You got it all wrong.

An American oil company is going to have absurd windfall profits this year, because the global price for oil has skyrocketed while American production hasn’t gone down at all. So that CEO is warning everyone that he’s gonna have an extraordinarily large bonus this year.

I think you’re mixing things up, where you assume that the past is part of an inevitable exponential growth in our future.

There are two exponential curves happening, neither of which is inevitably going to continue:

1. Global human population growth has historically been exponential across many periods of history. There are signs that this is slowing down and might reach a period of zero or negative growth, almost purely off of social changes.
2. Per capital consumption of resources has been growing exponentially since the industrial revolution. But when you dig in, that’s largely only true of certain resources, and some rich populations have reversed growth for certain resources (coal in the West, beef in the United States). This is where the fight is, and where we can work to reverse the trendline for fossil fuels generally.

Humanity doubled each 43±6 years

From this source , that really has only happened twice (48 years from 2b to 4b, and then 47 years from 4b to 8b). Before that, it was much slower (about 120 years from 1b to 2b). And might not happen again, where I doubt the world will ever see 16 billion living people on the planet, and where projections for 50 years from now are around 10 billion, with a peak and decline shortly after that.

The main work that needs to be done is on stopping the exponential growth in consumption of physical resources per capita, or the exponential growth in environmental damage per capita. And we’re working on it: recycling loops of our raw materials like steel or lithium batteries or glass or copper, pursuing zero emissions energy sources, switching certain land use and ocean extraction to be sustainable indefinitely. There’s a lot more to do, and we haven’t been successful on every front, but the fight is winnable and losing isn’t inevitable.

California is famous for having different emission regulations. They have an exemption from the national law that they’re allowed to make stricter emissions and gas mileage regulations. None of those should prove to be a burden for anyone who wants to sell a battery EV in California, because there’s no standard that applies only in California to EVs.

Kia pulled its EV6 GT, which basically did not sell well in the US. They only manufactured that particular top tier trim level in Korea, but the other EV6 trim levels continue to be manufactured and sold in the U.S. (Wind, GT-Line). Kinda stupid that they named their top of the line the GT and the one just below that the GT-Line, but brands can be stupid with naming schemes sometime.

now both Hyundai and Kia have stopped selling EV models last year solely in the US

They’re basically one company and they stopped importing EVs. They still build and sell plenty of new EVs in the U.S., made in their plants in the state of Georgia. They’re also currently expanding capacity at their plants, in the hopes of catching more of the growing electric SUV market.

So they no longer sell the top of the line trim level of the Kia EV6, or the Hyundai Ioniq 6, but they’re still building and selling very similar models on the same platform. The Kia EV6 still exists in the lower trim levels, and the Ioniq 6N and the Ioniq 5 and 5N, and their smaller EVs (Kia Niro, Hyundai Kona) are still available, too. Both brands launched their 3-row electric SUVs in the US, too (Hyundai Ioniq 9, Kia EV9).

A lot of companies are slowing down their EV rollouts, but I wouldn’t say that Hyundai/Kia is the best example of that.

Average new car price has gone up a lot because the average new car has been purchased by rich people who demand high performance and luxury features. And rich people have been doing great the last 50 years, so the top of the market has totally run away with high prices.

If you actually dig into specific models and what they go for, you see that the most basic cars have only gone up slightly in price, but are also much higher performing (0-60 times, quarter mile times, braking distance), more efficient (better highway/city gas mileage), more reliable (more miles/years to failure), and have a lot more standard features that used to be expensive add-ons (automatic transmissions, power windows/locks, power steering), and are generally better constructed (smaller panel gaps, better sound proofing/vibrations), and much, much safer by pretty much every measure.

Today’s cars, even the cheapest ones, are much better than the cars from the 90’s, much less the cars from the 70’s (5-digit odometers because getting past 100,000 miles wasn’t necessarily expected, bodies that rusted within a decade of normal use).

So if a first generation Honda Civic in 1974 cost $3000 in 1974 dollars (inflation adjusted to $21,000 today), we should compare what that car was, compared to what a Honda Civic is today (starting at around $25,000 for the barebones model, $30,000 for a few nicer features). Compare torque/horsepower specs, actual performance at 0-60/quarter mile, gas mileage, all of that. I’m not entirely convinced that the people of 1974 were getting a better bargain on their cars than today’s new economy car buyer.

I hate that cars have gotten so big, and that the SUV is basically the American default at this point. But I don’t think that car prices have actually gone up that high in the 30 years I’ve been driving. And cars from before I was driving just…sucked.

Yeah, one of the issues I’ve read about happening for concrete failures was that some construction crews are under enormous pressure to salvage concrete that had been mixed too early, or delayed in pouring, or whatever, and where the concrete pouring characteristics cause issues (or crews add unauthorized water or things to slow down curing and then alter the characteristics of the poured concrete without the engineers’ awareness).

It’s wildly counterintuitive to those of us who don’t work in the space.

Yeah, the most prominent examples:

Motorola spun off its cell phone division (despite being the company that invented the cell phone and the clamshell cell phone) and sold it to Google, who sold it to Lenovo. So Motorola phones, under the Motorola Mobility name, don’t have anything to do with the radio and electronic equipment company that is currently known as Motorola Solutions.

Volvo spun off its car division and sold it to Ford, who sold it to Geely, and kept the truck business. So Volvo trucks are made by a different company under different ownership from Volvo cars.

River sand is the right amount of jaggedness to where it can pour and settle into the right density in cement to have the right strength in the finished concrete. Ocean/beach sand works, too, but needs to be rinsed with fresh water, and is usually pretty valuable where it is (for beach resorts and what not).

They’re testing for how to use different types of sand (desert sand, manufactured sand, recycled sand) and testing the pouring characteristics and resulting concrete strength, so that they can make reasonable decisions on when it’s worth using substitutes.

Exactly.

The whole reason why lithium is such a good material for cathodes in car batteries is because of its very low mass per cation. So for a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, the the cathode material is LiFePO4, where the Lithium itself is only 4.4% of the overall mass of the cathode.

So it’s important to remember that although the lithium constitutes a small amount of the total mass of a battery, that swings both ways so that not much is actually needed to build the next battery out of recycled materials.

Your solar power storage expert is named Sun? Sounds lot like sun.

Maybe that’s why she became a solar power storage expert!

Also, I’d push back against the subtext that work experience gives skills. Plenty of people work a job for 10 years without having the adjacent job skills to be able to progress in that career or jump to another.

Critical thinking skills are the most important thing, and it’s possible to get a 4-year degree without actually picking them up or strengthening your skill sets in that area. But it’s also possible to work for 5 years without developing critical thinking skills, either.

In the end, no matter what you do with your time, only a small percentage of your effort is going into improving yourself. The people at work are trying to get stuff done for their employer, and the people at school are trying to get through the curriculum. It’s possible to do the work while the employer/school or even yourself cheats you out of the real long term benefits of actually learning during that time frame.

they could have bought a <$25k used EV last year and saved $4k with the EV tax rebate.

The people who were in the market for a car last year are by and large not the same people who are in the market today.

Plus let’s not forget, the actual EVs on the used market 12 months ago were different than today’s. Someone looking to buy a 3-year-old car today has to look for something originally sold in 2023, whereas 12 months ago they were looking at 2022 vehicles, with fewer models available and significantly fewer vehicles actually manufactured and sold.

For everything the Trump administration has done to make solar and wind power less economically feasible, it turns out his war in Iran has done way more to make fossil fuel consumption less economically feasible as well.

There really was a huge increase in the number of EV models available between model years 2018 and 2023.

So now, when you’re looking to buy a 3-year-old car, you have so many more EV options to choose from even compared to just 2 years ago.

You can choose different form factors (small cars, sedans, wagon/crossover/small SUVs, medium SUVs, literal pickup trucks), and basically any price tier from economy to ultra luxury high end.

Not every ecological niche was filled in the past 5 years, and some still need a bit more competition, but even with some pullback over the last year there are still plenty of new EVs hitting new categories (e.g., true three-row SUVs and minivans) that will feed into tomorrow’s used market.

And not every model will survive. The future of all-electric full size pickups looks pretty grim. Some entire companies might not survive the EV transition (looking at you, Honda). But overall, the used market will fill out with what was hitting the new market 5-10 years ago, and we’ll start to see a lot of consumer preferences start showing what the future of cars will look like.

goshery store

Doesn’t look like anything to me.