Not great framing because nobody made electric vehicles worse, they started off at a certain level of performance and then they'll just improve from there.

Now you could say well we made snow plowing worse, and of course in this specific example you'd be right, but you'd be ignoring longer time horizons and not really comparing or accounting for the impact of negative externalities.

An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window. You wouldn't say "things are worse now!", you'd recognize that you're making a change which is better over the long term.

> An easy way to think about it is if you uninstalled an existing window and had tarp on it for a few days while you installed a more energy efficient window.

A more apt analogy would be if the new window was not even invented yet.

Ok we'll use gas trucks forever and never change or improve or invent anything new.

????

Or we can just electrify applications that currently make sense and work from there as the technology improves.

Instead of just being argumentative you should read my original post and the post I responded to.

Yeah, I don't understand this pattern of comment-making on the internet. For whatever reason, your comment was downvoted slightly so then you got targeted by people over and over again, even in subsequent replies, with the least generous interpretation of every comment made. I suspect your initial comment also triggered a reaction in saying "it's not a big deal", to which a bunch of people thought, "Oh yeah, well it's a real big deal actually!" despite this being a single article about a very specific situation in NYC, something HN readers will forget about in less than two weeks.

I do not see the point in downvotes on this site. It seems like any slightly political article/discussion results in this sort of behavior.

Sorry for the meta comment.

HN's guidelines are to downvote if something doesn't add to the discussion.

I think in this case it's fine to argue something "is not a big deal" but I think you have got to add more to the discussion than "technology always gets better".

In that case, I'm not sure your comment added much to the discussion either. But the OP generically asked what the solution was, and the generic solution as far as I can tell is the long march of progressively better technology. It's very clear that the tech will continue to improve and is only in its infancy. Had the OP asked something like "what specific improvements can we expect to see in battery weight reduction and charging speeds so that this won't be an issue in the future" I probably wouldn't have replied because I don't know the specifics.

It's fine if you think my comment is low-quality or something, but cherry-picking mine to disagree with and then to go off on an argumentative tangent with poorly formed discussion points isn't really the answer either. It's not a big deal, this is all for fun and everything, but I'm not sure what exactly you were trying to get out of my original comment.

A more apt analogy would be if you removed the existing window without having ordered a new one or found a contractor to install it.

That's not a good analogy because in this case the snow plows still plow so some snow is still removed. To use your analogy then they would have sold existing plow-capable trucks and not had any to plow, but that wasn't the case.

The tarp is partially effective, just like the electric trucks.

Yes, partially effective until the new energy efficient window is installed. Stop gap measure. Transition period. Etc.

I apologize if that wasn't extremely obvious from what I already wrote.

No need to apologize.

The concern here is that the stopgap measure (the tarp/electric trucks) are implemented too early. The superior replacement window does not yet exist. There is no need to remove the older window and deal with a hole in the side of your house for half a year while you wait for new windows to hit the market.