In the case of the Chevy Volt, you just drive using the 1.4l gas engine. It has a 350 mile range, which is more than my fully gas powered Mazda 3 by 50 miles.
My only question with the Volt is how old can gasoline be in the tank? If I only commute back and forth to work and charge every night, it will be a long time between gas uses.
Excellent reply, however, how can a utility company give me a cheaper rate for my electric car if I'm charging it from home using the existing electrical infrastructure? This is the only way I'd consider an electric car--if I can plug it in alongside my cordless electric lawnmower.
And for driving enthusiasts like me, this is the way to win us over. Electric motors have the insane potential of making 500+ hp cars that cost 6-figures look stupid, for the price of a family car today. I imagine as EVs start catching on, government will have to start making companies tone down the power bands. There are enough bad drivers already...no need to put a powerful car at the fingertips of the everyday driver!
Another thing that will take time is for engineers to realize they are not constrained to the shape of current cars. They are free to make new designs (which will take forever to catch on) because car shapes now are mostly functional to fit around the internal motor and moving parts.
Can we drop the public transportation dream? It doesn't work in most of America because of geography and the fact our towns aren't based around a town center like in Germany and England (two places I've lived where I LOVED public transportation, but could never be implemeted in Texas).
I have a 15 mile commute. My company is one of two on this road on the outskirts of downtown. There are no bus routes, not trains, shuttles...nothing. At best, I could ride a train into the town center (by driving 20 miles out of my way to the one commuter train stop), then take a taxi to work....every day..... Or I could just drive my car into my work's parking garage and be at my desk working an hour before I would be using the above model.
If you are in the market for a new car anyway, you can't include the total cost of a Chevy Volt (or whatever) in your cost analysis. You can only include the amount that the Volt is MORE than a non-electric car you might have purchased anway. With rebates, a Volt is 32k. A Prius will run you about $25k. That's $7k difference, not the same as the cost of two Priuses.
Isn't your analysis flawed? You compare a gallon of gas to unit of electricity, but you make no mention how far that one gallon of gas can travel compared to that one unit of electricity.
What if you can travel farther on 34kWh of electric power than you can 1 gallon of gas due to, you know, the efficiencies gained in an electric motor versus an internal combustion engine?
Taxes are always used to encourage or discourage behavior, for the "good of society". It just depends on which political influences are in power at the time.
Credit for having kids? (Good for society) Credit for owning a house, versus renting? (good for society, generates local taxes, promotes ownership, blah blah), credit for buying a Chevy Volt? (good for society by decreasing dependance on foreign oil, fossil fuels).
I'm having a hard time thinking of a tax that exists that isn't either a reward or a punishment for citizens' behaviour.
Citation? If you bother looking into it, you'll see that SUV and light truck sales are way off from years past.
Declining sales figures have nothing to do with the fact that SUVs and trucks keep getting bigger. Look at the current generation Toyota Tacoma. It is bigger than the previous generation Toyota Tundra (which is the bigger of the two models). The Ford F-150 currently is as big as the last model F-250. The Subura Forrester has gone from being a station wagon to being a full blown SUV. As the guy above correctly points out, the current models are indeed trending larger.
While I haven't researched it at an academic level, I do take great interest in all things with 4 wheels and internal combustion engines, and I can't think of a single current model that is smaller than its previous model.
Yes, it's called "tax loopholes,"
He's not advocating loopholes, which are UNINTENDED ways of getting out of paying taxes. He is proposing tax CREDITS, and I agree it is a good way to dis-incentivize needless SUV sales.
and it requires a huge new IRS bureaucracy, puts a giant paperwork burden on the very people (usually, small businesses like landscapers, dog groomers, carpenters) that you want to "protect," and of course - by way of supporting that giant new layer of administrative recordkeeping, fraud prevention, etc., means more people working for the government who don't actually produce anything, but for whom taxpayers get to pay, right on through their retirement. Yes, please, I want more of that.
Or, they could just, you know, file their taxes like a small business owner does now and claim the tax credit we are proposing by proving the truck is part of your business. I'm not sure how this would have ANY impact on the current processes that small businesses follow when filing their taxes.
Excellent post. We should tax the living hell out of giant SUVs and trucks (in addition to upping gas prices and tax penalties for vehicles with low fuel economy). They added tax for "luxury" vehicles in the 90s...why not broaden the definition and tax the crap out of unweildy SUVs and trucks (with exemptions for people who use them primarily for work).
Getting a larger vehicle out of safety concerns is stupid and short-sighted. It's hard to be safe in a vehicle that does not drive safely. People with this mentality have probably never experienced car control in a well crafted vehicle as compared to some random GM Giant SUV that couldn't maneuver around an obstacle if given 30 seconds reaction time.
SUVs (and trucks) are the bane of Texas suburbia. I'll never understand why middle and upper middle class Texans consider an unsafe, poor-handling work vehicle to be a status symbol.
I'll take my chances in my Mazda. Chances are higher the SUV guy will be in a ditch than me colliding with SUV guy. Even then, given Austin traffic, if I collide with SUV guy, it will probably be at about 15 mph.
Companies need to make a compelling (yet affordable) electric car for me. That probably means the government needs to provide subsidies/incentives of some sort, because until there are buyers, there won't be models available, but until there are models available, there won't be buyers.
The Leaf could be the best car in the world, but it's fuuuuuugly and too small. The Volt is nice looking, yet is priced like a BMW 3 series, but probably assembled like, well, a GM product.
Hello, Honda, Toyota, Ford.......are you listening? Build me a 4 door hatchback (like a Mazda 3, or Ford Focus) electric vehicle with a decent power and range for under $30k and I'll sign the purchase agreement right now.
I want an electric car. I don't want a Leaf or a Volt (for the reasons above). I'll buy one once there are more compelling models to chose from.
I don't see it (Franken, at least). His books are the thing that switched my political reality. And they are funny. There's nothing nutball about his political stances--nothing along the nutball levels of a Glen Beck or Michele Bachmann, at least.
Miller and Garofalo were never funny to begin with, so the argument they are no longer funny is invalid;-)
Why be required to put a full day's work in if you can accomplish a full day's work in less than a full day?
What do I care if they pay their dues? Seriously, that's stupid. You can either do what you are hired to do, or you can't.
This old-fashioned ideology is best left for those who couldn't really cut it in college and can only fall back on "workin' harder" than the guy next to them.
I'll take someone with experience over a degree any day of the week. Most employers would.
I think you'll find in the real world, who is on your staff determines things like "size of contract you can win" and "level of certification your organization can achieve."
Hell, I got my job with an MAEd solely because the government contract required the company have that skill set, and they didn't have anybody. It's even more important in Engineering with all their established certifications.
This is the best post I've ever seen, and I'm a registered Republican.
With your permission, I am posting this pwnage as a note on my facebook page. (I'm former military and have a lot of fucktard friends who believe the shit that you just smacked down).
The problem I see is that for every 100 unskilled laborers that are displaced by technology, 0 of them go get skilled to learn how to run the technology that displaced them.
Define "padding". Saying I worked somewhere for 4 years when I only worked there for 3 is lying. Saying I was instrumental in getting something accomplished might be lying, and most likely padding, but that should come to light during an interview. People who claim to be able to do something they can't (and pad their resume) are either top-notch bullshitters (who I can spot a mile away), or just delusional, and will have no chance of convincing me in an interview that their accomplishments are anything less than padding. People who "pad" their resume to call out their strengths (and probably overstate them slightly) are just getting their foot in the interview door. If they have real accomplishments that might be slightly padded, those will hold weight during the interview.
While I've never had "hundreds" of resumes to sort through, I have had tens of candidates to consider on short notice (I suspect picking 1 from 32 in 2 hours is similar to picking 1 from 500 in a week?). It's pretty easy to me. Skim for education and qualifications, skip the fluff (I don't really care that you work 4 hours at the soup kitchen, sorry, or that you like to take your dogs to the off-leash park).
If I see a single thing on your resume that qualifies you, you go in the keeper pile. If not, or if it's obvious you put no effort into the quality of the resume, you go in the discard pile.
Then I read through them all (discarding the fluff) to see which few would be good to interview. If I get 500, then so be it. I take all day to do it as opposed to a couple of hours.
Well as we continue to basically hand out degrees to anyone who can afford it, I would expect the pool of potentially bad degree holders only to grow exponentially.
I have a little story that quickly de-bunks your mentality.
I joined the Army and never held a firearm in my life. Most of the hicks around me had been hunting their entire life and new "everything thar was" about guns.
Most of them were terrible at the rifle range, and I was nearly perfect every time. Why? Because I didn't self-teach myself a bunch of bad habits and think I was good just because I'd been doing it (incorrectly) for so many years. I paid attention to the instruction, learned the techniques, then applied them. Everyone around me was sticking to their "experience" and they failed.
There's something to be said about formal instruction in a craft. Done correctly, it can quickly pass decades of "experience".
Of course education plus experience is even better.
Like I always say to my music students, self-taught musicians are rarely as good as they think they are.
In other words, you can only know what you teach yourself or learn on the job, but will never have a full breadth-of-knowledge regarding your craft without formal education to go with it.
I think the problem would be if Facebook used a picture of YOU that your FRIEND had on his Facebook profile, and you don't actually have a Facebook account.
This is really not very complicated. If people have a problem with the privacy, don't use the product. Complaining about people who do use the product because it violates those people is just projecting your own values on those people. Maybe I don't care if they use my picture on anything they want (as a price for using their service).
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Egypt is only 29th in the world for oil production, and not even on the radar for oil exports.
In the case of the Chevy Volt, you just drive using the 1.4l gas engine. It has a 350 mile range, which is more than my fully gas powered Mazda 3 by 50 miles.
My only question with the Volt is how old can gasoline be in the tank? If I only commute back and forth to work and charge every night, it will be a long time between gas uses.
Excellent reply, however, how can a utility company give me a cheaper rate for my electric car if I'm charging it from home using the existing electrical infrastructure? This is the only way I'd consider an electric car--if I can plug it in alongside my cordless electric lawnmower.
And for driving enthusiasts like me, this is the way to win us over. Electric motors have the insane potential of making 500+ hp cars that cost 6-figures look stupid, for the price of a family car today. I imagine as EVs start catching on, government will have to start making companies tone down the power bands. There are enough bad drivers already...no need to put a powerful car at the fingertips of the everyday driver!
Another thing that will take time is for engineers to realize they are not constrained to the shape of current cars. They are free to make new designs (which will take forever to catch on) because car shapes now are mostly functional to fit around the internal motor and moving parts.
Can we drop the public transportation dream? It doesn't work in most of America because of geography and the fact our towns aren't based around a town center like in Germany and England (two places I've lived where I LOVED public transportation, but could never be implemeted in Texas).
I have a 15 mile commute. My company is one of two on this road on the outskirts of downtown. There are no bus routes, not trains, shuttles...nothing. At best, I could ride a train into the town center (by driving 20 miles out of my way to the one commuter train stop), then take a taxi to work....every day..... Or I could just drive my car into my work's parking garage and be at my desk working an hour before I would be using the above model.
If you are in the market for a new car anyway, you can't include the total cost of a Chevy Volt (or whatever) in your cost analysis. You can only include the amount that the Volt is MORE than a non-electric car you might have purchased anway. With rebates, a Volt is 32k. A Prius will run you about $25k. That's $7k difference, not the same as the cost of two Priuses.
Isn't your analysis flawed? You compare a gallon of gas to unit of electricity, but you make no mention how far that one gallon of gas can travel compared to that one unit of electricity.
What if you can travel farther on 34kWh of electric power than you can 1 gallon of gas due to, you know, the efficiencies gained in an electric motor versus an internal combustion engine?
Taxes are always used to encourage or discourage behavior, for the "good of society". It just depends on which political influences are in power at the time.
Credit for having kids? (Good for society) Credit for owning a house, versus renting? (good for society, generates local taxes, promotes ownership, blah blah), credit for buying a Chevy Volt? (good for society by decreasing dependance on foreign oil, fossil fuels).
I'm having a hard time thinking of a tax that exists that isn't either a reward or a punishment for citizens' behaviour.
It's trending larger and larger every year
Citation? If you bother looking into it, you'll see that SUV and light truck sales are way off from years past.
Declining sales figures have nothing to do with the fact that SUVs and trucks keep getting bigger. Look at the current generation Toyota Tacoma. It is bigger than the previous generation Toyota Tundra (which is the bigger of the two models). The Ford F-150 currently is as big as the last model F-250. The Subura Forrester has gone from being a station wagon to being a full blown SUV. As the guy above correctly points out, the current models are indeed trending larger.
While I haven't researched it at an academic level, I do take great interest in all things with 4 wheels and internal combustion engines, and I can't think of a single current model that is smaller than its previous model.
Yes, it's called "tax loopholes,"
He's not advocating loopholes, which are UNINTENDED ways of getting out of paying taxes. He is proposing tax CREDITS, and I agree it is a good way to dis-incentivize needless SUV sales.
and it requires a huge new IRS bureaucracy, puts a giant paperwork burden on the very people (usually, small businesses like landscapers, dog groomers, carpenters) that you want to "protect," and of course - by way of supporting that giant new layer of administrative recordkeeping, fraud prevention, etc., means more people working for the government who don't actually produce anything, but for whom taxpayers get to pay, right on through their retirement. Yes, please, I want more of that.
Or, they could just, you know, file their taxes like a small business owner does now and claim the tax credit we are proposing by proving the truck is part of your business. I'm not sure how this would have ANY impact on the current processes that small businesses follow when filing their taxes.
Excellent post. We should tax the living hell out of giant SUVs and trucks (in addition to upping gas prices and tax penalties for vehicles with low fuel economy). They added tax for "luxury" vehicles in the 90s...why not broaden the definition and tax the crap out of unweildy SUVs and trucks (with exemptions for people who use them primarily for work).
Getting a larger vehicle out of safety concerns is stupid and short-sighted. It's hard to be safe in a vehicle that does not drive safely. People with this mentality have probably never experienced car control in a well crafted vehicle as compared to some random GM Giant SUV that couldn't maneuver around an obstacle if given 30 seconds reaction time.
SUVs (and trucks) are the bane of Texas suburbia. I'll never understand why middle and upper middle class Texans consider an unsafe, poor-handling work vehicle to be a status symbol.
I'll take my chances in my Mazda. Chances are higher the SUV guy will be in a ditch than me colliding with SUV guy. Even then, given Austin traffic, if I collide with SUV guy, it will probably be at about 15 mph.
Companies need to make a compelling (yet affordable) electric car for me. That probably means the government needs to provide subsidies/incentives of some sort, because until there are buyers, there won't be models available, but until there are models available, there won't be buyers.
The Leaf could be the best car in the world, but it's fuuuuuugly and too small. The Volt is nice looking, yet is priced like a BMW 3 series, but probably assembled like, well, a GM product.
Hello, Honda, Toyota, Ford.......are you listening? Build me a 4 door hatchback (like a Mazda 3, or Ford Focus) electric vehicle with a decent power and range for under $30k and I'll sign the purchase agreement right now.
I want an electric car. I don't want a Leaf or a Volt (for the reasons above). I'll buy one once there are more compelling models to chose from.
I don't see it (Franken, at least). His books are the thing that switched my political reality. And they are funny. There's nothing nutball about his political stances--nothing along the nutball levels of a Glen Beck or Michele Bachmann, at least.
Miller and Garofalo were never funny to begin with, so the argument they are no longer funny is invalid ;-)
Why be required to put a full day's work in if you can accomplish a full day's work in less than a full day?
What do I care if they pay their dues? Seriously, that's stupid. You can either do what you are hired to do, or you can't.
This old-fashioned ideology is best left for those who couldn't really cut it in college and can only fall back on "workin' harder" than the guy next to them.
And I'm 41...
I think you'll find in the real world, who is on your staff determines things like "size of contract you can win" and "level of certification your organization can achieve."
Hell, I got my job with an MAEd solely because the government contract required the company have that skill set, and they didn't have anybody. It's even more important in Engineering with all their established certifications.
Yes, because the LAST thing an HR person wants from a prospective employee is somebody who conforms to the company processes.
Save your creativity for your personal consultation. A company that is trying to make money will tell you what and how to code, thank you very much.
This is the best post I've ever seen, and I'm a registered Republican.
With your permission, I am posting this pwnage as a note on my facebook page. (I'm former military and have a lot of fucktard friends who believe the shit that you just smacked down).
The problem I see is that for every 100 unskilled laborers that are displaced by technology, 0 of them go get skilled to learn how to run the technology that displaced them.
Yet we Americans rarely achieve even one level higher than our parents. Odd, that.
Define "padding". Saying I worked somewhere for 4 years when I only worked there for 3 is lying. Saying I was instrumental in getting something accomplished might be lying, and most likely padding, but that should come to light during an interview. People who claim to be able to do something they can't (and pad their resume) are either top-notch bullshitters (who I can spot a mile away), or just delusional, and will have no chance of convincing me in an interview that their accomplishments are anything less than padding. People who "pad" their resume to call out their strengths (and probably overstate them slightly) are just getting their foot in the interview door. If they have real accomplishments that might be slightly padded, those will hold weight during the interview.
While I've never had "hundreds" of resumes to sort through, I have had tens of candidates to consider on short notice (I suspect picking 1 from 32 in 2 hours is similar to picking 1 from 500 in a week?). It's pretty easy to me. Skim for education and qualifications, skip the fluff (I don't really care that you work 4 hours at the soup kitchen, sorry, or that you like to take your dogs to the off-leash park).
If I see a single thing on your resume that qualifies you, you go in the keeper pile. If not, or if it's obvious you put no effort into the quality of the resume, you go in the discard pile.
Then I read through them all (discarding the fluff) to see which few would be good to interview. If I get 500, then so be it. I take all day to do it as opposed to a couple of hours.
Well as we continue to basically hand out degrees to anyone who can afford it, I would expect the pool of potentially bad degree holders only to grow exponentially.
I have a little story that quickly de-bunks your mentality.
I joined the Army and never held a firearm in my life. Most of the hicks around me had been hunting their entire life and new "everything thar was" about guns.
Most of them were terrible at the rifle range, and I was nearly perfect every time. Why? Because I didn't self-teach myself a bunch of bad habits and think I was good just because I'd been doing it (incorrectly) for so many years. I paid attention to the instruction, learned the techniques, then applied them. Everyone around me was sticking to their "experience" and they failed.
There's something to be said about formal instruction in a craft. Done correctly, it can quickly pass decades of "experience".
Of course education plus experience is even better.
Like I always say to my music students, self-taught musicians are rarely as good as they think they are.
In other words, you can only know what you teach yourself or learn on the job, but will never have a full breadth-of-knowledge regarding your craft without formal education to go with it.
I think the problem would be if Facebook used a picture of YOU that your FRIEND had on his Facebook profile, and you don't actually have a Facebook account.
This is really not very complicated. If people have a problem with the privacy, don't use the product. Complaining about people who do use the product because it violates those people is just projecting your own values on those people. Maybe I don't care if they use my picture on anything they want (as a price for using their service).
There's something wrong with a corporation that charges $10 for a cup of coffee, too. This is nothing new.
There's something wrong with the use of hyperbole when stating a position.