Yes, there are trade-offs, but you can get really great tires on all three. The Michelin CrossClimate2 tires are arguably the best traction tires, Consumer Reports estimates 95,000 miles of tread life in their testing (higher than basically anything else), and they got a 4/5 for rolling resistance on Consumer Reports' dynamometer testing.
There's a lot of tires that are poorly made and just bad tires. For example, one tire got 2/5 for rolling resistance, tested to 55,000 miles for tread, and 2/5 and 3/5 ratings for the traction categories like wet braking, snow traction, ice braking.
I'm not arguing that there aren't trade-offs, but tire companies have been working to make better tires that minimize the trade-offs and produce better tires on all three.
> The rule is “designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment.”
It sounds like the rule isn't exactly that strict. This (combined with the fact that all season tires aren't covered) presents a very low bar. But there are tires that are just garbage - they're bad at all three. It doesn't sound like this rule would impact good tires that have very long tread life and amazing traction. It sounds like it'd impact the tires that are a pile of garbage.
There's a difference between a tire that trades off a small portion of rolling resistance for traction and tire wear and tires that are poorly made and are trading off a huge amount of one or two of those categories because they're just bad tires.
It's worth pointing out the CrossClimate2 tires are all-seasons and exempt from the requirement. The 4/5 is specific to Consumer Reports all-season category - actual efficiency is going to be noticeably lower than the high efficiency tires they are talking about in the article.
But you're not wrong in general. There are a lot of garbage tires. And that's not even considering the intentionally "bad" tires like the knobby off-road treads that also have the side effect of massively increasing road noise and reducing engine life.
But like a lot of the California rules, they have carved out so many exceptions and have no real enforcement mechanism (the worst offending tires are being imported directly from China). So the reality is that there is not going to be a lot of juice for the squeeze.
The US military-industrial complex is the single largest institutional hydrocarbon consumer and greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. It would be pretty stupid for me to listen to the government's advice about how best we should preserve the environment.
China has been the largest ghg emitter for the last 20 years, and currently emits more than twice as much as the us. Gdp spent on defense is similar as a fraction of gdp (slightly more in the us). So realistically the Chinese military is by far a larger emitter of ghg than the us military.
So the issue is under regulation, yeah, agree on that point.
Sounds like the only reasonable solution to the problem you raise is that the part of our government that's responsible for defense should be put under the seperate part that is responsible for protecting our environment instead of being exempt. I can't see any other real way of resolving that issue can you?
Because government self regulation totally works and the resources used up and the size of the government has not grown by such magnitudes that would make the founding fathers rethink the whole idea of democracy?
My Mach-E came with CrossClimate2 tires and I am not impressed. I've accidentally lit up all 4 tires under hard acceleration on a dry road, despite 5000 lbs pushing them into the ground and some amount of traction control still active.
I have a lighter sports car making similar power, on Michelin Pilot 4S summer tires. That car just grips and goes with barely a squeal. Good summer tires also have far better wet performance than CC2s, and they provide better feedback.. you feel more planted and in control.
I am impressed overall with the CC2's ability to be a true all-rounder that is usable in snow, but it is still an exercise in trade-offs and it'll never be as good as any purpose-built tire is at its purpose.
> The Michelin CrossClimate2 tires are arguably the best traction tires,
In their class, but not in general.
They are all-season tires. They don't perform as well as winter tires in the winter, and they don't perform as well as summer tires in the summer.
They're also a terribly mushy tire. They feel like you're floating around on the road and wallowing through the turns. This doesn't matter in the slightest to someone commuting to work in their 15 year old Honda Accord with blown struts, but if you enjoy driving they're on the list of tires to avoid.
Everything is a tradeoff. Some tires do a better job of optimizing within their class, but the Michelin CC2 is assuredly not the best traction tires in general.
>They don't perform as well as winter tires in the winter, and
A lot of people don't live in climates where winter tires are even sold; particularly California, Texas, Florida, three of the most populous states. Many people in those states aren't even aware "winter tires" are even a product category. That's like complaining the Walmart in Anchorage, Alaska doesn't carry SPF 50 sunscreen.
Just as a geographic note: You can buy winter tires in California. The Sierra Nevada (snowy mountains) run down a sizable chunk of the state. California has even hosted the winter olympics.
You left the "and" but left out the critical part of my quote: They're not as good as summer-only tires in the summer.
> A lot of people don't live in climates where winter tires are even sold
The CrossClimate 2 tire we're talking about is an all-weather tire with the 3-peak snow designator. If you're trying to call me out for talking about winter tires in comparison to a tire designed for winter weather, I think you don't understand what we're talking about.
> Many people in those states aren't even aware "winter tires" are even a product category
Again, the CrossClimate 2 is a tire with a winter designation. California also has a lot of snowy locations.
> That's like complaining the Walmart in Anchorage, Alaska doesn't carry SPF 50 sunscreen.
Not only do stores in Anchorage carry SPF 50, but you're going to need it in the summer. When the sun is out for 20 hours a day, it adds up.
Have any of yall given up on “nice tires” due to constant nail / screw punctures and subsequent loss within a very low mileage count?
I believe I spent $1200 on my last set only to lose two of them in the first six months due to road debris. Perhaps this is down stream of living in a boom state with constant construction but I’m nearly replacing cracked windshields and at least partial tires annually as of late.
> ... can get really great tires on all three. The Michelin CrossClimate2 tires are arguably the best traction tires, Consumer Reports estimates 95,000 miles of tread life in their testing (higher than basically anything else), and they got a 4/5 for rolling resistance on Consumer Reports' dynamometer testing.
That is incredible. My front ones are toast after only 15 000 miles / 25 000 km ( Continental Sport Contact 3 / N0 rating) and two years. 95 000 miles and I'd need to change them not because of wear but because they'd be legally too old.
Indeed, I put a full set of CrossClimate2 on my German car and the two back tires were completely toast within 24 months and ~15k Km (on Canada). After that I decided to start using proper summer and winter tires.
Artificial Analysis shows Grok 4.6 taking $1,068 to run their suite while Gemini 3.7 Flash takes $485. So it looks like Gemini 3.7 Flash is less than half the price in the real world.
Per-token cost isn't a great metric given that some use way more tokens than others.
Xylitol is really cool that way. The bacteria waste energy trying to convert it to a form they can use, but they just end up with at a dead end with xylitol-5-phosphate. Once they realize that they need to get rid of it, they convert it back to xylitol (so it can cross the membrane easier and probably to keep the phosphate). Of course, that means the xylitol is back to fool some other nearby bacteria into wasting its energy.
They end up wasting their energy on work that won't help them reproduce and needing to waste more energy getting rid of it.
I swish xylitol crystal after each meal for five minutes and then spit out. I no longer have plague on my lower bottom teeth, a problem area for most people. I like the fresh minty feel afterward as well. Wish I had learn about this earlier.
Sounds interesting, indeed. Just dug up this review [1] that claims there were no adverse effects from any of the interventions, and that after 2.5 to 3 years of use, a fluoride toothpaste containing 10% xylitol may reduce caries by 13% when compared to a fluoride-only toothpaste.
I wonder how well bacteria will adapt long term in your mouth to Xylitol exposure through bubble gum based adminstration.
[1] Xylitol-containing products for preventing dental caries in children and adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2015, Issue 3. Art. No.: CD010743. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD010743.pub2.
Couldnt find any (relatively recent) studies that looked at bacteria over multiple years, but some earlier ones (1&2), or shorter period ones(3), that touch on it (aswell as caries, as that is the prevalent subject)
Not just gut flora. High levels of circulating xylitol (and erythritol for that matter) have been shown in both mouse models and humans to be associated with increased platelet reactivity and elevated 3-year risk of major cardiovascular events.
But we're talking significant levels of xylitol/erythritol, such as from keto-friendly ice cream and drinks, not the modest levels from chewing gum, and the dental benefits are well established.
There's also other options than brutally punitive financial penalties or holding execs personally responsible.
For example, if a data center is illegally running gas turbines, the penalty could be that the data center must be shut down for 3 years and no equipment can be removed from the data center during that time.
With financial penalties, there's always calculus on whether the penalty is high enough to deter the action. But the only reason they'd want to, for example, use illegal power generators at a data center is to run the data center. Losing access to 100% of the value of that data center for 3 years would make the calculus easy: it wouldn't be worth it for the companies. They'd lose the entire reason for doing it and so much of the capital investment in equipment as it depreciated during those 3 years.
With AI companies believing the market is worth trillions, it's hard to imagine a financial penalty high enough to deter illegal actions. It might need to be in the hundreds of billions - a level which they probably can't pay given their current resources and which governments wouldn't levy. Not that they'll essentially confiscate a data center and its hardware for multiple years as a penalty either.
I agree with almost everything you wrote, but... confiscation and inability to operate at a location (as you suggest as a penalty) still ultimately boils down to a financial penalty for an organisation. It feels especially severe in this case (law breaking by a data center operator) because of the high cost and high depreciation rate of GPUs and supporting hardware.
If you take a different field of business, you can still imagine an organisation making the calculation that operation for a period of time --before their illegality was discovered and then acted upon by the authorities-- would still be worthwhile even if confiscation was the end result. (In some odd cases, this is close to the actual business model.)
If you want to deter hyper-rich companies, you could shift to fining them a meaningful percentage of their annual turnover or even their market capitalisation.
That's an unusually low electric rate for the US - way below the lowest state average which is Idaho at 12.4 cents. It's certainly possible that you are getting 7.5 cents including delivery, but I've had friends say that they're "getting 13 cents per kWh" here in Massachusetts, but that's just the supply rate and the delivery is another ~18 cents.
There are parts of states like Grant County Washington that have cheap hydro power, but it's very rare for power to be that cheap in the US. Even if this applies to you, it won't apply to the vast majority of people on here who will have electric rates 2-4x higher.
Average electric rates by region:
New England 28.1 cents
Mid Atlantic 25.1 cents
East North Central 20.8 cents
West North Central 14.8 cents
South Atlantic 16.1 cents
East South Central 15.5 cents
Mountain 14.6 cents
Pacific Contiguous 26.1 cents
Pacific Noncontiguous 42.1 cents
This is a bit misleading, because it's combining the 50 cents/kWh from California with 15ish cents/kWh in Oregon and Washington. Seattle City Light, for example, charges 13.38 cents/kWh on flat rate pricing, and far less with time-of-use billing (8 cents/kWh on off-peak).
I'm actually getting 11 cents in winter, 13 in summer, but my utility company is a co-op. Average for my state is I think 19 cents.
I think you can get down to around 8 if you are signed up for an interruptible load, or a dedicated off peak load, depending on the company, but yeah, standard rates aren't that low.
If you run off solar with battery backup, you can achieve lower than those rates! Look at Time of Use rates. The super off peak rates instantly become the max price point once you pair TOU with Solar + battery.
A lot of people quoting low rates are also just referring to their off-peak rate. This is pretty common in EV discussions. It's not exactly a fair argument there, either, because the flip side of having an off-peak rate is that the on-peak rate is usually quite a lot higher. So the true effective rate is a bit higher, somewhere in the middle depending on usage pattern.
My point is that the tradeoff to get off-peak pricing is that on-peak is way, way more expensive. So you can charge the EV off-peak to maximize the savings, but everything else you do during on-peak time costs way more.
Using myself as an example:
I adjust my A/C to run outside of 5pm-9pm (peak) if at all possible, we try to avoid pointless high-draw usage during that same window, and both of our EVs hold off charging until after 9pm.
My rate from 5pm-9pm is 0.43/kWh. My rate after 9pm is 0.09/kWh. The flat rate alternative, if I did not want to worry about time of day, would be 0.21/kWh. These prices are all-in, including transmission and distribution/whatever.
It would be dishonest to say that my EVs only cost me 0.09/kWh to operate, which on it's face is a claim to paying over 50% less. In reality, time of day pricing typically saves me somewhere between 10% and 15% in an average month compared with flat rate.
If you leave the EV charging out of your consumption, does a time of day plan still save you money on the remaining usage? Or does it cost you? If it saves you money, then it would make sense to be on a ToD plan regardless of EV charging. Which means it makes sense to consider your additional EV draw as costing the marginal off-peak rate. Essentially the EV load has the valuable property of being dispatchable.
You can do the same thought experiment with say a dehumidifier in your basement. It can easily be off during peak usage and still accomplish its job, so its cost of electricity is also the marginal off-peak rate.
> If you leave the EV charging out of your consumption, does a time of day plan still save you money on the remaining usage? Or does it cost you?
It would cost me more (modestly so, less than 10%) to be on TOD without the EVs. This will vary by customer, of course, and I expect that the power company designs TOD to be a wash for the average customer. They even guarantee it won't be more than 10% more expensive over the first year or they will refund the difference.
Then yes I'd agree with you, it doesn't make sense to describe your EV charging as costing $0.09/kWh since you're presumably only on the slightly more expensive ToD plan due to the EV.
Personally I'd love to have a ToD plan, especially with the rate structure you've laid out - break even seems to be using less than 1/3 of your daily electricity usage during the on-peak hours, which is only 1/6 of the day? I've got a bunch of fixed loads (computers) plus ones that tend to run overnight anyway (dishwasher, dryer, etc).
FWIW I'd think the pricing of the ToD plan versus the fixed rate plan has more to do with how the power company themselves has to buy power and model/hedge against demand at various parts of the day, rather than simply trying to make the costs even for the consumer.
> FWIW I'd think the pricing of the ToD plan versus the fixed rate plan has more to do with how the power company themselves has to buy power and model/hedge against demand at various parts of the day, rather than simply trying to make the costs even for the consumer.
I agree, my single point of evidence to support my theory is that the power company advertises the TOD plan by presenting an average customer with their breakdown of usage throughout a typical day, and then itemizes how it would look with flat-rate versus TOD. The resulting figure is within a few pennies. I figure that is not accidental, but I could be wrong and it is entirely coincidence.
They might just not want to encourage people to switch too hard, lest people blindly sign up for it thinking big savings, their bills spike up, and the poco gets a huge customer service problem. Instead they show just a few pennies savings, and lure only the proactive type of people whose start thinking "... and I could save even more by adjusting my usage" ? Just a thought.
To me (EU) that seems like a pretty generous limit. A normal house connection here is limited to 8kW single phase or 17kW for a 3 phase connection. You can get more, but that is very uncommon and gets expensive quickly
Specifying USD is indeed often a service usually offered by people born elsewhere for people born elsewhere. Americans seem rarely know about these mysterious places, where bills can come in all sorts of funny sizes and colours. (kind of joking)
Sorry for the confusion. It's not opensource. For first few installs, we are offering free 3 months and free consulting service to setup the tool end to end at your org. Post that pricing will be based on AI tokens consumption with some standard monthly pricing (we are also exploring the pricing sweet spot)
I am happy to get connected over email venkat@deepsql.ai and share more details on pricing and deployment help.
But to run the entire benchmark it cost $727 with Gemini 3.6 Flash and $925 with GLM-5.2, $198 (21.4%) less. I tend to look at the cost to run the whole index rather than the weighted average cost per task.
LMArena's "code" leaderboard is really skewed since it's a front-end JS code and design leaderboard. It generates a demo app with two models and then asks "do you prefer A or B". People can look at the code, but most of the time it's just going to be which one looks nicer.
Models that people like the design aesthetic of (Claude, GLM) tend to do better in LMArena than they do on other benchmarks. Design matters, but you look at a model like GPT-5.5 and it's behind Kimi K2.6, Sonnet 4.6, Qwen3.7 Max, and GLM-5.1 on LMArena's code leaderboard. Then you look at benchmarks like DeepSWE and GPT-5.5 blows them out of the water with only Fable and GPT-5.6 beating it.
I'm not saying that the LMArena leaderboard isn't useful, but I'm not sure how much weight I'd give it as a "code" leaderboard. I think often times it's a design comparison of simple front-end React apps rather than a coding comparison. GLM-5.2 is a very good model, but when you look at DeepSWE or Terminal-Bench v2, GPT-5.5 is well ahead.
It also depends on how many tokens it needs to burn through to accomplish something.
At this point, I always look at things like Artificial Analysis' total cost to run their tests. It'll take into consideration the cost of tokens, how many tokens it burns through, and how effectively it uses caching (and the price of that caching).
If a model "costs the same" but its reasoning ends up going through a ton more tokens, it doesn't really cost the same in real world usage.
Precisely. GLM 5.2 Thinking is pretty damn good - but it regularly does something nonsensical. Or even spits out what looks like a fragment of its memory cache. Or returns a bunch of Chinese.
I find myself having to resubmit a query very often...so it being a third of the cost of other AIs isn't really relevant.
When OnePlus started, they were considerably cheaper than flagship phones from others. At $299, the OnePlus One was a ton less than the $650 you'd pay for an iPhone 6 or Galaxy S5. You were getting a 95% flagship phone at half the price. You could get a OnePlus One with the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon or you could get a Samsung with 30% the performance and a 640x480 low-res display for the same price.
I feel like the "something new" was price. Over time, that price kept creeping up. Yes, it went from being a 95% flagship to being a 100% flagship, but it also went from being half price to full price.
It was also cool that it used Cyanogenmod which meant you got a community OS that actually got updates, but over time other manufacturers started offering updates for their phones (rather than abandoning them soon after manufacturing). And that was something new other than price. But I think the big thing was that it was a half-price phone when it launched. In 2014, it was just such an amazing deal. Today, it's the same price as Samsung phones.
There's a lot of tires that are poorly made and just bad tires. For example, one tire got 2/5 for rolling resistance, tested to 55,000 miles for tread, and 2/5 and 3/5 ratings for the traction categories like wet braking, snow traction, ice braking.
I'm not arguing that there aren't trade-offs, but tire companies have been working to make better tires that minimize the trade-offs and produce better tires on all three.
> The rule is “designed to ensure that replacement tires sold in the state are at least as energy efficient, on average, as tires sold in the state as original equipment.”
It sounds like the rule isn't exactly that strict. This (combined with the fact that all season tires aren't covered) presents a very low bar. But there are tires that are just garbage - they're bad at all three. It doesn't sound like this rule would impact good tires that have very long tread life and amazing traction. It sounds like it'd impact the tires that are a pile of garbage.
There's a difference between a tire that trades off a small portion of rolling resistance for traction and tire wear and tires that are poorly made and are trading off a huge amount of one or two of those categories because they're just bad tires.
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