As far as I know the mattress store thing is just a conspiracy but it makes sense because the price is somewhat arbitrary.

So in theory a mattress store could buy products for $200 and sell them for $1000. This would allow them to take in a lot of profits and have a solid paper trail.

The same is true for restaurants since they could overcharge for meals and it would look legitimate.

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Yes, and that's my point.

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Services and perishable goods too. Basically anything where you can say you sold a lot more than you actually sold and it’s difficult for anybody to prove you didn’t. It’s why Walt had a car wash in Breaking Bad.

It's closer to a formula than it is to trial and error. There are mathematical methods to estimating square roots, and calculators do not need infinite precision. They iterate over a formula that gets more precise the more you apply it, looking for the desired precision, and then they return the result.

It's easy when you can do logarithms (and multiplications and exponentials) to high precision, which is quite easy in itself. I think this is how Alpha does it.

This was not as obvious a few years ago (well, more like 10 or 15 now), most people simply used hardware computations for floating point numbers, which limits precision. Once you implement floating point numbers in software, which started to make sense at some point, you can simply choose a higher precision.

Well it’s not 72,828 multiplications, it’s something like thirty multiplications. If 2838393 is N, you first need to calculate N^2 , then N^4 as the previous result squared, then N^8 as N^4 squared etc. and then just multiply some of those power-of-two results to combine them into the required final power. For example, if you wanted to calculate 3^9, you don’t need to make 9 multiplications. You calculate 3^2, 3^4 and 3^8 (three multiplications), and then multiply 3^8 by 3 to get 3^9 (fourth multiplication).

> not everyone has access to charging infra at destinations

So there is a big chance you won't have access to battery swapping station also, since it would require even more powerful infrastructure. If there is no electricity there will be no battery swapping station. Or maybe you just want to buy multiple batteries and carry them with you?

> swappable batteries would also radically lower vehicle and battery fabrication costs

How so? Well, maybe if cars were sold without batteries that would of course make sense, but then you'd pay for the batteries anyway at swapping stations. I'd say that it would increase the overall cost, since you'd need more batteries than cars to make sure there is always one waiting for you at the station. But that's just guess game now.

> what happens when the battery’s lifespan is breached and capacity craters.

You go to the mechanic and replace the battery, like any other part of a car that goes faulty :).

Right now, most EV car consumers have access to charging infrastructure and are not doing very long trips all the time. Those who do, just buy petrol cars simply because they are much more convenient for those uses. If the market of home-charged electric cars saturates, then it's time to compete with ICE cars on those long distances. We are not there yet. And we may never get there, who knows? I know that if I were to buy a new car now, I'd go for electric regardless if I could swap my battery or not. It's just that they are expensive now due to high demand.

A gas engine will fail well before a car lithium battery. Do you often complain about the difficulties of replacing an engine?

I'm sure they have types of authentication not in widespread public use. That's sort of a cool password.

I have 300,000 km and no degradation. Even if you have a car that has some degradation, the battery still works. You have been brainwashed. Batteries generally outlast the vehicle. You're wrong.

Also, the fact that they can use batteries after the vehicle is dead is true. This has nothing to do with the fact that the batteries outlast the vehicle.

Also, by using floating point numbers, you can make the calculations a lot faster by sacrificing precision. Instead of storing 2838393^1024 (which is a huge number) you only store the most significant digits and how many digits it has.

The term "battery" originates as a term for "a collection". In war, a collection of cannons and artillery at a fortress error have been called a battery. In terms of power storage, a battery is a collection of cells. Your 12V lead-acid battery in your average car is a battery of six cells.

We have, over time, changed the meaning from a "collection of cells" to "anything that generates electricity". Thus, an AA, which is itself a single cell, has been referred to as a "battery" for many decades.

2838393^(72829) is 72,828 multiplications resulting in a number with 469,965 digits. A 64-bit processor can't directly work with numbers larger than 20 digits, which means it'll have to perform multiple operations for a single multiplication.

All in all, it's not enough that modern computers are really fast, if it just tried to brute-force the calculation it'd still take a lot of time.

I think op means 'passports' - they don't get passwords any cooler than anyone else afaik

So it won't last with the full capacity, but after about 10 to 12 years, the average lifespan of a car, the batteries will still have about 70% capacity left. The batteries themselves are currently estimated to have a 15 to 20 lifespan, hence them "outlasting" the car. In fact, a major recycling path for these batteries once the car is retired is to be used in large scale power storage systems! Or the batteries can be recycled of their lithium and become new batteries.

First, computers don't really care about large numbers. For us doing maths on small numbers is easier while computing big numbers requires keeping some stuff in your head or writing it down, which slows the whole process. For computers it's equally easy as long as the number fits into a specific portion of memory i.e. does not exceed some very large number.

Second, modern software is very advanced. Back in the day we had much weaker computers, so we had to do all sorts of math tricks to get a solution that is both fast and precise. Nowdays the pressure to come up with new cool math is not as high, but known stuff still gets used to make computations faster.

Yeah I couldn't drink Ribena for about 5 years after my little sister vomited up a blackcurrent squash/sour milk hybrid all over our sofa and it stank of it for about a month.

The mattress store for money laundering is more an urban legend 0r a conspiracy than an actual fact.

There are two things that make for a good money laundering front business: high usage of cash and high but opaque profit margins. You want to be able to increase your margins to be able to run more cash through the business, but also not be obviously disjointed from a market.

That's why a laundromat is good (tough to track the inputs of cost, not a fixed market for laundromat services, cash heavy), gas stations are bad (easy to see if you are out of market, gas is a commodity), and things like art or "consulting" are the best.

This is simply not true. In fact it's entirely incorrect and false.

All rechargeable batteries have a certain amount of charge cycles before they absolutely have to be replaced because they either can't hold a charge as long or as much of a charge or both.

In fact there is an entire industry developing right now where batteries are first used in EVs because they demand the most cycles and intensity of power delivery. Then those batteries are recycled into home and commercial solar power storage. Eventually they will be harvested for parts and entirely recycled to be remade back into other batteries or other things

https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/07/mattress-firm-money-laundering/

Fraud yes laundering not really it seems

I assume so they can hide the money under the many mattresses.

The mattress stores thing as far as I can tell is basically a meme born out of the internet wondering why every town has 4 of the same mattress store within a few blocks of each other

you made highly erroneous assumptions.

the claim of 10-20x efficiency for chargers vs swappers is intriguing

a swap station is bulkier and more expensive to build but at the same time is capable of continuously charging more batteries in parallel and testing all the batteries at the same time

additionally if you have five cars queueing for one 5min swap that’s 20min for the last car; if you have five cars queueing for four fast chargers, even if that fast charge is 10min, average wait time per vehicle is longer and that assumes full high speed delivery of fast charge which is dependent on multiple factors

this latter phenomenon is parallel to the walk left-stand right concept commonly used in escalators except statistically speaking standing on both sides moves everyone faster, both in teens of average speed and throughput and increases escalator reliability since the steps aren’t unevenly worn

the final bullet point is a good one, and there are multiple possible answers but a reasonable one is that access to the battery network is subscription based as in you pay a monthly fee for the batteries

additionally against your final point: swappable batteries aren’t structural but the frame around them most assuredly is, just like how the battery box at least should be structural but the batteries themselves cannot be for safety reasons