Most Treasuries are held by US banks, investment firms and municipalities. I'm pretty sure those firms hold a good chunk of global stablecoin volume, given the nonexistent regulation of crypto in the US relative to other countries.
"They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed."
So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US?
Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.
Agreed, this is a VERY odd statement. There are a bunch of Canadian companies that have been here for a long time. I don't have the data but would DNS and hosting providers like EasyDNS and HostPappa really have primarily US customers?
Im sorry but saying you won't support your own people because you THINK they MIGHT move to the US is BS (I removed it originally because I toned down my knee jerk reaction but I defend it as you brought it up). I hope OP has enough emotional capability to handle some gentle feedback.
FWIW in case you are unfamiliar with it -- Canada has a history of not supporting its own products and companies - so this sentiment expressed above is tough one to swallow given the exceptional talent and capability of Canadians and some countries efforts to undermine that.
I learned something new today, thanks! I did face this a LOT in Canadian workforce, never knew it had a term, but the way you get undermined and attacked for not being an average is crazy, taking/sharing the credit, and pushing you on the sides, excluding you from meetings and all shenanigans haha. Completely the opposite in the US, not just productivity wise, but US companies embrace individualism and “as long as you get shit done”, go wild! It’s why US companies do better, I doubt it’s the market size as always brought as a justification, I am sure if Canadian companies did better they will have US based customers too just like Switzerland had European ones.
30 years? E-commerce hasn't been around that long - try 5 years of optimization MAX.
FWIW OpenAI is desperately trying to monetize and they think e-commerce is a "simple" problem to solve. I mean they do need to convert their funnel without alienating their users. I assume they are going to have some big payouts for agentic purchases gone awry or leave merchants on the hook.
So, you're proposing we've been optimizing E-Commerce since...2021? Amazon was founded in 1994. It was not the first site selling things online (but it's the most recognizable one). E-Commerce has been getting attention for a *very* long time [0]
I remember having to describe a standard model to predict online shopping behaviors for my ML class exam in university. That was close to 10 years ago now.
Also remember a teacher telling us about that story of a company finding a woman was pregnant from her shopping behavior and pushing relevant recommendation. Prompting people around her like her dad or something to find out she was pregnant
as an aside, fall of '96 is when i started college. There was an elementary school on my drive to class where I would routinely get caught in drop-off traffic. All those kids i remember crossing the street are at least in their mid 30s now. ...I think i need to lay down and it's not even 9AM my local time.
I bet a lot of teachers look at what devs do and think that its also insane to sit in front of computer all day, in a no boundary job, working on something you really don't care about and is potentially really bad for civilization only to make money off and lose your sense of self.
My spouse has expressed this nearly verbatim after transitioning out of a 16 year career in middle and grade school education to medical curriculum development. It was hell on her mental health but at least there was a clear motivation and purpose for being there.
Not really, all you'd need to do is make a live price ticket that's dependent on congestion and make that available over the network, and economics takes care of the rest.
Doesn't that almost imply the happiest countries in the world have a lack of imagination on what could be better? Or maybe they don't suffer from comparison (the thief of joy) as a culture.
I'd argue it's likelier that people are more informed about their absolute position globally. Any screen gets you the mental image of the top of the ladder. So happy people would end up scoring themselves low, because there's a globalized vision of wealth nowadays.
Besides there's a difference in life self-evaluation and experienced happiness, so the report really is a misnomer.
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
It's a myth that EV charging requires an upgrade to a 100 amp connection. Scheduling charging to times when you're not using appliances will still result in a charged vehicle by morning.
The Youtube channel Technology Connections has an interesting video where it describes a successful transition to a fully-electric house while remaining on a 50 amp electrical connection. (it requires a smart circuit breaker)
We have a F-150 lightning, and charge it on a 12A, 120V charger. It’s fine for 6-10 trips a week. If I commuted in it to an office without a charger it wouldn’t be fine, but a smaller commuter car would be. (The truck gets 2.5 miles/kWh, commuter cars are at 4-5).
I’m sure we are outliers, but still.
Put another way: growing up with incandescent bulbs, I remember light switches that would turn on 6-8 lamp track lights. That’s half the current our EV charger draws. We had a space heater that drew more than our EV charger currently does.
Houses and neighborhoods are still built with electrical systems provisioned for pre-LED, pre-induction/heatpump workloads. They certainly have enough slack for everyone to plug in a level one or two charger simultaneously.
I wonder if the household share of grid power has gone down faster than total power has gone up, and that's why people are worried about EVs taking out the power grid even when everyone's individual house seems to handle it easily enough.
That's true enough at the level of individual households. If the whole neighborhood switches to EVs, the power grid in general might not be built to handle it.
(Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switching to EVs is something that happens one household at a time over many years. So, it shouldn't come as a sudden shock, and its something the utilities can make long term plans about. It just means power utilities need to be on the ball about not putting off infrastructure upgrades, and it means somewhat higher electricity prices for residential customers.)
If you've been assuming you need to replace all the oil with the same amount of electrical power then you're seriously wrong.
Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.
While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.
You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.
Its not a 1:1 replacement but its also quite a significant amount of energy and infrastructure that is needed. You still have losses in electrical production from Gas/Solar/Wind/Nuclear to your charging round trip efficiency.
Its a massive change in how things operate in the US - significant amount of money reinvested into the grid and not solvable only through behavioral change. Thats one of a quiver of things that need to be done.
It's poor HN practice to badly strawman others comments.
Dragging up sequestered carbon in the billions upon billions of tonnes and changing the insulation factor of the atmosphere _is_ bad and will lead to no good if not unchecked and somewhat reversed - that's just physics.
Ergo - that should _stop_ and other things should be made that sidestep the issue.
I’m really at a loss with these “we should stop using the abundant natural resource bubbling out of the ground and completely overhaul our entire infrastructure” arguments. We also produce more wind power than anyone else. Change will come incrementally.
You and I are in agreement then - and that change will ideally be away from harmful sequestered carbon.
> I have no idea
> I’m really at a loss
Seriously, starte with IEA reports, the IPCC reports, etc. they really do go into excruciating detail about these things you have no idea about and are at a loss to understand.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
So, EVs would reduce electricity usage in the long term (by eliminating the growth in demand from air conditioning).
On top of that, things like balcony and rooftop solar are much more economically attractive if you have a lot of load at your house, so people that buy EVs are likely to also self-generate a lot of electricity.
You can somewhat change the profile by price signals -- however if all vehicles are EVs there is a good portion of that demand that is inelastic. You will also need to be able to handle larger volumes of demand for faster charging stations and that entire effort of infra.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
So if EV's cause electricity demand to go up by less than 1% per year, it'll cause inelastic demand to go up a small fraction of 1%. If operators can't expand at that low a rate, we have bigger problems.
Full fleet of EVs would be 20-30 % of our annual electricity. Ain't no way we can acomodate for that on any near term timeline especially if you add in all the additional demand on electricity from AI/compute.
Now if had money as a country and had a recent history of building actual physical things for a reasonable cost. Yes may we could get there -- but current state of affairs - broke and limited manufacturing ability.
>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
> The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
I leval 1 charge my car and that is always enough. Salesmen who sold it to me says he does the same. It depends on your commute, (i typically ride my bike if the weather isn't too bad) and the other trips you make (why I bought it - there is a once a week trip I make outside of bike range)
> No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
Right, what people want is to pay less for fewer features.
If EVs with all their limitations are going to replace ICE cars for daily use, they need to be cheap. We need the Ford Focus or Toyota Tercel of EVs, with the same set of features (i.e. very few) that those cars had when they were introduced.
Otherwise I'll just go buy a used ICE Tercel or Focus.
When Tesla showed the world that an EV didn't have to look like a middle school science project and drive like a golf cart, it made sense that they went upmarket. They had to recover development costs. That won't work to get mass conversion.
If you can hoof it all the way to Fairfield (2.5 hours from Y Combinator HQ in SF; Muni->BART->Amtrak->taxi), you can get a 7 year old Model 3 for $14k tomorrow.
These are incredible new superpowers. The LLMs let us do far far more than we could before. But it creates information glut, doesn't come with in built guards to prevent devolution from setting in. It feels unsurprising but also notable that a third of what folks are suddenly building is harness/prompting/coordination systems, because it's all trying to adapt & figure out process shapes for using these new superpowers well in.
There's some VC money interest but I'd classify more than 9 / 10ths of it as good old fashioned wildcat open source interest. Because it's fascinating and amazing, because it helps us direct our attention & steer our works.
And also it's so much more approachable and interesting, now that it's all tmux terminal stuff. It's so much more direct & hackable than, say, wading into vscode extension building, deep in someone else's brambly thicket of APIs, and where the skeleton is already in place anyhow, where you are only grafting little panes onto the experience rather than recasting the experience. The devs suddenly don't need or care for or want that monolithic big UI, and have new soaring freedom to explore something much nearer to them, much more direct, and much more malleable: the terminal.
This breaks my heart about Ireland. I concede it's not possible to reforest the entire Ireland and have a competitive dairy and beef industry but restoring some of our wetlands and forests should be a goal that's taken seriously. We're at the point of getting 'cheap' talk from politicians.
Ireland has the climate to support the entire island covered in Atlantic rain-forests. People already agree Ireland is a pretty country, can you imagine how glorious it would be to have rolling hills covered in trees.
We do in terms of acreage. A lot of that is reclaimed farmland. Old-growth hardwoods are still down overall, and will remain so; that can take multiple hundreds of years to recover, since cleared forests regrow in phases.
Right. And tree coverage is not the be-all-end-all. My family visited the plantation where a few of our ancestors were enslaved; it had been turned into a state-run forest preserve (partly as a bid for the prior owners to hide the extent of the operation). Unfortunately, the farming practices employed back then have scarred the land; near where one of the slave cabins had stood, we were shown a large anthropogenic ravine that had been created by farming-related soil erosion. These places aren't quite the same forests as they were before European settling.
There's also the case of the near-loss of the American Chestnut.
Certainly that's not how the Europeans started out interacting with north America's natural resource. Mostly they treated it like the US does oil deposits now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Arrow_Policy
Northern Europe has been completely reforested, and has a forest cover which is larger than ever before. Because of the switch from wood heating to electric heating. Forest products remain one of the largest exports.
As for central Europe, yes they need to reforest their own countries before they go flying all around the world screaming about the Amazon, while drinking the finest champagne.
Social trust is high because there are pretty heavy handed control measures over the population with havy costs. Thats more of a fear based society than trust. Government can giveth and government can taketh.
1. Fear of a capricious state can cause survival-motivated compliance which can appear as "trust" in coarse measurements. Meaning, you simply do fewer of those things that would provide opportunities for distrust in contexts where that could happen.
2. In a relatively severe, but consistent regime, the high penalties for violating trust in everyday cases (crime) act as a deterrent.
3. Fear may cause people to be selective and mindful about their social associations based on stronger proofs of trustworthiness. You might tell a Hitler joke to someone you have used more energy/caution to "vet", but avoid being too casual in environments of undetermined trustworthiness.
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