If you think of investments as a black box into which you put money over time, and take out a big pile of money at retirement, you've entirely misunderstood wealth. You become wealthy by accumulating wealth over time (wealth: ownership of the means of production). Very little that happens to the economy should change the micro-% of all the worlds corporations that you own (assuming you don't fall for investing in individual companies or something). The exchange rate between micro-%-of-everything and dollars is really quite volatile, but that only matters a little, because you're not going to just sell everything one day. Keep accumulating until retirement is a given, then maybe you're slowing drawing down principle over time, but you're getting the average of 30 years of prices, not the price on the day you retire.
Why do expensive watches have sapphire crystals? Well, sapphire has advantages, but mostly because those watches are jewelry that happen to tell time.
Why will iPhones have sapphire screens? Because they are jewelry that happen to make phone calls. If you see Apple products as fashion accessories first, then sapphire screens are a brilliant idea.
Gorilla glass cracks anyway. First time I drop a phone, there goes the glass. But it also scratches. It's far softer than sand, so in arid areas the grit that gets everywhere can scratch your phone in your pocket. Sapphire at least has that going for it - there's little in everyday life that can scratch it.
Hmm, I thought the ideal for a reciprocating piston internal combustion engine like that was down around 30% (where the input air is cool). Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
Yup, same lgw, though I always feel like I'm walking on eggshells there, so I'm probably done with them. I always meant to ask "what's a slinch"?
Well put, but don't forget "gather more light". The reason long lenses tend to be big lenses is to increase the area you're gathering light from. The smaller and more distant^2 your field of view, the less light you have to work with. A face at 100 yards is going to need a large lens surface to give the electronics something they can see.
You should probably read up a bit on basic physics. Torque at the wheels is just a matter of gear ratio. Electric motors are "constant power", so you get the full HP off the line, but street cars with big engines reach peak torque at low RPM too (and there's a reason people pop the clutch or sidestep the brake to launch).
A Chevy volt manages a 9.2 second 0-60 time with it's 145 HP electric motor. The Mustang takes less than half that time. The Volt's top speed is 100 MPH, but that's draining the battery. I'm sure it can sustain 60, though, with the 80 HP gas engine.
It's working quite well. The cost of all that is very low on the scale of the banks and that's what matters. It's simply not about "0 incidents", it's about limiting the damage to little enough that it's not important.
Partly that depends on the bank, of course, as some are total dicks about it if your card gets skimmed, but that's a customer service problem. Detecting the problem, limiting the cost, and so on are all important systems that banks take seriously. And the banks are gradually making systemic, low cost changes to reduce the ease of skimming, or of hacking an ATM, but they're not in a hurry as it's just not that expensive of a problem (how many ATM heists to equal a single mortgage default?). More importantly, they're not trying to fix their customers!
Yup, Captstone is great, for what it is. The tech is coming along, finally. But there's so much more you can do: ideally, a turbine can be 2x the efficiency of a car engine, because you can reclaim otherwise-waste energy from the exhaust. You want the input air hot, unlike a car where you need it cool to prevent detonation, so you can put a heat exchanger between the two. Heck, if you've got the space/weight budget drive a second turbine off the exhaust pressure from the first.
Or, of course, there are the large, low-RPM diesel engines used in locomotives and cargo ships, though I don't know how well those scale down. Very long piston stroke seems to be key to all that.
But, if you are going to haul an extra 75lbs of generator and fuel just for the times you might need to charge up, you are going to waste battery power carrying the extra weight.
Most hybrids carry far more, for far less benefit.
Besides, a 50HP gas generator will more than likely be enough to power the electric motor continuously
I have no interest in a 50 HP car, nor do most US buyers. Not useful.
The point is: the generator is there to remove range anxiety. It might run while you cruise on the highway, and maybe you'll break even, but worst case you have to park for a bit while it catches up. But for the short daily commute you have a pure electric car will all the benefits thereof, and you don't have some super-complex trick transmission to break on you. The Tesla drive train e.g. is incredibly simple, and once mature should be incredibly reliable, plus the weight can sit very low for great handling (75 pounds up high won't mess that up).
Sorry, the motor really does have mechanical linkage to the drive wheels - see my reply to you elsewhere, or just see Wikipedia. It's a simpler linkage than a Prius, but still more complex than it needs to be.
hese units are connected via a planetary gear and electric clutches to provide power output for propulsion in four programmed operating modes:[63] 1.Single motor electric - The primary motor runs solely on battery power, maximum propulsion power is 111 kW. 2.Dual motor electric - At higher vehicle speeds the secondary motor engages over the planetary gear such that it reduces the speed of the primary motor. This facilitates higher efficiency and better mileage for the combined system, without increasing the maximum power. 3.Single motor extended - The battery reaches its minimum charge which triggers the combustion engine. The engine drives the secondary motor which now works as a generator, via the charging electronics, to keep the minimum battery charge level. The primary motor can still provide its 111 kW for short acceleration, albeit not sustained. 4.Dual motor extended - The electric motors are used again in dual configuration with increased efficiency at higher speeds. Additionally the gasoline engine contributes propulsion power via the planetary gear. While power is drained from the battery the amount is less than in mode 2 for the same propulsion power, thus extending the range.
That mode 4? The engine is pushing the car down the road. I understand this design choice, but it's not the simple one.
Preach it! You cannot try to fix a software problem by fixing the users. Requirements for strong passwords have no place in modern security. A 4-digit PIN works great for my ATM card, because of the combination of: * Two-factor auth * Good, fast system for repudiation and reclamation * Many, many back-end processes in place to limit harm
Is your IT system set up this way? Why not? Two-factor auth is easy, off-the-shelf stuff these days. Sharply limit password tries before account lockout, and abandon any thought of strong passwords, changing passwords, and so on - all of that is accomplished by the certs (and rotation thereof) on the second factor. The user's password is just there to make it OK if the second factor is stolen, during the time before the user reports it.
Everyone's "real" password is crypto-strong, because there's a properly-generated cert involved, and rotated at ITs discretion with no burden on the user. But people only need to remember something easy, just something that would take more than 3 tries to guess.
America has a massive cultural failing in teaching people about money. I didn't figure it out till I was 29, and apparently I'm ahead of the game. That's abominable. If I had learned all this stuff in school, I would have believed it by 25 and probably be retired now! But it's not just the schools - we need to make a real effort to teach our kids, friends, and co-workers.
Save more than what your 401K can hold. Seriously. If you're getting a professional salary, you should be saving at least 1/3rd of it. Half if you're single. Investing is a needed skill, and it takes years to develop, and you want to make your mistakes when you're starting and the stakes are low, not scramble after retirement to figure it out.
Very well put! I'm not will to say the Fed is a bunch of fools with this plan, because it is a new thing and sometimes you need to try new things, and thus far it seems to be working, but man it could go so horribly, horribly wrong.
not skip the batteries all together and have the output power the electric motor
I want to normally charge from the wall. But more importantly, I don't want to haul around a gas engine that powerful. A 400 HP electric motor coupled with a 50 HP gas generator would be just fine. It doesn't have to recharge in real time, and it doesn't need to weigh 500 pounds.
If you're single and have had a professional salary for 10 years, you should be halfway to retirement by now. Your wealth should be at the point where, while's there no way you could get by on it long term, there's simply no short-term financial stress in life.
The amount of physical currency in circulation is of course totally irrelevant. It's a bad metaphor, since it only encourages the gold nuts. The money supply has fuck-all to do with physical currency.
We haven't seem inflation as a result of QE because it hasn't increased the money supply. We added $2 T by buying our own bonds, but at the same time bank reserves increased by about the same, at about the same rate.
The Fed's trying a new trick to hold bank reserves: they're paying interest rather than increasing reserve requirements (currently 0 for most accounts), but the result is the same.
Is this a wise approach? Time will tell. But they simply aren't heedlessly exploding the money supply.
The Volt is a "parallel" hybrid - the engine can power the wheels. It's a simpler setup than say a Prius, since it only has high gear as I understand it, but still, it's a traditional car engine. (Plus I and those in my sub-culture will never buy a Government Motors car.)
A true serial hybrid has far more freedom to innovate in the efficiency of the gas engine. High efficiency gas turbine? Diesel generator like the hybrid locomotives use? Whatever technology works best, whatever engine positioning works best, without any requirement for mechanical coupling to a drive shaft.
I think that's exactly right. The "range" on electric cars is best case (no radio, no climate control, being that dick who won't accelerate on the on-ramp, etc). "Half" is probably a good engineering fudge factor, and a 40 mile practical range doesn't cut it.
I'm pining for a serial plug-in hybrid. Give me an electric car with a pure-electric drive drain, Tesla-style, but stick a super-efficient 50 HP generator under the hood, and give it a small gas tank. Now I'm quite happy with a 40 or even 30 mile practical range. Most days that's good, and the generator can run in the parking lot when it's not.
(You can make amazingly efficient turbine engines if you don't care about weight. Forget the terrible helicopter engines, think industrial power generation: multiple heat exchangers, possibly multiple expansion stages, cool, low-pressure exhaust with no waste. Scaled down to 50 HP I expect it would fit nicely in a car. And if it lets you save 80% of the battery weight it can be a good trade.)
If the utility gets a better return from optimizing their lobbying than their infrastructure, that's a problem. People respond to incentives. People need a communications infrastructure maintained too, but that doesn't excuse Comcast.
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Yes, you've misunderstood the thread (which is understandable, as the post I was replying to made no actual sense).
If you think of investments as a black box into which you put money over time, and take out a big pile of money at retirement, you've entirely misunderstood wealth. You become wealthy by accumulating wealth over time (wealth: ownership of the means of production). Very little that happens to the economy should change the micro-% of all the worlds corporations that you own (assuming you don't fall for investing in individual companies or something). The exchange rate between micro-%-of-everything and dollars is really quite volatile, but that only matters a little, because you're not going to just sell everything one day. Keep accumulating until retirement is a given, then maybe you're slowing drawing down principle over time, but you're getting the average of 30 years of prices, not the price on the day you retire.
Please, nobody tell Apple. :) I'm sure they can find an excuse for rubies in iBling.
Why do expensive watches have sapphire crystals? Well, sapphire has advantages, but mostly because those watches are jewelry that happen to tell time.
Why will iPhones have sapphire screens? Because they are jewelry that happen to make phone calls. If you see Apple products as fashion accessories first, then sapphire screens are a brilliant idea.
Gorilla glass cracks anyway. First time I drop a phone, there goes the glass. But it also scratches. It's far softer than sand, so in arid areas the grit that gets everywhere can scratch your phone in your pocket. Sapphire at least has that going for it - there's little in everyday life that can scratch it.
As the AC asked - how are you making the attempts without the second factor? And you lock out the device, not the person, of course.
Hmm, I thought the ideal for a reciprocating piston internal combustion engine like that was down around 30% (where the input air is cool). Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
Yup, same lgw, though I always feel like I'm walking on eggshells there, so I'm probably done with them. I always meant to ask "what's a slinch"?
Well put, but don't forget "gather more light". The reason long lenses tend to be big lenses is to increase the area you're gathering light from. The smaller and more distant^2 your field of view, the less light you have to work with. A face at 100 yards is going to need a large lens surface to give the electronics something they can see.
You should probably read up a bit on basic physics. Torque at the wheels is just a matter of gear ratio. Electric motors are "constant power", so you get the full HP off the line, but street cars with big engines reach peak torque at low RPM too (and there's a reason people pop the clutch or sidestep the brake to launch).
A Chevy volt manages a 9.2 second 0-60 time with it's 145 HP electric motor. The Mustang takes less than half that time. The Volt's top speed is 100 MPH, but that's draining the battery. I'm sure it can sustain 60, though, with the 80 HP gas engine.
It's working quite well. The cost of all that is very low on the scale of the banks and that's what matters. It's simply not about "0 incidents", it's about limiting the damage to little enough that it's not important.
Partly that depends on the bank, of course, as some are total dicks about it if your card gets skimmed, but that's a customer service problem. Detecting the problem, limiting the cost, and so on are all important systems that banks take seriously. And the banks are gradually making systemic, low cost changes to reduce the ease of skimming, or of hacking an ATM, but they're not in a hurry as it's just not that expensive of a problem (how many ATM heists to equal a single mortgage default?). More importantly, they're not trying to fix their customers!
Yup, Captstone is great, for what it is. The tech is coming along, finally. But there's so much more you can do: ideally, a turbine can be 2x the efficiency of a car engine, because you can reclaim otherwise-waste energy from the exhaust. You want the input air hot, unlike a car where you need it cool to prevent detonation, so you can put a heat exchanger between the two. Heck, if you've got the space/weight budget drive a second turbine off the exhaust pressure from the first.
Or, of course, there are the large, low-RPM diesel engines used in locomotives and cargo ships, though I don't know how well those scale down. Very long piston stroke seems to be key to all that.
But, if you are going to haul an extra 75lbs of generator and fuel just for the times you might need to charge up, you are going to waste battery power carrying the extra weight.
Most hybrids carry far more, for far less benefit.
Besides, a 50HP gas generator will more than likely be enough to power the electric motor continuously
I have no interest in a 50 HP car, nor do most US buyers. Not useful.
The point is: the generator is there to remove range anxiety. It might run while you cruise on the highway, and maybe you'll break even, but worst case you have to park for a bit while it catches up. But for the short daily commute you have a pure electric car will all the benefits thereof, and you don't have some super-complex trick transmission to break on you. The Tesla drive train e.g. is incredibly simple, and once mature should be incredibly reliable, plus the weight can sit very low for great handling (75 pounds up high won't mess that up).
Sorry, the motor really does have mechanical linkage to the drive wheels - see my reply to you elsewhere, or just see Wikipedia. It's a simpler linkage than a Prius, but still more complex than it needs to be.
Quote Wikipedia
hese units are connected via a planetary gear and electric clutches to provide power output for propulsion in four programmed operating modes:[63]
1.Single motor electric - The primary motor runs solely on battery power, maximum propulsion power is 111 kW.
2.Dual motor electric - At higher vehicle speeds the secondary motor engages over the planetary gear such that it reduces the speed of the primary motor. This facilitates higher efficiency and better mileage for the combined system, without increasing the maximum power.
3.Single motor extended - The battery reaches its minimum charge which triggers the combustion engine. The engine drives the secondary motor which now works as a generator, via the charging electronics, to keep the minimum battery charge level. The primary motor can still provide its 111 kW for short acceleration, albeit not sustained.
4.Dual motor extended - The electric motors are used again in dual configuration with increased efficiency at higher speeds. Additionally the gasoline engine contributes propulsion power via the planetary gear. While power is drained from the battery the amount is less than in mode 2 for the same propulsion power, thus extending the range.
That mode 4? The engine is pushing the car down the road. I understand this design choice, but it's not the simple one.
Preach it! You cannot try to fix a software problem by fixing the users. Requirements for strong passwords have no place in modern security. A 4-digit PIN works great for my ATM card, because of the combination of:
* Two-factor auth
* Good, fast system for repudiation and reclamation
* Many, many back-end processes in place to limit harm
Is your IT system set up this way? Why not? Two-factor auth is easy, off-the-shelf stuff these days. Sharply limit password tries before account lockout, and abandon any thought of strong passwords, changing passwords, and so on - all of that is accomplished by the certs (and rotation thereof) on the second factor. The user's password is just there to make it OK if the second factor is stolen, during the time before the user reports it.
Everyone's "real" password is crypto-strong, because there's a properly-generated cert involved, and rotated at ITs discretion with no burden on the user. But people only need to remember something easy, just something that would take more than 3 tries to guess.
America has a massive cultural failing in teaching people about money. I didn't figure it out till I was 29, and apparently I'm ahead of the game. That's abominable. If I had learned all this stuff in school, I would have believed it by 25 and probably be retired now! But it's not just the schools - we need to make a real effort to teach our kids, friends, and co-workers.
Save more than what your 401K can hold. Seriously. If you're getting a professional salary, you should be saving at least 1/3rd of it. Half if you're single. Investing is a needed skill, and it takes years to develop, and you want to make your mistakes when you're starting and the stakes are low, not scramble after retirement to figure it out.
Very well put! I'm not will to say the Fed is a bunch of fools with this plan, because it is a new thing and sometimes you need to try new things, and thus far it seems to be working, but man it could go so horribly, horribly wrong.
not skip the batteries all together and have the output power the electric motor
I want to normally charge from the wall. But more importantly, I don't want to haul around a gas engine that powerful. A 400 HP electric motor coupled with a 50 HP gas generator would be just fine. It doesn't have to recharge in real time, and it doesn't need to weigh 500 pounds.
If you're single and have had a professional salary for 10 years, you should be halfway to retirement by now. Your wealth should be at the point where, while's there no way you could get by on it long term, there's simply no short-term financial stress in life.
The amount of physical currency in circulation is of course totally irrelevant. It's a bad metaphor, since it only encourages the gold nuts. The money supply has fuck-all to do with physical currency.
We haven't seem inflation as a result of QE because it hasn't increased the money supply. We added $2 T by buying our own bonds, but at the same time bank reserves increased by about the same, at about the same rate.
The Fed's trying a new trick to hold bank reserves: they're paying interest rather than increasing reserve requirements (currently 0 for most accounts), but the result is the same.
Is this a wise approach? Time will tell. But they simply aren't heedlessly exploding the money supply.
The Volt is a "parallel" hybrid - the engine can power the wheels. It's a simpler setup than say a Prius, since it only has high gear as I understand it, but still, it's a traditional car engine. (Plus I and those in my sub-culture will never buy a Government Motors car.)
A true serial hybrid has far more freedom to innovate in the efficiency of the gas engine. High efficiency gas turbine? Diesel generator like the hybrid locomotives use? Whatever technology works best, whatever engine positioning works best, without any requirement for mechanical coupling to a drive shaft.
I think that's exactly right. The "range" on electric cars is best case (no radio, no climate control, being that dick who won't accelerate on the on-ramp, etc). "Half" is probably a good engineering fudge factor, and a 40 mile practical range doesn't cut it.
I'm pining for a serial plug-in hybrid. Give me an electric car with a pure-electric drive drain, Tesla-style, but stick a super-efficient 50 HP generator under the hood, and give it a small gas tank. Now I'm quite happy with a 40 or even 30 mile practical range. Most days that's good, and the generator can run in the parking lot when it's not.
(You can make amazingly efficient turbine engines if you don't care about weight. Forget the terrible helicopter engines, think industrial power generation: multiple heat exchangers, possibly multiple expansion stages, cool, low-pressure exhaust with no waste. Scaled down to 50 HP I expect it would fit nicely in a car. And if it lets you save 80% of the battery weight it can be a good trade.)
That sounds great! I think Texas may be the same way - they have a different power grid from the rest of the US (the US has 3: East, West, and Texas).
If the utility gets a better return from optimizing their lobbying than their infrastructure, that's a problem. People respond to incentives. People need a communications infrastructure maintained too, but that doesn't excuse Comcast.