to shrink reliance on Big Tech

Right there in the title

Finally AI in my favourite code editor!

/s (both)

Yeah, good advice.

For my parents house with NAS in their living room I still use WD Red Plus (not Red Pro), so pleasant & quiet (which was basically my only concern). But smol. Can’t find new ones as quiet tho.

How is the noise?
Did you make any model selection based on that?

We share that sentiment!

Sorry, I didn’t see any other connection from when you said this:

My point is just, what infrastructure can you do with say <$1b? It’s a lot of money but not building a whole new railroad kind of money. You can get a few station upgrade projects, a couple of electric trains, etc.

There’s room for private funding of a new electric car company. Save the tax dollars for big infrastructure projects.

My bad, but I don’t see the relevance otherwise - the tax dollars are already being saved & spent on big infrastructure projects, and the privately funded car company is also underway. Both are already facts.

Nobody is getting rid of cars or making any transitions overnight. How did you come to this anyway?

Using 1bn of gov money for car production isn’t political willpower?

And political willpower is already finally literally building new rail. Why take that money away and back into cars?

Also, the two issues; cars with or without solar panels, and solar panels on buildings are separate. And panels are ultra cheap.

So cars with solar panels are more efficient simply bcs there is more solar palens that way, regardless of your building having panels or not.

Every panel is a net positive, super effective or slightly less super effective ones.

And you are not putting any more or less panels on your house if you buy a car with or without the 200$ solar panels on/in it.

Why not say that if you can’t build a railway system for 20$ then you should stick with the current system that is just so great?

Sorry, but what sort of conclusion is that? I don’t understand, it’s divergent things.

Lots of tech that cars offer I can also have at my house, like a sound system or massage chair.

Car prices don’t reflect constriction costs.
Cars won’t be more or less expensive bcs of 200$ of solar panels.

Also people with budgets constraints dont buy new cars, why would they?

New electric car companies only intensity the always insufficient highways & daily rush hours adding time to peoples commutes.

Also cars cost money, we tend to forget that when talking about rail.

With less than 1bn you can build railroads between cities.

Some random sniplet (californiapolicycenter.org:

According to the HERS analysis, adding a new lane to an interstate on flat terrain in a rural area costs $2.7 million per lane mile. To do the same thing in a major urbanized area costs $62.4 million per lane mile, more than twenty times as much. Even minor projects display wide ranges in cost. Resurfacing an existing lane of a principal arterial in a flat, rural area costs $279,000 per lane mile. To do the same in a major urbanized area costs $825,000 per lane mile, three times as much.

(That is without car related costs with fall on individuals, or environmental costs that arent counted at all.)

California at the same time is building high-speed rail between LA & SF at 66 million per mile - that is including the railway stations & the city tunnels mentioned previously at billions per mile.
And that’s also a stupidly mismanaged project with 200+ million dollars in literally just planning mistakes and human errors (or sabotage).
With low maintenance & basically unlimited capacity I can only see that as a cost efficient project that should have been done 50 years ago.

Same reasons as railway I suppose - its expensive to destroy a city centre to get the land needed for it.

But you started the comparison with the underground thing.

In a free market and under current western capitalism the final consumer price (or entire consumer market supply for that matter) isn’t directly linked to features.
Ie they will sell you at max price as little as they can, not at a cost based price.
(Anyway, a cars worth of solar panels is such a negligible cost in relation to cars base price or options lists that it doesn’t matter that much)

And I don’t ever think you need any kind of prototype or testing to show how much solar energy can a surface of a car produce and how much travel distance does that represent - to ballpark it that is just a simple online search (you have enormous quantity of solar panel efficiency data, per latitude, as well as actual electric car consumption rates).
Bcs of that obvious common sense & various types of other solar cars out there I really doubt anyone is getting deceived here on solar mileage. The company does not claim they invented any revolutionary new solar panels (I doubt they hide the wattage spec they intend to install), nor hide the car (it’s a design 10+ years old, the point of which is that it has about a 0.1 drag coefficient, so about half of that of the sleekest other cars today). Their goal here is to put the existing design into production, so more of a logistical challenge - their prototypes need to prove they can build cars (to establish a production line), not to prove any overall concept of a solar car itself.
Additionally you can already get Hyundai Iconiq 5 with a solar panel sunroof for years now, it ads a mile/kilometer per day in real life (for people with a couple of miles/kilometre commutes that’s actually noticeable). But for decades you could get some car models (Toyota & Audi at least) with a solar panel sunroof, mostly they just powered the 12V battery with it to run auxiliary systems (like ventilation, AC).

I think you might have jumped to the conclusion this company is trying to sell solar cars with unlimited (outside?) range.

Oh, I agree with you there (well, not in the tech itself, why not both, have panels on buildings and on some cars – plenty of people drive only a few thousands of kilometres/miles per year & still need a car).

I’m just saying that as engineer I would start testing them separately, in lab conditions first to get the basics & correct obvious initial faults, then separately outside.
As management I however would insist that engineer has to find a way to glue whatever solar panels they can find to the prototype if there is gonna be a press release.

I didn’t read much what they are doing/going for tho, so can’t say much about that.

No it’s not, railway infrastructure comes at a fraction of a cost of highways, the maintenance alone, all the tires, fuel, insurance, etc of cars, even the environment impact (in like the area they cover/destroy) is minute.

All that costs, somebody has to pay.

You mean the huge underground train station & several miles of tunnels around if, with all the work preformed underneath an undisturbed city?

Yes, that is still waaay cheaper than constructing an underground highway of that magnitude/that area (+ an underground station you conveniently included in the estimate) .

Or did you have something else in mind?

• It’s incentivized by monies
  (ie for private data collecting),
• it won’t be optional for much longer
  (error: explorer.exe needs Recall to work, please enable recall & try again after the data has been synced to MS servers), and
• you won’t be able to turn it off, that is when it will deliver you mostly (recalled) ads you might have missed from a few days ago when it showed them to you the first time.

“Please click on at least 3 targeted ads to continue to use calc.exe.”

Remember kids, Recall can’t come into your house if you don’t explicitly install Windows.

It’s like vampires with invitations, zombies with brain-salads, or werewolves if you show them your butt.

I just can’t get it patented!
(Something about "a train" already being a different sex thing)

I’ll make a kickstarter (or similar better provider) about it.

It will run on solar energy & get up to 30kmph, so spankers need only to hold out their hands or paddles & the little TrampTram™®© will provide them the spankees butt already presented at desired speed.

If I lived in the USA I would market this as a judicial and prison tool as well, public spankings is a tradition we gave up for no good reason at all.

I presume they meant to put in railway infrastructure.

Railways cost so much less than one highway, we could have a system basically from home to work.
(eg smol trams to a midway se station to high-speed trains)

Im not saying it isn’t, but fitting custom curved prob special solar panels on a test vehicle does not sound cost efficient, especially when you can test the solar panels separately perfectly fine.

Cars are complex to construct properly even without drivetrains, plenty to test there.