Disqus - Latest Comments for SteveQuestioner

Re: Donut Lab Battery Mystery Continues

SteveQuestioner — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:47:22 -0000

My god, this is such a waste. Donut Labs has certainly achieved their objective of getting attention. However, there is nothing more to say on this matter, until they release final results. And even then it may require more analysis by others. It seems likely that they have done something useful, and it is possibly even an important advance, but I am skeptical it as earth shattering as the speculations. Will probably be an improvement in some uses; find its place. But take years before it is able to compete in volume with existing solutions. Which will also advance over those years. There will be multiple leading solutions, at different price points, and for different markets. I say this as a complete non-expert in the chemistries. This is the reality of manufacturing.

Re: Tesla Sales Down Tremendously in UK, Norway, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland

SteveQuestioner — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:05:40 -0000

The two rising countries were from low starting points. Implication: tesla was just getting started there. Likely have stronger presence now.

Isn’t January one of the least reliable months to conclude anything? Still, I get it. These are shockingly bad numbers. When we have percent of market share numbers for all major EV manufacturers, that will be more informative.

Re: New Pumped Hydro Energy Storage System Needs No Mountains

SteveQuestioner — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:31:17 -0000

… just occurred to me that using existing dam to store solar means must be good conditions for solar energy. Useful option, but co-locating industry and solar with newer storage methods on flat land closer to equator feels more flexible and cost effective. Not an accident that Texas projects are booming!

Re: New Pumped Hydro Energy Storage System Needs No Mountains

SteveQuestioner — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:23:41 -0000

Keep in mind: Reversible hydro would require adding a lower reservoir. Its size depends on how long you want to hold reversible energy. Anyway, sites have to have a suitable location near base of dam. I do like idea of retrofitting more than adding entirely new site, even with a 2.5x denser material. As you point out, massive reservoir of existing dam is a strong plus.

Re: New Pumped Hydro Energy Storage System Needs No Mountains

SteveQuestioner — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:17:02 -0000

Says more competitive than lithium ion. So, sodium ion batteries might outcompete RheEnergise? No hill needed?

Re: Digging Deeper into Differences Between Tesla Full Self-Driving & Waymo Driver

SteveQuestioner — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:01:27 -0000

Except .. there is reason to be skeptical that Tesla will succeed in this grand vision, in any reasonable timeframe.

And the notion that legions of existing individually-owned Teslas will suddenly become driverless ride-share vehicles?

First, as we have seen already, as Tesla software evolves, it leaves older vehicles behind. Oops, broke that promise. Likely to happen again.

Second, it is physically impossible for a camera-only system to be safe enough in all weather conditions. That will be an uninsurable situation given individual ownership of cars. Think it through.

Third, re insurance, how make sure individuals properly maintain vehicles? The cars will have to frequently drive to some maintenance location, to be verified safe. That hurts the economics.

So, focus on fleet-owned Teslas, built in a future year, once there is a solution that is acceptable to state regulators. A franchise situation, where local fleet operators can operate, similar to taxi fleets. This is a viable business model. The point of this letter to editors, is that the vehicles themselves is NOT the dominant issue. I would add to this that it also isn’t as much of the cost as you might think. Not saying Tesla won’t be able to compete. But it isn’t a walk-away win. They’ll just be one of several major vendors.

Meanwhile, Waymo continues to deliver real-world results.

Re: Uzbekistan Proves The Folly Of US Fossil Fuel Madness

SteveQuestioner — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 22:30:20 -0000

Re: “In 2026, the amount of “green” energy produced in the country will reach 23 billion kWh — enough to supply all of Uzbekistan’s annual electricity needs.”

Please double-check that. Doesn’t seem consistent with other sources.

Regardless, great article.

Re: Two Scoops of Ube

SteveQuestioner — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 01:33:24 -0000

The online version of the article omits the information I care about: the image which shows about ten different flavors from different ice creameries, describing them, and naming the ice creameries and their cities. Ironically, the text of the article doesn't even mention the "Ube" flavor that gives the article its title! Sadly, I already threw away my print copy...

Re: Low-Income Borrowers Blamed in Bailout Crisis

SteveQuestioner — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:11:17 -0000

Great article, but I feel that it understates the role of Freddie and Fannie, as well as the pressure on them that tempted them to underwrite bad loans.

I also would like to comment on factors that led to the combination of unsustainable housing prices with high leverage, and the specific mis-belief that led to AAA ratings on the top "tranche" of a CDO.

First, it wasn't just subprime; at a critical period, they seem to have tossed their previous high standards, as demonstrated by their exposure to Alt-A (unverified income) loans. Here is the official Fannie Mae 2007 document:
http://www.fanniemae.com/ir...
Note subprime exposure down to $56 Billion, but Alt-A up to $360 Billion!!!
They were relying on credit scores, without verifying sufficient income to maintain payments.

Did government FORCE them to do this? No, but the target percentage of "loans to below median income recipients" had been steadily increased by HUD, under both Clinton and Bush; 52% of all their new loans in 2005 had to be to such recipients, to maintain their government benefits.

Given what competing mortgage companies were doing, and what the government required, they may have faced an impossible situation. Well, not completely impossible: they could have chosen to shrink: to maintain their high standards, and make far fewer loans, since they would no longer have been competitive versus other loan offerings. Is it surprising that they instead chose to increase their risk?

So yes, it was a BUSINESS decision, but it was compounded by the government requirements.

Granted, their actions are still only a secondary cause; the primary causes appear to be years of low interest rates and easy mortgage terms (See *) allowing housing prices to rise to unsustainable levels, plus the interaction of securitization / credit default swaps & non-transparent risks / the ability to duck capital-holding requirements via these financial shell-games.

*: I'd also like to point out something I don't see mentioned much: when everyone was able to get mortgages more easily, that inevitably meant housing prices rose, helping home owners but hurting home buyers. Why? Because if I want a house and you want a house, and we are competing to buy that house, and we are both now able to come up with more money, then one of us is likely to be willing to pay that extra money to be the one who gets the house. This helped drive the housing price boom, which helped drive the illusion that housing prices could keep going up and up. My point is that the unsustainable housing prices weren't just due to Greenspan's < 2% interest rates in 2002-04 increasing the money supply, though those contributed.

It is crucial to understand these US-wide pressures on housing prices, because the unsustainability of prices, combined with unsafe leverage, is what did in the CDO financial instruments that were AAA rated. Historically, housing prices fluctuated differently in different regions of the country. So pooling mortgages across the country reduced risk. But in the current meltdown, housing prices everywhere were revealed to be unsustainable. It started with undocumented loans and subprime loans, but the most important facts about these loans:
0% down - 10% down; and low initial rates that later rose. And if it wasn't the primary loan on the house that left the homeowner with little equity, it was an added equity line of credit. As soon as ANY factor made mortgages harder to get, or potential buyers less able to afford large mortgages, housing prices were bound to drop. As soon as they dropped a little, some buyers owed more on their houses than the house was worth. It was rational to walk away. Or they had a loan with low initial rate, and the rate increased beyond what they could possibly pay, so they had no choice. Once this started happening, the snowballing was inevitable, given such a high percentage of households with little equity and/or rising-rate loans. We hit a bump that affected the whole country (it doesn't really matter what the initial bump was), and soon housing prices everywhere were snowballing downward, plus refinancing suddenly became more difficult as the lenders retrenched. So the number of homeowners with no incentive to stay, or unable to stay, skyrocketed. Often, these were homeowners who had survived the preceding few years with unsustainable borrowing practices, both on their home and on credit cards. Abruptly, lenders stopped extending additional credit, and these borrowers couldn't even maintain payments on the credit they had (many had been surviving by going farther and farther into debt). That this could happen nationwide, on the scale that it did, was inconceivable to the raters who assigned AAA rating to the top CDO tranche. (The top tranche got its money before lower tranches, so it seemed extremely unlikely that enough loans would default to affect it.) That AAA rating lulled some major investors to highly leverage those CDOs: some had their entire net worth exposed to a financial instrument they considered safe. Oops.

It wasn't just low-income people who hit negative equity -- it was across-the-board. And not just individual homeowners: there are partially-built subdivisions that were no longer going to make enough to repay the loans taken out to build them -- so the builders walked away.

Meanwhile, during the boom, people with existing homes pulled their increased equity out, rather than leaving it in. It isn't just the financial companies that exposed themselves to unnecessary risks; so did the average homeowner.

So, pick your poison: irresponsible financial companies with non-transparent securities hiding risk, mistaken AAA ratings, excessive leverage, government monetary policy and housing policy, unsustainable bubble in housing prices, people owning homes with little or no equity, historic levels of household debt, ten trillion dollars in federal debt -- it doesn't require any knowledge of economics to instinctively feel that one way or another something was eventually going to go very wrong. Plenty of blame for everyone.

I certainly agree with the basic observation, that blaming low-income people is .. absurd. And racist. However, that isn't actually what is being claimed. Rather, the claim being made is "unintentional consequences": that well-intended government actions (to help those people) may have exacerbated the situation. This is entirely possible, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Specifically, our government encouraged lending to low-income people, but failed to make sure the lending practices didn't put people into unsustainable situations. Community activists have been complaining about this fact for years. So, it isn't the CRA that is the culprit, but implementation of oversight, both in Congress and HUD, that failed us.