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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • i have a pretty specific example, but i do this in the comment section on pretty much every post about EVs, because very frequently there’s somebody repeating the lazy myth that oh actually EVs are just as bad as internal combustion engine vehicles because loose awareness of life cycle assessment. people state this all the time as if it’s some kind of philosophical point about the impossibility of technological solutions to climate change, when in actuality it is a quantitative falsehood that is easily disproven with very cursory research, like you can pull up the relevant data from the IEA in like five minutes. ive told this to probably like fifty people, including at my job at an EV company, and it has never once changed their mind, i guess because again people are actually not looking to engage with this point quantitatively. but it still takes me a little while to disengage from my natural inclination to be helpful about something that on its surface is a math question.




  • i had this disconcerting experience several years ago, i was talking with a friend of a friend who i’d had a couple of classes with but never really spoken to, and we were talking about technology in some context, and i made some off-handed reference to the unabomber’s manifesto. he didn’t know what i was talking about, so i briefly explained the themes, industrial alienation, etc. and then he asked who the unabomber was, so i explained that whole thing. and i had to explain that like, i was not really serious about wanting to live in a cabin in the woods, it was just sort of a dark humor joke, then he said ‘oh no it’s okay, i totally understand,’ and then he got serious and said, ‘personally, i really agree with charles manson. the race wars are coming’ i was like ‘uh,’ and diligently avoided ever being in the same room with him again. i’m not even white??


  • ok i work in a kind of tangential industry and can kind of answer this probably

    in general the higher the voltage the smaller the current, which you’re generally happy about because your 1) electrical losses and 2) cable/wire diameter are both proportional to current

    the tradeoffs being 1) it gets harder and more important to isolate the circuit (e.g. your wire insulation that prevents the 12V bus from shorting out to the vehicle chassis now needs to be thicker) and 2) all the stuff people make for cars (i dunno, windshield wiper motors, radiator fans, whatever) is currently for 12V

    in general this move probably makes sense, provided they’re able to figure out their supply chains, and if tesla can position themselves as being like the first company to figure out a bunch of these 48V components at scale that’s probably going to be really good for them. they did a kind of similar thing with the charging infrastructure if i understand currently, like now the tesla charging cable is the de facto north american standard