Piketty's book (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) is most definitely not a fad. It is a result of serious research into historical economic data and anyone intellectually honest ought take it seriously. As anything in the social science of economics, it is subject to debate, but to call it a 'fad' is odd, to put it mildly.
I think it's popularity among layfolk, like myself, was a fad. I'd be incredibly surprised if it's flying off the shelves now like it was right after release.
But popularity doesn't validate or invalidate its content.
In our current understanding of the world (quantum mechanics), the world is inherently probabilistic ("random", not deterministic) in the microscopic realm. There are differing opinions among physicists whether or not there could be a more fundamental layer of reality beyond this, and if so, whether it would be deterministic. Notably it could be said the mainstream view is that reality is not deterministic.
If you were shown a screen, told it consists of individual pixels, but no matter what microscope you grab you can't discern those pixels, does that screen consist of pixels or is it a continuous canvas?
That's kind of where physics is at, no? Until you succeed in building an apparatus that lets you see individual pixels, it's a continuous canvas for all intents & purposes.
Some discrete & deterministic layer underneath it all is a more elegant possibility imho. Might suit people who prefer "nature at its deepest level is math" worldview. But why would reality 'bother' to fit into that shoe? It just is. Whatever that is. Discrete or continuous, deterministic or probabilistic.
I think there are good epistemological reasons to at least consider the fact that this is not what quantum mechanics is about. There seem to be ways you could kind of try to make what you are talking about work, but they are incomplete and pretty incondite and have, at any rate and to the extent that I understand them, some pretty unappealing philosophical characteristics.
The real meaning of the commutation relation is not that there is a fundamental _relation_ between sets of observables but, I would argue, that at a deep level pairs of non-commuting observables like x and p, share a single ontological substance which we can view partially as either position or velocity depending on how we arrange our measuring apparatus.
The second most popular view is that the universe branches deterministically, which means there will be some observers in a very small percentage of branches who observe seemingly miraculous events (very low probability). Their notion of probability would be different from ours.
I mean, who drives 1200km in day anyway? But it is doable with todays EVs, many of which have ranges of around 500km or more, and only need a couple of hours of charging to drive 1200km (after starting with full capacity), during breaks you would mostly take anyways. Teslas, VW's ID.4, Hyundai's Kona electric and many more come to mind.
Cheers for Toyota's research, though.
In the US, long drives aren’t crazy. This year I’ve done 4 single day drives in excess of 1400km. The furthest I’ve ever driven without stopping was 2500km, but that was with 4 drivers, and I guess a “day” isn’t quite right bc it took us like 27hrs.
750 miles are still fairly rare, as a fraction of all road trips. We'll hear from everybody who does it in this thread, of course, but on average it's definitely an edge case.
However, it doesn't matter, I could do 750 miles a day in my Model 3 just as easily as my gas car. It would be more comfortable in the Tesla, too.
I've driven lots of cars and nothing beats the comfort of a premium German station wagon such as a Mercedes E class for long trips followed by Volvo ones.
A model Y or 3 are in a very different tier of cars.
Everyone likes Volvo, but I continue to find them very underwhelming. Mercedes is good, but they have really fallen behind the other German manufacturers in many ways.
A Model 3 is decidedly in the middle, I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.
But before I'd take a Mercedes E class or any other station wagon, I'd take an F150 King Ranch ;-). Truly that is the land yacht of the modern era. Inefficient, expensive, but there aren't too many cars more spacious or soft for cruising down the highway. In the US, obv.
> I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.
That's all stuff that Mercedes cars have since decades?
The first radar-based dynamic cruise control was implemented on the 1999 W-220 S class. Mercedes cars had lane centering and even automatic lane changing since 2013.
Even today Mercedes is the first and only manufacturer to offer level 3 automatic self driving.
There's lots of things that Mercedes has been doing wrong in years (design wise especially, but engine choices on AMG models have also been questionable lately) but the safety and comfort of their premium cars (E class and upwards) is still at the top end of the industry.
I've driven 1600km/1000mi in a day multiple times. I don't find driving that far in one day fun but sometimes it's a better choice than dealing with hotel rooms, especially with pets.
Lot's of people all the time? Perhaps you live in a small country or have all your important people quite close to you if these numbers don't seem reasonable. I must make 1-2 road trips like this a year to attend family events, weddings, funerals, etc. It's not fun to drive 12 hours straight, but it's doable, especially with 2 drivers.
I live in North Dakota, so if I want to get anywhere I usually drive. I did Fargo to Bozeman by myself last year. Have driven Fargo to Yellowstone in a day. Fargo to Seattle in 2 days with another driver. Chicago is a 9 hour drive. Denver is 13 hours. Long road trips are a regular part of life when you live in the middle of nowhere.
