Love the computer blog! The history of computers is fascinating. It is truly mindbending to visualize the physical scale of 1kb in storage 60 years ago to 1kb today.
I have Digital Apollo on my shelf but haven't read it yet. I highly recommend The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe and A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin for a good history of test pilots and astronauts through gemini, mercury and Apollo.
The ICE/EV switch question is interesting, because it's hard to think about it and not come down on the side of EVs being a sustaining innovation. Some component suppliers (in the manufacture, power distribution, and aftermarket care value chains) will be swapped out and the resource extraction geopolitics will change, but there's no step change in human capabilities or behavior. Interestingly, the US has very few Lithium reserves, so the fracking-generated autarkic trend in energy of the past decade is likely to reverse. Tesla seems to understand this - it wouldn't be surprising if, in 10 years, the fact that Teslas have electric drivetrains is the least interesting thing about them.
Wall Street has been writing about the ICE -> EV switch for a decade. The conclusion is almost always to buy copper (for both the charging infrastructure and the cars themselves), and to sell the PGMs. Buy power semiconductors and lithium. Until someone develops a better battery material or finds a way to economically recycle lithium cells.
Then "we" have to figure out how to schedule the load of charging EVs in a green and economical manner. As renewables produce power intermittently, it's handy to have a bunch of cars (batteries) hooked to the grid, taking power when its plentiful and (perhaps, when battery tech is advanced enough) discharging when power is scarce.
For the coming period when only a minority of people have been vaccinated, stores (and therefore governments) will have it much easier maintaining mask mandates, rather than trying to police who has been vaccinated, and anyway the unvaccinated people scared away by that situation are probably greater than the vaccinated people too angry to wear a mask. So that just leaves outdoor behaviors, where masking is already not really a strict norm in most places, and maybe commerce in places taking it less seriously that I can't speak to.
The more interesting period would be when a near-majority of people have gotten the vaccine but not everyone who wants it / not enough to reach herd immunity, but if supply/distribution ramps up as expected, the time we spend in that stage should be shorter than the time it would take to actually adopt and align on new rules for it.
Love the computer blog! The history of computers is fascinating. It is truly mindbending to visualize the physical scale of 1kb in storage 60 years ago to 1kb today.
I have Digital Apollo on my shelf but haven't read it yet. I highly recommend The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe and A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin for a good history of test pilots and astronauts through gemini, mercury and Apollo.
The ICE/EV switch question is interesting, because it's hard to think about it and not come down on the side of EVs being a sustaining innovation. Some component suppliers (in the manufacture, power distribution, and aftermarket care value chains) will be swapped out and the resource extraction geopolitics will change, but there's no step change in human capabilities or behavior. Interestingly, the US has very few Lithium reserves, so the fracking-generated autarkic trend in energy of the past decade is likely to reverse. Tesla seems to understand this - it wouldn't be surprising if, in 10 years, the fact that Teslas have electric drivetrains is the least interesting thing about them.
Wall Street has been writing about the ICE -> EV switch for a decade. The conclusion is almost always to buy copper (for both the charging infrastructure and the cars themselves), and to sell the PGMs. Buy power semiconductors and lithium. Until someone develops a better battery material or finds a way to economically recycle lithium cells.
Then "we" have to figure out how to schedule the load of charging EVs in a green and economical manner. As renewables produce power intermittently, it's handy to have a bunch of cars (batteries) hooked to the grid, taking power when its plentiful and (perhaps, when battery tech is advanced enough) discharging when power is scarce.
For the coming period when only a minority of people have been vaccinated, stores (and therefore governments) will have it much easier maintaining mask mandates, rather than trying to police who has been vaccinated, and anyway the unvaccinated people scared away by that situation are probably greater than the vaccinated people too angry to wear a mask. So that just leaves outdoor behaviors, where masking is already not really a strict norm in most places, and maybe commerce in places taking it less seriously that I can't speak to.
The more interesting period would be when a near-majority of people have gotten the vaccine but not everyone who wants it / not enough to reach herd immunity, but if supply/distribution ramps up as expected, the time we spend in that stage should be shorter than the time it would take to actually adopt and align on new rules for it.