ristvan:
My poor children. Another lecture they get is, You drive as I suggest 99% of the time for that 1% of the time it’s going to matter. For instance snow sticking to the road. I hammer on the fact the truck can roll if you ask it to do what it cannot do. When I was young, snow was the call to find a large parking lot.
Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Ragnaar
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Comment on Science, uncertainty and advocacy by willard (@nevaudit)
> it would be unpublishable in a peer-reviewed journal like Philosophical Magazine […]
It might be in something like Synthese, if you could write something like a philosophical conclusion:
http://link.springer.com/journal/11229
However, I don’t think lichurchur is worth the effort anymore.
I might be biased.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by willard (@nevaudit)
It’s not the teeth that kill:
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
RiHoo8, good questions. I believe that driverless cars will be focused for some time on urban markets, due to the density of customers as well as the challenges they face in rural areas. Like Wille Sutton supposedly said when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.” Hopefully the software will be better at facing the issues you raise after years of operating in cities. I’d plan on hanging on to my 4×4 Jeep for a while if I were you.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by mosomoso
Yep, thin out the traffic for the sake of the cars. Pondering whether you need mass transit or individual transport is a bit like asking if you need a back wheel as well as a front wheel on your bicycle. Will you eat your steak with a knife or a fork?
Living with the Paris metro for a bit when I was young taught me that you don’t need expeditionary grit just to cross town, like you did in Sydney. (Btw, Some time after I left Paris – when a shower in a hotel could cost more than a room – they got themselves a better power system in France. Something to do with nukes.)
As to the cost of better transport overall, we’ve seen so much money spent on gigantic white elephants in this last decade we can surely open our minds to something that has green appeal (shudder) but actually works. If a raging warmist like Sergey Brin can find a niche for his driverless vehicles in all that, good luck to him. But raging warmists aren’t big on finding sensible niches. In HuffPo world they’re sensible, but I’m talking about the worldy world here.
I love the (ageing) Paris metro and I love long-wheel base turbo-diesel Toyota Landcruisers. Driverless cars can show their form (somewhere in California?) and I’ll be happy to show them some love. But let’s watch out for white elephants, okay? They’re everywhere these days, coming at us on steroidal Segways.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ordvic
So sometime in the near fututre we will have no more drivers. Therefore no more drivers license or DMV. A noble cause.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
Tonyb, having operated cloud centers with extremely sensitive data for some years, Google is better than most any automaker at maintaining secure computing environments. The current Google car software does checksums and other tests on the software a reportedly 1,000 times a second to insure integrity. The system control software is also fairly well isolated, with substantial firewalls. But nothing is impossible. I suspect it would have to be an inside job to hack it.
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Comment on Week in review – Energy edition by Roger Sowell
Perhaps I’m stupid… stupid enough to look at the evidence before us.
After more than 50 years of best efforts, nuclear power world-wide is only 11 percent of total electricity production. It is in 4th place behind coal, natural gas, and hydroelectric power. The only technologies that are smaller are oil, wind, solar, and geothermal, plus the experimental ones like wave, tidal, and bio-gas.
After more than 50 years of best efforts, small nuclear plants are not economic, as evidenced by no small island having nuclear power. Nothing of 1 million population or smaller. Yes, Taiwan, Japan, and UK are islands but have much greater populations.
For all their supposedly great benefits and low costs, nuclear plants are shutting down right and left because they simply lose too much money. Plant owners in the US are crying to their congressmen to “DO SOMETHING!!!” so they can stay running – producing power nobody can afford and nobody wants.
For all their vaunted safety, as the commenters on this blog harp on and on about, not one of you can point to a single nuclear plant that is self-insured; or has commercial insurance for all of its liability. Prove me wrong, name all of the nuclear plants that are completely un-subsidized.
Even the newest nuclear plants, and not in the US so one cannot blame the NRC, have horrendous cost overruns and schedule delays. Finland and France cannot seem to build the new EPR for what they said and as fast as they said.
Now, the UK finally became honest and published the huge subsidy for the Hinkley Point facility that all its electricity will require if and when it is built. Quoting my article on SLB:
“The Hinkley Point C plant will have two reactors, each 1,600 MWe, of the EPR reactor design that is currently such a fiasco in Finland at Olkiluoto. To their credit, the BBC article admits the Hinkley Point C will require 10 years to first operation. However, the plant life is also stated as 60 years, which is wildly optimistic.
The subsidy for Hinkley Point C apparently takes the form of a high sales price for power at the transaction bar – the plant boundary. The plant owner is guaranteed the equivalent of US 15 cents per kWh, approximately double the present rate for wholesale power in the UK.
What is interesting is the quoted price to build the plant, at £24.5 billion (the equivalent of US$ 39.2 billion). This equates to MORE than $10,000 per kW, at $12,250. Again, this is precisely what SLB has maintained all along – a new nuclear power plant costs far more than the $4,000 some advocates maintain. Instead, it will cost at least $10,000 per kW, and more likely $12,000 per kW. Here we see at least a small beginning of honesty from the nuclear establishment.
However, given the long, dismal history of nuclear plant schedule delays and cost overruns, it is to be expected that the Hinkley Point C twin reactor plant will take far longer than 10 years to startup, and will cost far more than US$ 39 billion. It will likely require 15 years or longer, and $48 billion or even more.”
Russian plants in other countries are only built with below-cost financing.
France, that darling of the nuclear proponents, had to subsidize its electricity and was caught for doing so. Strange, for a country that has nuclear supplying 85 percent of its power grid, that the power is just not that cheap and required massive, decades-long subsidies.
The safety argument is equally invalid, but the ostriches on this blog bury their heads in the sand and refuse to see reality. Yes, I know there are a few (very few) who are objective and can see the futility of nuclear power, but the nasty nay-sayers are far more abundant.
Prove me wrong. To Mr. Grace, yes, there have been 5 serious meltdowns, not 3 as the nuclear proponents would have us all believe.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
I actually had this option in an early draft, but it got wordy and complicated for most readers, so my editor and I decided to cut it. But it certainly is technically feasible.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Editor of the Fabius Maximus website
Ruttbridges,
The distinctive part of a driverless car are the sensors, actuators, and computers. They are not cheap (something seldom mentioned by journalist fans). Their ability to run as a system for years in the demanding environment of a car – with minimal maintenance — remains to be seen. Note that they need to degrade or fail gracefully.
Adding them onto the currently poor economics of hybrid and electric cars and you get a really expensive vehicle.
Odd that so many on this thread wave away this dimension of the problem. Five years is ambitious time to expect such declines in cost. Are there precedents for such a large fast price drop in a large mechanical device? We are not talking about microwave ovens.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by Steven Mosher
Rud.
I’m referring to cars. Not food. I never speak ill of farmers with my mouth and belly full.
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Comment on Driverless cars: the transportation revolution is coming by ruttbridges
Mark, Santa Fe is a wonderful town. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there, and in the nearby pueblos. I collect Native American pottery.
Thanks for buying the book. I focused on the bigger city markets first, which is where higher population densities create bigger markets. I suspect that is what the early mobility providers will do as well. If these vehicles work well there they will likely spread to smaller communities. However, rural America has some more unique challenges that I didn’t try to address in Version 1.0.
However, I do believe that there are very good opportunities in suburban markets. You might enjoy the three chapters on mass transit, one of which deals with some of these issues. One also takes a hard look at Austin, which has a fairly extensive and heavily subsidized mass transit system. It is mostly based around buses, which are especially susceptible to inexpensive driverless car mobility systems. I do love that town, more for it’s music, nearby rafting, scenic beauty, history, and people than for its growing transportation challenges.
Try Uber next trip to Houston… I think you’ll like it.
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Comment on Impact of AMO/PDO on U.S. regional surface temperatures by Jim D
Anyone representing the CO2 effect with a linear trend has failed at step one. If you want to represent CO2 forcing, use an increasing trend that has doubled since 1950.
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Comment on Impact of AMO/PDO on U.S. regional surface temperatures by stevenreincarnated
” When the land leads, it is the forcing that is changing, not an internal ocean variation.”
citation?
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Comment on Impact of AMO/PDO on U.S. regional surface temperatures by JCH
<a Href="http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1905/detrend:0.7/mean:120/normalise/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:120/normalise/offset:%20-0.3/plot/esrl-amo/from:1905/mean:120/normalise" rel="nofollow">the PDO ran the show until around 1983, and then ACO2 laid on a snot knocker</a>
The AMO just hangs out; tags along for a ride; drifts around doing its own thing.
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Comment on Week in review – Energy edition by jim2
Possibly. But, OTOH, “green” energy projects frequently turn out to be a pie-in-the-sky scheme to catch some public green (tax money).
I can’t prove it, but my gut says these guys are for real. Guess we’ll see.
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Comment on Impact of AMO/PDO on U.S. regional surface temperatures by Jim D
Physics
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Comment on Impact of AMO/PDO on U.S. regional surface temperatures by Jim D
Here is CRUTEM4 leading AMO (see last crest and trough)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/mean:120/offset:-0.7/mean:240/plot/crutem4vgl/mean:120/detrend:0.8/mean:240
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Comment on Week in review – Energy edition by AK
<blockquote>I can’t prove it, but my gut says these guys are for real. Guess we’ll see.</blockquote>So was mine. I just said I'm <b>beginning</b> to wonder. Just a little.
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Comment on Impact of AMO/PDO on U.S. regional surface temperatures by JCH
Nice graph of the biggest tease in climate history.
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