I’ve yet to see an EV that doesn’t have some sort of flush handle design. My understanding is that it improves aerodynamics and I’m sure a secondary reason is “Tesla did it first” and the high tech aesthetic that EVs are expected to have.
This caused a lot of confusion with VW; a lot of people thought the id.3/4 were their first electric cars, because the eGolf and eUp looked so... normal. I'm fairly sure they deliberately said "we need to make it look more electric-car-y" at some point.
To be fair, the parent didn’t specify which direction they were talking about. And is brake overheating a cause for an entire truck to catch on fire? That sounds more like an engine failure kind of thing.
Yes, last time I read about a fire in that tunnel I believe it was the brakes. I don’t know how.
Even if it’s an engine issue, I don’t see how an EV would be more likely to catastrophically overheat. An EV will generate a lot less heat for a given amount of power. There’s also less potential for oil and fuels leaks which exacerbates the issue.
The risk would be from power cell failure and how difficult it is to put out those fires for most of the chemistries used, how they're packed, etc. I would guess the rate of occurrence will be pretty similar. I don't think we'll fully know until we have a bunch of older EV trucks to know how the risk compares to older diesel ones.
> Yes, last time I read about a fire in that tunnel I believe it was the brakes. I don’t know how.
Friction brakes convert momentum into heat. If you ride the brakes going down a mountain you generate more heat than the brakes can dissipate into the air and the brake temperature keeps going up until they're hot enough to start a fire.
If I were to guess, it's about using "motor breaking" (not sure that's the correct English term for it) that you do if you travel downwards for a long time, in order to avoid over-heating the brakes so they are ineffective. I'm guessing doing motor breaking for too long, in a hot environment, might overheat the engine as well?
Engine braking doesn’t work on diesels, that’s why they have “Jake brakes”, that loud braaaaaaaaap you hear when they go downhill (and why you see signs at the edge of town saying “compression brake use illegal”). I highly doubt a diesel engine would overheat going downhill. (Not a diesel mechanic, but FWIW used to be an auto mechanic decades ago.)
Am I sure? No, but I have been told this numerous times by actual diesel mechanics, and otherwise why was it necessary for Jacobs to invent the compression brake?
Your car also has rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag to contend with. Might work well at slowing a passenger car, not so much with a 50K lb. vehicle, hence the Jake brake.
> Your car also has rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag to contend with
I like to believe I'd recognize the difference, especially since it's a manual car and I can tell the difference between letting it roll in neutral and shifting down a gear which slows down the car :) Maybe it's not that it doesn't work on diesel cars but the effect is just less than with petrol?
Manual tranny, why didn't you say so? :-) Yeah, I guess you would notice the difference.
But I think you've hit on the difference, as I vastly simplified what is going on. Not that I expected you to read the link I gave, but it does give some explanation as to what's going on. And what's going is that the pistons are still going up and down because air is continually drawn into the engine. Air is compressed, and even though there is no fuel to make it go bang, that air still needs to uncompress and so returns a lot of the energy back to the crankshaft. Ergo, very little engine braking.
As a personal example, our diesel Sprinter van (automatic tranny, FWIW) had some degree of engine braking, but so little that I wouldn't rely on it for much more than coasting to a stoplight or other low-stakes slowing. If I'd like to stop sometime in the next day or two, I hit the brake pedal.
I don't see how that could overheat the engine. You're backdriving the engine from the wheels and fuel injection should be complete shit down so there is no combustion.
> The traditional response to that was violence against scabs
And how are you going to do that when the scabs are in India? Unions work in “physical” domains (like plumbing, factory work, etc.), not so much in “virtual” domains where all you need is a computer to do your work and there’s an entire world full of workers who would think they’ve died and gone to heaven if they could make half your salary.
> So, I’m sorry, why do we want that here (let alone anywhere)?
To the second question, not everything in the modern world is going to be clean and green. If you want things like steel, plastic, computers, etc. there's gonna be some dirty manufacturing involved. No way around it.
To the first, ideally every country wants some amount of self-sufficiency, or at the very least, some amount of redundancy. Remember how badly the world's pants got pulled down during Covid?
And finally -- frankly, not everyone is capable of more than unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Supply-chain redundancy with a side-effect of employing people who might otherwise have very little in the way of employment prospects? That's a good thing!
This is what everyone forgets when they label anyone against a wealth tax as “temporarily embarrassed billionaires.” Even if the government could convert 100% of a billionaire’s wealth into cash (they can’t) and confiscated it all, great, what are you going to do for revenue next year?
Taxes always START by targeting the wealthy but have this funny habit of applying to more and more people as time goes on. The US income tax was a whopping 1% percent until you made the equivalent of $400K. How’d that work out?
> That's why poor people pay the highest percentage of their income
The key word here is income. “Wealth” and “income” tend to be conflated by ostensibly intelligent people who should know better. If I’m granted a million dollars in stock but draw a $20K salary, I’m “wealthy” but not “paying my fair share” because I’ve hardly earned any income for the year.
> Is it right? From my knowledge stock compensation is considered as income and is taxed.
Unless you have enough stock that you can take a zero or low interest loan against that stock as collateral and kick that can down the road until you die and there's a huge threshold for estate tax, that is if you've not got it structured so that the stock is owned by a trust.
> This is about giving more people access to more material resources by taking away some of the exclusive access to those resource by the rich.
You realize most of this wealth is tied up in stocks and other assets that anyone can purchase, right?
> Will preventing the uber rich families from buying their seventeenth fleet of housing complexes
But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?
> and their twentieth estate
And who but the extremely rich would be able to buy these estates in the first place?
Certain forms of stock are effectively liquid. This means that you can turn around and leverage them to buy material resources quite easily.
It doesn't matter that "anyone can purchase them". If you have N dollars and I have Nx1000I can buy more stock than you. I can also diversify better than you, I simply have more options, more power, etc. Unless I am a total idiot or you get absurdly lucky and effectively win the lotto, my greater amount of initial capital will go further than your small amount.
> But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?
I didn't mention either of these people. There are plenty of people not in the limelight that do precisely the things I'm talking about, often through banks and companies that they run—I can have my investment firm buy property and increase my salary off the extracted rents and it achieves the same thing.
> And who but the extremely rich would be able to buy these estates in the first place?
Exactly. You just restated the problem with inequality. It gives a small class of people exclusive access to important material resources. Further they can they use this exclusivity to further entrench their positions.
> If you have N dollars and I have Nx1000I can buy more stock than you. I can also diversify better than you, I simply have more options, more power, etc. Unless I am a total idiot or you get absurdly lucky and effectively win the lotto, my greater amount of initial capital will go further than your small amount.
And, so what? This just sounds like whining that people in this world who have more money than you exist. I'm sure there's a lot of people in this world who would hold this exactly same argument against you ("you have N dollars, but I have N/1000"). You're not denied the opportunity to build wealth with what money you DO have just because Bezos and Musk et al exist.
> Certain forms of stock are effectively liquid. This means that you can turn around and leverage them to buy material resources quite easily.
Sure, but this isn't the infinite money glitch people seem to think it is. The loan and its interest have to get repaid with... money! That's first taxed! And anything purchased is... subject to taxation!
> It gives a small class of people exclusive access to important material resources.
Look, no matter how little income inequality is, you're gonna have to be rich to say, buy a building in Manhattan or a house in some similarly coveted area.
> Sure, but this isn't the infinite money glitch people seem to think it is. The loan and its interest have to get repaid with... money! That's first taxed! And anything purchased is... subject to taxation!
Interestingly, my broker lets me just pile up the interest and doesn't expect me to pay anything back, but only as long as my overall portfolio is worth comfortably more than my debt.
Of course, if I ever want to actually get at all my money, I'll need to pay the debt off.
Btw, leveraging your stock portfolio isn't all that different from a mortgage on your house. But people seem to be much more confused about the effects of the former than the latter. It seems to be easier for people to understand that a mortgage ain't an infinite money machine.
> And, so what? This just sounds like whining that people in this world who have more money than you exist. I'm sure there's a lot of people in this world who would hold this exactly same argument against you ("you have N dollars, but I have N/1000"). You're not denied the opportunity to build wealth with what money you DO have just because Bezos and Musk et al exist.
I don't have a problem with differences in wealth. My problem is with (a) differences so extreme that they border on the inhumane (we arguably have enough resources amassed to end world hunger, yet people still starve. Why?) (b) People are fed the lie that this system is purely meritocratic. That is plainly untrue. That was my point about the relative "distance" your money can go. If you are born into a wealthy family, you can basically live a zero-labor life and continue to reap rewards, generate more income, gather more resources for yourself, concentrate capital. When your origin is the greatest determining factor in wealth, it's a gross lie to suggest to day laborers that if they just "work hard" they too can strike it rich.
Sure, I would agree that under the current system manhattan remains unaffordable. But this is not an essential property of manhattan, as you seem to think. It is a side effect of the current economic structure we have. Alternative structures would lead to significantly more affordable living in the city. In fact the NYC dems just voted for a mayoral candidate who wants to establish such an alternative. People who think like you are increasingly becoming the minority, and it's because it's glaringly and exceedingly obvious that there are massive problems of wealth distribution in the current system. You can honestly identify that there are issues and ask for solutions without being anti capitalist.
People get so caught up in morality when it comes to wealth, which is absurd. As if somehow wanting some of Bezos money to be redistributed so that it can feed people instead of paying for 500mil dollar yatchs is a moral affront. How about we instead focus on the moral affront of underpaying workers, having them the piss in bottles in warehouses, gaming the system by incorporating offshore, the list is endless. It's hilarious that anyone would defend the rights of these robber barons. You've got to be either seriously brainwashed or an extreme ideologue to think that there are no issues with inequality today. Even staunch capitalists are starting to admit there are problems. Its simple systems dynamics. Any system that maximizes singular variables is necessarily unstable and heading toward collapse.
> But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?...
One of the bigger ways this plays out as opposed to your example is:
Tons of property is locked up as short term vacation rentals that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example
Similarly the amount of resources locked up in industries that 99% of the time only cater to the very rich is quite a lot and more importantly the trajectory is going more and more that direction.
You could have a world where the work is done mostly by robots and a few million rich people use the world as their playground and then what happens to everyone else?
> Tons of property is locked up as short term vacation rentals
You might not want to dig too closely into who exactly owns all these short term vacation rentals. There's a non-trivial number of people who aren't conventionally what we picture as being "wealthy" who own a lot of them. It was a very popular Covid-era life hack to buy a house at an absurdly low interest rate and rent it out. And that's not getting into people who just managed to buy a house at the right time. For example, I'm just a software engineer in a MCOL area but I bought my first house in the early 2000s and paid it off a little under 20 years later. I sold to fund the next house, but I could've easily bought something more modest and rented the old one out. This is not an uncommon occurrence.
> that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example
Are you under the impression that you have to be fabulously wealthy to rent an AirBNB for the weekend?
> Similarly the amount of resources locked up in industries that 99% of the time only cater to the very rich is quite a lot and more importantly the trajectory is going more and more that direction.
Sources?
In any case, what you say seems to suggest that consumption taxes would be the way to go.
The second amendment is “very clearly” spelled out in the Constitution yet many roadblocks to gun ownership are thrown up in various states and people STILL make tired arguments about how the amendment “should” be interpreted. For example, the old argument that the founding fathers could have never conceived of AR-15s and thus their legality under the second amendment is debatable.
Likewise, in 1868 the writers of the fourteenth amendment probably couldn’t conceive of rapid international travel and the possibility that pregnant women could just show up weeks before their due date and their newborn child should “obviously” be an American citizen.
The amendment was quite obviously targeted at Native Americans and slaves, not any and all pregnant women the world over who manage to reach the US before giving birth. But as you’re noticing, there’s multiple ways people can interpret laws. It’s rarely as cut and dry as “this is obviously against the law!!!”
> Likewise, in 1868 the writers of the fourteenth amendment probably couldn’t conceive of rapid international travel and the possibility that pregnant women could just show up weeks before their due date and their newborn child should “obviously” be an American citizen.
This is a better point than you realize, and in the opposite direction you intend.
Immigration in the 1800s was a… cursory process. Not only would those kids be citizens, but their parents would have had little trouble staying around.
> It imposed a head tax on non-citizens of the United States who came to American ports and restricted certain classes of people from immigrating to America, including criminals, the insane, or "any person unable to take care of him or herself." The act created what is recognized as the first federal immigration bureaucracy and laid the foundation for more regulations on immigration, such as the Immigration Act of 1891.
The quotas you describe didn’t come until the 1920s. Well after the amendment.
> “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
So, I assume that you know that's a poem by someone who was engaged in pro-immigrant propaganda? And the entire reason that Lazarus was engaged in pro-immigrant propaganda was because she was advocating for Jewish refugees from Russia...who weren't exactly welcomed.
Basically, your proposition that it was era of free immigration is historical revisionism. There's a whole island out in front of the Statue of Liberty where the primary purpose was finding reasons to turn immigrants away.
(Castle Garden was established in the 1850s, and the history extends way before the nativist laws you're referring to in sibling comments [1])
Yes, and? I'm not debating the legality of whatever the current administration is doing. I'm just telling you that you have the history wrong, and that there's a deep irony in quoting Lazarus as some kind of "good old days", when she wrote the poem as a form of advocacy for immigrants.
> Nope. Wrong. That's the new facility. Castle Garden started in the 1850s
That's not "a whole island out in front of the Statue of Liberty" (it's in Battery Park, Manhattan), and performed a significantly different role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1882 "restricted certain classes of people from immigrating to America, including criminals, the insane, or 'any person unable to take care of him or herself.'… [creating] what is recognized as the first federal immigration bureaucracy and laid the foundation for more regulations on immigration"
The 14th Amendment, having been approved decades before we had that first of immigration laws on the books, was approved in a historical context where "illegal immigration" was essentially not a thing.
> I'm not debating the legality of whatever the current administration is doing.
Perhaps don't jump into a thread about the legal basis of it, then. This particular bit is discussing the claim made at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44400640, where another user claims the drafters of the Amendment would've opposed "anchor babies".
"Consistent with the views of the clause's author, Senator Jacob M. Howard, the Supreme Court held that because Indian reservations are not under the federal government's jurisdiction, Native Americans born on such land are not entitled to birthright citizenship. The 1887 Dawes Act offered citizenship to Native Americans who accepted private property as part of cultural assimilation, while the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act offered citizenship to all Native Americans born within the nation's territorial limits."
SCOTUS did rule on the anchor babies thing, in 1898.
Indeed, how terrible! Those kids who then grow up in other countries outside the US will eventually be adults who have to pay taxes without sucking up any physical resources of said United States, whatever will we do about this huge drain on our resources? </sarcasm>
Why am I supposed to be mad about people doing this, exactly? Because of hazy "rules are rules" talk?
> When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment.
I don't think it's exactly this, but it's close. Every so many years you have a new crop of talent rotate in and someone wants to make their mark and shake things up in order to be promoted. Rinse and repeat.
Disagree. All you have to do is look for lack of a front grill or flush door handles to tell if a car is an EV.
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