Brushless DC motors are the most efficient way to make an EV. The controllers on those require software. Battery charge balancing also needs software; it’s dangerous to just feed voltage to lipos.

You can’t have anything like a modern EV without software of some kind. You can make a glorified golf cart, but its range/efficiency would be shit.

Removable batteries aren’t going to happen. The extra mechanical parts needed to make it happen take up space that could be more battery. This isn’t a couple of AA batts, here; the voltage and weight mean everything has to be chonky.

Doubly so for a company like Slate that wants to keep things cheap. They need to pick existing parts off the shelf as much as possible. Removable EV battery parts don’t exist.

We put in a preorder for a Telo. It’s more expensive, but the extra range alone makes it worthwhile.

My wife drives a Mini EV, which has around the same range as the base Slate. It’s enough to get them to work, but I had to do a long range trip a while back and I’d never choose to do that again.

Hummer EV is a halo car. They’re intended as “hey, look at me!” and nothing more. Its 0-60mph time is listed near an Ariel Fucking Atom. Which isn’t just ridiculous on its face, but seems downright dangerous considering the weight and driver visibility of a Hummer.

Best headline I saw for it was “the EV for people who hate EVs”.

2nd most electric pickup. There’s limited competition. Just based on history, the F150 Lightning isn’t likely to reliquish the title now that it has it.

Some day, car companies will figure out that they are software companies with a manufacturing arm.

It’s also important to note that Teflon (PTFE) is used in a multitude of stuff, and there’s no easy replacement. Got a 3D printer? The tube connecting the extruder motor to the hotend is probably PTFE.

The PTFE industry isn’t going to collapse just because we all switch to different cooking pans.

If that’s why the movement is a joke, then why are there several upvoted posts here saying that one is a legit reason?

Still true. For many larger platforms that have frame on body construction, the van and truck are almost identical except for the shell put on top. But you’ll see a lot of shared parts even in unibody stuff.

I do think minivans should be more common as being more practical, but I don’t see how they’re safer. They also tend to be less fuel efficient due to aerodynamics. They tend to have a lower floor with more or less the same ceiling height. That gives them a larger frontal cross section compared to an equivalent sized SUV.

This applies to vans and trucks, as well. Trucks based on the same platform tend to have better mileage than the van.

It’s good to remind people that if they have a durable good that works fine, but its original manufacture was problematic, then it’s generally better to keep it as long as it’s doing its job. Even if the replacement is less problematic, it’s impossible to make anything without some kind of impact. Keeping durable goods going is better.

Important for this thread is that cast iron, at least right now, is usually made in coal fired furnaces. It’s an incredibly dirty industry. Now, if I need a pan I will tend to prefer cast iron and then use it forever. But don’t throw stuff away that’s perfectly functional.

I happen to live near one. The city had to shut down a well until they could install a filter.

I also have an undersink RO system, but people shouldn’t have to do that.

Nothing like that in ARM. Even microcontrollers have enough RAM that nobody cares, I guess.

That would work for people like you or me. Unfortunately, there seems to be a mass of people who have no idea how to make the distinction that surface level niceness means nothing, and mean people can be mean for good reasons.

Hollywood is one of the most unionized industries in the US.

There’s a disconnect between the actors/writers and the producers. The producers just want money. They don’t care otherwise, and aren’t smart enough to realize how they’re funding something that advocates against them. They do fuck with the script according to what they think focus groups will like. If someone brought them a Luigi script, the producers would tell them to stick in a lovable dog as a faithful companion to Luigi, and Brian Thompson’s family would be shown eating DiGgiorno pizza for dinner because they got a product placement contract.

This is how stuff like DS9: Bar Association or Star Wars: Andor gets produced.

Or option 3: the whole airport system collapses.

I don’t know the full details, but I’m not sure how being more organized in the Reagan era would have helped. If the boss is willing to fire everyone, then a strike doesn’t matter anymore.

I guess you could do more to try to prevent scabs from coming in? It’s already incredibly difficult to train up the scabs in this particular niche, and they were willing to go that route, anyway.

Unilever is spinning it off again.

You did have the freedom, but nobody told you that you did. There aren’t a lot of perks to growing up a Jehovah’s Witness, but never having recited the pledge is one of them.

The number of people willing to put up with the round trip latency to GEO is relatively small. They would only do it if there’s no other option. There aren’t enough customers to justify the kind of mass deployment Starlink needs to be profitable.

You can put lots of sats in a low orbit and get low latency, but then they either need to be replaced every few years (the kind of capital expenditure that companies are allergic to in the long run) or self-boosting (expensive, and still eventually need to be replaced). You can put them in a higher orbit, but latency goes up noticeably, you need even more sats for coverage, and it’s more expensive to put them there. You can put them in GEO and use fewer sats, but latency goes through the roof. These are the options orbital mechanics and current technology allows.

If we had a space elevator or similarly cheap way to access space, then it becomes more viable. Note that while Falcon 9 and Starship potentially make it viable to build one of the space megastructure ideas that have been floating around for decades, it would also crater SpaceX’s business model. Chemical rockets would build their own demise (at least for launching from Earth, and there are probably better technologies for scooting around the solar system once you’re up there). Musk likely knows that and would fight it.

Or you can build fiber to peoples homes and leave satellites for Antarctica or the Himalayas or such. That works, too.