21 thoughts on “Bill Gates”

  1. With his obvious gynecomastia (Manboobs) listening to him on the topic of nutrition seems pretty silly as well

  2. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re smart.
    I’m decoding that statement to mean: just lucky…

    2. Everybody seems to forget the acumen of Steve Ballmer, or as I thought of him back in the 90’s Darth Ballmer.

  3. A lot of the auto industry appears to be abandoning electric vehicles (due mostly to the end of federal subsidies).

    1. The rest of the auto industry is abandoning EVs because its players – including the vaunted Chinese – have failed to figure out how to make both EVs and money. Tesla is pretty much the only game in that particular town.

      It’s also pretty much the only scalable game in the autonomy town. The rest of the industry will flail about trying to come up with their own versions of automotive autonomy for a few years yet, but will wind up licensing Full Self-Driving in the end.

      Electric drive trains are simply qualitatively better than ICE. The US will likely continue to lag a lot of other places in its rate of EV adoption, but the transition will eventually be made.

      1. Electric has a use case – it is much more efficient for trips that involve many stops.
        So delivery vans work. If you only drive in one city it also works.

        For everywhere else, where you have long uninterrupted driving at more or less the same speed, an ICE ends up being more efficient.

        This is even more the case when the electricity is coming from burning the fuel that would otherwise end up in the engine.

        There’s also the problem of making an electric drive train with the same durability as an ICE. We’ve been doing this for a century with ICE, but electric drive trains for vehicles haven’t had nearly the same effort put into it. Sure it’s theoretically simpler, which is the only reason there’s any competition at all.

        1. Your two cited efficient EV use cases are true because of regenerative braking. An EV can recover energy that would be a dead loss in an ICE vehicle.

          Which is why EVs are also more efficient on long hauls. EV trucks can climb long grades much more quickly than ICE trucks and then recapture much of the energy used for the climb on the subsequent downgrade. Regenerative brakes don’t fade either.

          The same is true of EV cars on long hauls, but that constitutes a much smaller fraction of total car miles driven each year than was the case, say, a half-century ago. I’m a Boomer and grew up when long car trips were common as flying was expensive and passenger railroads were in steep decline as the Interstate Highway system was built out.

          The source of the electricity used by EVs is certainly an issue, but liquid petroleum fuels were never widely used for electricity generation in the US, coal is now all but gone and the vast majority of combustion-based baseload and peaker capacity runs on natural gas – which burns much more cleanly and efficiently than either gasoline or diesel.

          For EVs, an ordinary consumer also has the option of installing home solar panels and a house-scale storage battery to allow most or all EV charging to take place at home. That can obviate most visits to charging facilities saving both time and energy. Nobody with an ICE vehicle, in contrast, has an oil well and a mini-refinery in their backyards nor ever will.

          Durability is an ICE-loser too. EV drive trains are very durable and require no ICE-style routine maintenance – no oil changes, filter changes, tune-ups, transmission service, etc. Teslas have been topping the lowest-total-cost-of-ownership lists for years.

          Modern EV battery packs will typically outlast the rest of an EV. Very few IC engines will last beyond 100,000 miles. I was a cautious and conservative driver when I was still driving and owned only a single ICE vehicle that cracked the 100K mark. Five of them died around 70K miles – three GM products and two Fords for whatever that may be worth.

          A lot of Americans – some for political reasons – believe a lot of nonsense about EVs. Their alleged unsuitably in cold climates is one of the most widespread such beliefs. Given that Norway, for example, is rapidly approaching having an all-EV vehicle fleet, that particular canard doesn’t fly.

          I grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Trust me when I say that ICE vehicles very much have their own issues with cold weather. Even apart from drama anent starting after an overnight cold soak, ICE vehicles require one to put up with a significant wait before the engine coolant warms enough to allow the cabin heater and windshield defroster to usefully function. I recall many times waiting for what seemed like forever in the driveway at idle before it was actually safe to get on the road because the windshield was fogged over and couldn’t clear until the engine warmed up. Feh.

          1. The EV is like the dancing elephant. The amazing thing is that the elephant dances at all, not that it doesn’t point its toes or keep its free leg straight or keep time with the music particularly well.

            John McCarthy (of the LISP computer language fame) had in his retirement a blog of technological optimism, writing that even with lead-acid batteries, we could still keep our cars if the petroleum ran out. His blog traffic was sufficiently low that he replied by email to me about my skepticism of this, outlining battery swapping as a scheme to at least in theory make this work.

            The arrival of electric cars with lithium batteries (tells you how long ago this exchange was) changes all of this. You don’t have to squint too hard to see that if we absolutely had to do away with liquid fuel in personal transportation that we could make this happen.

            That said, this is not to say that electric cars are more cost effective, yet. But I had joked that the cost of an EV is not on a curve to become cheaper to purchase than an equivalent gasoline-powered car, rather, the cost of gasoline-powered cars will rise to reach the high cost of an EV, and sure shootin’ that is what is happening!

            I am clinging to a 28-year-old Camry with about 230,000 miles on it until “they come out with a long-lasting EV in my price range”, and the reason to hang on to it is not just that EVs haven’t dropped in price according to some optimistic projections but because all new cars are so expensive and are also more brittle than the Gen 4 Camry with the inline four-cylinder engine, which is proving to be the Dodge Dart of the 21st century, that is, a way underpowered by current standards car that runs and runs and runs.

            Nothing lasts forever, and I may be faced with purchasing a replacement car, but the electric car isn’t quite there yet that I wouldn’t buy a gasoline powered car.

            Strangely, I am watching the Tesla Semi. If battery-electric propulsion was really more cost effective than gasoline (or diesel in the case of a large truck), you would see the Tesla Semi everywhere, but it has been years since its introduction, and I am not seeing them.

            As to Saving the Planet, if something costs more, it is not Saving the Planet–it is consuming resources that could be put to use in Planet Saving in some other application.

            Again, the dancing elephant. It may not dance that gracefully, but that it can dance it all amazes people.

          2. Let me just add that it is very silly that we have anything other than electric cars on the islands of Hawaii. Maximum range is never an issue (without water wings installed), gas is crazy expensive, and solar is cheap and reliable.

            I don’t know why any buys ICEs here anymore. Total cost of ownership is way higher, and they aren’t as good at any use case.

          3. As noted, EVs already “dance” better than ICE vehicles on pretty much any scale you care to name so your elephant analogy is a non-starter.

            EVs still do average being more expensive than ICE cars to purchase, but, as also noted, their total cost of ownership is better. The initial cost differential is mainly a matter of current production scale. There is nothing intrinsically more expensive about an EV than an ICE vehicle. Given the vast disparity in total number of moving parts, in fact, the intrinsic advantage will be with EVs as their production volumes increase.

            The reason ICE cars are increasing in price is that their production levels have pretty much plateaued in recent years and the average level of inflation in the world is not now offset at all by greater production volumes every year.

            EVs’ superior total cost of ownership flies in tandem with their being less costly to fuel. It’s no accident that EV adoption rates are far higher than in the US in places where gasoline and diesel are much more dear – notably Europe.

            Interestingly, I also corresponded a bit with Prof. McCarthy back when I was an undergrad Comp Sci major in the Late Pleistocene Epoch – though not about electric cars. The man had zero academic hauteur about him.

            The Tesla Semi hasn’t taken over the long-haul truck market yet because the factory to mass-produce it is not yet complete – though it’s now getting close. Production to-date has been on a pilot line at Tesla’s GigaNevada battery plant. Pepsi and Frito-Lay were the initial test customers and have been well-pleased with their Semis. A few other large fleet operators have been added to the test program since, but widespread adoption still awaits mass production. And there have been many improvements to the Semi since the initial prototypes debuted. The Cybertruck also appeared in an initial form some years before mass production started.

            Saving the planet doesn’t figure in my evaluation of EVs at all. Eventual EV dominance will certainly reduce demand for crude oil and its derivatives, but won’t eliminate it by any means – too many other non-motor fuel uses.

            And I am not one of those who views the increase in atmospheric CO2 of recent decades as a looming catastrophe. It has, in my view, been a net positive in terms of reversal of desertification and increases in crop yields.

  4. I’ve met a lot of incredibly smart people who were functionally stupid in many areas of life.

    2. Being smart doesn’t remove someone from the human condition. It just means they lack the awareness that normal people develop.

  5. “Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re smart.”

    Or more precisely exceptional competence in one area (back in the day computers) doesn’t make him an expert in totally different fields (climate science) or even still currently an expert in the trends of your previous area of expertise (AI).

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  7. Very few IC engines will last beyond 100,000 miles. I was a cautious and conservative driver when I was still driving and owned only a single ICE vehicle that cracked the 100K mark. Five of them died around 70K miles

    You must honestly be the worst driver in the history of the planet.

    ICE engines, even poorly maintained, last hundreds of thousands of miles. I can’t imagine what kind of violent abuse you put cars to, to make a pattern of killing five of them at less than 70k miles. At least you got the manufacturers to pay for your idiocy. 70K miles is well below the powertrain warranty on any car.

    Unless you’re lying.

    Which seems much more likely.

    1. Freeway driving in CA. Never put the tach needle in the red. Admittedly, three of the early crap-out vehicles were bought used – a Pontiac Astre, a Ford Fairmont and a Ford Taurus. The other two were Saturns bought new.

      And, no, the warranties didn’t cover anything. At the time I bought all of these there were no warranties available for used cars and the new ones had, if I recall, 50 or 60K warranties.

      The only car I’ve ever owned that exceeded 100K miles was a third Saturn I bought used with 80K miles on it as it was all I could afford at the time – the low resale value, I suspect, being a consequence of this marques generally poor durability – doubtless a factor in GM’s decision to cancel the marque some years ago. Within two or three years of that event, Saturns had essentially vanished from CA roads on which they were once ubiquitous.

      I’m certainly willing to believe that at least some newer ICE cars are able to reach well beyond 100K miles routinely, but twice or three times that is still exceptional. I had a 2008 Hyundai that gave virtually no trouble and was looking to cruise past 100K with ease until some bozo totaled it for me short of that.

      If you’ve managed to repeatedly get 100K+ from ICE vehicles, well, ‘Me ‘ats off ‘t the dyuke’ as the old joke goes. But I learned the hard way that US ICE marques, at least, are gubbage.

      1. About a half a decade before my now defunct 2007 Toyota Corolla died (transmission seals finally failed and it seized up in Drive) its odometer hit 299,999 miles and stayed there for another 5 years of driving. Apparently no one at Toyota thought that would be possible.

        1. Perhaps it’s just a matter of having lived in CA for over a half-century where foreign marques are overrepresented, but all of the stories I’ve ever heard about 200,000-mile and 300,000-mile cars have been about Japanese or Korean makes – Toyotas, Subarus and Hyundais. Cars made by legacy US producers are simply junk.

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