Apple has thousands of employees. But it's not design by committee. There's a strong drummer in that company that keeps everyone marching in step, so that the entire company adopts and shares that one person's vision, or at least the general philosophy behind it. That's not to say that the drummer has a vision that goes unaltered by interactions with other smart people, but when their vision changes, it propagates.
That's one way it can go. But can also work where the final vision is a collaborative effort on the part of all the people working on it.
Apple's strategy is actually originally inspired by the Beatles, where five people all contributed and the resulting songs sounded nothing like any one of those people in particular. I'm certain if Steve Jobs designed everything on his own, Apple would be different than it is with a dozen people all working on one thing. And Jonathan Ive says this directly in interviews. He refuses credit for his work, because in his mind it's the entire team working together that's responsible for his final work.
Curious about the bit about strategy inspiration - do you remember where you learned that?
Sure, Jobs isn't designing every little piece - it's more that he serves as the dictator. Because he's very unforgiving in design reviews, I think his subordinates start to think like him.
Dictator usually have advisors, but in history, the dictators who are swayed by lots of advisors with strongly competing interests tend not to do too well.
I'm inclined to agree. I'm happy I heard about this bundle, but I don't think it falls under the purview of HN. HN has started seeming more promotional in general in recent times, with far more linkbait articles than I remember there being a year ago.
I think your 90% vs. 50% characterization is spot on. I once tried to found a company with someone who has fairly fundamentally different views on many things, thinking it would balance my crazy ideas out with an alternate viewpoint, but we just ended up fighting about trivialities, and could barely get anything done.
I think close to 100% is ideal, as long as noone is being a yes-man.
You should be multiplying the diesel price/joule numbers by roughly 5x to make them comparable to electrics.
When you buy metered electricity, you're paying for the end product. Internal combustion engines are roughly 20% efficient on average, going from chemical energy to kinetic. Electric motors are 90%+ from electricity to kinetic.
"Electric locomotives benefit from the high efficiency of electric motors, often above 90%. Additional efficiency can be gained from regenerative braking, which allows kinetic energy to be recovered during braking to put some power back on the line."
True. Too bad the media is on a witch hunt, and finds it convenient to gloss over facts for the sake of generating indignation over Tax-Payer Funded Bonuses Of Inconceivable Magnitude, so most people don't know this.
The GS employees I know are not happy about this...
They should include in their annual report "this year our corporate tax paid for x nurses and income tax on our employees bonuses paid for y teachers".
Which would cause all of the energy to be dissipated as heat in an instant... perhaps you could put it into some non-volatile heat sink, but unless it's a really big heatsink, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near that thing when it went into resistor mode, especially if the energy density/storage of these caps increases. Maybe put it into a heatsink that's within a big vacuum thermos... :-)
Regardless, it's definitely easier to deal with than a tank of hydrogen, but I'd say that tech is a non-starter anyway. If we can make electricity alone work via advances in charging time over batteries and energy density over existing caps, there's really no reason to transport energy around in an intermediary, let alone an extremely inefficient and volatile one like hydrogen. Power mains are a much better solution, relatively lossless by comparison to an intermediary transform.
On the other hand, for action movies of the future, hydrogen tanker trucks would provide great explosion fodder :-)
> perhaps you could put it into some non-volatile heat sink, but unless it's a really big heatsink, you wouldn't want to be anywhere near that thing when it went into resistor mode
Specific heat capacity of water ~= 4(KJ per Kg per Kelvin)
so, assuming we can safely take water from 20 degC to 90decC, we'd need 21MJ / 4KJ/K/degC / 70degC == 75Kg of water as a heatsink.
Or about the weight of one passenger.
Double or triple up for safety factors (avoid steam) and you're still OK. Have some insulation and drive some A/C to chill the water further and you're also OK.
So yes, dump it into a resistive load immersed in a tank of water?
(Edit, that said I do think that The Right Way to do transport+energy etc is for us to find our correct "limitless" source of energy (fusion or orbital solar, I guess) and turn that into synthetic hydrocarbons as a convenient, relatively safe, energy dense fuel. i.e. we don't build massive supergrids for pushing that power to people over wires. We pump the power into a CO2+H2O=>petrol converter which we then ship around the world using the existing infrastructure. We also don't need to retool the whole world's transport infrastructure. Obviously all carbon-neutral too. (Carbon -ve if you've got the spare power.))
How would systems running on petrol be carbon-neutral? Granted, you reduce one form of carbon emissions by presuming a clean form of energy and petrol generation. Use of the petrol, however, should still result in carbon emissions. Have I missed something?
If you're making the hydrocarbons from CO2 and H2O, you're taking as much CO2 from the air as burning the hydrocarbons will liberate.
Obviously, you need to put in the energy too. But I think synthetic hydrocarbons are a great way to carry around useful energy. They're very energy-dense, should be cleaner than oil from the ground and the whole world is tooled up to use them.
However, they're not useful until we also have:
- loads of power
- an efficient way of turning that power + CO2 + H2O into hydrocarbons
Yeah, in London currently, did a double take when I saw the difference between Oyster and standard fare. The standard fare is absurd, whereas oyster puts it on par with NYC (and has the very nice feature of acting as a la carte until you reach a maximum for the day, at which point it effectively becomes a day pass).
And that's the first really solid evidence that I've seen shared that zodiac signs are utter BS, which makes me doubly grateful to them. Something to point to when someone says it can't be proved otherwise...
The best evidence against astrology I've heard came from my college astronomy professor. Basically, due to the precession of the earth on its axis, the constellations are visible at completely different times than they were when astrology was invented. So even if it wasn't BS back then, it sure is now.
