The argument against abandoning soft power is that it's going to cost a lot more in hard power to maintain the same status. We'll see how it plays out.
Totally anecdotal but I had a bad burn on my foot and I thought I could manage it with otc stuff. It kept getting worse so I went to have it checked out and was prescribed the silver cream.
From one day to the next it started showing positive effects and a week and a half later I was fine. I was kicking myself for waiting so long.
The Wish more likely suffers from being a car where they shoehorned in a screen to seem more advanced for the time, while keeping the physical controls.
Nowadays screens are being used as a cost cutting measure. It stands to reason that if an automaker reintroduces more costly physical controls it’s going to be to address the issue of cumbersome controls. Hopefully, anyway.
> You can self promote, but you can’t pay third parties to do it for you and you can’t sell it as a service
An acid test I've found surprisingly powerful is that of the founders promoting the Constitution through pamphleteering. They wrote the pamphlets themselves. The historical record is silent on whether they paid for their printing or distribution. (The papers could publish due to subscribers and paid advertising.)
If your rule would let them pamphleteer, it should be fine. If it would not, it probably needs work. I have not yet seen a definition of advertising that satisfactorily isolates this.
Someone who prints something for a third party isn’t selling ad space.
Everyone could self promote, they just couldn’t contract someone to do it for them. Employees could promote for their employer, but it couldn’t be subcontracted out. And you can’t pay a company to put up your ad on their billboard or their website, etc.
Ignoring how this might be enforced, would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?
> would it be enough to let people express themselves while cutting out the impact of negative externalities of advertising?
I think it's doable. But I haven't seen the scalpel yet.
In the meantime, we have clean lines we can run up towards. Banning ads (basically, commercial speech) in public space. Banning commercial bulk mail. And banning targeted commercial advertising (beyond the content it sits).
I wonder if they just prioritize big companies who they either have agreements with or are scared could actually cause them serious legal trouble, and deny everyone else as much as possible because they’ve calculated the risk/reward/cost of getting it wrong.
For what it's worth, the most entertaining circuit racing in the world happens at grassroots level featuring slow, cheap cars that permit a lot of drafting.
The faster the cars get, in the main, the less overtaking occurs.
Watching a winner of 80+ NASCAR races ride along for a hot lap of the Australian Bathurst 1000 course is fairly entertaining ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLkLtBkUVuo
Yes, this year's Bathurst finale was quite the spectacle if you haven't seen it!
But while Supercars can be entertaining, they are in some ways a faster version of the categories I'm describing - they don't have much downforce and not that much mechanical grip either, so they're pretty slow in corners even if they are respectably fast in a straight line.
Spectacle, for some, isn't about the speed alone, it's also about risk and skill.
The bare minimum of downforce and grip in tight corners on a mountain pushes the skill requirement to, uhhh, over 9000.
I used to spend hours every day at 252 km/hr (156 miles/hr) 80m above the ground. That got dull fast as it was in dead straight headings for 20km or so at a time.
( Did have to keep an eye out for birds taking off over lakes, power lines, etc. though )
I think that an ideal race league would use WRC-inspired homologation rules and little else (except for some safety features)
Any chassis size. Whatever aero you want. Any engine size/configuration. The only constraint is that it needs to be something you can put into production.
we’d get to see a Cambrian explosion of weird race car variants that would make race day strategizing wild. and we’d really get to showcase cool creative engineering. And we’d eventually see the benefits of that engineering trickle down into normal production cars we all drive
It's been done. Look up the Can-Am series. At best, it would last a couple of years until the cars got way too fast for the tracks, and the manufacturers were no longer prepared to invest in it because there was no commercial return in it for them.
The idea that there is any significant relationship between what makes a good production car, even a sports car, and a racing car was always dubious and today is frankly nonsensical.
The way to make a car fast round a race track basically comes down to the amount of downforce it can produce, and the power of the engine. Downforce is almost completely irrelevant to road driving, as taking corners fast enough to generate cornering forces of over 1G is frankly suicidal on the road.
As for engines, aside from the fact that the internal combustion engine is doomed in road transport (despite what the current administration thinks), producing an engine with performance that exceeds what even good drivers are capable of handling without electronics doing the job for them was solved at least 20 years ago, and continues to be a solved problem despite tightening of emissions standards.
In any case, while lighter, smaller, lower cars remain the preferred option for motorsport applications, all anyhbody wants to actually buy, particularly in the United States, is gargantuan SUVs and pickup trucks, which makes any application of motorsport technology for the road moot.
It’s easy for a manufacturer to make a couple hand crafted cars with insane specs. But by requiring homologous, it adds a unique kind of restriction where it’s a car that they have to be able and willing to make at scale. That requires buy-in from industrial engineers as well as business/marketing folks
Edited to add: just learned that homologation doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it did. So my parent thread should have been about “sec-style homologation” specifically and not just “homologation” generally. The idea is that you need to have a car built in production in order to be homologated
There is no power-network in existence, not in the medium-to-long term, that would allow tens of millions of cars (mauve hundreds of millions if we talk at the continent-wide level) to get all electric, the physics isn’t there and it won’t be. You’re correct though, it could be that the next US administration will try to copy the bureaucrats here in Europe and try to go the let’s-ban-the-petrol-engine route, which would, in practice, mean that only the well-to-do consumers (like most of the users on this forum) will be able to still have personal cars.
> Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.
Quote on that? A developed country like the US has problems even now, see California (with the yearly fires there) or Texas. And how do you solve the "last-mile" connections without regularly starting fires everywhere? (on account of all those higher-voltage thingies being closer to residential units).
The 15-25% of demand number is pretty similar to the number I've seen in multiple places. Furthermore, cars have an economic lifespan of approximately 20 years, so that increase in demand will take place over a couple of decades.
Furthermore, if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity. This typically occurs between midnight and about 5-6am, and in areas with a lot of solar, during the middle of the day. This is already widely implemented, with utilities in many jurisdictions offering things like EV charging time-of-use tariffs, and customers with rooftop solar systems (which are much cheaper in, say, Australia, than they are in the USA) installing smart chargers which are configured to run when they have a surplus of electricity from their home solar systems. This will ensure that EVs are making use of the existing grid, rather than increasing peak demand and requiring new grid infrastructure.
Furthermore, "vehicle to grid" systems can allow EVs to feed electricity back into the grid at peak times (with their owners getting paid for this service).
Given all of the above, while EVs will contribute to an overall increase in demand for electricity, they will do so in such a way as to minimise the need for extra infrastructure, and they will do so slowly enough as to allow such infrastructure to be built.
> if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity.
Like I said, this EV mania is targeting the well-off middle-classes, those that “are always smart about it”. The populist backlash against all this is well-warranted,
There’s no power network that holds capacity for the chance of future demand. They add capacity as the demand increases, because the money comes in to pay for it.
These AI datacenters right now are a prime example. They needed more power, and suddenly they’re building it for them.
I guarantee none of those "100% EV" people have experienced winter in Montana, or summer for that matter. Even the Dakotas are not EV friendly. It's more of a city thing. Go nuts in the city--I'm all for EVs in certain applications.
I favor little regulation and tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions, 100 kg of this kind of gasoline per race, do whatever you want.
Any chassis size is probably not a good idea because cars collide with each other and they must do it safely. So maybe rules should define a box that cars must fit into, with the parts that get in touch with other cars at given places and with given shapes. Example: we don't want spear like nose cones at the same height of the heads of drivers of other cars. No halo can protect against that.
The problem with little regulation is that manufactures will be frightened to enter because it's easy to have a championship in which the one with the bright idea wins all the races and the other ones are scattered 2, 5, 6, 7 seconds behind.
> The reason these series always get compared is because Indy’s tight rules make it less compelling while F1’s more open rules make it less competitive.
I'm new to racing, but can you elaborate on this? How are F1's rules "open"? They seem just about as strict if not more so than IndyCar to me? At least I don't think IndyCar has "ahead at the apex" rules?
> In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Screw "Grill the Grid" or whatever nonsense they're doing on YouTube now; let's see the F1 grid do a rally.
There are technical regulations and sporting regulations. I'm not very familiar with IndyCar anymore but my feeling is that F1 got stricter on technical regulation but IndyCar is even stricter: only one chassis and more standard parts. However F1 sporting regulations seems to be tighter. The classic clash between Villeneuve and Arnoux in 1979 would be unthinkable now. Not only they would be black flagged and stopped for a GP but no driver would even think about doing those kind of overtaking attempts.
I don’t think it has much to do with being named. It’s the assumption that most people have that what they’re reading is being said by someone whose opinion they would actually value if they knew them.
Disclosing names wouldn’t help. People actually knowing the person would help.
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