OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

What on earth makes you think that?

You've been reading too much right-wing propaganda.

Seems unlikely. Evidence?

I see quite a few Tesla's driving around my bit of Sydney, which does suggest that we have rather more than seven functional EV charging stations. The 80-apartment block in which I live has a couple of Tesla's parked in the basement. There is a plan to add charging points to the parking area, but it hasn't happened yet, so there must be open access charging stations around to look after them.

Only if you believe what you read in ZeroHedge.

Note last line = (joke)

Except the number of children under 16 is closer to 13 million and the college and university student count appears to be closer to 3 million which includes foreign students.

Yes, I know, hence the :-)

I did fall for it slightly, in the sense that I had a look at those and the latest figures. Excellent graphics by the BBC here:

It would certainly be a waste of time for Cursitor Doom to try to be polite to me - not that he seems to know how.

Some of the people who post here don't seem to be able to post anything that doesn't deserve sneering contempt.

Cursitor Doom does seem to a member of that group. John Larkin can do better, but feels hurt when the approbation he gets doesn't live up to his expectations. Most of his contributions barely make it to adequate, and he seems to think that he deserves fulsome flattery for every offering.

Wealth is the thing that allows human resources to be invested long-term, and not all burned up right now.

Marx was a moron. "Capital" is just a symptom of what really matters, which is ideas.

Communist countries crush ideas, which is why they are so poor.

It would be tough, a world without house cleaners and barristas and supermarket shelf-stockers.

Read a sociology textbook some time. I did. Well, I got through most of it.

The government will spend a billion dollars per functioning charging station? I see a business opportunity!

Jeroen Belleman

Ideas are good, but not enough. Someone will have to do the work, too. Who said 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration? Edison?

Jeroen Belleman

The company I once worked for had 40(ish) years ago a phone sanitising company come in. They went around every desk sprayed the mouthpiece and wiped it dry with a cloth. It was the same cloth used on all phones. Possibly much more of a risk of contamination than not having it done at all. It was a one off possibly as a lot of staff complaining it was a complete waste of money.

Ideas generate money. Money doesn't generate ideas.

A good idea often starts in a garage (or lately, a dorm room) with hardly any capital. It creates jobs and industries.

HP, Microsoft, google, Facebook, and the first airplane started very small.

Yes, governments create business opportunities. We have a billion-dollar homeless industry in San Francisco, and it keeps growing.

Capital is just a symbol of co-operation. Capital is a group of people putting their pennies together to pay another group of people to do something no one can afford to do on their won.

Communism is a group of people taking all the money from another group of people to pay them do do something that benefits no one except the people who took the money..

They crush individual initiative,

Apple! Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak also started in a garage IIRC.

I'm right with you. I have the schematics for charger that can't fail and only want 100 million in exchange for my design.

What do you think all those homeless people are going to do when the debt bomb finally explodes and there's no more money for cops, the army - or anything else?

And a lot of giant companies faded away because management had no ideas. DEC. Kodak. HP. Xerox. Intel.

Wealth is the capacity to buy things, including human labour. It can be spent in all sorts of ways, some of them constructive.

Karl Marx wasn't a moron. He corresponded with Abraham Lincoln.

Capital is what you need to turn ideas into profitable reality. If you've had good ideas in the past, and been able to realise them, you may accumulate enough capital to be able to invest in realising new ideas, but there are other ways of accumulating capital and it certainly isn't just a symptom of having had good ideas in the past.

Communist countries are autocratic, which does mean that powerful people have are influence in areas they don't understand, and suppress good ideas they don't appreciate.

The US is plutocratic, which means that rich people have influence in areas they don't understand and can suppress good idea that they don't appreciate. Your own attitude to anthropogenic globla warming is a classic example.

Actually, money can seek out ideas. That's what venture capitalism is all about.

But a lot more of them start out in universities and research labs, which are set up to find them. This kind of institution is good at publicising their better ideas and attracting capital to exploit them.

Any sensible development program starts small, aiming at those applications - niche markets - where a limited capital investment can generate generous returns. Once you've plucked the low-hanging fruit you will probably have enough income to invest in going after mass markets.

It's a mechanism that allows co-operation to work.

Capital can be under the control of a single individual - with inherited wealth it frequently is.

That's what right-wing lunatics like to think. Lenin's hobby-horse - when he finally got control of the Soviet Republic - was rural electrification, which benefited most of the population.

Any autocratic system crushes lots of individual initiatives, but not the initiatives of the autocrats.

If you aren't well-connected in the US or the UK, your individual initiatives won't get far either.