In which way does it screw any of this to create a political obligation to finance charging-stations at the relatively few places where a European main-road doesn't have sufficient demand that the market alone will ensure that chargers are installed?

It'll cost taxpayers a bit of money of course. On the other hand it'll be a benefit for competition between EVs and ICEs that consumers will know they can buy either type of vehicle and feel certain that there'll be sufficient chargers along ALL main-roads in the EU.

And let's get real; a few charging-stations is small fry. It's not as if this decision will amount to more than an utterly TRIVIAL fraction of the transport-budget in EU.

Many EU-countries will reach this goal "organically" i.e. by pure market-mechanisms before that date anyway. One charger every 60km along the main roads isn't a huge number of chargers, and many of these already exist, or are being built, to meet demand, even in the absence of any mandate.

The mandate will likely result in a few extra stations needing to be built during the few roads that are part of ten-t -- but have low enough demand that it's not otherwise directly profitable to build one. That's nice for people with EVs since it'll mean that there'll be frequent chargers along ALL of EUs main roads, rather than just most of EUs main roads.

Why "thousands"? One charging station per 60km, and only along the main roads that are part of the ten-t network would amount to a few hundred tops for most countries, and in fact odds are many countries will organically have reached this goal before the deadline simply from market-demand and the additional stations that need to be built to fulfill the promise are close to zero.

Comparing the density of public transport networds between different countries when they're NOT presented at the same scale isn't possible. In this map Switzerland and Germany are presented as being the same size, and with Switzerland having a lots less dense network.

But reality is that Germany is on the order of 9 times the area, so the density of the German network is only 1/9th of what it appears here, relative to Switzerland.

Nouriel Roubini has predicted about 25 of the last 3 recessions. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but it's not a particularly good or usable clock.

I hear it'll be out any decade now. The Last of Us is pretty good in the meantime.

That was my first hunch too -- that 250% improvement from current state-of-the-art solar-cells would be a gorram miracle if true -- but is a claim much too good to be true so it probably isn't.

The best multi-junction cells are already at over 40% efficiency, so improving that by 250% would result in a cell with 140% efficiency which is a tiiiiiiny bit unlikely on account of things like basic thermodynamics.

The fact that the 250% improvement is loudly proclaimed, but the actual efficiency isn't even mentioned (a very suspicious absense) my guess is that the actual efficiency is anything but exciting. Probably substantially worse than the most common cells today.

Yepp. And the other killer features they tend to brag about are similarly dumb and/or already covered by better options.

Hang out with your long distance friends they say.

But here's the thing: I've already been playing games with long-distance friends in virtual worlds for over 2 decades. There's nothing new in this. World of Warcraft came out 20 years ago, and it's been 45 years since the first MUDs came online.

VR plays no role worth mentioning in this. Advertising and wild claims notwithstanding playing WoW in VR isn't more compelling than playing it on a plain old monitor.

Converse with your friends they say.

But for this my main wishes are things like high-quality video and audio with a minimum of lag, stuttering or other quality-issues. And VR doesn't actually help with that in the slightest. No I don't really care whether I can "walk around" my friend that I'm talking to -- but I do care that the audio-quality is good and that the picture doesn't freeze.

It's possible that some killer use for VR will be found at some point. But this far I've seen nothing compelling.

We've been doing this for a long time already. 50 years ago complex factories were built as scale-models first in order to detect problems before construction starts on the real factory. Today (and for the last couple decades) we use digital models instead.

But VR and "the metaverse" play essentially zero role in all of this. 99% of it happens on ordinary flat 2D computer-monitors.

I don't know. Nobody has this far made a VR environment that has any benefits for any of that. What benefits would people derive from "meet with others in a 3D space" relative to just having a video-meeting? I've not seen it, neither has anyone else.

I just video-meetings extensively, and yet I see zero point to meeting someone in a 3D space instead.

Hell it's not managed to become popular even for porn, which is often an early adopter of new tech.

This far nobody has come up with an actually compelling reason to use it, other than in gaming where already people are spending piles of time navigating fictional universes in 3D. (mostly without VR-headsets that *also* tend to subtract more than they add -- even people who do own VR-headsets usually end up spending more time playing without them than with)

I think it's a solution in search of a problem, really.

No, Amazon would *not* be a better place to shop if it was a "virtual mall".

This problem arise because "work" currently serves two distinct and entirely unrelated purposes:

1. It serves as a mechanism for getting stuff done. All the products and services that humanity needs must be produced somehow; currently the main mechanism for this is that people work.
2. It serves as the primary mechanism for distributing income to most adults.

Let's say increased automatization means we can get the same products and services made using only half as many working hours.

If that simply meant your working-day would now be 4 hours per day, for the same pay, I doubt many would complain about it all that much; higher productivity is awesome!

But the problem is, odds are it'll instead result in half the workers being fired and losing their income, while the other half continues for roughly the same pay as today, the benefits of increased productivity go mostly solely to the "owners".

And ownership is a LOT more unevenly distributed than capacity to work is. That's especially true for low-educatiion-needed work.

Let me put it this way; nobody is 10 times as efficient as the average adult at picking strawberries, driving a taxi, or peeling potatoes. Inequality in capacity for manual labor is real, but fairly modest. But nothing prevents one person from OWNING more than 1000 average adults. When income is predominantly distributed to owners balooning inequality is the result.

My preferred solution is to disconnect #1 and #2 above. Not in the sense of doing away with work, but in the sense of having it no longer be the sole realistic source of income for most adults.

We could for example create an UBI -- and set it at a certain percentage of GDP/capita. Doing it that way has the advantage that progress in productivity will benefit everyone in a given country. It could be financed with taxes, primarily on the owning-class, but also on things that have negative externalities in accordance with classical capitalist theory for how to create efficient markets.

The state subsidizes EVs with a grand total of ZERO dollars, so I see no justification for claiming that the state pays for it.

EVs are however exempt from the CO2-tax that ICE-cars pay, depending on how much they pollute per kilometer driven, and that is indeed the main reason why Norway is about 5 years ahead of other countries in EV-adoption.

It's nonsense to claim that it only works in Norway because of this though; many other countries have similar market-share trajectories that are merely a few years behind.

That wasn't the point here though, the point was that people who don't understand exponential growth tend to see it as nothing happening for many years, and then SUDDENLY the thing explodes. Even when the reality is, like in the example-numbers I posted here, that there's pretty steady growth throughout.

Yepp. People underestimate exponential growth. It took only 11 years here in Norway for electric cars to go from 1% and to 80% of new cars sold. (2011-2022) -- that's the equivalent of +49% per year for over a decade.

Peoples reaction to it tends to be like this:

• 0.5%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 0.75%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 1.2%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 1.8%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 2.6%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 3.8%: Nobody is buying EVs!
• 5.8%: EVs are only suitable for a tiny set of niche applications!
• 8.7%: EVs are only suitable for a tiny set of niche applications!
• 13%: Most people will never be well-served by an EV!
• 20%: Most people will never be well-served by an EV!
• 30%: An EV can perhaps work as car number 2 for some households
• 45%: An EV can perhaps work as car number 2 for some households
• 80%: WOOAAA What just happened? Nobody could've foreseen this!!!! Where did all these EVs *suddenly* and *completely unexpectedly* come from??????

It appears to most people that all the growth came in the last 2-3 years and very suddenly. That's not true. Anyone who was ACTUALLY paying attention would've seen that we've had in the viscinity of 50% year-over-year growth for well over a decade, and anyone who knows basic math knows that if that trend stays, the thing takes over the world completely faster than most people anticipate.

We do have some. Solar plus hydropower is an awesome match, and you can even use pumped hydro if you want active storage and not merely something to fill the gaps when there's no sun.

How can you ever trust it? If you type text on someone elses keyboard; how can you ever know that it's NOT recording every key you press and transmit it to some third party? How can you know it's NOT secretly making a copy of all your personal data?

And what's the benefit? People have already been carrying personal computers around for more than a decade; we call them mobile phones. They fit in a pocket. Trying to borrow some random hardware instead of having your own hardware would provide which benefit(s) precisely?