The clever design choices Tesla made to make the Cybertruck cheap to make.
At $39 000, the Tesla Cybertruck will be sold at the same price as Tesla Model 3, a considerably smaller car. It is also extremely competitive price wise against traditional internal combustion engine trucks, which is something I think surprised a lot of people.
But is it actually cheap?
Electric cars will usually be more expensive that internal combustion engine cars because batteries are really expensive to make. That is the bulk of the cost of EVs. However, in the long run an EV will often be cheaper because electricity is significantly cheaper than gasoline and EVs require much less maintenance.
Analyzing GDP, unionization, culture and many other properties of different countries using the Julia programming language.
Got the basics of data-analysis down and want to move a bit further? If you are a complete beginner, I advice you to look at my earlier stories on data analysis and plotting in Julia:
- Plotting and Graph Terminology — What is a data frame or a data series?
- Ditch Excel and Use Julia Data Frames — Recreating common operations used in a spreadsheet using Julia. Loading data, inspecting the data and grouping it.
- Slicing and Dicing Pizza Data with Julia and Gadfly — Introduction to Julia Data Frames by playing around with pizza data and plotting it.
If you…
Are Nordic countries collectivist or individualistic? If they are individualistic, how is that individualism different from American individualism?
American individualism is well known throughout the world, and one may point to Asian collectivism as its opposite. One example that always comes to my mind is from an experiment run by psychologist Richard Nisbett. He compared American and Asian children by having them look at a fish tank and describe what they saw.
American children tended to focus on the biggest fish and what it was doing. The focus was on the one doing something. Japanese and Chinese children in contrast would instead explain the ecosystem. …
In this imaginary Hollywood blockbuster Americans don’t wake up to a Alien Invasion but a transformation to a Nordic country?
How on Earth did this transformation happen? We don’t really know, but I am sure Hollywood could figure out a way this would happen, with their deep expertise in unrealistic superhero backstories.
Here our protagonists Joe and Kaitlyn are not waking up with new cool superhero names and powers. Instead they are waking up as Bjørn and Siri, in this odd new Nordic reality.
How will our American heroes cope with this new Nordic reality? What has changed?
Dude, Where is My Car!?
Joe cannot find his car. The garage, driveway and everything are gone! Even the road outside the house is gone.
It is…
The story they don’t want to tell you about how Nordic countries got prosperous.
Here is the sugar coated version they do want to tell you: In the early 1900s free wheeling capitalism unleashed the creative spirits of free enterprise and made the Nordic economies blossom. It was all good, until at some point in the 1970s reckless socialists took over, wasted all the money and tanked the economy. It sucked but the sane pro-market people got back in charge, deregulated and got everything running smoothly again.
Or at least that is what free market think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and Ludwig von Mises Institute would like you to think.
Unstructured notes and observations about corporate democracy in Norway, meaning the laws and regulations meant to give employees a say in how companies are run.
Nordic social democracy is a lot more than just free health care, college and high taxes. In this story I am jotting down random notes from my research into different aspects of Norwegian corporate democracy.
I will use the following sources:
- History of Corporate Democracy in Norway — Report produced by FAFO, a research institute for social science founded by the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO).
- Corporate Democracy — by Store Norske Leksikon, which is a Norwegian online encyclopedia owned and operated by the major educational institutions in Norway, which provide the content.
- Lovdata — Norwegian laws online.
- Corporate…
Notes on how taxes, welfare services and GDP developed in the postwar years.
When Social Democrats began taking power in Nordic countries how did spending and economic growth get affected? This is what we will look at in this story.
GDP Growth
Comparing GDP growth between countries is quite hard. You could convert the GDP for every country to dollars for each year. But then you will get unnatural fluctuations based fluctuations in currency exchange rates. For this reason I have taken GDP values in local currency for each year and plotted GDP development for each country relative to this.
Thus the GDP for every country is set to 100 in 1960. Thus this graph…
As described by former Norwegian prime minister Odvar Nordli.
Back in 1974, the social democratic prime minister of Norway, Odvar Nordli saw a need to explain the difference between the type of socialism found in the Soviet Union and the democratic socialism championed by social democrats such as him. Today in the English language media there is a lot of confusion about what democratic socialism and what role it played in the development of Nordic social democracies.
Thus here I have chosen to give an English translation of Odvar Nordli’s words on democratic socialism. The original Norwegian article can be found here: Arbeiderpartiet i dag og i morgen.
Read…
Former social democratic prime minster Olof Palme, explains in his own words, why he is a democratic socialist.
Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK both called themselves democratic socialists, and used Nordic countries as a source of inspiration. American conservatives and libertarians loudly opposed this comparison, insisting that Nordic social democrats are not democratic socialists. That can certainly be debated today, but as late as 1982, they most certainly were. Social democrat and democratic socialist were one and the same thing, as it had been since the concept of social democracy arose in the 1800s as a reaction to Marxism. Democratic socialists built the Nordic model.
Related stories:
The involvement of government in the industrialization of Sweden.
This is parts of my note taking and research into the role of the state in industrialization of Nordic countries.
Here are some previously treated countries:
General Observations about Sweden
Jumping around in different material written about Swedish industrialization and comparing to how Norway and Finland industrialized there are some really start differences
Sweden had an insane number of geniuses inventing all sorts of stuff in the late 1800s laying the foundation for lots of big multinational companies.
- Gustaf de Laval — seems like a sort of Swedish version of Edison. …
Erik Engheim
Geek dad, living in Oslo, Norway with passion for UX, Julia programming, science, teaching, reading and writing.
