ItsBob
Joined 4 years ago
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538
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185
Member since
Dec 8
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 month ago
I'm of the opinion that the greenest car you can have is the car that you currently own!
No matter what you buy, energy was expended to make it! The car you own already has spent the energy. It's done.
So, assuming you're not spitting flames and smoke out wherever you go, your current car will be greener than quite literally anything you can buy, new or secondhand.
Note: I've done zero maths to verify this but it makes perfect sense to me :)
Comment · 1 month ago
When I was referring to ICE vs electric I was referring to personal transportation only.
Sometimes you just _can't_ use less oil. My own situation is that I make 5 sub-100 mile round-trip journeys each week now. It's the poster-child for home charging an EV. It saves me at least £3k a year on petrol alone.
However, I had to pay an additional £7k over and above what I sold my petrol car for (just last week, in fact) in order to get a secondhand EV. I could have gotten a much older, higher mileage one for around the same as I sold my car but that was too big a gamble for me. So I was in a position that I _could_ use less oil by switching. Not everyone has a spare £7k lying around.
I was told by a friend of mine (he's been driving electric for 5 years I think!) that a few years ago, the 92p/kWh fast chargers used to be about 30p. We now have waaaay more of them available and the price has gone up by about a factor of 3x so I don't see the price coming down any time soon and more infrastructure isn't helping in our case.
The UK energy prices are really high too: £0.13/kWh is the global average and we pay £0.27/kWh [0]. So electric isn't always the answer either unless you can get a cheap tariff.
Plus if you need to have a car and you live in a flat, you're only real option is petrol/diesel and a great many people here live in flats.
In terms of industry, it will have some luck changing the last few miles of delivery over to electric. That may be fine though - leave the mega-miles to the diesel trucks and then city and town deliveries could be made by electric vehicles where they only need to do 200 miles of stop-start driving.
Energy isn't free... if we want to power things we need to expend energy somewhere in the chain in order to do so.
Comment · 1 month ago
Every car has a 4G/5G modem in it now! Unless you cut off your search at about 2018, no matter what car you buy, you're giving up data!
I don't like it either but you have to pick your battles these days.
Comment · 1 month ago
Unfortunately it's not as black and white as that. The alternatives here in the UK are limited. It's basically ICE or electric.
We have a staggering number of people that live in apartments so charging is out of the question except at public charging points and the cheapest I've seen is £0.40/kWh. Most of the fast chargers are £0.92/kWh.
When I get my home charger fitted I'll be paying 6.9p/kWh between midnight and 6am but I have a driveway.
Not everyone can give up ICE cars. The logistics don't add up for many people plus the entire world runs on diesel - every truck, earth-mover, factory etc. relies on diesel in some fashion.
Comment · 1 month ago
In what way is it not worth it? I'm genuinely curious.
I used to be dead-set-against electric cars but I just bought one and am loving it. The maths is staggering. It's secondhand though as I don't believe new ones are worth it.
Comment · 1 month ago
I've just bought my first electric car. It's a 3 year old Skoda Enyaq Sportline Plus.
It's lost 60% of its value, has only done 57k miles and has a battery state of health of 97.4%. I paid £22k.
I still maintain that new cars, especially new electric cars, are not worth the money but secondhand ones are a bargain now... relatively speaking.
Comment · 3 months ago
I haven't read the transcript yet but are there no "human in the middle" loops here?
Surely we could just get a pair of eyeballs on everything flagged and if it's not 100% crystal clear what's going on, then it gets flagged for a senior pair of eyes to look at?
I'm against the Minority Report kind of stuff but a system (AI Flock cameras in this case) flags up <thing>, surely it should then go into a queue for humans to look at! Flock can add in a certainty score and the human must verify!
It could still increase efficiency this way.
Comment · 3 months ago
I don't think Microsoft would fail if it all crashed. Nor would Google or Amazon as they all have alternate revenue streams.
It's the pure AI companies like OpenAI that will hit the wall.
However, the tech companies are increasing their debt enormously. That's the issue.
Comment · 3 months ago
> It’s mostly private credit
I believe that some of the private credit is the banks' own private credit arm! It's absolutely mental: the bank can't lend to them so they have a private credit company/division that can skirt around the rules and still provide the capital!
Also, I bet that the Oracle datacenters aren't for Oracle LLC but Oracle Datacenter No 4 LLC so that if it all goes tits up, Oracle LLC walks away!
Comment · 3 months ago
> Further, unlike during the dotcom crisis, most of this spending is not driven by debt.
Unfortunately, that's not the case. Between the big 5 (Microsoft, Meta, Amazon etc.) they're spending more than $600 Billion in 2026! They don't have that much cash lying around so they're selling bonds!
That's debt!
Not only that, they're increasing the bond sales in Europe! I assume that means they're tapped-out in the US!
All this off-the-books stuff, despite being legal but shady, is still debt! Debt has to be paid by someone.
To sum it up: the AI buildout is a highly leveraged, debt-fueled expansion, not an organic, cash-funded software cycle... this will not end well!
Comment · 3 months ago
You'll be able to buy used H100s. One careful owner. Never overclocked etc.
They'll be knackered though, unlike a good Herman Miller chair. :-)
We might even be able to afford RAM again!
Comment · 3 months ago
It's hard not to be fatalistic about all of this now: In my mind, it's crystal clear that the investments will never be paid back. The revenue streams from all the companies involved don't add up. It must fail at this point.
That means losses. Big losses for some.
I assume that these off-the-books companies can quite literally be pinched off and the debt becomes the banks' problem, so the primary company, i.e. Meta, Oracle, can walk away but the banks will be left holding the bag.
We know what happened the last time the banks played their stupid games!
Comment · 3 months ago
> I don’t know if the public would be as accepting of a bailout for AI companies
It won't be framed as bailing out the AI companies. It will be sold to the public as bailing out their pensions and investments.
It's all about the marketing...
Comment · 3 months ago
It won't just be America though. I include others like Canada, UK (where I am), parts of EU etc.
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