You can actually talk to the candidate about their solution: why they picked one approach over another, why X wouldn't work, how well they use LLMs (e.g. 10-line comments for a single line of simple code? do they reuse functions or create four different clones?), etc. With LLMs, assignments can be larger/more complex so you can see more.
I'm not saying it's better or worse, but I don't think assignments are inherently bad. It works the same way in education from what I've heard - written assignments may not be very valuable on their own anymore, but you can ask students questions about specific things irl to see if they actually know their stuff.
A good opportunity for everyone to start thinking about improving their (current/future) home insulation - if they can afford it, that is.
For example in the EU, while good insulation has always been a given in the Nordics for obvious reasons (although modern buildings are even better!), it's only relatively recently that these topics have started to be taken more seriously in the south. Energy costs were generally affordable, and there wasn't as much focus on the environmental side of things (i.e. using energy more efficiently to reduce pollution or switching to cleaner energy sources).
Just trying to shed a positive light on all of this, even if things are gonna suck for a while.
>Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass
Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.
True, but it enables you to compare things against those which you can't buy upfront. London Travelcard zones 1-6 is £3264 annually or £313/month, but there's no option to buy multiple years in advance as if you were buying a car outright.
£313/mo is more expensive than the cheapest new car leases, but you wouldn't want to drive a car through London zone 1, and you'd have to pay £18/day in the congestion zone.
Not "anything": if the [capital cost * interest rate] is high enough, that can make things objectively bad regardless of the repayment period.
25k could be either side of that.
Just for the sake of illustration (I don't know current car loan interest rates, I'm not interested in ever getting a car at full price, and this is just about financing costs and not any of the other costs associated with car ownership): if you were to get e.g. an expensive Tesla for 100k and had a 5% loan, you'd pay 5k/year forever without ever paying off the capital.
Here in Germany, the BahnCard 100 costs €3199/year and that gets you nationwide use of all public transport and lets you take your bike with you and get seat reservations; or there's the Deutschland-Ticket which costs €756/year and gets you local public transport everywhere (no reservations, only the slow intercity trains not the express ones, no free take your bike with you etc).
If the car costs more than €756/year, and can do fine with local public transport, and you're one person not a family, at 5% interest the maximum price (of a free-to-run car, so let's assume it is an EV with PV on all surfaces) would be €15,120*, and that's if you own it literally forever.
Two people sharing a car, or a lower interest rate, the threshold goes up.
* OK, so I'm assuming there that the Deutschland-Ticket never gets more expensive, so that's "inflation + 5%", but this is all just as an illustration anyway.
>it would take decades to get rid of all ICE vehicles
If governments were serious and fair about it, they'd just provide decent subsidies (or similar formula) to people who don't have enough money to switch, and it'd happen faster. What's going to happen though, is that many governments will just tax ICE vehicles to death (+ the cheaper chinese vehicles) while blaming you for not having enough money to switch.
Beware the the "fair". Currently, governments are taking in vast amounts through fuel taxes. That will need to be replaced. It wont be an extra fee at registration. Current politics favors use taxes. As the concept of taxing electricity going into cars is a massive cluster of issues (ie the "smart grid" with differemt rates for different uses) the answer will likely be road pricing: a per-mile fee, which could mean manditory tracking. The transition to EVs as fair market actors is not over. It hasnt really begun.
The UK has stated that the current mileage check within the annual roadworthiness test will supply this data.
A clear weakness is that mileage readings can be altered. This used to matter on a smaller scale: dodgy second-hand sales, but now more or less anyone could be considered as potentially incentivised to interfere.
The mileage must remain a changeable field since the recording component may need replacement, for example, after accident damage or to correct a fault in the assembly that recording memory is part of.
Pure mileage is one option but many have voiced other structures such as altering prices based on time/place/road driven, which would require more data than simple odometer readings.
A more central issue is the synergy between fuel consumption and damage to roads. Heavier vehicles do more damage but also burn more gas and so pay more tax, a synergy between cost and revenue. A flat rate based on mileage alone would equate all EVs as the same regardless of some being massively more damaging than others. We would need different rates for difference classes/weights of vehicles.
> many have voiced other structures such as altering prices based on time/place/road driven, which would require more data than simple odometer readings.
There are people who won't care about this but I think that legibility would be a huge concern here. It's one thing to do $X per megameter, but it's another to start breaking it down into various zones etc
At that point might as well just do congestion pricing in cities.
Do it like taxes, have a low rate for the first X kwhs then increase after. Great aunt Mildred gets to heat her home, your neighbour that has a massive house, EVs, jacuzzi etc etc pays more.
EVs are always going to be an outsized user of electricity, and it's unclear to me why someone's jacuzzi should be heated vat free.
Huge range of efficiency difference between houses. (How did "Insulate Britain" fail so hard?)
I had an actual aunt called Mildred, and she lived in a very old (possibly literally Tudor, not mock, actual) cottage with actual fireplaces and so on.
Her place likely used about 42 MWh/year to heat, though this would be coal and wood not electricity because actual fireplace, compared to my house which is so well insulated that it took a week to notice we'd switched off the heating, in winter, while it was snowing outside.
For 42 MWh/year, you can fully recharge a 100 kWh car battery every day and still have more left over than my house consumes in total.
...and, to be a bit more explicit about it, the worse the efficiency of the house, the more likely that household is to already be lower income. So a tax like that would end up being seriously regressive.
And with solar power becoming cheaper and more common, it's going to be making less and less sense to disincentivize electricity usage.
If we want to preserve and maintain our roads, we might have to...*shock, horror* increase income taxes on the wealthy!
Because the use of a jacuzzi does not burden any public resources. That jacuzzi isn't occupying a space on a road, or adding wear and tear to that road. And you don't need an entire licensing/enforcement infrastructure to regulate who/how/where/when jacuzzis are to be used.
fuel pump meters can be altered too as well a farm diesel abuses - scofflaws trying to get around paying their fair share will always take some regulatory effort
Another approach is to incentivise middle to high income earners like Australia has done re novated leases on EVs being exempt from fringe benefits tax.
Lower income people aren't buying new cars, they buy second hand.
So be incentivising others to purchase new EVs over combustion, it creates a supply for the second hand market in 5-10 year horizon for those lower income earners. And while subsidies are in place for new models, this further pushes down the price of used EVs.
It'll be interesting what happens to Australias second hand EV market when the subsidies end in 2029.
>high income earners like Australia has done re novated leases on EVs being exempt from fringe benefits tax.
UK did somethin like that with ZEV Mandate. Salary Sacrifice, almost zero BiK, 100% tax writeoff, no road and luxury tax. All this resulted in flooding the market by luxury 100K pound German EVs, which all ended up on second hand marked 2-3 years later when leases ended breaking depreciation records.
I agree with what you're saying, I also suspect that governments will tax ics at a certain point, not only to get rid of them but also because they can get away with it because the whole population isn't impacted.
So I'm concerned about a time where the rich have EVs, the poorest haven't, and the government are taxing ics.
I'd like to see some kind of Keighley car standard to get cheaper EVs on the market. Here in Europe we have quadricycles, but the speeds are limited to only make them useful for cities.
France does this. It's called social leasing and is offered for those with low income but reasonable work related mileage.
It could be argued that just returning the tax money to the people (and/or reducing regressive taxes) is a fairer approach as it gives money to those who cycle or take public transport as well as those who switch to EVs.
Govts could do a lot of things. They could require employers to offer remote work (like during COVID) or provide free charging. Its a lot easier for big corporate buildings, mostly shared by many corps, and have a parking garage to add chargers. They also can negotiate aggressively with utilities and just get EVs charged for free. 20%+ of solar is curtailed anyways, which is only going to increase. Or they can add solar panels. Businesses in every country have tons and tons of incentives and subsidies for all kind of things. Govts have absolutely no problems giving incentives to businesses. Its only when regular people get a tiny benefit for a limited amount of time, everyone kicks up a fuss ..
I've seen governments give tax incentives to buy EVs that are then sold 2-5 years later, pumping a secondary market of second hand EVs. Cheaper for the government (they don't pay, they just take less tax).
I don't think OP advice is wrong as a general advice though. I've also smoked very sporadically and never got really hooked (as opposed to my whole family), but plenty of regular smokers started with that first one. It's better to not take any chances.
People move to where they can make a living. Globalization has largely killed farming as a viable livelihood (in most of the EU at least), it's simply not profitable enough unless you have a massive amount of land/cattle or have invested heavily in automation (usually both). Without that important sector, it's doubtful the trend will reverse unless cities become literally unlivable or there's some kind of miracle in transport technology.
For Finland it seems that it is not the farming automation that kills these places. It is the deindustrialisation. Places die as the jobs die. And jobs are killed by big factories being closed leading to all other services starving. Globalisation is the killer, but via factories not farms.
The trend will reverse once we have enough people in positions of power both able to recognise and willing to admit that remote work is, for at least 75% of office jobs, at least as good as onsite work. (Not "without tradeoffs", just "at least as good, overall".)
Sadly, this is going to have to be at least a generational change, as the current people in power are deeply entrenched in the mindset that "managing people" means "ensuring butts are in seats", and that they are neofeudal lords overseeing their techno-serfs, which they can only feel good about if they can go aggravate them in person.
Even with opportunities for remote work, after having spent ages 8 though 19 rurally and in suburbia, you'd have to pay me enough so I'd be able to comfortably retire to a proper city after about 3 to 5 years. I've gotten to know myself, I'm deeply not into nature or generic sports, and only digitally socialising with people you share interests with (i.e. not parents and siblings) makes existence suck immeasurably (sure modern multiplayer games are a bit better than what you got over dialup, but still).
I'd love to have statistics on how many people can not work remotely because their partner can't work remotely. Maybe starting with how many jobs are office jobs that don't require f2f would be a good sample, but I've never seen such numbers.
> Globalization has largely killed farming as a viable livelihood (in most of the EU at least)
Honestly that was really primarily mechanisation and industrialisation. The number of people required to farm a given area of land has _plummeted_; in Europe it is still artificially inflated with subsidies.
I suppose organizers choose the easiest way to contact people rather than relying on one of the least-used messaging apps that people won't install just to attend a meetup.
I'm not saying it's better or worse, but I don't think assignments are inherently bad. It works the same way in education from what I've heard - written assignments may not be very valuable on their own anymore, but you can ask students questions about specific things irl to see if they actually know their stuff.
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