I come to HN to satisfy my long standing curiosity and interest in current events. My mental wellness has been trending down this past month due to news feeds, headlines and comment sections. Attempting to counter this trend I’ve blocked news aggregators at my hosts file (habitual opening news sites mindlessly) and disabled all the current event widgets built into Windows 11 that show up on new tabs, system tray and start menu. It was a good week after that. But that leaves little to check online. Seems the news even makes it here. So much politics this month. I understand why, but this EV thing is just… I know the goal is to appease the populist movement to make me cry liberal tears, and defeat any progressive agendas, and hats off to them they are succeeding! Not sure what to do next. EVs and green infrastructure make so much sense to me long term and short term and the rest of the world seems to be getting it.
I hear you; the current events are pretty depressing, but it's still important to be aware of them and the direction things are headed, because they are so impactful not only in the US but worldwide. Sure you can find it elsewhere, but HN does tend to have more nuanced discussions, links to other relevant information, etc. So I for one am glad these items are being posted and that the auto-flagging seems to have subsided.
You are far from alone. I think it's a "civic responsibility" to be aware of what one's government is up to.
This is all happening because we've collectively allowed it to (ostensibly, but there are doubts about the legitimacy via gerrymandering, voter precinct suppression, and quite likely, election fraud).
The fact that most of the IGs were fired before DOGE was given access to anything and the fact that there are no auditors involved is a strong signal that we'll find out years from now that rather than save taxpayers any money while shutting things down, DOGE almost certainly funneled a tremendous amount of money into certain individuals' pockets.
How is the efficiency of delivering fuel to cars compared to burning fuel centrally, generating electricy and delivering it to cars via the grid?
Edit: From the answers, it looks like efficiency is better when the fuel is burned centrally.
So what can be the benefit of turning off charging stations? If you want to strengthen the fuel industry, wouldn't it be better to burn the fuel centrally and feed the electricity into the grid?
It's impossible to give a single answer to this because it depends on how you define "efficiency", and on what kinds of "fuel" you're talking about.
If you define it as (say) pounds of CO2 emitted per mile driven, then electric cars are about as efficient as gasoline-powered ones if the electricity comes from coal plants, but significantly better if it comes from natural gas. And of course, way better if you have access to renewables.
It’s similar in some ways to ISIS blowing up historical sites. It’s exercising power for attention and as a statement of values, even if the people they are hurting most are themselves.
You can't really discount the electricity from other sources on the grid in that equation. An EV is also receiving power from sources like wind and solar unlike a non-hybrid gas-powered car. There's nothing more efficient than not burning the fuel at all.
Stop. They don't care. They want you to exhaust yourself over this and everything they are doing. They want to instill Russian style malaise by flooding crisis and making you defend all this stupid shit. They don't care the outcome. If you win you lose because you are exhausted and they just do the next thing. They have stated their goals prior to coming into power and none of it was efficiency. Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and steelmanning a position they don't have. They want to destroy the American administrative state.
However many overlook the other benefit, which as software devs we should easily recognize. Powering your car with electricity abstracts the fuel from the use of the fuel. An electric car doesn't run on any one single type of fuel, it runs on whatever is available in the area.
EVs always win, even when powered by coal, because of the thermal efficiency of larger generators. The grid gets cleaner/low carbon over time (and cheaper per kwh, broadly speaking, due to the lower cost of renewables vs legacy thermal), a combustion vehicle burns petroleum for its entire service life. The search keywords to surface this are "well to wheel efficiency."
> So what can be the benefit of turning off charging stations? If you want to strengthen the fuel industry, wouldn't it be better to burn the fuel centrally and feed the electricity into the grid?
Spite and prioritizing the oil and gas industry for economic reasons. Which is somewhat humorous, as China is building EVs so fast, they are impairing the global oil market price. The US government simply cannot take enough action to assist the petroleum industry (for economic gains) to compensate for China's impact on the global oil market.
(50% of vehicles sold in 2024 in China were battery electric or plug in hybrids, "NEVs")
> Some 60% of vehicles bought under the program last year came with a plug, and China’s car market is already at a tipping point: Battery and plug-in hybrid cars, locally termed New Energy Vehicles or NEVs, in December made up 49.4% of car sales, and 46.8% across the full year. Conventional and normal hybrid cars will be a minority of the market this year, and the only way is down: Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that NEVs will hit 68% market share in 2027 and 81% in 2030.
When government money is spent on activity that benefits the wider population (or even worse, eliminates a niche that could be used to extract wealth!), that is wasted money not going into the oligarchs pockets. Hence the call for efficiency - to eliminate this waste.
The disrespect that this administration is showing for the entire governing process disgusts me. We'll be spending decades undoing the damage these clowns are doing.
People underestimate how fast the Government moves when there is consensus. The issue with Americans is that we have rarely any true concensus.
I definitely feel bad for the career civil servants and fear for the loss of their expertise. It will take decades before indiviuals can replicate their job at any level of efficiency. But Government could hire more workers to do the jobs of the old experts, or maybe hire them back or even contract to them as consultants (at grossly worse prices but I don't think any of these experts are dead. Just distrustful and maybe a bit vengeful about the loss of their work environments).
Nothing going on here is permanent loss. Its 'only' a gross level of inefficiency and waste. But if we all agree that 2024 was a better year than 2025, it isn't a big deal to rebuild to the status quo.
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What is truly gone is out soft power across the world. Europe won't have a damn reason to trust us for decades.
"Nothing going on here is permanent loss... it isn't a big deal to rebuild to the status quo."
There is no status quo to rebuild.
Loss of trust, loss of momentum, loss of context, loss of relationships - insofar as any of these things existed, they are permanently destroyed. That's what will need rebuilding. The original process took decades, if not a century or more. You can't just disrupt that and then expect to restore it easily - or expect it to spontaneously reconfigure on its own with reliably desirable outcomes.
People working in the government are not fungible labor units like GPUs or VMs, to be spun up and disposed of without consequence. The network formed between people is even more important than the individual jobs - and it has an insane cold-start penalty.
Maybe if the folks in charge were absolute geniuses in leadership and organizational psychology, something miraculous might happen. But, that's never a thing to expect in general, let alone given the evidence at hand. They're making the classic blunder of trying to rewrite the system from scratch, which has almost never gone well for anyone.
> People working in the government are not fungible labor units like GPUs or VMs, to be spun up and disposed of without consequence. The network formed between people is even more important than the individual jobs - and it has an insane cold-start penalty.
I don't believe those networks are ever destroyed.
In practice, those networks will be transferred to the private sector, and the government will have to pay premium money to hire them back as consultants rather than as government workers.
There's exceptions: maybe there's a 60-year-old super-old guy who is at near retirement age, and takes this opportunity to take an early retirement and refuses to answer any phone calls to come back. But I don't think these people are the norm. Offer any 60-year-old or even 70-year-old enough money and strictly promise them its a temporary rebuilding moment and they'll likely come back.
Government is supposed to work slowly and thoughtfully. It provides stability. Much like a pendulum that swings back and forth. This tipping over the edge in one direction is not a good development at all.
Are you talking about the four years under Biden where the pendulum swung to EV-damn-the-cost, or Trump "Elon doesn't need subsidies to be profitable anymore"?
I understand Trump wanting to drill-baby-drill and boost the fossil fuel companies (and supposedly drop gas prices though that was just a lie fed to his base as it's not something he can control), but shutting off the EV chargers doesn't lower the price of gas. It certainly doesn't save the government any money or make it more efficient, nor does it root out corruption and fraud. And unless those EVs have DEI stickers on them, then it doesn't help purge America of the "evils of DEI".
I understand being against anything woke movement and not caring at the environment for economic growth purpose.
But here it is counterproductive. It is like killing a new better technology when it makes sense and bring you growth. Like cutting budgets for disease and cancer treatments research!
Practically handing the future of automobiles to China. ICE has peaked as a technology; EVs are still nascent. Silly to hold back adoption and growth for nonsensical reasons.
This was the biggest culture shock the first time I went to China a few years ago. At least half the cars are electric (you can identify them by the license plate). 90% of the electric cars I saw were from brands I'd never seen before. There were at least a dozen different brands that seemed to be super popular. I rode in a bunch of them, and they're all super nice inside, with large screens and well-made interior.
Western car brands are about to get a lot of competition.
- china - have 3.5x more than global battery capacity need for 2025
- china - evs cost less than ice cars
- shenzen - 5-6 yrs ago - transition to 100% ev bus and taxis
- china - 2024 - ev & phev - 47.6% of total car sales
- 2023 car sales - china: 21.7M, USA 16M, EU 10.6M, JAP 4.7M
- 2024 - china owns more than 80% production of every part of battery
- TSLA - relies on China for 40% of battery supply chain
- massive investment in battery and materials since 2000
- chinese govt vehicles, taxies, buses -> evs
- chinese govt - massive incentives for consumers - priority parking, green license plates receive almost immediately for low cost
- but only for cars that use chinese batteries
- researchers - china spent 200-300 billion on ev subsidies alone
- domestic car companies want to milk existing ice technology
- car maker's worker unions don't want to ditch ice car manufacturing for possibly less work
- local politicians don't want to push car makers, cause disruption
The only way out of the quicksand is for each local govt to create a temporary moat and force their local car companies to catch up using local suppliers (who also have to catch up with Chinese component makers).
But that's not gonna happen overnight.
And those local car companies aren't run by software people - the engineers at the local car companies are probably mech eng trained or finance/marketing types.
Yes, a former colleague who moved back to Beijing said she'd wait about 18 months for the licence to buy an electric car, but about 5-6 years for an ICE car.
This is real. There's a bunch of federal vehicles that don't have cats in them, or the equivalent systems for diesel from the factory. They are exempt from emissions standards.
That's going to be great. Many dead cars by the side of the road, and not moving cars is good for the environment. (yes the cat will also be destroyed but as a bonus so will your o2 sensors and possibly the rest of the engine with it, turbo's also do not like it)
It's important to remember that none of Elon's companies would exist without decades of massive government assistance. Loans, funding, tax credits, government contracts, etc.
So what we have here is the absolute dumbest of people dismantling the machinery of American empire, cheered on by people who think their material conditions suck because there are a dozen trans people who play college athletics and not because billionaires have robbed them blind so they can be slightly wealthier.
USAID is a perfect example of this. USAID spends its budget on American companies and then it uses that product for influence in other countries. American empire cannot exist without exploiting the Global South. Foreign policy and military power exist to subjugate other countries. Domestic policy is simply dividing up the spoils.
All that's happening here is a massive self-own to American Empire that leaves a massive void China will fill. All of this will destroy Tesla. Elon is killing the market for Teslas, making them more expensive and any retributive tariffs by China will most likely target Tesla and the materials required to build batteries.
I'm rapidly becoming an accelerationist because there is no opposition to this and nothing will stop American decline at this point.
I'm guessing Elon hasn't been informed yet and this decision will change soon? or do teslas charge at different points and therefore will end up being the only electric vehicles that will be used by the government and their workers?
These days many stocks seem to be detached from reality-based price pressures. Some stocks have more in common with crypto speculation than with funding a company.
Exactly. If you look at all the recent Tesla earnings calls, they have fallen flat or below expectations and the price had skyrocketed because of “guidance” and promises of future robots, or ai, or whatever. It is not grounded in reality at all.
What a bunch of petty sons of b***. Trump has aesthetics against electric cars, and that seems doubly bizarre since his partner is Elon Musk.
But this is just extreme and ridiculous. The right has always had a fetish about fighting against the environment. Trump will only be alive a few more years and he doesn't care what happens to the planet.
You think the other side is not capable of violent protests? Protests only work when majority of the population is ignorant of some injustice or corruption that is affecting a minority and your protest highlights the issue and brings it to attention. It won’t work when the country is split into 2 equal-sized factions where everyone knows exactly what the other side is up to and are actively cheering for their side to win. Violent protests will lead to violent counter protests and nothing else.
Tribalism is a major factor in how this situation arrived.
Violence will not improve the political landscape, and it likely won't even improve the voting metrics for the opposition (ex: the Trump assassination attempt was the major turning point for the online prediction markets last election).
Keep in mind that What we see is a direct result of half of the country directly voting for it. Certainly there are people regretting the Trump vote. They need to be engaged with in a positive way (demeaning them does nothing, even if they "deserve" it). Much of the country doesn't even vote. That seems like an extra critical issue at the moment. And not just for national elections, but local elections and midterms as well.
The hyper factionalism is a game of ping pong, and Trump it won't be the last actualized result of it.
And the benefits the USA has vs Hungary in the for mof stronger checks also leads to a wait and see attitude. We are all hoping the judiciary will stop the flagrant violations of law, and that some how two more years of foreign brainwashing in the media,that will now be completely uncontested will somehow lead to candidates that actually respect the rule of law. If the judiciary appears to put up a good front for long enough before capitulating, and the legislature pretends they might stop the worst abuses for long enough, everyone will just be comfortable with the new normal.
I misinterpreted the line from the article that said private access and inferred this meant free access, I did not do a search yo confirm so thank you for correcting me. It is very common in the US for EV owners to get free parking, free charging but I was wrong to assume.
Okay. It's 2025. You have a fleet of 650,000 vehicles and you've only managed to purchase and install 8,000 chargers for an amount of vehicles that you're not even clear on.
You can be mad at this administration, but if you are, you should be _furious_ at the previous administrations for so drastically squandering their opportunity. It very much looks like a bunch of federal greenwashing at this point.
Whoops, I guess the "hacker news elon musk pity party" isn't over yet. I'll hold off on the inconvenient truths in honor of this. But ya'll should pick a date when you're going to decide to get over this.
Or maybe "pool" or one of the others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
This is all happening because we've collectively allowed it to (ostensibly, but there are doubts about the legitimacy via gerrymandering, voter precinct suppression, and quite likely, election fraud).
I think the serenity prayer offers useful advice in this regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer
I guess maybe charge at Tesla superchargers?
Edit: read the article. Apparently sell them all off regardless of the cost
Sounds great for government efficiency
This is more in line with their goals:
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
https://archive.is/oyTRT
The fact that most of the IGs were fired before DOGE was given access to anything and the fact that there are no auditors involved is a strong signal that we'll find out years from now that rather than save taxpayers any money while shutting things down, DOGE almost certainly funneled a tremendous amount of money into certain individuals' pockets.
The middle of the road explanation is that it's just more reactionary Lysenkoism.
Edit: From the answers, it looks like efficiency is better when the fuel is burned centrally.
So what can be the benefit of turning off charging stations? If you want to strengthen the fuel industry, wouldn't it be better to burn the fuel centrally and feed the electricity into the grid?
If you define it as (say) pounds of CO2 emitted per mile driven, then electric cars are about as efficient as gasoline-powered ones if the electricity comes from coal plants, but significantly better if it comes from natural gas. And of course, way better if you have access to renewables.
It's a message about values. The message is fuck you. It's stupid on purpose, because fuck you.
"We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work" https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/11/books/review/administrati...
> They want to destroy the American administrative state.
You did it a little yourself there. s/administrative//. They want to destroy the American nation state, period.
I really want to have such optimism.
However many overlook the other benefit, which as software devs we should easily recognize. Powering your car with electricity abstracts the fuel from the use of the fuel. An electric car doesn't run on any one single type of fuel, it runs on whatever is available in the area.
Electric vehicles use half the energy of gas-powered vehicles - https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles...
Levelized Cost of Energy+ - https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
Well-to-wheels greenhouse gas emissions for cars by powertrains - https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/well-to-wheel...
Where Coal Is Retiring, and Hanging On, in the U.S. - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/06/climate/coal-... | https://archive.today/Egwuc
New solar plants expected to support most U.S. electric generation growth - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64364
> So what can be the benefit of turning off charging stations? If you want to strengthen the fuel industry, wouldn't it be better to burn the fuel centrally and feed the electricity into the grid?
Spite and prioritizing the oil and gas industry for economic reasons. Which is somewhat humorous, as China is building EVs so fast, they are impairing the global oil market price. The US government simply cannot take enough action to assist the petroleum industry (for economic gains) to compensate for China's impact on the global oil market.
Trump wants more drilling, but the oil market is already saturated - https://grist.org/energy/trump-wants-more-drilling-but-the-o...
China’s Oil Demand Is Vanishing Faster Than It Looks - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-01-19/china-... | https://archive.today/BMo4N
IEA Says Oil Demand Growth Weakness to Continue on China and EVs - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-21/iea-says-... | https://archive.today/2aN1j
(50% of vehicles sold in 2024 in China were battery electric or plug in hybrids, "NEVs")
> Some 60% of vehicles bought under the program last year came with a plug, and China’s car market is already at a tipping point: Battery and plug-in hybrid cars, locally termed New Energy Vehicles or NEVs, in December made up 49.4% of car sales, and 46.8% across the full year. Conventional and normal hybrid cars will be a minority of the market this year, and the only way is down: Bloomberg Intelligence estimates that NEVs will hit 68% market share in 2027 and 81% in 2030.
People underestimate how fast the Government moves when there is consensus. The issue with Americans is that we have rarely any true concensus.
I definitely feel bad for the career civil servants and fear for the loss of their expertise. It will take decades before indiviuals can replicate their job at any level of efficiency. But Government could hire more workers to do the jobs of the old experts, or maybe hire them back or even contract to them as consultants (at grossly worse prices but I don't think any of these experts are dead. Just distrustful and maybe a bit vengeful about the loss of their work environments).
Nothing going on here is permanent loss. Its 'only' a gross level of inefficiency and waste. But if we all agree that 2024 was a better year than 2025, it isn't a big deal to rebuild to the status quo.
-------
What is truly gone is out soft power across the world. Europe won't have a damn reason to trust us for decades.
There is no status quo to rebuild.
Loss of trust, loss of momentum, loss of context, loss of relationships - insofar as any of these things existed, they are permanently destroyed. That's what will need rebuilding. The original process took decades, if not a century or more. You can't just disrupt that and then expect to restore it easily - or expect it to spontaneously reconfigure on its own with reliably desirable outcomes.
People working in the government are not fungible labor units like GPUs or VMs, to be spun up and disposed of without consequence. The network formed between people is even more important than the individual jobs - and it has an insane cold-start penalty.
Maybe if the folks in charge were absolute geniuses in leadership and organizational psychology, something miraculous might happen. But, that's never a thing to expect in general, let alone given the evidence at hand. They're making the classic blunder of trying to rewrite the system from scratch, which has almost never gone well for anyone.
I don't believe those networks are ever destroyed.
In practice, those networks will be transferred to the private sector, and the government will have to pay premium money to hire them back as consultants rather than as government workers.
There's exceptions: maybe there's a 60-year-old super-old guy who is at near retirement age, and takes this opportunity to take an early retirement and refuses to answer any phone calls to come back. But I don't think these people are the norm. Offer any 60-year-old or even 70-year-old enough money and strictly promise them its a temporary rebuilding moment and they'll likely come back.
The executive moves quickly and is designed to move quickly. Congress and Courts are designed to be somewhat slow and deliberate.
That's why all this change in the President / Executive branch is happening so quickly.
So ...?
I understand being against anything woke movement and not caring at the environment for economic growth purpose.
But here it is counterproductive. It is like killing a new better technology when it makes sense and bring you growth. Like cutting budgets for disease and cancer treatments research!
Western car brands are about to get a lot of competition.
This YouTube video talks about China's lead in EVs and batteries
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjxKu_WQoBU
tl;dw:
- china - have 3.5x more than global battery capacity need for 2025
- china - evs cost less than ice cars
- shenzen - 5-6 yrs ago - transition to 100% ev bus and taxis
- china - 2024 - ev & phev - 47.6% of total car sales
- 2023 car sales - china: 21.7M, USA 16M, EU 10.6M, JAP 4.7M
- 2024 - china owns more than 80% production of every part of battery
- TSLA - relies on China for 40% of battery supply chain
- massive investment in battery and materials since 2000
- chinese govt vehicles, taxies, buses -> evs
- chinese govt - massive incentives for consumers - priority parking, green license plates receive almost immediately for low cost
- but only for cars that use chinese batteries
- researchers - china spent 200-300 billion on ev subsidies alone
- domestic car companies want to milk existing ice technology
- car maker's worker unions don't want to ditch ice car manufacturing for possibly less work
- local politicians don't want to push car makers, cause disruption
The only way out of the quicksand is for each local govt to create a temporary moat and force their local car companies to catch up using local suppliers (who also have to catch up with Chinese component makers).
But that's not gonna happen overnight.
And those local car companies aren't run by software people - the engineers at the local car companies are probably mech eng trained or finance/marketing types.
I don't know about any direct subsidies but I wouldn't doubt that there's something there.
So I guess that's a yes on lead.
How do you define the term "woke"?
The redefining it from the original "awareness to systemic racism" should go on the books of Propaganda's Greatest Hits.
So what we have here is the absolute dumbest of people dismantling the machinery of American empire, cheered on by people who think their material conditions suck because there are a dozen trans people who play college athletics and not because billionaires have robbed them blind so they can be slightly wealthier.
USAID is a perfect example of this. USAID spends its budget on American companies and then it uses that product for influence in other countries. American empire cannot exist without exploiting the Global South. Foreign policy and military power exist to subjugate other countries. Domestic policy is simply dividing up the spoils.
All that's happening here is a massive self-own to American Empire that leaves a massive void China will fill. All of this will destroy Tesla. Elon is killing the market for Teslas, making them more expensive and any retributive tariffs by China will most likely target Tesla and the materials required to build batteries.
I'm rapidly becoming an accelerationist because there is no opposition to this and nothing will stop American decline at this point.
Violence will not improve the political landscape, and it likely won't even improve the voting metrics for the opposition (ex: the Trump assassination attempt was the major turning point for the online prediction markets last election).
Keep in mind that What we see is a direct result of half of the country directly voting for it. Certainly there are people regretting the Trump vote. They need to be engaged with in a positive way (demeaning them does nothing, even if they "deserve" it). Much of the country doesn't even vote. That seems like an extra critical issue at the moment. And not just for national elections, but local elections and midterms as well.
The hyper factionalism is a game of ping pong, and Trump it won't be the last actualized result of it.
And a significant part of the USA is cheering these actions. Many from ignorance, some from malice, and some are true believers.
Eh, Canada had the convoy occupation in Ottawa with comparable geographical challenges.
You can be mad at this administration, but if you are, you should be _furious_ at the previous administrations for so drastically squandering their opportunity. It very much looks like a bunch of federal greenwashing at this point.
Whoops, I guess the "hacker news elon musk pity party" isn't over yet. I'll hold off on the inconvenient truths in honor of this. But ya'll should pick a date when you're going to decide to get over this.