He does also own holiday homes and farms but for the most part he doesn't go in for the typical billionaire lifestyle. On the surface it seems less awful than Musk or Zuckerberg but to hoard that kind of wealth while people suffer is unethical. He may have pledged to give away his wealth, but now he's giving it to his children to give away. What's stopped him from giving it away for the last 30 years?
Excessive consumption isn't really the main problem with billionaires. It's the money they don't spend on consumption which is worst. The money spent on the pursuit of more money, buying up zero-sum goods that shouldn't even be for sale, like political power.
From my reading, GP is saying that, if one problem is the main one, it is the problem of billionaires spending money on not-consumption. There was no praise for "excessive consumption".
He famously drives himself to work every day in a battered old car because he doesn't see the point in spending money where he can avoid it, so I'm sure he's timed it.
They are designed for drastically shorter flight times. Of the airframes I am aware of that are actually flying right now (pipistrel and the beaver) both of them have a range of approximately 1/5 that of the same airframe with a gas engine.
The Pipistrel is probably the best example since it is actually available for sale in both ICE and electric. The ICE version of the airframe has 5.5 hours of cruise fuel good for 650 NM. The electric version has a payload that is 60% less, a ceiling of 12k feet compared to 18k feet, and an endurance of 56 minutes.
Basically, they are sacrificing range and payload. It isn't that electric planes can't possibly fly, its that ICE powered planes have a pretty hard to overcome advantage until battery power density increases by an order of magnitude. There are already mass market brushless motors that could replace most aircraft engines at a lower weight.
The problem is that gasoline holds 30x or more energy than a battery by weight. It doesn't matter if I can get replace 100 lbs of ICE engine with 1 lb of electric engine, because the real issue is that I would need a literal ton of batteries to replace less than 100 lbs of gas.
The existing electric planes are designed to be trainers. They are primarily for takeoff and landing and flying in the pattern at an airport. Less than 1-hour endurance, and useful load that can barely accommodate two people.
Not to be that guy but if your community gets cut off from the Internet in an economic collapse maybe audiobooks of public domain works are not super important
Just like in the movie Book of Eli [1] I will keep everyone's MP3 players charged. They can also come over and listen to solar powered Bluetooth speakers and their music, books, whatever. Maybe some children's books for the kiddos to keep some level of normalcy. This may be even more important should we go from economic collapse to societal collapse.
I appreciate you being that guy as I am often also that guy. We should form a club.
