Musk says VW actions proof oil’s time is over – he’s right too
Combustion engines hit their thermodynamic limit a long time ago, since then we’ve just been trying to deal with their emissions. It’s been over 150 years since J. J. Étienne Lenoir built his double-acting, spark-ignition engine. It lacked compression and had low efficiency compared to modern engines so we saw some rapid improvements over the next hundred years. But there is no escaping physics. The maximum efficiency from a combustion engine is 46-50% (Otto / Carnot cycles). In the real world we see only 15-35%.
The available energy typically breaks down into :
– 33% lost in exhaust gasses released into atmosphere
– 24% lost in coolant
– 5% lost in friction
– 33% goes to moving vehicle and powering accessories (radio, A/C, etc)
Even a bad electric motor is 80% efficient which is why EVs top rankings in efficiency.
The highest efficiency combustion engine cars for 2015 are small body, small engine vehicles like the Honda CR-Z and Scion IQ. They manage 37 MPG. Hybrids like the Toyota Prius manage 42-50 MPG despite being larger vehicles.
Pure electric vehicles smash those numbers. The Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S, Kia Soul Electric, BMW i3, get over 100 eMPG.
The lack of headroom when it comes to combustion engines is clear in the actions taken by VW. Consumers want improvements in efficiency and are more than ever aware of the costs and global consequences of burning oil.
But if your engine can’t deliver, and won’t ever deliver, what do you do? Cheating seems to be one of the options available to businesses.
Now this takes me back. All that sweating over colour and resolution modes and designing with graph paper probably explains why I never became a gamer. Writing simple games was a deeper kind of fun.
It was also a pretty zen short of activity. Solitary, slow and very different from programming in the internet age.
Oh please. Somebody call the waambulance. The Verge as well as being a big crybaby is also one of the worst offenders when it comes to laggy, spammy, phishy “content” on the web. http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-sucks/
Treat your readers with contempt and they’ll happily return the favour. So if this is a case of “you’ll miss us when we’ve gone” then I’d like to test that prediction.
Emlyn O’Regan is on a roll channeling the Zeitgeist. Ad-blocking is all the rage on mobile (thanks Apple) but this move seems to have reopened some seemingly settled arguments about advertising generally.
Notably absent from this debate are the Googlers.
Advertising on the web has moved on in many people’s minds from “minor annoyance” to “fucking nuisance”. Arguments have gone from “I accept that content producers need to get paid” to “fuck the media and their stinking business model. And screw their nasty spyware and malware too!”
It seems the “content” that actually gets produced is pretty shit and that some of it really needs to go away, like, now.
Originally shared by Emlyn O’Regan
Advertisers are trying to manipulate you emotionally to get you to do something you wouldn’t otherwise do, possibly something not in your own interests. So it shouldn’t be a surprise then that they don’t care about serving up malware; it’s what they’re already doing memetically anyway. Advertising is mental malware. Ad blockers are your friend.
This website is being clobbered right now by non-members of the elite driven by a sudden upsurge of internet-driven wtf? The essay they are trying to read simultaneously is excellent so keep refreshing that browser, you proles.
Elite culture always needs smashing. Here’s another example but while it seems quintessentially and perversely British upper class, you will find this sort of behavior in lots of places where access to the top rungs of society is tightly constrained. Along with all those lectures about “meritocracy” created for the benefit of the aspirational middle classes, you will find hazing rituals and mutually incriminating orgies. These are the building blocks of elite culture.
To take a different example, consider the elite practices of the male dominated Chinese business culture. In China, it’s hard to cut a business deal without sharing a few hookers. You can’t join an elite without giving them some leverage over you.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story is the fact that we are hearing about it at all. For some reason some members of the British elite are breaking ranks. They’ve moved from dark mutterings about blackmail to publishing directly on the front page of newspapers.
Via Yonatan Zunger
Originally shared by Jordan Peacock
Essential reading:
Burning money in front of a homeless person isn’t just intended to be a nasty prank, it serves to train a Bullingdon boy’s senses, to make other humans seem somehow less. That David Cameron and his allies George Osborne and Boris Johnson have all done this, and that they have all presided over a sharp spike in homelessness in London and throughout the UK, are not coincidental.
[…]
The pig scandal that now has the world laughing at Cameron wasn’t from the Bullingdon Club but the Piers Gaverston, less well-known (until this week), but with a reputation for bizarre sexual rituals and initiation rites. Where the Bullingdon boys built their fraternity around shared values of hating the poor, the Piers Gaverston was about sexual humiliation and the creation of shared secrets. Its structural function is as an agreement of mutually assured destruction between the rulers of tomorrow – I know your secret and you know mine, so let’s stay on the same side, yeah?
This forms one of the core mechanics of the British ruling class – why reveal someone’s dirty little secret when you can keep schtum about it and control them? This forms the basis of the parliamentary whipping system, where the Chief Whip of each respective party is expected to have an arsenal of dirt locked away in their office so that when the time comes, their party leader can ‘whip’ rebellious backbenchers with threats that sometimes include leaking that story about you that you really don’t want to be leaked.
In this elite culture not all corruption is financial. When it comes to the top of British politics, sound character and a clean record do not make you an asset. You’ll have a hard time joining unless they can confirm that you are scum – and can make sure that the public don’t know about it.
An interesting example of this is the role Margaret Thatcher played in the elevation of certain members of her government and its allies. Recent allegations in the growing parliamentary child abuse scandal arose that Thatcher “turned a blind eye” to pedophiles that she promoted, including the provision of knighthoods to known serial child abusers Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith. Her own Home Secretary, the now deceased Leon Brittan, is still being investigated.
In each case, Thatcher is now thought to have been warned by security services about the deviancy of these men, but is alleged to have studiously ignored it. When it comes to secret-keeping and elite power, it is not out of the question that in knowing they were child abusers, Thatcher would have had political leverage over these allies of hers, and so promoting them would have helped her strengthen her own power while in office.
[…]
The wound of that hypocrisy was already festering before Lord Ashcroft punished him this week for breaking the rules of the ritual: that you will obey the people who made you, or you will be humiliated. This wasn’t, as some have said, young men being silly. Not if the secrets being kept are designed by powerful men to keep other powerful men under control. That kind of arrangement is the antithesis of democracy.
And it is also the antithesis to the meritocracy they proclaim. Not just because it’s rich boys getting an easy ride to the top – we already knew that – but because David Cameron’s nasty little scandal speaks to a suspicion many people already have: that in British society, you don’t get to become Prime Minister because you’re talented or because you work hard. You don’t even get there just because you’re rich. You get there by traumatizing the homeless and skull-fucking a dead pig, and that ritual gives you power because you have demonstrated utter, pathetic submission to your fellow oligarchs.
Seems that when it comes down to it Hillary just isn’t very good at this election business. At the current rate, she will lose the nomination once again to an outsider.
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