Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues.
We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.
> I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business
I did tech consulting early in my career, so got to see a large number of companies as I was working for them. Some good, some bad.
There were a few reliable characteristics about the good ones though:
- Distilled corporate culture into learnable points, ensured everyone learned those, and then reliably used and referenced them in the context of everyday business decisions
- Centralized strategy, decentralized tactics. Execs cane up with strategic targets, then implementers were free to design their own solutions to deliver those
- Had an expectation of employee-initiated internal mobility (team switching) and used it as a management evaluation signal
- Had a strong internal process for recognizing when they promoted / hired a bad manager (i.e. they made sure a bad manager with a good team didn't look good)
I'm not sure about the last two, but Amazon nails the first two in spades. Bezos made it abundantly clear the company was about efficiency and scale... and fuck anything else (employees included).
Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.
Is that supposed to be an example of a good decision? Outside the US hybrids are quickly becoming irrelevant. The decision is looking like it will cost Toyota the crown
Worldwide outside the US BEVs are about 16% of new car sales (BEVs + PHEVs are about 25%). Hybrids are still going to be relevant worldwide for quite a while.
The peak of ICE car sales (which includes hybrids) was in 2017 and it’s been downhill since then, and it’s going to plummet from here as EV share keeps growing rapidly. Bev share is growing significantly faster than hybrid. I personally wouldn’t be betting my company on a rapidly shrinking market
Writing code was never the job. It was a small part of the job that can now be delegated to AI.
Eliciting the right requirements and user needs. Creating a sound architecture and design. Validating final product meets the requirements. Ensuring there is good test coverage. You know `Engineering`. Mechanical and Electrical engineers didn't go away because of CAD.
Literally all those skills are the result of decades of friction, challenge, and deep domain knowledge...all of which are circumvented when LLMs are utilized early in the process.
CAD is also useless to Mechanical and Electrical engineers who didn't learn fundamental the skills that it streamlines.
> Eliciting the right requirements and user needs. Creating a sound architecture and design. Validating final product meets the requirements. Ensuring there is good test coverage.
Besides your first point, the rest can be delegated to AI as well. And you don't need to be a "software engineer" to spec out requirements and user needs.
This is happening at my company: all of these software phases are being delegated to AI. And the people without any understanding of software have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Features no one needs are being made in minutes. It hasn't been long enough to really tell how that's turning out. Everything seems to be in endless development.
While that's true, the open / local models are getting good enough. Given time and the technology trend people may prefer a private local model for most use cases. Nobody is arguing that a Ferrari isn't a faster car, but the Honda is the more practical choice.
Seiko had a whole line microprocessors. I remember working with the S1C33 with a broken C compiler. We ended up using C macros and assembly. Never want to do that again.
No it can't. To combust it needs ~ 500F. If you left it out uncovered in the open and allowed the it to vaporize with a spark nearby, it might explode, but thats not spontaneous combustion. Gasoline sitting in a sealed container wont spontaneously combust.
Oh, it was most definitely gasoline. As long as there is no vapour hanging above the container, it works just fine... as the neighbour post says, the first 50 times. Then one day the old timer blows up himself and the shop
Gasoline isn't that explosive. You can shoot up a gas tank and it will just burn. What you see on TV is movie magic. Gasoline vapor can explode, but you need the right air to fuel ratio and a spark.
Requires a good mix though. The parent is still correct.
Mythbusters spent a long time trying to get cars to blow up in a dramatic hollywood fashion in various episodes and determined that under most conditions it wouldn't happen.
They did get it to happen, they just had to try really hard.
And was still not really possible without some really unlikely conditions. Not that car fires aren't dangerous, regardless of whether the vehicle is ICE or otherwise, but the fireball thing doesn't really happen.
uphills + cold/hot climates, the ranges won't be able to compete with ICE. its basic physics. cold uphill still reduces charging speed, available power, and range, while sustained heat accelerates degradation. Thermal-management systems mitigate those weaknesses by consuming energy and adding cost, weight, and complexity.
meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env. Comparing an engine with a motor while ignoring the battery and electricity supply chain is silly
I still do not trust that sitting on a pile of lithium batteries is safe. NMC does not mean non flammable or consequence free. LFP cells can still enter thermal runaway, release toxic gases, reignite, and require difficult firefighting procedures. They also generally trade energy density and cold-weather performance for that improved safety. Also the speed charging ? That dramatically reduces the stability and lifespan of the batteries. Ton of used EVs not being sold because the battery replacement is somewhere between 40~60% of the car's value.
we had ICE for over a century now, its just like a software that gets continuous updates ICE systems are highly optimized, repairable, energy-dense, fast to refuel, and supported by enormous infrastructure. EVs are improving faster partly because they still have major weaknesses to solve. A steeper improvement curve does not prove that the present technology is superior for every use case neither is using the latest javascript framework.
Could you ELI5 these basic physics? I've heard many people make claims like this but there's never any physics that actually follows. I've had most of an undergraduate curriculum of physics, so if it's beyond basic, then don't be afraid to refer to those physical ideas.
> meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env
Is 30% "ridiculously clean and efficient"? 35%? I'm not sure I can agree with that at all.
Battery production? That's ridiculously efficient. For a very small amount weight, there's an insane amount of Wh that get shuttled through that material, which can then be recycled into even more kWh of storage than went into the recycling process, due to the continual improvement in battery production efficiency.
Meanwhile, every single gallon of gas results in 20 pounds of CO2 emissions. Fracking oil requires disposing of 2-10 gallons of dirty waste water for every gallon of gas. That's a massive amount of waste for only 20-50 vehicle miles.
> The latest battery chemistries perform incredibly well in cold and hot climates.
Oh? Show me a model of EV that has it is going to lower capacity battery heating and cooling systems.
I’m an automotive EE… I can’t name any. I’m working on things that will go in 2032 vehicles. Surprise, most are ICE, but of the EV vehicles the battery protection systems are becoming more rugged, not less.
Sodium batteries loose only 10% or capacity and doesn't need pre-heating when charging. Latest Chinese LFPs perform well in cold too (I don't know exact deets and tbf they don't do great job publishing them other than marketing fluff). Also added ripple preheating that Tesla has.
I'm surprised they didn't flag and downvote you. There seems to be a certain crowd that seems view EV as sort of a panacea without considering the true realities which involve experience and research to know they are far from replacing ICE
If ICE is the only vehicle for you, because of religious reasons, thats okay. There are large and small countries ( China, Norway) that have majority EV cars and continue to grow. There are 120+ other countries that are buying EVs. Even in US, there are a few people who have bought EVs and realized it works for them.
A person who really needs an ICE car would encourage others to buy EVs because it would reduce oil demand, and with demand destruction, considerably lower oil prices. With lowered demand, Saudi Arabia can supply a barrel for $5 - $10/barrel from Ghawar Field. Which means a gas-head who commutes every day from Yukon, Canada to Guadalajara, Mexico has a significantly lower gas bill.
The only people who wants everyone to buy ICE are fossil fuel shills.
The whole world is in a transition phase. For some it will make sense to jump to pure EV use, for others it won't. That whole “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” thing...
I have one of each. They work well for different reasons.
EV is the charge-at-home city car that is preferred for every day use.
The ICE is for when two cars are needed and long distance travel because charging stations here are not well sorted yet.
My plan for the future: The ICE car will be replaced with a hybrid with a significant emphasis on battery. Then eventually it'll be an EV as well. We'll get there.
This is the correct use for EV. A second car, around town. Perfect.
The EV push back is because the MBAs decide to market them as replacement daily drivers. And despite the people that went all in being part of the same reality that has caused the massive pushback against EVs… they will defend their purchases to the death.
I have had two EVs for around town. Love em. But not real for only car outside of California.
Very happy with an EV as our only car here in Europe. No charger at home. The car does about 24k kilometers per year, including road trips and vacations. Remember that there are other countries on the planet and lots of other people.
Thats correct, but Americans are conditioned by fossil fuel shills that EVs are not for them, driven by irrational fear of range anxiety. To dispel a lie, we need to spend 100x effort[1]. Its hard to convince everyone to switch to EVs, perhaps we agree with the false premise, but break it down and focus on certain demographics that it will work for.
a) 37% of US households own two vehicles. This is the biggest demographic and they can definitely have one EV.
b) College students and professors/administrators who live close to campus. They drive a lot less, ~5K miles/year instead of 12 - 15K miles/year.
c) Retired people, very old people who only drive around town for shopping, doctor appointments.
As adoption increases, most Americans would have seen first hand that EVs work and they can charge anywhere, electricity is not scarce and every building has electricity (don't need to go somewhere special just to charge it), electricity is not the work of the devil, it is okay to use EVs.
I suspect there's a big of cognitive dissonance here. My guess US has more emphasis on road trips, longer distances, vastly more wilderness areas, etc.
Europe is mostly urbanized it's almost boring. Dunno about China, but I guess they cracked charging infrastructure.
“Oh, but Norway uses EVs a ton!” … cool, Norway is the size of an average US state, the population of Connecticut, over an extremely thin area which optimizes one vector of infrastructure automatically. And makes the majority of its money on oil.
Geez, almost like EV ultra-success stories aren’t even remotely comparable the rest of the world.
If Norway is the size of an US state, what’s stopping every state from being like Norway? Or does it somehow matter for EV efficiency or charging speed how far away the borders are?
I finally met someone who plans to downgrade from EV to ICE. He does 100k km per year, running multiple businesses. Lives 120km outside Dublin. Biggest issue seems to be wait at public charge stations. IMO he needs to get long range EV and get better chargers at home/work. But oh well, I'm not going to stop him if he's going to get luxury sports cars instead lol.
China cold tests their EVs in Harbin and Mohe, where “cold” means -40 (F or C doesn’t matter, it’s the same). They lose some range, and indoor charging garages are more common (for better charging performance), but the tech has gotten good enough that even harbiners (a small city of 20 million people) are adopting EVs at a rapid clip.
It is so rare for EVs to catch fire that it makes the news whenever one does, and these form the core of the anti-EV memes that are popular with boomers on Facebook.
We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.
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