Ground effect height is a function of the size of the wing. I'm guessing these are going to have to be massive to be of any use, otherwise you'd be so close to the water that you couldn't "fly" in choppy water, and with a strong headwind you'll need even more margin because I'm guessing that waves moving with the wind are going to reduce the ground effect.
This is the point of insurance no? It's the underwriter's job to figure out what the risk probability of insuring a specific vehicle is, and then to represent that risk in future lawsuits while paying out the named insured in the meantime. If you think the traveling public should be party to insurance from vehicle collisions in general, then that's a legislative framework change for all road users (and you can bet your behind that will mean higher premiums for everyone, which I'm personally ok with. We've externalized far too many costs. Let's ban writedowns for exploratory oil drills too.)
As a driver, how would you track down the insurance company behind this trucking company? People have other things to do.
But there must be some compensation to be forced to become an unwilling participant in Musk's experiments! Otherwise what's the disincentive for these experimenters?
Well if people are stuck in traffic for hours due to a technical problem closing the highway then I think they have lots of time!
My main point, though, was that this idea of yours is great and that the legal structure would be compensation through insurance. The insurers figure out what is risky and what isn't (regardless of the company) and then pass that risk on to their rate payers. The rate payers know that trialing risky technology costs more and it is baked into the operational cost. Yes, people causing accidents should be liable for the time lost! It doesn't matter who causes the accident, Musk or just Joe Schmoe!
HOWEVER, what you'll find out is that one or two meltdowns on I880 is barely going to move the needle. Your average every day collision is going to just get a lot more expensive, with a small fender bender easily causing millions in payouts. The technology companies will still be a drop in the bucket and will happily pass on the risk to their eager customers, who are absolutely thrilled at the idea of cutting out a massive gasoline expendidure from their operation sheets. A 1% or 2% cut in freight cost is massive, and these new trucks are promising to be cost-competitive with RAIL. That is an absolute game changer, and shipping companies would be happy to pay more for insurance since a couple product development failures is absolutely nothing in the big picture of the world and where traffic slowdown comes from.
I love your idea, but if what you want is to punish progressive product companies, this isn't the way to do it.
Brake dust is at least mostly solved by EVs, because regenerative braking does the vast majority of the braking work, thus no dust. Tire dust is real, but is going to be there no matter what kind of powertrain a vehicle has. EVs have more wear, but it is marginal. A Tesla Model 3 weighs less than any new pickup truck for sale today.
> A Tesla Model 3 weighs less than any new pickup truck for sale today.
I'm an EV fan but this is apples to oranges comparison. EV vehicles are substantially heavier than their ICE counterparts. Their instant torque also wears tread quicker. That's just facts and there's nothing wrong with that. The world is not black and white.
> EV vehicles are substantially heavier than their ICE counterparts.
Tesla model 3 curb weight: "3,552 lbs to 4,072 lbs"
BMW 3 series curb weight: "3,536 lbs to 4,180 lbs"
> Their instant torque also wears tread quicker.
This works the opposite of how you imagine it does. Because electric motors have a flat torque curve, electric cars typically use a single-speed transmission, e.g. Model 3 has a fixed gear ratio of ~9:1.
Modern ICE cars typically have around 6 gears and the lowest one will have a higher total gear ratio than that, more like 15:1, causing wheel torque to be around two thirds higher in that gear proportional to engine torque than it would be at 9:1, and the engine's torque peak is commonly ~2400 RPM, which translates to as little as 10-15 MPH in first gear.
Electric cars like the Model 3 Performance accelerate quickly because they have >500 horsepower. So do ICE cars with equivalent power. Meanwhile something like a Nissan Leaf has similar power and correspondingly a similar 0-60 time to a Honda Civic.
To put it another way, there are very few modern cars where you can't hit the traction limit of the tires by putting your foot down in low gear, so the limit was never the powertrain to begin with.
Electric cars typically have a faster 60-100 time than similar ICE cars, because then the ICE car has to use a higher gear, but now we're back to the thing where this is hardly relevant unless you're accelerating the vehicle flat out to 100 MPH.
You're thinking that the entire economy will collapse down to just 3-4 vendors?
Human power and social structures just don't work that way. No AI company is making my sandwich, operating the bus, or serving soup in the school cafeteria. Real estate, human service, specialized expertise, and have-power influence isn't going away.
Who's making the robots? Who's owning the bus? Who's growing the ingredients in the soup? Who's deciding when the bus needs to stop due to a security or safety concern? Who's flirting with the customers and recognizing the power brokers? Not the AI companies.
Just because robots can do stuff doesn't mean the human power structures or service preferences evaporate.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The Shuttle requirements were absolutely modified by DoD's desire to ship military satellites and carry out operations. One of the many tug-o-wars that ended up with such a compromised design.
And since you brought up the X-37B, I have to admit, I absolutely love its dynamic flight capabilities whereby it literally banks off the upper atmosphere like a silver surfer to rapidly change orbits at perigee. Quite an interesting bit of tech that did evolve from the shuttle and is still doing work this very day.
Ah, but humanity is an expansive and consuming force, as is natural since most forces in the universe are entropy increasing ones. And since amino acids have been discovered on asteroids and tardigrades and fungus have been shown to survive space travel, we can't even say that Space provably lacks biological matter. Expanding (back?) into space is our manifest destiny, and good for the price of real estate too since all of earth becomes a luxury destination.
Population growth has been slowing for a long time, and is actually already below replacement level in most parts of the world outside Africa. It's unlikely that we will ever reach a global human population of even 11 billion. Some estimates put the peak at under 9 billion.
Unless humanity goes extinct in the near future this is certainly inaccurate.
People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends to be about 20 years, or the the window of fertility for a gen - from age ~20 to ~40) will decrease in size by half, in a compounding fashion. So over 1 century, that's a 97% decline (0.5^5) in generational size. Extinction comes shockingly fast.
But the opposite is also true. So what's going to happen is that low fertility populations are simply going to go extinct. That's going to be just lovely for humanity as it also corresponds with higher income, higher education, higher liberalism, higher secularism, and so on. And the current high fertility groups will come to quickly dominate the world. So it's kind of amusing in a way that Biblical texts will indeed come to pass - you'll have groups like Amish or Haredi, the meek - who happen to have high fertility rates, indeed inheriting the Earth.
This is part of the reason fertility is, by far, the biggest crisis facing humanity today. All love to the Amish and Haredi, but I don't want the Earth to turn into a planet of overalls and sidelocks. Even that would probably be just liminal, but we need some sort of high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect to emerge. It's probably going to require something to akin to a modern religion, though presumably without a deity. Or maybe the Mormons had it right all along.
Even space telescopes have been built on the skeletons made for spying, and rockets in almost any form were weapons before they were carrying peaceful missions. That we have Russian, American, and European components communicating together at the ISS is kind of a lovely, if temporary, closure of the circle.
Yes. "UI Speed" should be a configurable thing, so that if the UI changes as you're choosing an item, it acts instead on _what was there_ at a brief moment in the past, e.g. 20-50ms ago.
Well, by "computer" we're of course talking about colocated equipment with real capital costs. The data center operators are the equivalent of the people selling shovels to the gold rush prospectors.
This'll go identically to bitcoin mining, which is literally a computer that you plug in and it makes money. The big ASIC manufacturers were running their own ASICs in-house until they were no longer profitable. Then, they would sell them to customers who pre-ordered back when it was profitable.
The answer to this question seems obvious. There are no 42 year olds that retire by merely "saving and not over spending" when even one child is involved.
Yes there are. My brother in law sold his startup and is sufficiently retired while raising my nephews. Not a common case, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not zero.
Nope. Before the kids we had an incredible savings rate. Sometimes around 80-90%.
Now our spending is much higher but the growth of our investments over the last 10 years has been incredible and outpaced that by a large margin.
For a while I thought some startup stock I had was going to fund a lavish retirement but then AI largely destroyed the value of those shares so we're just planning on the boring index funds.
Ahh, I see what you mean. When I read the original comment it seemed like a regular save and spend less approach. If some saving in index funds was obvious, I am sorry for my assumption.
reply