1. Vehicle needed lidar
2. Vehicle should have a collision detection indicator for anomalous collisions and random mechanical problems

This is directly a result of Elon’s edict that Tesla cars don’t use lidar. If you aren’t aware Elon set that as a requirement at the beginning of Tesla’s self driving project because he didn’t want to spend the money on lidar for all Tesla cars.

His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools. While this statement has some modicum of truth, it’s obviously going to trade off safely in situations where vision is compromised. Think fog or sunlight shining in your cameras / eyes or a person running across the street at night wearing all black. There are obvious scenarios where lidar is a massive safety advantage, but Elon made a decision for $$ to not have that. This sounds like a direct and obvious outcome of that edict.

All electricity is overhead for security reasons, routing solar energy through the rails would destroy that. Doing that (beyond the 100m test-track) would mean a prolongued political discussion.

Electricity is overhead for safety reasons (maybe that’s what you meant by “security reasons”). As long as the voltage is kept low (< 48V) and the runs of solar panels aren’t too long, the power can be run safely in the tracks.

My first reaction was how stupid this is. Dirt, debris and other things will get on the panels and cause lots of problems, but after a few minutes I realized it’s actually quite brilliant.

There are three major costs of solar, the panels, the location, and the wiring + inverters. If the tracks are used as the wires (extremely low resistance paths back to an inverter), the location is wasted space so basically free, and the inverter can be placed anywhere along the path to remove the power from the tracks, the cost of this comes down to mainly the cost of the panel, which is actually pretty cheep these days.

The real challenges will be in cleaning & maintenance, vandalism, and modifying the track to limit the conductive paths (assuming they’re used for this).

This isn’t what they want to happen. They know it will happen, but this isn’t the goal or objective.

Amazon is a big boy company, if they want to cut staff, they’ll cut staff. The problem with cutting staff this way, is that they don’t get to decide who they’re cutting. They don’t want to cut talented employees at random, they want to pick the low performers and let them go. This is kind of the opposite of that.

The higher skilled the employee is, the more likely they are to have been hired remote, and to feel they can find another job also. That means they’re effectively shooting themselves in the foot and getting rid of some of their talented employees for the benefit of bringing people into the office.

There has been a swing in the business opinion that work from home isn’t as efficient. This is basically the higher-ups falling in line with that opinion.

Technology has moved from nitch nerdy thing to general public usage and as it did so it became usable without knowing what’s going on. Gen Z doesn’t know shit about technology, they just know how to use it.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to get a computer working you had to screw with the RAM settings or build the computer yourself from components. If you didn’t know how to do this you talked with someone who did. I’ve forced my kids to learn at least some of this, but the idea that they’re more tech savvy is ridiculous. They’re users of tech, but it’s become too complicated (and more user friendly), so they don’t know what’s happening behind their screen.

As an engineering manager, I’ve already received AI cover letters. Don’t do that. They suck. They get “round filed” faster than no cover letter at all. It’s insulting.

(Realistically if I couldn’t tell the difference then it would be fine, but right now it’s so fucking obvious.)

I would rather pay an ad-block company a monthly subscription than give it to YouTube in blackmail. This will just be another salvo in a never ending war.

But the reality is managers want to pick who gets laid off. It’s not that they want to just cut heads and reduce costs… upper management. may want that… but the actual managers want to keep their best and brightest. They know who the people are who get shit done, and they want to keep those people. Rto tends to have the opposite effect.

The reality is it is often the best employees, the most experienced employees, and some very high level employees who have the most confidence and are most willing to say " screw you, I know I can find a job somewhere else" And give the middle finger to the employer who’s trying to do an RTO plan.

Don’t be fooled by the headlines. Real businesses want to control who they let go. They want to have all the power in the relationship. They want to cut their lower performers and keep their superstars. RTO is about the worst head cutting program you could dream up.

This is the home of Tesla. There are a million EVs here.

I’m in the SF bay area.

The off-hours rate for my electricity is $0.04 cheaper than the prime hours rate. It’s laughable. $0.51 vs $0.47. Why bother even thinking about it at that pathetic difference? It’s certainly not going to change the math much.

It’s shockingly high. I live in the SF bay area and I’m a bit pissed off at how bad we’re getting screwed.

We have a Volvo XC90. Much bigger (and probably heavier) than your Bolt. It gets ~26MPG on the gas only mode. It has an 18.8kWh battery and can go ~30 miles on a charge. So again, bigger, heavier, and less efficient. At $0.50 per kWh, it takes ~$9 for 30 miles, and ~$5.5 in gas to go 26 miles.

That’s all great, but the real thing that will stop it is economics. We have a PHEV and I calculated it out and we pay $8 per gallon equivalent compared to $5.50 for regular gas. That’s a pretty big difference. Right now we ignore the EV part of the vehicle. (Live in California and I pay $0.50/kwh.)

We’re planning on getting solar shortly and that may make it feasible, but until then, it’s not.