Favorites January 10th 2023

Electric cars, electric planes, and asking Calvin's dad questions

December 2022, Palo Alto

Henning Gloystein @hgloystein

This collapse in German gasoline/diesel new car sales from 90%+ to less than a third took place in just 3 years (!) - in Europe's biggest car market/manufacturer cleantechnica.com/2023/01/08/evs…

Apparently Germany's subsidies for electric cars have reduced in 2023, but they're going to continue for at least a few more years. I guess part of the question is how much of a network effect there is in charging infrastructure build-out. (Also, how quickly will gas infrastructure actually get decomissioned)

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Asking GPT-3 substantive questions is like asking your dad.

It hallucinates facts and citations, one comparison I saw was to blog comments, not entirely useful, but also quite suspect. Our relationship with information we read from ChatGPT requires further consideration, more so than Wikipedia, but directionally similar.

Robotbeat🗽 ➐ @Robotbeat

A reason folks consistently underestimate battery-electric approaches to things is ease of adding charging infrastructure. This battery-electric eventually-VTOL prototype aircraft made a 1400 mile cross country trip. Used the same kind of DCFCers EVs use.

m.youtube.comBETA ALIA Flies to ArkansasRecently, our flight test team completed a series of “cross-country” flights using our all electric aircraft, ALIA. The aircraft successfully flew from Platt...

180 Miles of flight for $19 seems pretty good.

Ian Millhiser @imillhiser

It's interesting how the Republicans kinda sorta pretended to do some kind of populist thing for a while. But the minute they gain a single house of Congress, the only thing they can think to do is protect rich people from paying taxes and cutting Medicare and Social Security.

CBO scoring is out for the Republican IRS defunding bill, surprise, net deficit of 100 billion dollars. I did not realize that Americans actually view the IRS relatively favorably. Oh, and Republicans are excited about cutting medicaid too!

Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch

California's water resource situation has improved exponentially, seemingly overnight. Water stored in the snowpack and reservoirs now exceeds the normal for the time of year and will continue to rise rapidly over the next 7-10 days.

I'm concerned, like Kai Ryssdal, that a significant amount of California's extra water reserves are being stored in the crawlspace under my house.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Roman concrete lasted a long time because it wasn't reinforced with steel (which corrodes). To make reinforced concrete last a very long time, just use stainless steel. But stainless steel is expensive.

constructionphysics.substack.comRoman vs Modern ConcreteThere’s a new paper out exploring some of the chemical mechanisms at work in Roman concrete. As per usual, it’s triggered a round of enthusiastic discussion of Roman concrete, and how its ability to last for millennia puts modern concrete (which often fails after a few decades) to shame.

Sorry, that whole story about Roman Concrete the other day was blown way out of proportion. The linked Construction Physics article was excellent.

Threads

• Gov. Hochul of New York laid out a land use / housing plan. Here's a thread about it. TL;DR: transit oriented development, ambitious yearly total housing targets for municipalities, and a builder's remedy if they don't achieve them. Looks great, although text of the proposed bill is not yet out.