, and so on, and by the time all is said and done, they won't pay more with the higher rate.

If true, raising the tax rate won't get any more money for the government, although it might be good PR for the rich and good income for their accountants.</comment>


Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2,000 man years' on UIs that didn't work - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/10/nokia_ui_saga/ <comment><USER2> Or as JWZ put it 8 years ago, the CADT model of software development.

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I nearly spat out my drink when I read the sentence claiming that a team within Nokia working on a _Linux version of the product_ tried to launch a UI/UX competitor to QT, even though Nokia had _acquired Trolltech, the QT company_ , using... wait for it... GTK.

Anyone want to put up odds that there were _other_ UX "initiatives" there pushing Tcl/Tk? :)

<comment><USER4> _using... wait for it... GTK._

The real irony here is that this GTK+-based UI modernization attempt was the only one that actually shipped. The product was called Nokia N900 (still a fairly popular device in hacker circles).

The Maemo operating system on the N900 worked well and was a good effort by 2009 standards, with a hardware-accelerated GUI and an excellent desktop- quality browser. Unfortunately Nokia's internal fumbling doomed it to premature obsolescence: as soon as the device shipped, Nokia effectively declared it dead by talking up their various internal Qt and Symbian competitors instead, and then confounding things further with the MeeGo OS merger madness.

(Their upcoming MeeGo device has already suffered the same fate thanks to the recent Microsoft deal, of course.)

<comment><USER5> As good as the Maemo 5 redesign was, I think they set their sights too low (e.g. single-touch), which effectively forced them into another redesign for Maemo 6. The mistakes of switching to Qt and merging Maemo with Moblin seem to have been politically motivated, though.

<comment><USER6> I disagree. Multitouch is cool, and it's great for certain tasks (notably zooming web pages) but compared to having a great UI, having a fully featured platform for developing apps, having great apps, integrating well with popular network services.... I don't think it's that big of a deal.

If I were designing a smartphone, and it came down to whether we supported, say, multi-touch or video chat... I'd pick video chat. I'd put the developer hours on making UI fixes first too. Multitouch would be one of the first features to get punted for 2.0.

And actually, I'd invest in making the single-touch really smooth before I did multitouch too. It's just really low on my list of priorities. It's 95% whiz- bang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost" overly diminishes the significance of UI. For users, the experience of using the phone is not a minor detail added onto a great device, it IS the device.

Perhaps a better quote for Nokia's situation is, "My kingdom for a horse...."

<comment><USER8> They had 3 horses, which were trying to turn and eat each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Back in the 90's, Nokia im my opinion has the best UI's by far compared to the competitors then. When Motorola phones did not even query the phone book to get the caller's name, Nokia was innovating with tabbed menus and whatnot. Its a shame they lagged.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how many man-years Microsoft has spent on failed UIs? (and, yes, they've had successful ones too).

Nokia had a broken development process. _The answer clearly was to surrender and turn the company over to ... another company with a long history of broken processes_.

NOTE: I'm not saying everything in Microsoft is broken by any means. Microsoft has had processes which produced Windows ME and Windows Vista ... and they fixed their process and produced some better things. That might be evidence Nokia _might_ have been able to do something similar.

</comment><comment><USER11> > With its mature and well-debugged phone stacks, it is better for phone calls > than any other smartphone: it drops fewer calls, the calls sound better, and > it uses the antenna better.

I've heard this "fact" presented many times, but is there actually any meat to it? It seems to me there must be many mature and well-debugged phone stacks out there.

<comment><USER12> IIRC, the phone stack live completely outside of Symbian itself (I'm not sure how this looks in something like Android). So each vendor attempting to deploy a phone would have to provide their own telephony stack... I worked on at least two memorable projects where they just couldn't make that work.

Now Nokia has put out hundreds of models of S60 phones, each largely sharing components. I would imagine that their telephony layer was rock solid. I have no idea if the assertion in the article is true or not, but it wouldn't surprise me. Nokia has always "gotten" the phone side... it's the UX side of a smartphone that has always vexed them.

<comment><USER13> The thing that didn't work iirc is that people other than Nokia tried to write their own Symbian Telephony server (TSY) and failed to get it working.

What makes Android successful, was coming late to the party are QCOM & co having easier to integrate solutions with their baseband chipsets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It appears that this Register article is based on the following blog post from Mark Wilcox. Just in case you want it from the horse's mouth... strange that they cited this obliquely in the Register article, but didn't link to it...

<http://mobilesoftware.tumblr.com/>

<comment><USER15> The link is all the way at the end of the Register article.

To be fair, the Register article does provide useful context that is missing from the Wilcox piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also Nokia wanted to flood the market with cheap phones to curtain the people from seeing other brands. I guess this might have created them a support nightmare. New kids understand the concept of singularity and just strieve for perfection, lefting Nokia the land of the lost buttons.

<comment><USER17> That never happened in the US. It was only the past couple years that S60 phones got introduced to AT&T and other US carriers as bundled with contracts. And nobody's going to pay $400+ for a phone they know nothing about. I always decried the fact that Nokia's phones were more advanced than the iPhone when it came out, but nobody gave a crap (they also didn't know it existed).

<comment><USER7> I admired Nokia's "noble" stand against carrier exclusivity deals and subsidized phones, but in retrospect it cost them a lot of their relevance in the US market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Its not that it didnt work, People use to love Nokia it worked like charm. Nokia was the biggest mobile phone manufacturers until it stopped innovating and iterating their products. It wasn't new for them that Apple and Google are coming up with their phones and how they would be changing the mobile industry. Had Nokia took that up and changed their product to be up with the tech innovations they would have not lost the market share. Right said if you don't innovate or iterate you are going to Die.

<comment><USER19> Totally agree. I bought a Symbian phone in 2003 (Nokia 6600) and got a new one in 2008 and the user interface was almost the same. The only difference was better looking icons and more options. The applications was the same as before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's rather unfortunate because Qt Quick is a rather promising framework for mobile development, it just needed a bit more polish.

The Symbian UI is _really_ bad right now though, it actually defies many layers of common sense. The flagship Nokia N8, for example, _still_ doesn't have a full qwerty keyboard in portrait mode. You have to rotate it to landscape mode in order to type, and the keyboard input takes up the entire screen.

I'm not really sure how that device managed to get shipped without such basic functionality in place, not to mention the fact that it is March 2011 and still not available.

<comment><USER21> By the way, they just launched Qt Quick Components for desktop: [http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for- deskt...](http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/10/qml-components-for-desktop/)

Should make app development a lot easier...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> They were designing for the wrong hardware, Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical capabilities. With that said Nokia's brick phones have some of the easiest interfaces to use of any device ever, which is a huge reason they are so popular in the developing world, that and they saturated the market.

<comment><USER23> > Nokia hasn't had a single device that rivals the iPhone's technical > capabilities

Which iPhone? Version 4? Of course not. 3GS? Have a look at N900. The hardware is pretty much comparable, with N900 being slightly better in many categories. More memory, 32GB storage in every model, twice the screen size, additional flash memory, 2MP more on the camera. Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen.

So out of 4 released iPhones, only the most recent one is definitely better than N900.

<comment><USER24> _> Actually the only place where iPhone wins completely is the multitouch screen._

That's no small thing though. I had the N810, which I'm pretty sure used the same display and sensor as the N900 and the touch screen was just painful to use.

I think an actually working touch screen sensor has been one of the biggest things the iPhone introduced (or popularized, mobile phones at the time all insisted on resistive sensors, probably because of lower costs).

<comment><USER23> I'm not judging features here as more or less important. I just meant to point out that N900 can easily be a rival to all but the most recent iPhones from the technical point of view. I'm not sure about N810 screen - never used it. I'm ok with the N900 one, although yes, it could be more sensitive. But I'd honestly take resistive screen over the cap. one for the advantage of using it in gloves (my hands are easily getting cold ;) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would waist another 2000 man years than go with a company that released a credible competitor on October 21, 2010 ; although they've been doing it since at least year 2000 (i.e. working on handheld / mobile operating systems). That's not a good track record if you ask me - whereas both Apple and Google came out of nowhere and swept the market since the first versions released.

<comment><USER26> While not specifically a phone, the iphone does have ancestry that didn't exactly "sweep the market"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)>

<comment><USER27> iOS has about as much to do with the Newton as it has to do with Go.

<comment><USER28> And Windows Phone 7 has barely anything to do with Windows Mobile. And no one can court developers like Microsoft(the big problem with Nokia). There are already close to 10,000 applications compared to close to 5,000 for WebOS which had a head start.

<comment><USER29> Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows CE 6 [1]. It has a lot more code in common with Windows Mobile than iOS has with the Newton.

1\. [http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based- on-...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/04/windows-phone-7-based-on-a-hybrid- windows-ce-6-compact-7-kerne/)

<comment><USER28> Windows CE 6 is a complete redesign of Windows CE 5.2(on which Windows Mobile is based).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How many man hours are there to a man year? Is the unit supossed to concider how much hours a man works in a year, or is it just 365 * 24 a man hour?

<comment><USER31> Don't forget that the measure is probably in metric too.

<comment><USER5> I guess you're joking, but a European person-year is definitely smaller than an American person-year (or PY as we call them at the office).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Well atleast they had a bubble inteface! [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=player_embedded)

I was reading a post by a Nokia employee that teams used to work on improving their own branches of Symbian that were never merged into the main one. This lead to fiefdoms and waste of duplicate effort.</comment>


Namebox - The Easiest Way to Sell Your Unused Domains - <AUTHOR> http://namebox.io <comment><USER2> I assume there is no validation required to prove you own the domain you are selling?

Example: [http://i.imgur.com/VHd5uVg.png](http://i.imgur.com/VHd5uVg.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't appear so.

It is also missing any system for aiding in the transfer of domains (it leaves this up to users to negotiate individually, which could introduce fraud). An escrow system would be nice.

<comment><USER3> Use Escrow.com. And this is a recently released project with many improvements coming soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great! I added some of my domains here: [http://namebox.io/bluetidepro](http://namebox.io/bluetidepro)

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting! An option for filter by domain would be useful.</comment>


Capehart Communications Collection – For Sale - <AUTHOR> https://telemuseum.info/ <comment><USER2> This is super cool, it would make for an amazing exhibit paired with an interactive audio/video tour. Having said that, I seriously doubt this is the largest collection in the world by any measure.

<comment><USER3> i've visited a number of private telephone collections and Don's is absolutely massive by any standard. i can't do it justice, nor can any photo album. but he has, among other treasures, some highlights from my memory:

      - autovon equipment
      - several generations of digital switches
      - electromechanical switches too
      - loads and loads of paper documents on compact shelving
      - bell labs prototypes
      - phones that i never knew existed
      - the first switch from Sprint's long distance network

i sincerely hope that he finds homes for all his collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Largest private collection by an individual

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just imagine 8,000 sq feet of display area, and, as far as I know, there is also a living area there, like a house inside this warehouse. The price is very reasonable and I would buy it if it was not so far away from me.

<comment><USER5> Where did you see the price listed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Inside info. I am just a secret fan who wishes he had this building in his backyard. Hopefully some crypto baron realizes the historical significance of this collection and buys this marvel for the chump change</comment></comment></comment>


Why No One Is Beating Tesla's Range - <AUTHOR> https://jalopnik.com/why-no-one-is-beating-teslas-range-1837952903 <comment><USER2> No one's beating Tesla's range because no one is willing to use the NCA battery chemistry. All the other automakers stick to NMC (for very good reason). Tesla will have a ~20% range and cost advantage just by nature of using NCA over NMC.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't seem to explain why other cars are getting less range from batteries with similar capacity.

<comment><USER2> NMC batteries needs to be much bigger/heavier to match the capacity of NCA due to NCA's better energy density. Then you have both the increased weight and increased cooling burden associated with the larger NMC battery that negatively impact range.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't add up. The I-PACE and Taycan both have similar weight to the Model X, yet are substantially less efficient. The e-tron is lighter than a Model S and has absolutely horrible efficiency.

<comment><USER2> The e-tron is similar in weight, size, and power to the Model X and pretty much gets within 10% of its efficiency comparing WLTP ratings. I think the efficiency loss can be explained by cooling (if this article is to be believed that Audi has more complicated/expensive cooling) and aerodynamics (it has a normal SUV profile vs the coupe of the Model X).

<comment><USER3> I found about 250 miles for the e-Tron and 315 miles for the Model X competing WLTP ratings. I imagine aerodynamics are a huge factor in this difference.

<comment><USER2> For 83.6kWh usable battery on the e-tron vs 95kWh on the Model X.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I just saw 95kWh and figured it was close. I didn't realize the usable was so different.

I'm a bit suspicious of the WLTP ratings for these cars. The EPA rating for the Model X Long Range is 325 miles, while the e-tron's EPA rating is only 204 miles. Any idea why the Model X would score lower on WLTP while the e-tron would score so much higher?

<comment><USER2> They probably just have different blends of city/highway/speeds. Just like how gasoline cars have different estimates from different testing agencies, electric cars do too because they all have different efficiency curves.

The ratings generally try to mimic the driving conditions of the region and automakers tend to optimize for their home turf. So it's not too surprising the American automaker does better on the American test and the Europeans do better on the European test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article seems to frame the shared cooling system as a flaw. For a different perspective: [1] "Sean Mitchell, Detroit veteran Sandy Munro of Munro and Associates mentioned that among the Model 3's unique components, its "Superbottle" is one of the most innovative. Combining two pumps, one heat exchanger, and one coolant valve in one cleverly-designed bottle, the Model 3's cooling system is arguably the most unique in the auto industry."

[1] [https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-superbottle- disrupti...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-superbottle-disruption- video/)

<comment><USER5> Except the article is a comparison to the model S, not the model 3...

<comment><USER6> Model 3 is just a scaled down Model S using a lot of the same core technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is, at best, "sponsored content" from Audi, and at worst, an Audi advertisement directly written by a PR firm. Why is this on the front page of HN?

<comment><USER8> The first sentence is absolutely true. And frankly, unsurprising to anyone who has been around the magazine industry for longer than a week or two.

As they used to say of computer magazines in their heyday, "Everything in the magazine is an advertisement, some of which are labeled as such."

Paul Graham wrote an essay about PR in this site's early days called "The Submarine," where he credited PR for the success of his own startup that he sold to Yahoo.

PR is part of the game, and recognizing it as such is part of the game.

BUt with respect to your second sentence, just because it's PR doesn't necessarily mean it is false or misleading. That assumption would be an ad hominem fallacy.

A PR piece planted in Jalopnik isn't that much different than an interview with the CEO. You know the CEO is stating their company's official position, but you may still want to hear their point of view.

I 100% agree it is useful to make sure that everyone reading this be aware that it is mostly ghost-written by VW Group. But once you are aware of that, it is still useful to read it and debate amongst ourselves whether their claims are reasonable and informative.

Personally, I thought the article did a good job of explaining that they were repeating VW's claims. It did not feel like they were pretending to print the views of a so-called "independent think tank."

JM2C.

<comment><USER7> I just honestly don't think it's even worth it for us to discuss this article on a somewhat technical, popular discussion forum like HN. It doesn't make any attempt to give background/contextual information about any of the specific issues discussed, it simply jumps right into pushing the Audi features and openly bashing Tesla with vague generalizations; for example:

"Motor cooling is the weak link in the Tesla Model S, with motor heat soaking usually responsible for power reductions under hard driving."

It doesn't explain the motivations of either company's designers and engineers, it doesn't give background science on cooling technologies, and it doesn't even really explain why Audi's system is better. It just says Audi has "more aggressive and redundant cooling systems," and that Tesla's cooling, "is the weak link in the Tesla Model S," with little-to-no further explanation.

If you are talking about an interview with a CEO where they focus on how they are better than one specific competitor, and come off petty, shallow, and unreasonably biased, then I would have similar feelings about that content. A bunch of us here talking about this article is what a marketing analyst's or PR agent's dreams are made of.

<comment><USER8> One of the pleasures of HN for me is that when a shallow article is published, sometimes a bunch of people chime in and give more thorough explanations, e.g. the discussion here about the tradeoffs between the battery technologies used by Tesla versus Audi (and just about everyone else).

If the article serves as an invitation to a good conversation, I'm all for it. But of course, sometimes an article is so bad that the entire conversation is composed of people debunking its nonsense.

Or worse, certain highly emotional topics get posted, and everyone just yells past each other. Regardless of the quality of the OP, the conversation makes me feel like I lose 50 points of IQ when I read the comments.

I sum, I agree that sometimes, bad articles make for bad conversations. Did this one? Maybe, maybe not, I'll accept your word for it if you think poorly of the quality of conversation around it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article still doesn't explain the 166 mile difference in range despite only 5kwh difference in battery capacity. Walling off 12% doesn't cover the difference nor does the 4% difference in weight. Is there an efficiency difference?

<comment><USER10> This article smeels like PR to me. Especially as Porsche, Audi and VW are basically the same company [0] and struggling to sell their EVs.

Tesla is the dominating force. Some numbers from Norway:

[https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/16/tesla- model-3-12-4-of-a...](https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/16/tesla- model-3-12-4-of-all-norwegian-vehicle-sales-january-july-2019/)

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group#Subsidiaries_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Group#Subsidiaries_and_brands)

<comment><USER11> Volkswagen Group is the biggest car company in the world at the moment, with Toyota a close second. Volkswagen owns 12 automotive brands. Pretty soon they'll also be the biggest electric car company in the world, purely because they're spending the most money on it:

[https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vws-91b-spend-evs- out...](https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/vws-91b-spend-evs-outpaces- investment-rivals)

They'll release multiple EVs across multiple brands every year from now on. Volkswagen's MEB platform is going to allow them to produce cars with equivalent range to Tesla's at a lower price point. Volkswagen says their battery cost is now below $100 per kilowatt hour:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/business/volkswagen- trade...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/08/business/volkswagen-trademark- electric-vehicles.html)

That's the advantage of the economies of scale Volkswagen will be able to achieve with MEB, both from in-house production and from licensing the platform to other manufacturers from small manufacturers like e.Go to large manufacturers like Ford.

<comment><USER12> But still: a VW (or for that matter _any_ other car than a Tesla) will not have one thing that makes Tesla unique: software. Even discarding the fact that Tesla has probably the most data worldwide to train self-driving AI and way more experience in building fully-electric cars, no one comes remotely close to what Tesla can do. Modern non-Tesla still are sold with "map updates" ffs, and something like "remote software update" is totally unheard of.

Tesla's strength is software and extreme agility in software development. The other car manufacturers are prevented by their sheer size and corporate infighting culture to catch up and they will be for years to come.

<comment><USER13> I'd counter argue that it's maybe not that bad to have proven, formally validated software in the field, which is what traditional software developers in the automotive sectors did for decades. You tend to push out less crap if you are forced to make sure it works well from the start due to lack of updates.

At least the German Automotive industry relies very much on formal verification and model driven development for this reason.

<comment><USER14> Except the UI stuff they push out _is_ utter crap. It's slowly improving, but I if I understand the industry correctly the efforts that are leading to that started many years ago.

Meanwhile when Tesla releases a bug they can ship a fix within days.

Why arbitrarily limit your development like that? To make some money off your customer being forced to go to the dealer to get an update? That's just terrible UX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Even using the quoted 83.6 kWh figure as comparison, tesla gets 50% more miles per kWh. That is still pretty stark difference.

<comment><USER16> Good point. Well, I guess we need to wait 7-8 years until the batteries from other manufacturers become worn and see if their claims stand.

Battery reliability in the long term as well as sustained performance should not be underestimated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some manufacturers are beating Tesla on price and range. The Hyundai Kona can be bought for a bit less than a similarly priced Model 3 and the Kona has more range at that price point. The Volkswagen ID.3 will come with three battery sizes for 330km, 420km, and 550km WLTP range and they will be cheaper than the equivalent range Model 3s.

<comment><USER17> WLTP range is different measurment that Tesla's EPA range. Conversion rate is approximately 1.12:1 ([1]), so ID.3 EPA range would be 491 km.

[1] [https://insideevs.com/features/343231/heres-how-to- calculate...](https://insideevs.com/features/343231/heres-how-to-calculate- conflicting-ev-range-test-cycles-epa-wltp-nedc/)

<comment><USER11> There's no need to do conversions. Just look at the WLTP ranges on Tesla's European sites. Here's the Irish version of the site for the Model 3:

[https://www.tesla.com/en_IE/model3/design?redirect=no#batter...](https://www.tesla.com/en_IE/model3/design?redirect=no#battery)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just want more reliable car choices for driving in the car pool lane. There are a number of plug in hybrids SUVs from Lexus, Porsche, and BMW that are not on the approved eligible list. Deferring my next purchase into infinity in the mean time.

</comment><comment><USER19> .

<comment><USER9> I believe traditional manufacturers probably know more about building cars that can last (thought not in all cases certainly). But yeah, this does come off as a bit hype-ish over details that probably matter a lot less to buyers.

<comment><USER20> Traditional manufacturers also know that they make money from maintaining cars. If traditional manufacturers make cars that last, they will go out of business.

<comment><USER9> There's a balance they have to strike. If you can't on average get 7-10 years out of a car with normal preventative maintenance, you won't sell many as both those who buy for the long term and the secondary market for used cars will avoid.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The new home of popcorn-app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/popcorn-org/popcorn-app

<comment><AUTHOR> And some developers are working on this [1] new webpage.

[1] [http://popcorn-time.tv/](http://popcorn-time.tv/)</comment>