Maybe you’re not dreaming big enough on what makes ideal conditions. The fraudulent Nikola company managed to film a semi “driving” a few km without a powertrain, by just letting it roll downhill. I bet there’s a place that has a high enough altitude and smooth enough roads for a long downhill descent where 600km on a 300km battery is possible.
Makes me wonder about the wheel’s rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that’s all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).
Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.
Looks cool, though, I guess.
The hubless wheel is on their current models. It’s basically their signature differentiator.
There’s reason to be skeptical of the company and its claims as a whole, but at least that particular feature has shipped and has been test driven by reviewers:
https://thepack.news/11000-km-in-2-months-marc-travels-rides-the-verge-ts-across-europe/
We are far beyond the GDP vs. GDP(PPP) that started this.
No, you started talking about PPP in response to a news story that described the United States and China competing over influence over the Venezuelan economy: Chinese aid and investment in response to United States sanctions. Those are essentially going to be dollar denominated, and PPP doesn’t matter. I’ve been saying from the beginning that you were wrong to bring PPP into the discussion, because this discussion, in this thread, isn’t about domestic consumption in either China or the U.S.
The US’s main problem is it’s lack of industrial production.
Again, when talking about the effects of sanctions and foreign aid and investment, we should be talking about transactions that occur in the currency at issue. If China wants to provide aid to Venezuela in RMB, Venezuela will either need to spend that on Chinese producers or exchange for another currency to spend elsewhere (including Venezuelan Bolivars being spent domestically). If there’s going to be a currency exchange, then PPP of the aid providing nation doesn’t matter. A million USD from China is worth the exact same amount as a million USD from the U.S.
On the world stage, as an economic power, the US is losing to China.
I think if we’re talking about on the world stage, as an economic power, the interconnected West is best understood as a power bloc. U.S. inconsistency and unpredictability on things like Russian sanctions actually show the limits of U.S. unilateral power while still showing the power of the broader Western order. Yes, China and Russia want to provide the world with an alternative multipolar order, and fragmentation of the Western powers may open up opportunities for that vision, but that competition is playing out along alliances, not isolated nations. In any event, PPP doesn’t have anything to do with that particular competition.
If we’re not comparing the ability of a citizen to buy things with the fruit of their labor. What are we comparing?
In this particular case? I think we’re comparing Chinese and American ability to project economic influence (from trade or aid, to outright bribes or coercion or boycotts or sanctions or everything in between) over Venezuela.
The normal person
But the normal person has nothing to do with governments dealing with other governments on the global stage. And that’s what this story is about, Venezuela being caught between two competing visions of their future in the international order.
If a country wants to build an airport in their capital city using the resources of foreign governments seeking to influence them, the question isn’t about how many eggs the citizens of those countries can buy in their home turf, but about how much concrete and steel and heavy machinery those other countries can provide in the country considering offers.
No serious economist uses GDP as a metric for actual economic production. Can we please at least use GDP (PPP)?
In terms of flexing on foreign countries on the international stage, though, raw GDP (or at least imports and exports) is pretty important.
The PPP calculation comparing China to the United States may tell us a lot about how much a resident of either country can expect to experience using the local currency domestically, but if we’re talking about influence over a third country, in that third country’s local currency, then I think each respective PPP back home doesn’t matter as much.
My “We’re totally different from Enron” accounting report has a lot of investors asking questions answered by the report.
Or maybe use excess power to electrolyze water for fuel cell use later?
Hydrogen storage presents a lot of challenges, because it tends to leak at normal temperatures found on Earth. So we either tolerate a lot of loss during storage, or we use lots of energy chilling it to a temperature where it won’t easily escape.
why were highly skilled Korean engineers working “illegally” in USA to begin with?
Most of them say they had valid visas or work authorization.
The U.S. has a visa waiver program where people can come into the U.S. without a visa, and have certain rights similar to visa holders. Many of the South Korean workers have taken the position that the visas they had that allowed them to work for 6 months, or the visa waivers they had entitled them to do temporary work for less than 90 days, and that they were within those time windows.
The lawsuits being filed also allege that immigration officials acknowledged that many of the workers did have legal rights to work, but that they were deported anyway.
So no, I don’t think it’s been shown that the workers did anything illegal. It really sounds like ICE fucked up by following a random tip a little too credulously.
It has long been used as a transitive verb. The Oxford English Dictionary has collected examples going as far back as 1897 using it generically to make something disappear, but this particular meaning, of government officials forcibly abducting a person and not explaining where the person went, really started to pick up by the 1960’s. The novel Catch-22, published in 1961, had a character use it in the transitive way, with the protagonist complaining that it wasn’t even proper grammar. And that novel was popular enough that it started to appear a lot shortly afterwards, in magazines and newspapers and books.
From the article:
There are multiple organizations broadly known as “National Geographic,” so before we go any further, let’s run through some definitions and distinctions. In 2018, Disney bought a majority stake in an entity called National Geographic Partners, LLC—or NGP, for short. This is the for-profit company that encompasses the magazine, the television channel, and other properties that live under the Nat Geo brand. It was formed in 2015 by then–majority partner 21st Century Fox and the 137-year-old National Geographic Society. The Society is a registered non-profit organization, and it remains a 27 percent-owner of NGP, even after Fox’s sale of its 73-percent share to Disney. When I refer to “National Geographic” in this story, I mean the National Geographic Society unless otherwise specified.
In other words, this article is about the nonprofit that has existed for 137 years. The for-profit subsidiaries were 73% acquired by Fox/Murdoch, and then sold to Disney when Disney bought Fox. But this film was published directly by the nonprofit and not the for-profit subsidiary that is partially owned by Disney.
This long form article is why I pay for a Defector subscription. It’s a good, well researched article that gives the appropriate background and tells a story that nobody else has told, and that maybe never would have been told, by any other outlet.
No, LCOE is an aggregated sum of all the cash flows, with the proper discount rates applied based on when that cash flow happens, complete with the cost of borrowing (that is, interest) and the changes in prices (that is, inflation). The rates charged to the ratepayers (approved by state PUCs) are going to go up over time, with inflation, but the effect of that on the overall economics will also be blunted by the time value of money and the interest paid on the up-front costs in the meantime.
When you have to pay up front for the construction of a power plant, you have to pay interest on those borrowed funds for the entire life cycle, so that steadily increasing prices over time is part of the overall cost modeling.
My problem with nuclear is both the high cost and, somewhat counterintuitively, the very long life cycles to spread that high cost. The economics only make sense if the plant runs for 75 years, which represents an opportunity cost of displacing whatever might be available in 25 or 50 years.
A solar plant planned in 2025 might be online in 2027, and decommissioned in 2047, replaced with whatever technology/economics are available then. But a new nuclear reactor bakes in the costs for 80+ years, to be paid by ratepayers who haven’t been born yet.
So if in 2050 a 2030-constructed nuclear plant is still imposing costs of $66/MWh on ratepayers, to finance the interest and construction costs from 25 years earlier, will that be competitive with the state of solar/wind/batteries/hydrothermal at that time? Given the past trend lines, it seems economically foolish to lock in today’s prices for the next 80 years.
This paper lays out the cost projections that one could expect with the lessons learned from Vogtle Units 3 & 4, with the tax credits and government guarantees available as of 2024:
https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP201 TR CANES.pdf
Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That’s just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it’s also not very realistic to assume that there won’t be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.
Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?
I’m just familiar with Lazard’s LCOE methodology. The linked paper talks about LCOE, so that’s just how that particular cost analysis works.
Vogtle added 2 AP1000 reactors for $35 billion. Future deployments might be cheaper, but there’s a long way to go before it can compete with pretty much any other type of power generation.
But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear
I think Lazard’s LCOE methodology looks at the entire life cycle of the power plant, specific to that power plant. So they amortize solar startup/decommissioning costs across the 20 year life cycle of solar, but when calculating LCOE for nuclear, they spread the costs across the 80 year life cycle of a nuclear plant.
Nuclear is just really, really expensive. Even if plants required no operating costs, the up front costs are so high that it represents a significant portion of the overall operating costs for any given year.
The Vogtle debacle in Georgia cost $35 billion to add 2 MW 2GW (edit to fix error) of capacity. They’re now projecting that over the entire 75 year lifespan the cost of the electricity will come out to be about $0.17 to $0.18 per kilowatt hour.
I think that’s right. To summarize, here’s where I think we agree and disagree:
We agree: GDP is not a particularly good metric for measuring international economic influence.
We disagree: You think adjusting GDP by PPP makes it better for this context, and I think that adjustment makes it even worse.
We agree: Exports matter for discussing economic power on the international stage.
We disagree: I think imports and investment also matter. You clearly don’t, by dismissing them as mere consumption and financial engineering.
We agree: United States economic power overseas is in decline, including in the hegemony of the US Dollar, and its importance/influence through organizations like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, or even things like the SWIFT banking network.
We disagree: I think the United States is still much, much stronger than China on global economic influence. The lines may cross, where China overtakes the United States, but I think that would be in the future, whereas your comment suggests you believe those lines crossed in the past.
In the end, a country like Venezuela wants to sell barrels of oil to buyers, for a good price. That means things like U.S. sanctions (especially when enforced by the entire west) will hurt more than Chinese aid helps. At least as of 2026.