Heat pumps are the same technology as air conditioning, just with inputs and outputs hooked up in reverse. It's not magic, and there's over a half of century of experience in maintenance of AC units. Scaling up production and installed base of heat pumps will benefit from economies of scale, and make them cheaper to install and maintain.
UK can produce more wind energy than it needs. The grid needs more interconnects, but it's a solvable problem. I'm really annoyed when people say "the grid can't handle it!". 100 years ago it couldn't handle electric lighting, but we didn't stick to candles. We've built the grid to handle what it needed, and we'll expand it to handle more.
> back to the drawing board
And do what? We're already overdue for preventing the climate crisis, and need solutions yesterday. We can't wait for heating with unicorn farts.
The realistic options are either staying with gas boilers or switching to heat pumps. Gas is highly problematic from both environmental and geopolitical reasons, so we need to make heat pumps work.
> Odd to conflate electric heating and heat pumps.
There is an important efficiency distinction between heat pumps and resistive heating.
US firms buying politicians can only be called "lobbying" when it happens domestically in the US. Outside of the US, you have to call it "sparkling foreign interference".
It is always a shame when governments get corrupted, but the European view is usually not "welp, the experiment failed, let's get rid of the government completely", but rather "we need to make the government stronger, to have it resist interference harder".
US constitution has "We the people", but Americans don't really see their government as "We", but rather as some incompetent entity they're forced to live under.
Europeans more strongly see governments as their representation. The government is seen as people banding together, through their representatives. Governments exist to resist undesirable forces, like exploitation of people by commercial entities.
This is also the reason why Europeans like regulations, a thing unfathomable in the US. It's not "oh no, those dumb politicians stifle our precious job-creating businesses", but rather "we're the labor force, we're the consumers, and the businesses depend on us, so we won't let them fuck with us". So US firms fucking with us is a terrible thing, but the reaction will probably be to make more regulations to resist US tech even harder.
> US constitution has "We the people", but Americans don't really see their government as "We" ...
I think you misunderstand. I'm an American, so I should probably clarify a typical American perspective. Caveat: you probably can't find any statement all Americans agree on :-) ).
The US Constitution does begin with the phrase "We the people", but I think you misunderstand its context. It never says the US government and its people are the same. I can quote that sentence from memory. The text follows with the goals for creating a federal government (e.g., "establish justice" and "provide for the common defense"). It ends by saying that We the People "... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America". In other words, it's clearly stated that the government is not the people. The US federal government is instead an organization established by the people under rules defined by the Constitution.
So Americans would generally agree that the US government is NOT the people. The US government is instead an organization set up by the people, in order to accomplish certain goals. If we don't like how its current leadership runs things, the intent is that We the People can change the leadership via an election (as established by the Constitution).
> but rather as some incompetent entity they're forced to live under.
You'll find lots of claims about incompetence, especially at political rallies where someone is trying to convince everyone to vote for them. But while many people want someone or other voted in, and there are always proposals for changes, few call for the elimination of the US government. They just want "their side" voted in.
> Europeans more strongly see governments as their representation. The government is seen as people banding together, through their representatives. Governments exist to resist undesirable forces, like exploitation of people by commercial entities.
Americans also view their government as necessary to resist undesirable forces. Per that sentence, the government exists to "provide for the common defense" and "promote the general welfare".
However, the American view is that governments can also be the source of tyranny. This is not a crazy view; see the various dictatorships around the world. Governments can be powerful entities. Therefore, there needs to be a way to ensure that they are (1) representative and (2) constrained so they don't become tyrannical.
> This is also the reason why Europeans like regulations, a thing unfathomable in the US.
The US has lots of regulations, so it's not that the US doesn't have any. However, Americans are generally more skeptical of regulation than Europeans. All regulations have unintended consequences; if the regulation is not carefully crafted, the regulation can be worse than the problem.
For example: I would instinctively ignore the goal of any proposed law or regulation. I don't really care what its goal is. That is mostly irrelevant. What is the actualimpact of the law or regulation? If it does something good, but overall makes things worse, then it should be rejected even if it has a good goal.
> In 2008, the eurozone and the US had equivalent gross domestic products (GDP) at current prices of $14.2 trillion and $14.8 trillion respectively (€13.1 trillion and €13.6 trillion). Fifteen years on, the eurozone's GDP is just over $15 trillion, while US GDP has soared to $26.9 trillion.
Seems like they are not protecting their citizens interests nearly so well as they believe they are.
We have healthcare, guaranteed sick days and holidays, strong worker rights, consumer protections, passenger trains, and no daily mass shootings. We pay for this.
The stereotypical view the other ways is "yes, salaries in the US are way higher, but if I go there and get cancer, I'll bankrupt my family for three generations, and still die while on hold angry-calling my insurance provider".
Did Europeans not already have those advantages in 2008 though? If the figures quoted are correct then the Eurozone has had negligible growth over 15 years while the US has almost doubled the size of its economy over the same period. That surely can't be explained merely by Europeans continuing to enjoy the same advantages they already had but paying for the privilege.
I'm SDE myself so I don't have much data on that. I've heard people in finance get insane salaries. I would assume that folks working in SpaceX are doing better than their European colleagues from ArianeGroup (who may soon do even worse [0]).
How patronizing. I was born in a country where SDEs and "people who keep you alive" were paid more or less the same and don't want to go back, thank you very much.
OP seems to conflate EU with eurozone, but don't countries like Norway or Switzerland that are neither in EU nor in eurozone have sick days and passenger trains? Not sure you need bureaucrats in Brussels breaking your e2e encryption to have those things.
We have that in Canada too (besides the trains) and we're not nearly as backwards economically as most EU countries. EU has been stagnating for the last decade while Canada has maintained a consistent growth rate.
Incorrect. It's a bit problematic to compare EU as a whole, because countries join and leave, but if you compare bigger EU countries to Canada, Canada is not significantly better.
Also Canada has a higher real population growth which skews the data (per capita would be better), and on the per capita basis Canada looks pretty bleak.
Edit: my mistake, you said "last decade", but the 2010-2019 comparison is even more damning to Canada, 7% growth over 10 years vs 14% for Germany and 25% for Poland. (GDP - nominal).
To be fair, the European tendency to push the government to resist undesirable forces is kinda the whole reason for the Treaty of Brussels in the first place.
Europeans might see their own governments as representation, but I don't think they view the EU as representing them. I've met a lot of people who think those guys in Brussels don't give a damn about us here, wherever that "here" might be. The sentiment seems similar to what people in the USSR thought of Moscow.
I think part of the problem is that the EU can't work in the same way the US federal government does or ever did. Culturally the countries are too dissimilar. There are many friction points that make a closer union very difficult to swing without trying to pull a fast one over the population (like they did with the vote over the EU constitution).
One friction point is the "liking of regulations" you mention. Some European countries seem to like that but others don't. People absolutely laugh at the ridiculous German bureaucracy, how dated the way is that the French run things (cheques!!!) or how naive the Swedes are. And they usually do not want that in their own country.
When European countries want to pass unpopular legislation, instead of proposing it domestically, they propose it as an EU law, and turn back and say "look what EU made us do!". EU-wide successes of course are reported as personal achievements of whoever is on TV. Pro-EU vs anti-EU is also often a rallying topic in establishment vs opposition political debates, which tends to produce exaggerated controversies, sort of like the topic of abortion in the US. So I think there will always be some voices saying EU wants to outlaw curved bananas.
European countries are very different. I'm not sure if more than California vs Alabama. However, people remember that European countries used to have actual wars with each other throughout their history, up until not that long ago, so it's preferable to have disagreements worked out bureaucratically, even if that's a lot of bureaucracy.
I have a pet theory that this is actually the main mechanism by which the EU gains power over time; anytime a grown up decision needs to be made, it's upsourced to the EU level, so that local politicians can focus on the stuff that makes everybody happy (which by the nature of things tends to be inconsequential).
Unpopular legislation is often unpopular because it goes against people's best interests.
So you are saying that one of EUs main purposes is to allow politicians to circumvent the democratic process and so act against people's best interest.
EU is still a democratic institution, with representatives democratically elected by citizens of EU countries.
It's a different, bigger forum. This doesn't subvert the process. It may bring additional scrutiny and require international consensus. This is usually a higher bar for ramming bad laws than in local parliaments that may have dodgy deals or loyalties between parties/president/courts.
There are unpopular laws because they are bad ideas (like all the "think of the children" surveillance). There are also laws that are good for society long term, but unpopular due to short-term inconvenience (e.g. pollution limits raising prices, or anti-smoking laws vs smokers' freedoms).
The chief problem is different languages - you can't have a debate for an EU level party easilly televised, etc.
The cultural differences are not any worse, than chasms splitting the US, like go ask someone in Alabama and in New York aboit trans people or whatever.
Like sure the food in Romania and france is differrent but its not a relevant issue at election time
>The cultural differences are not any worse, than chasms splitting the US, like go ask someone in Alabama and in New York aboit trans people or whatever.
The Spanish will occasionally celebrate communism. They even have communist party members in the EU. Meanwhile communist symbols in a country like Lithuania are literally illegal. And this isn't some government holdover.
Things like education, childcare and even a general outlook on life is very different between EU countries.
I think this stark advantage is mostly in the US, and mostly due to gross incompetence of Electrify America.
In western Europe there are Ionity and Fastned networks that are pretty reliable and faster than v3 Superchargers. Non-Tesla charging is generally becoming competitive and usable. Tesla still can offer better UX in areas where they have a good coverage, but other manufacturers are catching up to that too.
So maybe Tesla has realized their advantage won't last forever? Their first trial of opening up Superchargers was in the Netherlands, home of the Fastned network.
Slimmer cables on superchargers are Tesla being clever and pushing more amps over the cable than the cable is rated for, and monitors when the cable overheats. Everyone else seems to do it by the book and has cables thick enough for their max amperage.
BTW, CSS2 supports 3-phase AC charging, which is common in Europe, but not in the US. In this regard NACS would be a downgrade for Europeans.
Maybe, but over billions of charging hours I have not heard of any stories about chargers catching on fire yet. I have to assume that if one of them did catch on fire it would be all over the news, the media is starving for anti-EV stories.
Assuming it's true, then probably the sensors are fail-safe.
But I'm not totally convinced Tesla is going over the cable rating. A lot goes into the rating of a particular cable -- everything from conductor material and size to the insulation around the conductors, proximity of conductors, etc. Not to mention the liquid cooling. It's plausible that supercharger cables are rated for more than 600A.
There could be a standard protocol describing how to authenticate and talk to a server, and get notified. It's not that different from chat protocols.
And operating systems could allow user to select their preferred server, although I wouldn't expect Apple to allow something advanced and anti-vendor-locking like that.
It's not about opening accounts, it's about monthly fees. If banks can't make money from debit card transactions they'll have to charge account holders directly.
I'm hoping C++ modules take off, because getting rid of naive textual inclusion enables mixing of code from different language versions, even if they're slightly incompatible.
It would enable C++ to have an Edition concept like Rust, and be able to start removing warts and poor defaults from the language, without breaking old code, and without needing the whole world to upgrade at once (well, except the modules adoption).
This makes me wonder how long does it make sense to keep running older, less energy efficient computers? There will be a point where energy wasted on less efficient components is higher than energy used to build a modern computer.
CPU in this iMac has less than a quarter of iPhone's speed. If it wasn't for macOS, this could probably run on a Raspberry Pi.
I just looked it up – if you're interested in comparing iMacs (2006) to iMacs (2021), it seems like the comparison is ~160W vs ~80W.
All of this is moot, though, if it's just a proof of concept/I did it to see whether it was possible!
That being said, it's a good question: I always wish there was a tool where you could calculate all of the tradeoffs involved - TCO for you (both purchase and operating costs), TCO for the environment, etc.
UK can produce more wind energy than it needs. The grid needs more interconnects, but it's a solvable problem. I'm really annoyed when people say "the grid can't handle it!". 100 years ago it couldn't handle electric lighting, but we didn't stick to candles. We've built the grid to handle what it needed, and we'll expand it to handle more.
> back to the drawing board
And do what? We're already overdue for preventing the climate crisis, and need solutions yesterday. We can't wait for heating with unicorn farts.
The realistic options are either staying with gas boilers or switching to heat pumps. Gas is highly problematic from both environmental and geopolitical reasons, so we need to make heat pumps work.
> Odd to conflate electric heating and heat pumps.
There is an important efficiency distinction between heat pumps and resistive heating.