Any numbers to back up your hand-waving about the CO2 from the volcano? I know cars alone aren't the biggest source of greenhouse gasses but a while back I thought I'd read they were responsible for over 20%.

If for the sake of argument you grant that global warming is a serious long term problem and the switch to electric cars would make a dent in that problem, I'm making the point that the switch to electric cars is going to happen anyway. The advantages are too significant for it to not happen. So this wouldn't have to be some horrible inefficient free market destroying thing. Yes, it would be government interference in the free market but this is the sort of situation that even libertarians, the sane and reasonable libertarians, should agree that interference is preferable. We can wait 30-100 years and the electric car revolution will happen. Gradually, very gradually. And at the end of it, we'd all benefit from significantly lower transportation costs because once you get reasonable cost/performance out of your batteries, electric really does kick the crap out of ICE.

Or (in a perfect world) we could turn it into a political project and patriotic+green social movement and I think in less than a decade new electric cars could be outselling new gas cars. (Of course It would take another decade or two for the majority of used gasoline cars to disappear.) The data I've seen (not looked at in great detail) implies those missing decades would make a difference. And my point is it wouldn't just be ecological; not only that, but we'd benefit from the reduction in transportation costs much sooner.

To clarify, I am not really in favor of taxing gasoline car or subsidizing electric cars at the consumer level; I think this is horribly inefficient and ends up being just a symbolic gesture. I'm in favor of tech and supply improvements (e.g. perhaps getting a megascale lithium refinery built, funding research into nanowire batteries, getting enough people and companies to invest in Tesla so they could rapidly expand production.) I think the electric car will ultimately sell itself, but sitting back and letting the unguided free market work is magic is going to take quite a few decades.

I actually rather doubt that the volcano would add up that much--a few hundred million cars is quite a lot of CO2, is it not? Let's say the average exhaust pipe is 2 inches in diameter and there are 100 million cars being driven every day. According to the back of my napkin, that's the equivalent of a single exhaust pipe ~950 feet in diameter. So imagine an exhaust pipe three football fields wide pumping out exhaust gasses at the same rate that a typical car does. Imagine it does that for a year. Seems to me that be more than a single volcano eruption, but I don't know. I need to find a reliable, unbiased place that gives best estimates for not just projected temp changes but the projected effects of removing all cars, removing all coal plants, etc. so these debates can go smoother.

I should have been more clear that I don't let Musk/Tesla leadership off the hook by ANY means, but it was a long enough post as it was. (And Musk criticism is usually heavily modded down around here.)

The economy of batteries is the bottleneck and also the big question mark... I don't know what the bottom line is there. Prices have fallen significantly more than I would've expected, so future Li Ion battery prices might depend entirely on lithium mining and refining. I think I heard most of the word's lithium comes from a desert in Chile or something? Too lazy to look it up. But it MIGHT be that we don't *need* a battery revolution; what we have now might be fine, we just need for the economies of scale to kick in.... we may just need someone to build a huge enough mining/refining operation. The other (non-mutually exclusive) option is tech like nanowire that's supposed to be ZOMG amazing but has been vaporware for decades.

But either way, it's something that could benefit from a huge hype campaign. And I blame Musk, Tesla leadership, the politicization of Tesla (and the accompanying lack of rah rah rah patriotic politicization), etc.

The issue of batteries, and any other electric car hiccups, are things that could likely be solved with major business partnerships, major investment based on perceived mass demand, governmental involvement (grants to refine nanowire tech, whatever). I think best case scenario, we could have made waves and get people buying more new electric than gas cars in a matter of perhaps 10 years. (But the way things are going now, I can't imagine electric outselling gasoline within the next 30 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if it takes more than 50.) Re: global warming, those decades could make a difference! And as I said in my original post, there are a bunch of other economic benefits that electric cars should bring, particularly in a country like America with its suburban sprawl.

Tesla isn't what it could be; that's really all I was saying. The ingredients are all there for it, but no one is pulling really hard for it to be revolutionary or patriotic or inspiring and that's a HUGE shame. Musk pisses me off to no end because he pisses away his free media spotlight time on his least-important ideas (Hyperloop, underground roads, and yes SpaceX to be pretty non-revolutionary in the big picture.)

Sony calls the technology "Crystal LED", which is its brand name for micro-LED display tech. Samsung is also experimenting with the format.

They're basically making a display out of tiny but normal LEDs. As they said -- very bright, and infinite contrast. But mostly only useful for commercial displays due to the limited density.

Do you really believe that one of the largest tech companies in the world with a long track record of illegality, fraud, corruption and industrial espionage does not try to manage its online reputation?

Blame so-called 'social media' for kids not being socialized properly, it just gives them an excuse to NOT be actually-social with their peers, so they don't develop proper social skills -- and they don't get censured for behaving badly.

So far as machine conveniences doing too many things for us, I agree. Remember Wall-E? That's where we're heading, having people be dumb, dumb, dumb, because they don't have to really learn to do anything themselves, there's always some machine or software to do it for them. Get a few generations of that, and you have a populace who can't even take care of themselves in basic ways without all the high-tech help. Not good.

"Sharing is normal!". "Privacy is for people who have things to hide!". That's what so-called 'social media' has been indoctrinating people to be like. Dangerously bad.

Bitcoin mining has pushed the development of hardware in china to smaller and smaller feature sizes, even more than GPUs and CPUs. They are shooting themselves in the feet and allowing the next generation of hardware to be run (and eventually designed) elsewhere. This is China giving up the lead in high tech for a few years - we better take this chance and run with it, we probably won't get another chance like this.

I am SOOOOO glad I grew up in the days before cell phones and cameras everywhere.

I would not have had as much fun or experienced so much as a kid growing up if I"d been surveyed constantly like they are today.

Hell, if I were raised like they are today, I guess I"d have been taken away from my parents by protective services (I did play and run all over neighborhoods un-supervised for most any given day).....and likely my antics would have landed me likely on some terrorist watch list.

That and when I sit around with old friends, we trade stories of mischief we got into....thankfully no photo documentation of it to haunt our adult lives, but we do all remember and laugh about it over drinks from time to time.

I'll definitely trade my independence and ability to run all over the place unsupervised, and to spend genuine time in meatspace with friends I am still close with over these past decades, over the higher tech today....where you see kids on a date out heads bent over phones rather than interacting with each other, getting to know each other, etc.

Sure, growing up as I did...I failed, I fucked up...I got caught occasionally, but I lived and learned through it.

ON the other hand, I did have a film camera back in the day, and when it was out....I did make sure to keep all the negatives, if by chance anyone I grew up with becomes a senator or runs for president...so that I can a good job/compensation for keeping said negatives private.

;)

How in the hell have you worked in tech for 40 years and NOT know what a SysAdmin is?