That's just from the improvement of the cells themselves, they also talked about an additional 10% decrease in mass and a 14% increase in range due to the integration of the battery pack into the body of the car, which the new, larger cells will allow them to do. An overall improvement of 30% range with these changes ain't too shabby, and that's from incremental improvements to what they are already doing. Honestly everything they covered today seemed so straight forward and feasible that it just seemed kind of boring, but the changes combined are quite impressive. The important part of the presentation really, is the total overall cost reduction of the battery pack of 56%, that's what leads them to believe they can produce a $25,000 car.
You've got to admire the kid that got in for babysitting for the director of undergraduate admissions...maybe they are smarter than most of the other applicants or they just happened to live next door.
That's the huge difference between private schools like MIT (Ivy League and Stanford too) and public schools like UC Berkley. Public schools receive a lot of funding from the state and they should be audited by the state and have some transparency in their admissions process. California clamped down on the UC schools years ago for admitting too many out of state students, and they had the authority to do that. I don't think it's unique to Berkley at all, all state schools have to answer to the state they serve.
One of my kids applied to Cal a few years back...at Cal you apply to the individual college (such as the college of engineering) when you apply. Some colleges are much easier to get into than others and it's very difficult to change colleges once you are admitted, it's like applying to get into the school all over again. Obviously getting into the CS or Engineering programs at Cal is very hard but many of the other programs are much less competitive. I don't know if that's how all the UC schools are or not, but the difficulty of admissions seems like a mixed bag at UC Berkley.
It's a total mix with Joe Rogan, on the one hand he's had Alex Jones on his show with the two of them talking about taking drugs to communicate with aliens in another dimension, but on the other hand I thought he did a pretty good job interviewing Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders before the democratic primaries started. The quality of any single one of his episodes is largely driven by the quality of his guest. I honestly think Joe fills the role of an average guy asking the kind of questions most average guys would ask very well. He also generally sounds sincere, curious and unbiased when he brings people on his show. Yeah someone like Alex Jones can take the show way off the rails, but on the other hand he's interviewed people like Edward Snowden, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders and had very interesting and thoughtful conversations with them. In fact when it comes to non-mainstream political candidates like Andrew Yang, Joe was one of the few people to give them more than a few minutes to articulate their platform.
When ordering multiple things you can opt to have them shipped together to save some packaging, though it might mean an extra delay. I wonder if at some point Amazon will have more lockers available in most communities where they could deliver items without extra packaging and they can be safely picked up by only the recipient. I would be willing to go a little bit further to pick up my packages if it would save some packaging/speed up deliveries.
I've come to the conclusion that this is what most parents and students are looking for...a [relatively] safe place to finish growing up. The degree is only part of the equation.
It's also worth pointing out that the new prototypes, like SN5 that flew today, are made with significantly thinner steel over what "Star Hopper" was made with last year. They have spent a lot of effort perfecting their manufacturing technique so they can make these things as light as possible and still achieve the safety margins that they need to support manned flight. That's why they need the 22 ton weight on the top for this flight, because they can't throttle a single Raptor engine low enough to hover these new designs.
My youngest's university is offering free tuition for the summer session in 2021 next year to students that are enrolled this fall. You can bet we'll be taking advantage of that and hopefully that will mean an earlier graduation and some money saved later on.
The average 18 year old just starting college doesn't have a job or has a low paying hourly job, has no savings and is still very much dependent on their parents for at least some financial support. For many parents delaying the time their children enter the work force can represent a significant financial burden. I am all for saving up and taking time off between jobs, sabbaticals, extended vacations and traveling the world, but doing it on mommy and daddy's dime is a fairly selfish pursuit.
I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of gap years in general, but this year 2020-2021 seems particularly bad because it seems likely it will be an unproductive year for many so you might as well make some progress towards your degree.
The problem with gap years is you loose an additional year of income at the college graduate level on the backend, that's a pretty big missed financial opportunity. With the economy in the state it's in now, it's unlikely most college students will be able to land decent paying jobs during a gap year, if they can find a job at all. Better to just finish the degree as quickly as possible and be ready to enter the work force as a college graduate when, in a couple of years, our economy should be in a strong rebound.
We have 3 college students in our household. We've had these conversations many times in our house over the last few months. The above is the conclusion I've come to for my own kids, that a gap year is basically a waste of time in the current economy. The last thing I'll add is we are saving some money on online classes, room and board makes up roughly $10,000-$15,000 of the cost of sending a kid to college, having the kids at home doing online classes at least saves us that.
> Keep in mind people who test positive but die of a car wreck are counted as COVID19.
In Colorado there was lawsuit over this, because there was a case of a college age man dying of alcohol poisoning but he tested positive for Covid-19 so was counted as a Covid-19 death per CDC regulations. So the Colorado Health Department now tracks two numbers: people that died with Covid-19 and people that died because of Covid-19. As of right now the first is 1,752 deaths and the second is 1,615 deaths. Statistically it's not a huge difference, you can see the numbers here:
Moderna's vaccine does not require two doses, they administered two doses as part of their phase 2 trials to test for adverse reactions. They are only doing a single 100 µg dose for their phase 3 trials, and it's likely that will be the dose in the final vaccine:
Moderna has plans to be able to manufacturer 1 billion doses a year. AstraZeneca has announced plans to manufacturer 2 billion doses a year, with plans to produce 300 million doses by the end of 2020. The Chinese firms Sinopharm and Sinovac are ramping up their production right now, and will produce 200-300 million doses by the end of 2020. With all the other firms developing a vaccine it seems highly likely we could produce enough vaccine to vaccinate the entire population of the Earth in a single year. Now distributing and administering that much vaccine is another story, but manufacturing will not likely be the bottle neck.
Yeah, the biggest problem with Teslas is they don't follow a lot of established conventions in the auto industry. Things like the windshield wiper controls or opening the glove box are not in the standard place. You definitely have to take the time to learn how to use the car.
It's not just Youtube, Android apps and developers get banned as well, often with little explanation or recourse. I'm not sure why anyone would invest time or money building a business on any of Google's platforms.
I have 2 kids in college right now. One goes to a non-Harvard Ivy League school, the other one is at a state school. My wife and I both went to an average state school (as far as college rankings are concerned). We've gotten more insight than usual into our kid's academics as both of them have been home this spring and taking online classes due to the Covid outbreak. The level of academic rigor and the high expectations at the Ivy league school are through the roof compared to my own college experience and my other kid's academics. I frankly don't think I could have handled it had I been able to attend a school of that caliber. I can't speak for Harvard specifically but I have my doubts that an average student would survive for very long at some of these elite schools. I also have my doubts that their teaching style would scale real well to a large number of students. They rely heavily on hiring exceptional professors and giving them a significant amount of autonomy in the classroom. The class sizes are very small by university standards and the vast majority of assignments and tests are hand written and graded by the professor.
One of the drivers for Colorado moving to the SAT from the ACT was the amount of free SAT prep courses online. SAT partnered with Khan Academy to offer a lot of test prep and practice tests online for free.
In Colorado all high school Juniors take the SAT in April for free. I think they have to pay to add the writing section but most universities have removed the writing requirement.
Because there is a market there, actual money to be made, that would be a lot more realistic for companies like Cruise and Waymo to solve than some pie in the sky self driving car. They could have been working towards a public transportation system that doesn't require millions of dollars in capital construction costs to put in place first. But that's not as sexy I guess.
Speechless? Where I live we have full size public buses that are frequently only carrying one or two people. In fact if I had a nickle for every time I've seen a completely empty light rail train in the middle of the day in Denver, I'd be a rich man by now. Public transport in the vast majority of the US is a failure. In Colorado Uber and Lyft probably haul 10-100 times more people every day than ride our public transportation, that's not efficient at all. The main complaint people have is public transportation doesn't run often enough, or provide enough routes, self driving vehicles could fix that and make it economic for US cities. If you had smaller buses (sometimes called vans) you could run them more often and thus make them more appealing to the masses. Is it less efficient, yes, but if it gains more riders that's a net gain IMO.
Agreed, I was thinking the self driving vans or mini-buses would hold maybe 10 people. They wouldn't have to be as big as a full size bus as they would come by more often, making them more convenient for the riders.
I live in a smaller city and we have full size buses that only come by every half an hour, which means if you miss a connection it could take you an hour and a half to travel a distance you could easily drive in 15-20 minutes. If the buses came by more often, more people would ride them, but that would be cost prohibitive if you had to pay all the drivers.
Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that could be cost effective. Something like that could change public transport and would be very accessible to even small cities.
Where I'm at they've replaced nearly all of our diesel buses with natural gas. They certainly look a lot cleaner driving down the road and I'm guessing they are cheaper to operate as well. Something like that might be a good intermittent step for a lot of these places while the cost on electric buses comes down.
Yes partly alcohol, but also the front of the house is cheap to run. In the old, old days you only had to pay waiters $2.13/hour and they made the rest off of tips. Now it's like $8/hour in our state (Colorado) but that's still nothing, when you consider how many tables (and entrees per table) a single waiter can take during a busy hour, far less than 20% of each entree for sure. The problem is demographics are changing. Our restaurant 20 years ago did like 10-20% takeout and delivery, the rest was all dine in. Now it's closer to 50-60% takeout and delivery for us, so companies like GrubHub are eating up a lot of restaurant profits. People just don't eat out like they used too. It's not just us, there have been a ton of articles the last couple of years complaining about these companies, this first one says GrubHub takes 30% (yikes):
When I mentioned GrubHub and DoorDash to my wife when I say this article posted, I got a 30 minute rant about how much she hates them. She couldn't even give me a fixed fee she paid from these companies, she started listing off different fees and charges, but she said it was more than 20% per order. These companies have absolutely shot themselves in the foot with how they have treated their customers. What a lot of people really want is to be able to order online or through an app, that's the value these companies provide. For us we already had a WordPress website, so I paid a small fee to install the Woo Restaurant plugin to handle the online menu and ordering. It really wasn't much trouble to setup and it's been way less trouble than any of these middle men, and we get to continue to keep the profits.
This. Most restaurants are lucky to make 10-15% profit on each order and these "services" are charging the restaurant 20%, plus other fees like credit card processing fees etc. My wife runs a restaurant and she has used all the major delivery services, including GrubHub and they take a huge cut. It's not sustainable and it's driving small restaurants out of business. They also don't manage their drivers well at all. We've had drivers show up 2-3 hours late to pick up an order, with angry customers calling asking where their food is the whole nine yards. The bottom line is they can't justify the huge cut they are taking from every order, they are simply not providing a good service. And of course when there are issues customers call the restaurant, there's no way to get ahold of anyone at GrubHub. Any smart restaurant owners are going to bail on these guys and hire their own drivers as quickly as they can.
NY was in a terrible place, they should have shutdown the subways immediately when they started getting cases there, but it would have crippled the city.
There is an additional security that kids can provide their parents even today. I have 3 kids that are all in various stages of finishing up school and starting their careers. We've stayed pretty close as a family and there is no doubt in my mind that my kids will always be there for my wife and I as well as each other, if we were to need it. As it stands right now, current events have forced all of my kids to come back home (which has actually been kind of awesome), but if something like this (pandemic/recession) happens in the future those roles could easily be reversed. It helps that my wife is Asian and has instilled a certain level of family obligation in our children. It's a heck of an investment, supporting another human being for 22 years or more, but no one will look out for you the way your own family will.