gascan

24 ms·

211.
by gascan 8y ago
Yes and yes, I believe. American regulations on emissions have been tightening, which (as one of the largest markets) drives requirements. Also, Mazda is one of the smaller fish, so they have to innovate to stay competitive.
212.
by gascan 8y ago
Your own link describes roads as generally nonexcludable: Once a road is built, it is difficult to exclude people, although toll roads can exclude nonpayers. Taking the definition to the extreme makes it no longer useful. Yes, technically
213.
by gascan 8y ago
Gasoline engines are getting better and better. Have you seen some of Mazda's latest engine innovations? Emissions have been improving rapidly, and fuel economy has been improving too (unfortunately these gains have been hidden by incr
214.
by gascan 8y ago
Small turbodiesels were way ahead of small gasoline engines for decades in fuel economy, power, and so forth. Diesel, which uses direct injection and compression ignition, has always been a natural fit with turbocharging, which makes them i
215.
by gascan 8y ago
Taking this a step further, presumably an honest vendor only need flash a new firmware at the dealer to the ECU with the unused cheating codeblocks removed, while a secretly cheating vendor is suddenly trapped.
216.
by gascan 8y ago
My question is what's the core goal. Is the primary objective sales? Or is the primary objective shaming cities into actually funding their road maintenance budgets.
217.
by gascan 8y ago
Direct funding is good- but ultimately the road is a (very expensive) public good, and Domino's can't fund full maintenance all by itself nor does it reap all the benefit. Public funding has always made sense for road repair becau
218.
by gascan 8y ago
Unless some competitor comes and knocks Type-C off the pole position, eventually the odds are implementing more complete Type-C will get easier and easier. Better Type-C chips will come out, get cheaper, & easier to design with. Maybe t
219.
by gascan 8y ago
Power/charging cables in particular. After all, when was the last time your power drill caught a virus from your extension cord?
220.
by gascan 8y ago
how long will it take to reverse engineer? Long enough that by the time they do, the chips they've ripped are behind the times. Chips march on a pretty fast cadence, and with billions of transistors they are no small feat to reverse
221.
by gascan 8y ago
Your own sources offer a good perspective, if one takes the time to read them. Ethanol has been promoted as a ‘green’ fuel because its combustion tends to produce lower emissions of carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons and NOx than petrol. But the
222.
by gascan 8y ago
It's at least supported by my own personal experience, which inclines me to believe the narrative. My wife & I were considering installing solar on our residence. The payoff was marginal, but it was there. We were going to save for
223.
by gascan 8y ago
Is there a fuel oxygenate you'd prefer to ethanol? Ethanol isn't great on it's own, but added to gasoline in small amounts, it reduces emissions & smog.
224.
by gascan 8y ago
Counter to narrative, there is/was some US based panel production capacity, we do still make things here! True, except those operations are owned by foreign companies, right? Particularly... Germany and China.
225.
by gascan 8y ago
VLIW plus a "sufficiently smart compiler"? Isn't that IA-64 in a nutshell?
226.
by gascan 8y ago
Coupling an undersea datacenter with an offshore windfarm just sounds all-around clever.
227.
by gascan 8y ago
I completely agree, it's kind of nuts. It was only maybe sixty years ago that nobody but the rich could really afford two cars, and yet here we are today where it's basically taken for granted as a basic requirement of life in muc
228.
by gascan 8y ago
There is a certain amount of inflating expectations going on, IMO. I'd bet a lot of the people who worked their way through college, went to community college. Also, even comparing like for like- my father attended Berkeley in the 60
229.
by gascan 8y ago
I actually had meant to type "home & auto repair...". But anyway, IMO most of the value is learning what's going on in the car and the process of diagnosis. Many, many shops employ the "speculatively replace X and se
230.
by gascan 8y ago
The reason frugality is so fundamental is because everyone needs at least a little of it, no matter how much they make. Just as with the diet saying "You can't outrun your fork", lifestyle inflation will perpetually dog your
231.
by gascan 8y ago
spending a lot of effort on living frugal. There's just something off-putting about the thought of spending decades living frugally There's a whole range there. You don't have to live on ramen. But you can be really aggress
232.
by gascan 8y ago
Nobody hired them for advocacy, but e.g. the MMM webpage makes a lot of money in ads. A lot .
233.
by gascan 8y ago
If you don't know what makes text legible, and you can't really justify a particular font choice- I think there is an argument to be made that following whatever the latest best-practice is, is in fact a sensible/desirable be
234.
by gascan 8y ago
At least we've been moving glacially in that direction, thanks to UEFI & faster booting. POST, device initialization, etc has begun to stick out, and is slowly being improved.
235.
by gascan 8y ago
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter Not having read the book, I'm guessing it mostly breaks along the lines of perishability? E.g. bread lasts a few weeks, butter lasts a year.
236.
by gascan 8y ago
I can't wait for a public beta on a bullet train.
237.
by gascan 8y ago
The more A/C in use, the hotter the city gets, exacerbating the urban heat island. And even if Arizona used exclusively solar (which it doesn't), the climate is still on a warming pattern. Also, energy trapped by black solar panel
238.
by gascan 8y ago
Yeah, the Sunbelt migration could be sustainable if people were moving there to live in the heat and xeriscape their yards, but apparently people want to move to Phoenix and live at 72 degrees with lush green everywhere. Aside from the limi
239.
by gascan 8y ago
Cheap water seems to give the idea it will always be cheap & plentiful. And rules preventing market pricing will perpetuate that notion right up until the day your faucet dries up. Increasing tap fees are the closest thing to a market d
240.
by gascan 8y ago
Is there some kind of price to tangible assets ratio? Because I suspect Comcast has Netflix beat handily there as well.

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