There's areas in South East Asia like islands in the Philippines that are warm enough to not have winter, and so the popular vehicles are covered trikes. On more remote islands, electric is popular because of the aforementioned supply chain issue, and there's also plenty of sunlight to draw from. Doesn't mean that there are no gasoline bikes/trikes, just that electric vehicles outnumber gasoline powered ones.
Falling behind in what, is the question. The race to electrify is because we're cooking the planet with fossil fuel usage, and electric cars are the future in which we don't choke ourselves out. Electrify transportation and move the grid to renewal resources. The economy is one thing but we only have one Earth.
See even this is an assumption. We don't need electric cars - we need to walk and bike (i.e. better building patterns). Creating EVs still creates emissions, you still have to mine the resources to make them, and you still use ships to transport then from China which aren't electrified. Using a lot of energy to drive a few miles to get a loaf of bread isn't sustainable no matter whether it's an EV, Hybrid, or ICE vehicle.
But if you think this is a big deal that needs to be solved (and I'm no opponent to saving the planet and reducing emissions or any of those things) my recommendation would first be to get China to release its hold on rare earth mineral processing, and then have them voluntarily give away EV and battery technology to other countries building cars so we can work on this problem together. Unfortunately China lost the trust of the western countries through its action and so we're sort of stuck in this situation because of them. None of the EU, Japan, Korea, or America are going to let their auto industry be destroyed and lose all of those good jobs just for the sake of the environment. It's a non-starter. If you think that's the approach to take you're probably wasting your time.
Substack seems to prove there is an audience for some blogger out there that's willing to pay money. Whether there's enough market for that on the open Internet remains to be seen.
The earnings distribution on Substack is almost certainly the same as on e.g. onlyfans: a small number of high-profile writers earn big bucks, a slightly-larger number of creators actually earn decent money but not enough to live on, and the vast majority essentially make nothing at all.
How is that different than any other human endeavor? Not everybody that fancies themselves a writer is going to have the skill to draw an audience. Just because a few heavy hitters earn the most revenue doesn't mean the model is broken. That is just the way humans are for any given skill.
>How is that different than any other human endeavor?
I don't think I understand what you're getting at. Unionized factory workers all get paid the same amount, modulo seniority and other factors, and there is no steep income gradient among auto workers because of this. Is that not a "human endeavor"?
>Just because a few heavy hitters earn the most revenue doesn't mean the model is broken.
The model is broken because the vast majority of blogs are trash. The writers are simply not entitled to be paid by the pageload, because the content is not worth paying for. The large earners are the exception that proves the rule.
Boston to NYC to DC to Charlotte, or Seattle to Portland to San Francisco to LA aren't served by ebikes. People aren't going to stop traveling between places that distance apart. HSR solves for that kind of stretch in a way that airplanes don't.
Nobody ever said you'd ride an ebike for those distances, though. My point was that for someone to live car-free, local transit is much more important than high speed rail. And we don't always need to build _more_ transit, building more homes near the transit we already have would make a big difference! BART stations have a lot of pretty low density single family housing around them. Or even parking! Which could make sense at a terminus for park and ride but not for most stations. Sacramento's light rail similarly has a lot of stations where few people live or work.
For what it's worth, improving biking infra improves the catchment for existing rail too. Vacaville Amtrak is in an annoying location but would be easier to get to with proper separated bike infra, and make commuting to the bay easier.
Also, I've taken the train Seattle to Portland and Boston to NYC several times and both are pretty decent. HSR would help but not massively so I suspect. BOS-NYP is 4 hours.
For SF-LA, HSR would be nice but flying is also fine. Just having the coast starlight run _less horribly slow_ would help.
On the other hand, it always amused me that the best way to go from New York to Portland, Maine (I have family there) was to take the train to Boston south, get out and walk 20 minutes, and then get on the train to Portland. There's a lot of other examples of missing links and just plain deficient planning. Why is it you could only get light rail to LAX as of very recently?
Of course (I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here but if you make it illegal to build new nice places, people will outbid each other as much as possible to live in one of the few pre-existing nice places)
Of course, the US did one better and destroyed most of their _existing_ nice neighborhoods in addition to making new ones illegal to build.
3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATI, and Cirrus were also in the right place at the right time, but there's a reason we're here talking about Nvidia and not them. How much was Jensen vs things out of his control though, few people will ever know.
Yeah, and that reason is that Nvidia managed to achieve vendor lock-in with CUDA - which is not generally regarded as a good thing, but it was certainly good for Nvidia.
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