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Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#651

Post by captainmuon »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #163

The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles. By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustaina…

It's feels a bit weird for me as a left-winger to make this argument, but won't all that be solved by the market?

If there are not enough chargers, won't that create an incentive to build more? And yeah, you probably can't build them fast enough, or the grid capacity will not be sufficient, but won't people then just move to places where they can? Or switch to alternative modes of transportation?

I think the fallacy is that people just want to replace ICE cars with EVs as they are, and then realize you need a lot of space and grid capacity to charge them, etc. But because of the scaling problems you mention, there will be a very large pressure to build better public transport. If people can't charge their EV, or can't afford a car, or don't have good transportation, they will move somewhere else. This is structural change, and yeah it is going to be inconvenient and expensive (and we could have done it better with more foresight), but ultimatively we will figure it out.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#652

Post by seti0Cha »

nokya wrote: post #129
unpopularopp wrote: post #20

Climate migration. What happens Europe now/since 2015 is nothing that will come in the next couple of years. And the individual countries and so as the EU is pretty much unprepared. I'd even say that will be one of the cause of downfall of the union.

I am under the impression that instead of preparing for climate immigration, EU citizens are actually slowly but surely mutually brainwashing themselves into increasing hate towards immigrants as a whole. From what I read and understood about climate change, a tsunami of immigrants from southern hemisphere countries towards northern hemisphere countries is to be expected. I would rather have my elected ones work on a…

Outside observer, but my understanding is that a big concern is that people from more illiberal cultures will make the nation more illiberal. There is also concern that making low skilled labor more plentiful will be harmful to the prospects of existing low skilled labor. A third concern would be that if the immigrants express an ethnic preference for their own community, this will cause increasing difficulty for existing residents. If you want to convince people that immigration will be in their best interest, I'd start by finding ways to ameliorate those concerns.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#654

Post by mmaurizi »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #274
kurthr wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason you assume people won't simply charge at night with relatively standard 240V (or even 120V) chargers? Most cars don't average more than 60 miles a day, which is less than 20kWh. In much of the US you could install 10-15 solar panels to do that even in the winter. Now solar panels are mostly made in China (as are almost all consumer electronics), but that seems like a far more general problem to solv…

Charging in cities and apartment compexes is still an unsolved problem, and most people live in cities. For example, just to provide enough chargers for Philadelphia's 1.5M residents (63% of them drive to work), one of every ~6 car lengths on every residential sidewalk would need concrete dug up and a charger installed. The city will never pay for that, and it would be a logistical and political nightmare. Even if in…

I've been thinking about this for a bit (I happen to live in Philly) & I think the easier answer for cities is instead of focusing on charging "at home" parked on the street, to instead go all-in on destination charging (charging at work, at the grocery store, etc).

Adding charging to a garage or parking lot is easier than on the street, and you don't have to worry about not being able to access "your" spot.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#655

Post by trgn »

mdp2021 wrote: post #467
trgn wrote: post #387

I'll propose a more utopian future. The end of modernism and a return to humanism. A realization in the West that fetishizing technology has turned people into widgets. A genuine bottom-up counter movement that already exists today, but will be the mainstream. Man will yet again be measure of all things, rather than adapt to the measure. In practice; things like the triumph of the walkable city; more home schooling;…

> a more utopian future Based on what, on the realistic intervention of which actors? And are you sure all the ideals in your set can be considered objective, naturally sharable, as opposed to ideological and partial?

> And are you sure all the ideals in your set can be considered objective, naturally sharable, as opposed to ideological and partial?

Agreed, they are not objective. If you wish, you can change my first phrase to "a more dystopian future", if you think it's worse.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#656

Post by mywittyname »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #163

The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles. By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustaina…

> and so many things we don't even have a plan for,

Why do you have the impression "nobody" is planning for these things? These topics are talked about endlessly in every medium by laypeople. Billions of dollars in public and private sector investment is being funneled into everyone of these topics.

The complaint about grid capacity baffles me. The USA used to regularly growth capacity by well over 30% a decade. It only stopped expanding because energy efficiency standards were so damn successful that net usage declined in spite of population growth, and the majority new capacity went to displacing coal production.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#657

Post by tomtheelder »

moralestapia wrote: post #569
elicash wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar at all with this space. Is vertical farming a possible solution here?

It would be very expensive. One person needs about 5 hectares of land to be self-sufficient (i.e. to cover all its food needs, including protein). If you can afford your own 432 Park Avenue (Cost: ~$1BUSD, Floor area: ~4ha) for that, then the answer is yes. But also, with that same $1BUSD you could buy around 100,000 hectares of land in rural US, close to the size of Qatar; you can see how relatively inefficient vert…

Disclaimer: I am also very skeptical of the whole concept of vertical farming, but...

That 5 hectares of land per person metric is totally inapplicable here. Sort of the entire point of vertical farming is to be (in theory) vastly more efficient per unit of land. If you believe the claims it's somewhere between a 10 and 50 times reduction in land usage for same output.

5 hectares is also on the very high end for estimates of that metric. It also drops hugely if you're not relying on animal products.

I don't think vertical farming in apartments is the future, but I think your calculations here are also way, way off.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#658

Post by seti0Cha »

tomuli38 wrote: post #595
motohagiography wrote: post #287

Reasoning it through, what don't people politely talk about? Sex, money, politics, and religion. Sex: the impact of the normalization of casual sex work on sustainable families, and how specific tech and financial services for managing single motherhood will be huge. Money: financial alternatives to emerging social credit based systems, grey markets, working class capital/savings flight, cyberpunk dystopia. Politics:…

How exactly are secularlists disenfranchising religions? There is a large swathe believing the separation of church and state is religious oppression, and they act like the country is not for those of all faiths.

When a court rules that a particular area is outside of elected officials' power to legislate, in a sense they are disenfranchising those who would vote for officials to make such laws. Leaving aside whether it is right or wrong, the underlying issue is that someone's set of values has been elevated outside of the democratic process. This has always been happening since the beginning, but in recent years we've experienced a significant lack of agreement over those values such that one side feels disenfranchised.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#659

Post by mywittyname »

riskable wrote: post #632
SamuelAdams wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also note that “half of all new cars sold” does not mean half of all vehicles on the road. People will keep using their ICE cars for 10-20 years after their manufacture date. I’m curious to see the actual projections of cars on the road that are electric vs ICE. My guess is, by 2040, it might be 25% (in the USA).

Another way to look at it: A ton of gas stations aren't very profitable. Most don't even make any real money on the gas! So what happens when 1/4 of all their customers disappear? Many will close and when that happens there will be less competition, driving up gas prices which will result in more people buying electric cars. It's a cycle that--once it kicks off--is going to move very quickly. Faster than people, citi…

The revolution won't be televised.

This is going to hit harder and than people realize. There are so many really great EV options from nearly every manufacture. And their sales figures are growing at a solid clip. According to Cox, EVs are 12% of new car sales in 22, and it's the only segment that grew YoY (the overall market fell 20% YoY).

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#660

Post by ROTMetro »

cauthon wrote: post #562
ChadNauseam wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Height is a univariate trait that does not change after the age of ~20. If you show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”. I don't know why that would be the standard, since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental…

> since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental factors might make that fundamentally impossible Yes, that is my point. Both intelligence and attractiveness have a significant amount of variation attributable to environmental or other external factors, and have the additional complication that they cannot be measured by a single objective unit (like height can). > do you think that in 2…

Show the military why this is needed and you might get some funding action, that is after all how we got a school lunch program.

https://www.ilsna.net/resources/schoolnutrition/historyschoo....

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