That’s kind of irrelevant though because the US wasn’t colonizing them. And in both, the US had complete dominance during the entire occupation.
The south Vietnamese and the Afghan governments were weak and corrupt and caved as soon as the US withdrew. In a colonial situation, the US would have not pulled out at all and would have implemented a permanent occupation.
It’ll become rarer, but will never go away. As long as diesel is being made, heavier duty trucks will have a diesel option.
Even if it becomes a solely biodiesel option. You’re just not going to beat the efficiency, energy density, and quick refueling of an internal combustion engine until you can have a battery 1/15 the mass for the same energy, and can charge the thing in under half an hour, and doesn’t cost more than the vehicle itself when it’s time to replace it.
ICE engines, and diesels in particular can run for millions of miles. The record for a semi mileage is just over 3 million miles on the engine. You’re not going to find a battery pack that can go anywhere remotely close to that long. Especially in a heavy use vehicle like a truck that will be constantly going through charge cycles.
Just looking at the Tesla semi, the 500 mile range battery is 900kWh. A 100kWh model S battery costs $15,000 to replace, with $13,500 of that being the battery itself. Scaled up, the semi battery would be in the $90-100k range to replace.
The average semi runs around 100,000 miles per year. If you can get 1,000 full charge cycles out of the battery, you’d be replacing one every 5 years to the tune of nearly $100k each time. Not to mention replacing the electric motors themselves at several grand pop, and those don’t tend to last as long as the battery. Especially in a truck hauling 82,000lbs.
For a freight train you absolutely couldn’t. Even high power lines aren’t powerful enough to power the electric motors on a locomotive through the standard way that things like light rails operate.
That locomotive example I used has a 4.5MW electric motor output. It would be next to impossible to get 4.5MW from the line to the motor using a third rail or something. The power draw would be too great for a freight train with say 6 locomotives. I live 50 feet from a rail line and 6 locomotives is about the average I see per train.
And just for scale, there are over 26,000 Class I locomotives like that in service. If each one ran for only 12 hours per day on average, that would eat up half a trillion kWh of power per year. That would be 12% of the total US electricity production per year, assuming no losses in transmission or efficiency.
Most if not all freight locomotives are diesel electric as well.
You’re just not going to beat the energy density of diesel. 1 gallon of diesel fuel has roughly 40kwh worth of energy in it. Modern diesel motors are around 35% efficient.
So you’re looking at ~14kwh of useable energy from 1 gallon of diesel, weighing 7 pounds. So 1kwh is around 0.5lbs.
1kwh of EV battery currently weighs ~13-14lbs based on the model 3s battery capacity and weight as well as the Hummer EV.
So on a train or truck with a 5,000gal tank (just using the AC600X locomotive as an example), you’re talking 35,000lbs of carried fuel and 70,000kWh of useable energy.
To carry the same energy, you would need 910,000-980,000lbs of batteries. Twice the weight of the locomotive itself. Even if we increase the density by a factor of 10, you still need almost 3x the weight of batteries as you do diesel.
And the time to charge a 70MWh battery would be insanely prohibitive. Like a few days each time. With a 1MW charger you’re looking at minimum 70 hours if you could run at peak power with no losses. Realistically more like 80 hours with how chargers slow down as the battery gets full and charging losses.
Natural gas could used to be a little bit cleaner, but CNG vehicles use 12-15% more fuel to get the same power than diesels so it would really be a wash on CO2 emissions. And you would have to replace every diesel engine out there along with all the infrastructure just for a less efficient power source. Natural gas is phenomenal for large scale power plants, not as much for ICE vehicles.
It’s the same issue with large ships. You just can’t beat the energy density of petroleum. And ships use the nastiest byproducts of oil refining already because they’re so cheap. Banning using bunker fuel would just cause them to switch to diesel for a little more rather than go full EV. Going back to sail boats is going to happen before EV boats lol.
Same with planes. Batteries are just too heavy for aircraft in any large capacity. Plus it’s not like we really want a bunch of giant flying lithium bombs overhead. Putting out an EV fire is already insanely difficult. Imagine trying to put out the fire from a battery 10x larger that crashed in the woods somewhere.
Diesel isn’t going anywhere any time soon. I would imagine we start producing more biodiesel before the really heavy machinery goes full electric. And as long as there is diesel in use, it’s gonna make its way to consumers in large pickups because diesel can’t just sit around forever and companies are gonna do whatever they can to keep production high to make money.
Definitely not. Passenger cars will go EV relatively quickly, but you’re not going to see ICE go away in your lifetime.
Heavy duty trucks, aircraft, ships, etc all use petroleum combustion. That’s not going away any time soon. And as long as that’s still around they’ll still be making diesel.
You’ll end up seeing EV half ton and quarter ton pickups, potentially EV replacing the gas option in 2500+ trucks, but they’re going to have a diesel option for decades.
I mean if you don’t use the health app you’ve eliminated like 90% of what the watch is for. The entire premise is a wearable biometric sensor that also functions as a direct link to your phone.
I have an ultra that I use for a ton of stuff. I originally got an SE for the better sleep tracking, but that turned into using it for workouts at which point I got a series 8. When I got into longer distance cycling (75-100 miles) the battery on that didn’t last long enough so I upped to the ultra.
Oh absolutely. It’s probably worth the $3500 at least. I just cannot think of a use case for myself that would justify it lol. I don’t work from home enough to claim it for work, and I can’t remote in from a Mac anyway.
And with kids, I definitely don’t have the free time to use it to watch movies or anything.
Come on Covid-24!
Pretty much the only reason I didn’t buy one.
I did the guided demo at the Apple Store and it’s a cool thing. If it were $2000 with AppleCare instead of $4000 I probably would have bought one.
I’ll see what they release for the “Air” version.
Actually pretty much none of them require a CDL unless you’re operating commercially.
You can go buy a school bus right now and drive it around without a cdl. Only needed to carry passengers.
You don’t need a CDL to be a delivery van driver either at all.
The current GVWR limit before you need a CDL is 26,000lbs. No light duty vehicle on the road comes close to that. Even the biggest Ram 4500 caps out at 16,500lbs GVWR. The Hummer EV caps out at 10,550lbs.
Using the actual rules of the game, you’ve typically already won by the time you’re at the point of having that much money lol.
Net worth taxes are stupid.
Just tax loans collateralized by stock as income, and give a deduction on the interest when they pay back the loan.
That’s currently the biggest loophole the wealthy use. They use their stock portfolios as collateral for loans, which are untaxed. Then as their portfolio grows they take out more loans to cover the old one and fund their lifestyle, or they liquidate some of their assets at the much lower capital gains tax to pay it back.
Just tax collateralized loans as realized gains and be done with it.