Mine was much better. We were driving west on I40 and passing west of Winston-Salem when we saw -- my wife and I together -- a light that literally rippled in the sky, lights flashing like they were rolling around on some invisible shape. It flew first to the right of the road, then made an impossible turn and came back diagonally across the road in front of is, then rose and zipped back to the right and came directly towards us, parallel to the road, the lights growing brighter and brighter and with the whole thing literally glittering with rippling sparkles of light. I'm a physicist, she's a physician and at no time did we actually believe we were being visited by aliens following I40 in to attack Winston, but we certainly could not identify what we were seeing -- it was absolutely a Unidentified Flying Object!
Then it smoothly passed us on the right about a mile away, and we could see that it was a biplane towing an advertising display, heading back for another pass over some stadium where they were apparently playing football. We were barely too far away to see exactly what they were selling, but damn, that display rippled and sparkled in the night JUST LIKE lights spinning around on a flying disk, one that constantly tumbled or changed shape.
The moral of the story is mixed. Lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack, and one anecdote cannot address every UFO sighting in the history of mankind. However, as I've pointed out to my sons -- who are much more inclined to give credence to the idea that we are constantly being watched by aliens and that their experiences like this one HAVE no natural explanation -- during the 50's through the 80's, the US was more or less constantly under the threat of air attack and ICBM attack from the USSR and to a lesser extent China. SAC had every border lit up with radar that was being watched continuously for "unidentified flying objects" that without question would have been interpreted as an attack by the USSR, not visitation by snoopy space aliens. Every commercial airport was equipped with radar and flight control, (and still is today) and any object not identified by procedure and law would be immediately detected and in all probability investigated, especially post-9/11.
So sure, space aliens could be masters of stealth AND nefariously snoopy AND could be malevolent (spying us out To Serve Man) or constrained by THEIR laws and customs not to interfere while we rush to destroy each other, waiting to see if we survive long enough to build a peaceful global society. Science fiction novels delight in this kind of stuff. But Bayesian assessments of stacked arguments of this sort are never very convincing. Every special explanation required decreases the probability of the truth of the conclusion. Our governments -- all of them -- have to be members of a global conspiracy to hide "area 51" evidence. Reliable sightings have to be suppressed. The alien stealth has to be almost perfect to hide from civilian radar, or civilian radar has to be part of the conspiracy (which by now has grown to include the entire air force, NASA, the top levels of every government, all of the major intelligence and police services -- worldwide). AND we need psychotic aliens because REAL aliens intent on invasion would have crafted a killer virus long before now and collapsed civilization or would have just fired a few nukes at Russia and the US simultaneously and than sat back snacking on popcorn while we collapsed it for ourselves and left them some simply mopping up to do before they took over the rest of the world without credible opposition, and REAL aliens interested in making friend would have made friends long ago. But Bayesian reasoning is a bit difficult for most folks, sadly, and explosion of premises/priors (a.k.a. common sense, withholding a significant degree of belief in the absence of credible evidence AND a credible, evidence supported explanation) is all too rare.
After all, roughly 80% of the people on Earth believe in malevolent and beneficent
Or, install it on a VM under Linux, or on its own disk partition in parallel, or on its own SD disk, or on your OLD computer because if you are a geek worthy of the badge, you have at least two or three obsoleted/backup computers lying around that you no longer use as your primary system (I have, lessee, five immediately operable systems and a sixth and seventh I could use with a small bit of effort).
There are multiple VM alternatives available under linux -- I currently use virtualbox simply because I started with it as the best alternative back when VMware stopped being open and free. Building and installing a VM with an operating system is the work of a couple of hours as long as the OS has an easy network install. SDD is now cheap if your laptop has an open slot. HDD is cheap an enormous, ditto -- room to put four or five OS's in a line-em-up-and-boot them configuration all with 500 GB to TB scale disk allocations at roughly $30 to $50/TB in 4 TB form factors.
I'm avoiding the entire discussion about systemd per se, because while I personally am an Old Guy (tm) and was quite content with init, the various boot files, and so on largely because I understood it and could manage it or hack it armed with nothing but terminal interfaces (xterms) and an editor, I haven't really suffered as Linux moved over to systemd. It isn't as easy to hack down deep, perhaps, but then, Linux doesn't seem to need the down deep hacking it used to just to get it to work. And a lot of the management can still be done with an editor in a terminal, it is just arguably a bit more difficult to figure out what and where to do the editing.
Linux in the old days was enormously stable (once you worked at it a bit on your particular hardware as needed) but it was like all Unices "expert friendly". I was an expert, and for experts the OS and software stack provided and still provides enormous power and flexibility at the lowest possible price -- the cost of becoming expert enough to install and manage it, since "all systems" come preinstalled with WinX or IOS and "no systems" come preinstalled with Linux (I know, not all all, but close enough not to matter). I'm sure BSD would have worked or will work now as well, just like I know I could get by on any of a number of different flavors of linux. The only real problem even now is that for laptops and desktops (ignoring android devices, in other words) installing linux is too much for 95% of all of humanity. Hell, you could make it some sort of complex IQ test -- can you install linux from scratch on a new system, and do you dare to trash the preinstalled OS to find out?
This is unlikely to change, because of agreements between all of the major computer manufacturers and Microsoft, and Apple's agreement with itself. There isn't any significant economic advantage to changing it for the sellers. There isn't any demand for Linux systems, and in the current oligarchy-dominated marketplace, no consumer demand can possibly develop. Those smart enough and/or with a need do it themselves (usually after paying the Windows Tax when they buy their machines because what choice do they have?) and the rest of them are never presented with a floor display in Best Buy with preconfigured Linux systems ready to take home and puzzle over this whole "root" thing and how to create an account and how to get your printer to work with it and how to get your camera and phone to work with it and how to get your $#!)@ bluetooth speakers or headphones to work with it and... even as an "expert" with 30 years experience managing Unixoid systems, I STILL can't get my plantronics cans to work with Fedora.
So my advice -- stop worrying about systemd, as even most expert people just don't care, as long as it installs easily, manages adequately easily, and works. AFAICT, Fedora "just works" with systemd as much as it ever did with init. Fix the stuff that makes running Linux in almost any flavor (still) a PITA. Bluetooth! For gosh' sake, it's 2017! Printers. Installing a printer shouldn
Yeah, this is going to work really well in a state where telcoms donate roughly twice as much money to its senators' and reps' campaigns as all of the people in the state making less than $200,000 a year put together.
Which is -- wait for it -- most of the states in the US. That's the problem. With net neutrality, the playing field is not level and there are limits on competition that might or might not benefit the consumer. Without net neutrality, the playing field will not be level because there will be no limits on monopoly abuse that will definitely not benefit the consumer because the public utility near-monopolies in question own congress, the president, and will soon own a shit-pile of your money that they will collect as a target specific toll to reach parts of the internet that don't pay them off (and still charge you more to do so).
No arguments from me. As I said and continue to say, Big Corporations (with the capital letters) are currently in control of 3/4 of our four tier government (and have disproportionate influence in the fifth estate as well) by virtue of being the primary funders of all candidates in all elections of significance in the country. They have effective veto power both inside the parties and in the elections because nobody can afford to run for office without the 90% or so of the total cost of running that they contribute, directly and indirectly.
The "freedom" of the market is a secondary issue, and it will be impossible to even begin to untangle things until we pass and enforce legislation outlawing corporate contributions to politicians, PACs, parties, and other things beginning with "P". Outlaw lobbying while we are at it -- paying somebody to advocate for or against a law again introduces a factor into lawmaking not covered in the Constitution and gives disproportionate influence to those wealthy enough to hire a lobbyist (in addition to its demonstrated potential to corrupt politicians by silently lining their pockets or drowning out reasoned opposition) -- and I mean lobbying by the Sierra Foundation as much as lobbying by the Alt-Right. No lobbying at all. Outlaw or stringently limit the amount any private citizen can contribute to a political candidate, political party, or all political parties and candidates put together -- again anything beginning with "P". Level the field for "campaigning" so that it does NOT cost a significant fraction of a billion dollars to run for President and so that third, or even fourth party or no party candidates are not effectively prevented from being a serious political force. Do all of this and wait a decade to vote out all of the rascals who have been sucking on the Oligarchic Plutocratic Tit for decades. Then we'll see what (if anything) we need to do about, or with, the freedom of the market, once it really IS a market and not an extra-constitutional political force that has long since diluted the "republican democracy" intended by the founders to where it is a sick joke.
Well said, sir! No mod points today, though, sorry, as I'm already commenting and don't do the AC swaparoo to do both.
I always liked it as a sound bite "Taxes buy me civilization", much as the liberty I give up -- such as the freedom to kill my neighbor, steal his sheep, and rape his daughter if I'm stronger than he is and can get away with it -- buys me freedom from murdering, raping, sheep rustlers in turn who just happen to be stronger than I am or who have a few more friends.
It is surprising how quickly the religious principles of the rabid libertarian evaporate, though, when confronted with the plain old bad luck of life that nobody ever insures against. Having any sort of public health care system is an insult to democracy and the freedom to die a pauper if you actually get sick -- right up to the day they have a single "accident" and find out the hard way that the emergency room, surgery, and two weeks in the ICU plus two weeks on the wards of the neighborhood hospital has left them backrupt and -- if it were not for the corrupt bankruptcy laws and social support network -- would leave them living under an overpass somewhere and panhandling on corners. Then you have things like Ayn Rand, the poster child for libertarianism, using medicare/medicaid when (after a lifetime of smoking and NOT buying insurance or saving money) she gets cancer.
What it really comes down to is a mix of spite and the kind of world you want to live in. If you want to live in a world dominated by the wealthy, the strong, and the ambitious, where the poor, the weak, the sickly, and the stupid are left to struggle, starve, and die young, by all means, rant on about the evils of taxes and the virtue of selfishness. Just remember that the real Midas Mulligans of the world, when confronted with an upstart who tries to start a bank to compete, hire some unemployed layabouts and have them pitch bottles of gasoline in through your new bank's windows, kidnap your children, and leave you notes pinned to your gutted Alsatian suggesting that you might want to sell out at 10 cents on the dollar to Mr. Mulligan. Or, in the case of the energy oligarchs, lean on the government so that they send in the army to take by force the right of way of a long oil pipeline.
Taxes do indeed buy me civilization, but the real problem with our current system is that "democracy" has been completely undermined by the absurdly wealthy who own the very restaurant where the menu of "column A and column B" is presented to the voters. It doesn't matter. Vote for either side. They all belong to the rich and powerful either way, or they wouldn't be on the menu in the first place.
According to reality, the "people" who make less than $200,000 a year "are" less than 10% of the government. The other 90% is made up of a comparatively few corporations, PACs, and people who work for those corporations and make over $200,000 a year. That's about how campaign money falls out. It costs around $11,000,000 to run for Senate, on average. Well over $100,000,000 to run for president. It costs a bit less than $2,000,000 to run for the House of Representatives. The oligarchs who own and manage (at a high level) the large, often multinational corporations that contribute tha vast bulk of this money have de facto veto power over who gets to run in the first place. By the time the "choice" is presented to the voters, it is reduced to the Whore of Babylon vs the Antichrist -- we the actual people are a loser either way, and no matter who wins, their soul will be owned by the people that bought and paid for their campaign an who they KNOW will have to continue their support for them to hold on to power.
That's the interesting thing. You see, the Constitution doesn't identify "the corporation" as a political entity at all. Unsurprisingly, as "corporations" in the modern sense almost didn't exist in America at the time and there wasn't that much by way of "old money" oligarchy in a country that had just thrown OFF the overseas monarch and his oligarchs that ran it immediately before. They also had no concept of the modern "political campaign" with its ever shifting base of paid advertisement, rumor, fake news, sly innuendo, attack ads, sound bites, billboards, and massively printed and distributed posters. They would have been shocked by the idea that someone running for president would target just a handful of "battleground" states for the bulk of their campaign activity and spending on the basis of pre-election "elections" by a tiny fraction of the people plus statistical extrapolations, neglecting to even show their face in dozens of other states full of the very people they would represent but that were supposedly "solidly" behind one candidate or the other.
Unless and until we muzzle the oligarchy that effectively controls the US electoral process from the ground up by the simple expedient of contributing money equally to BOTH candidates in many races -- if they avoid vocalizing things like the need to muzzle the non-constitutional oligarchy itself, if they both appear equally compliant and smart enough to understand what will happen if they ever vote to alter the situation -- we'll continue to have politicians effectively sell their votes on things like net neutrality for the contributions from the big telecoms and their executives. In North Carolina (where I live) for example, Burr got around $600,000 of his last election budget from households that make under $200,000. He got around $1,200,000 from communications companies and their top executives. Hmmm, you can talk about "votes" all you want, but money talks, bullshit walks, and telecommunications paid for almost 10% of his campaign, twice as much as he raised from the ordinary voters in the state combined.
Plutocracy, oligarchy, the recreation of a de facto feudal "nobility" in the form of the very rich (Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, etc) who control the jobs and livelihood of millions of voters with their billions of dollars -- they are not our forefather's democracy. Either we the people wake up and smell the shit in our Starbucks (metaphorically speaking) and alter from the ground up the way elections are funded and run -- banning outright ALL forms of corporate support for candidates, eliminating lobbying (all forms, the good, the bad, the ugly), eliminating PACs, maybe eliminating the need to obtain campaign contributions altogether -- something that is ENTIRELY within our capabilities in the Internet age -- or we will continue to yield complete control over who emerges as candidates to be voted on in the first place as well as the length and strength of the campaigns they run to the wealthy few at the expense of the ordinary American.
You are doing just fine on the mileage, I'll say that. My 10 cylinder Excursion would get 12 mpg or a hair over on mixed city/highway driving for a month or two after putting synthetic oil in it, but you could just watch its mileage eke away when it idled at a stop sign or light, especially when it was still cold. Since I drove it to work, and work was only 3 miles away, it would barely GET warm by the time I got there, especially in the winter. I wonder if some Einstein rebuilt/retuned the fuel delivery system of your truck to idle super low just to get that mileage boost. It might make it harder to start in the winter, but I'd get upper teens on level highway, and maybe 8 or 9 mpg in "normal" stop and go traffic. If I left the mileage computer alone for a year or more, it would eventually settle in at 11.2 and only move a point if I trucked a load up the blue ridge or got stuck in a traffic jam, or take a long flat trip to the coast.
I did love that car, all two tons of it. Sadly, I failed to get the cruise control replaced in time when Ford issued a late ownership recall, and it literally spontaneously caught fire in my driveway and burned out the motor. I got a replacement 8 cylinder gas Excursion for $5000, and it got a bit better mileage -- around 13 mpg IIRC -- but it also struggled to pull my boat and just didn't feel as good driving it. Eventually I traded it for my 4Runner, which pulls my boat almost as well, but which gets over 20 mpg when it isn't pulling the boat or a trailer, and still gets 16 to 18 pulling the boat. Basically, that's like getting 10 gallons for free every time I fill the tank in comparison. I drive to and from the NC coast almost weekly -- 400 miles round trip plus extra driving there as everything is spread out at the coast -- so I save well over $100/month compared to the Excursion.
If the heavens opened and somebody GAVE me an electric car with a range of 300 miles, I'd cheerfully leave the 4Runner AT the coast and use the second (really third) car to get back and forth -- why not? But when I run numbers on buying a small electric or used high mpg car just to commute so I could leave the 4Runner there and do the trip down in the Prius at 40+ mpg instead, there is simply no way this would pay for itself if I got something bigger/safer than maybe and Elf:
I'd seriously consider one IF it would go at least 45 mph, but running them at their peak speed of 30 down the 45 mph country road I have to drive on to get to Duke (where most people go 50 to 55, naturally) is just plain dangerous. They just aren't enough of a "car" to be road safe, even though the price and range are perfect for commuting IN the city where the speed limit is 35.
This is where the US car makers screw up. An electric commute car makes great sense, but only if:
a) The price point is under $10,000. I'd even say well under -- maybe $8000 for one that is decently accoutered. b) It has a top speed of at least 45 mph. c) It has a "car like" body that can be closed and locked and that protects one from rain and cold wind, and has proper lights and signals so one can drive it in the winter, on rainy days, in rush hour traffic, and feel at least moderately protected and comfortable. d) It has enough "cargo" capacity to be able to carry some groceries, work materials (computer case, briefcase, backpack) and/or a passenger without losing much in torque or max speed. e) It has at least 60 miles of range, ideally "adjustable" by e.g. adding a second battery pack. Personally, I'd put at least a square meter of solar panel on it integrated right into the roof so it would self-recharge when parked in the sun. Sadly, the most one could reasonably hope to accumulate over a day is around 0.5 to 1 KWH, but even that might be enough to manage a short commute "for free, forever" as far as fuel/charging is concerned.
The Elf isn't terrible in this regard. a), c) (could be better), d) (in one variant a
Right, and what this study says is that it's still cheaper to buy the EV because of what you will save on fuel costs.
And what I'm saying is that simple arithmetic says that if they put ALL of the fuel savings on the extra costs, they'd break even if the vehicles lasted for 300,000 miles. Or so. They are making a raft of assumptions about maintenance costs and more without any real data to back them with, and aside from the fact that comparable vehicles are unlikely to LAST to get 20 years/300,000 miles (the point where 30 mpg fuel economy breaks just about even), most people just plain can't afford a new EV, just like most people can't afford a new Lexus or a new 4Runner.
And (as somebody else pointed out on the thread) the economies are arguably the worst in an urban environment where one doesn't PUT 15,000 miles a year on a vehicle, which is exactly where they should be the most useful.
Except for the variety of EVs that cost around $6000 new for urban transport. Most of them are capped at around 30 mph and won't really work well out into the suburbs (or I'd own one already) but they are REALLY cheap to own and run. And more are coming. Sadly, one of the "best" ones is going to be built only in China, although I have hope of seeing it eventually in the US.
I'm not really arguing with any of that, only with the direct statement that they are, right now, cheaper out of pocket to most consumers. That is simply not correct. Many consumers can't afford the cheapest EV, but can still afford to make the payments (and buy the gasoline) for a new gas car and can EASILY buy a used gas car. As soon as you start talking about subsidies and externalities and so on, you may be right but you are missing the point, which is that a consumer has to be able to afford to pay for and operate whatever car they buy, and while EVs may be accessible to the comparatively well off professional, they are not really all that accessible to well over half the population of the US.
I actually doubt very much that any car is going to beat the Prius by much now that its price has come down to the same general range as normal gas cars. Not gas, not electric. I'm also very interested to see what Toyota makes of the general design as battery capacity and efficiency continue to mount. Smaller battery, lighter car, higher mileage still. Larger battery, smaller motor -- perhaps higher mileage still. Large enough battery, electric motor already in the car, add a plug and you have an electric car when you are in town and can easily charge to go short distances, and you still have gasoline and a hybrid when you are on the road and don't have to wait for charging times. That would be the best of both worlds, as far as cars go.
Sure, as I've said in other replies above, we have two, one 9 years old and one 3. I was presenting figures for the 9 year old one as we've owned and run it for the entire time in between. It is early to judge the Prius V that is much newer but it was $30,000 (down from $40,000+ for the original). We MIGHT break even on the V in the long run compared to similar size cars we might have bought at the time, but it will be close -- it only gets around 40 mpg compared to the originals 50 mpg (it's a bigger car, though, not apples to apples). The smaller Prius (C? can't remember) is cheaper and maybe a bit smaller than the original Prius and it might well be the best deal in its class year, a clear win. At $20K I suspect it would be, especially at 50 mpg, assuming it still has seating for 4-5 and decent cargo space like the original Prius.
A very good point, although I wouldn't say mpg isn't important or isn't the right measure. It is just what I was saying in my first statement -- you have to compare apples to apples, and you have to respect MARGINAL advantages. If you compare a 30 mpg compact car to a similarly compact electric car (and with similar outfitting of "luxuries" and "options" as well), of course you'll get a very different result from comparing a 10 loaded mpg SUV to a stripped electric car, and -- as you very correctly point out -- if a car or truck gets TERRIBLE gas mileage in the first place, you have low hanging fruit in the marginal cost game.
Not so very long ago, I owned a Ford Excursion that actually got a bit over 11 miles per gallon. You could carry three boys, two dogs, a mountain of luggage, and pull a trailer or boat -- in comfort -- but the mileage sucked. It also had one of those trip meters (early one, the ones in may cars now are much better) so that you could watch what was contributing to the poor mileage.
On the road, the Excursion's mileage wasn't anywhere nearly as bad. If you filled it up, reset it, and then drove on the Interstate for a few hundred miles, you'd average just under 20 mpg. But the MINUTE you stopped at a light, or a stop sign, the mileage would inexorably get sucked down. It had a 10 cylinder gasoline motor, and just keeping it running when stopped was almost half of its poor mileage, the rest being wasted energy from acceleration. I had fantasies about building a gas-gas hybrid -- basically sticking a lawnmower motor in front of the gas motor and tweaking it so that the lawnmower motor was the only thing running at stop signs but it was geared to kick the main motor back into function as you sped up when the light changed much the way the Prius electric motor does now. Just doing that would have made the mileage go up to maybe 16+ mpg, and of course a SMARTER gas-gas hybrid design would have regeared to avoid at least some of the speedup efficiency penalty and/or dropped back to fewer cylinders on the highway.
So I am perfectly happy to believe that electric actually makes MORE sense for poor mileage vehicles like trucks, that also have the advantage of more base weight to trade off into additional batteries. The 10 cylinder Excursion motor was huge, and heavy. Its 40 gallon tank was heavy when loaded. The whole car was extra-strong (F250 frame) to hold the heavy motor, gas tank, and "car" stuff. An electric motor of similar power would likely have been smaller and lighter, and all of that extra mass could have gone to batteries and range. Tesla looks like he gets that.
Well, our Prius hasn't cost significantly less in maintenance than a comparable all-gas car, and there is always the question of how much it will eventually cost to replace the entire primary battery too (ours hasn't needed it in about 8 years of use). Like any car, they have tricksy bits to them as well. For example, it costs $300 EACH to replace the front headlight bulbs because of the idiotic way they engineered the front end, requiring a partial disassembly of the engine to get the bulbs in and out. If you replace one or two of those over 8 years, it can pretty easily match brake replacements. But your point is well taken, and we do love our two Priuses (one older, one new Prius V). The V doesn't get the gas mileage of the original, but it was both cheaper and a bit nicer inside. But at 40 mpg, the marginal advantage over a 30 mpg gas car has all but disappeared.
I do agree about the insurance against gas price hits bit. But your mentioning of insurance reminded me that you are also paying a much higher premium for car insurance with the more expensive cars, AND are paying higher taxes on them, for longer.
According to a Forbes article published back in October (which curiously was trying to make all the same points) an electric vehicle costs about half as much as a gasoline car costs IN FUEL. To drive a full 300,000 miles in a 30 mpg gas car equates to 10,000 gallons of gas at a cost somewhere in the ballbark of $25,000. Half of this is $12,500, your expected cost (rough numbers, YMMV) in electricity. The difference is about equal to the up-front cost difference of a $25,000 30 mpg gas car and (say) a Chevy Volt. For the Volt you will also have just about half the range -- and most of its competitors are worse. You MAY have to replace the batteries in the timeframe required to reach 300,000 miles -- assuming you can reach it at all for either car -- which would completely cancel any advantage in maintenance in the meantime. Then there are the higher insurance, higher taxes, and the marginal costs of the extra money required to BUY the more expensive car up front. And assuming that you run the car(s) less than 300,000 miles just makes everything worse -- for the electric car.
So no, I still don't agree that electric cars are ready for prime time except as a luxury item, and even if they eventually get to where they ARE cheaper in the fifteen year of ownership lifetime (note that 300,000 miles is owning the car for 20 years at 15,000 miles per year, which honestly I think is pretty extreme anyway), having a higher up-front cost is going to place them out of reach for a lot of people who just can't afford to make the higher payments. In the meantime, they are going to continue to be a pain to keep charged and risky to take on long trips until we build a LOT more infrastructure to support them.
Note well that I'm not ragging on them for political reasons. As I said, I own two Priuses, and they ARE cheap to run. But my Toyota 4Runner gets 21+ mpg as an SUV, can pull a boat, can hold way more than either Prius, I can drive it anywhere in the US, anytime, without worrying about finding some way to fuel it along the way and I'm fond of it too. Tesla's next round of cars may finally hit the price/range point where I'd seriously consider one -- maybe by the time one of my existing cars finally wears out. But I absolutely need 300 to 400 miles of range before I'd consider one -- all of my gas cars have an easy 400 (almost 500 for the original Prius) miles of range and I can fill them up in five minutes anywhere.
In the city, as a short range commute car, electric may make more sense. Gas cars get their worst mileage in stop and go in-town driving (Priuses less so, but still). Having long range between fills/charges is less important, especially if you can charge at home. But in my SMALL city, where I drive 3 whole miles to work each way, it would take me an eternity to pay off the marginal cost difference, and short of the 300 mile Teslas wouldn't have the range to do the country driving I also do a lot of.
Sure, but note that his point still stands. You can't ignore opportunity cost. In the case at hand, it might be the difference between financing $35,000 and financing $20,000. Over (say) five years, you will be making much higher payments in the former case than the latter case in addition to the proportional increase in total interest paid. That money you failed to pay out remains in your pocket. Whether or not you invest it (his original point, valid enough if you are trying to compare costs) or use it to live on because the car you are buying is all you can afford, either way it isn't just the cost differential, it is the cost differential plus the cost of (as YOU note) borrowing the cost differential plus the marginal cost of the extra out of pocket money you have to spend to make the payments.
This becomes clear if you imagine that -- in order to make the higher payments -- one had to borrow money to make them. Then you accumulate additional debt during the payout period, which basically makes you take longer to pay off the car and pay out more than the marginal difference in interest and capital cost on the loans. There really is no way around it in a fair CBA.
It's the difference between 15 year and 30 year loans, for example. If you buy a cheap house, you can afford a payment that pays it off in 15 years. If you buy a more expensive house, the same payment might pay it off, but you might need a 30 year loan to keep the payment low enough to afford. You will pay a lot more money out in the latter case, and even if you CAN afford to buy the more expensive house on a 15 year loan, you can't pretend that the extra money you have to pay out to do so is "free".
Yeah, and I strongly suspect that somebody just can't do arithmetic as well. Perhaps SOME electric cars are less expensive than SOME gasoline cars, but there is a huge range of prices for gas cars, even in a given class. If you compare a high end luxury gas car to the cheapest electric, add in the subsidy, and make negatory assumptions about the probable price of gasoline over the expected lifetime of the car, you can probably fudge it to make it come out a win, but if you compare apples to apples without subsidies, it isn't so clear. Suppose a car goes 12,000 miles in a year. At 20 mpg, that costs 600 gallons of gasoline, or around $1500/year. Over a ten year lifetime, fuel costs are only around $15,000, so if electric cars ran FREE you'd need price points for CHEAP electric cars to match those of CHEAP gasoline cars within around $12,000, allowing for the cost of money. But the cheapest electric cars are easily this much more than the cheapest gasoline cars, and even the study only allows for a 10% difference in maintenance costs, which really remains to be seen as these costs are highly variable by manufacturer. But electricity is NOT free -- even if it is being provided "free" in some places it is really just another subsidy, and costs SOMEBODY somewhere between $0.10 and $0.20 per KWH.
I ran into the same difficulty with our Priuses. The first Prius we bought was $40,000. At the time, we could have easily gotten a similar size/class car for maybe $20,000 to $25,000, one that got around 30 mpg. There is no way we paid off the difference in financing costs over the lifetime of the car with the marginal savings on gasoline at around 50 mpg. New cheap Priuses are better -- close to break even -- but electric cars IMO have a ways to go.
Why? If a space bacterium fell to earth now, how long would it last? Chances are not terrible that it would be eaten almost immediately, or that it would fail to reproduce and eventually oxidize. I mean, you could be right and space bacteria could be falling to the Earth all the time but there isn't anything LIKE a guarantee that we'd see them, as we have a hard enough time finding and classifying the bacteria that we already have -- or separating out ones that might be falling from space all the time from the home-evolved sort.
Again, I'm not trying to start an argument here -- only to point out that once any sort of genetic sequencing of the bacteria is done (if it CAN be done) then we'll know a lot more than we know now. In the meantime, pretending that we can be certain that it is/isn't an Earthly bacterium is a waste of time, because we can't, and won't be either way until a lot more work is done. Which is pretty much what the top article says as well.
In the meantime, it might be wise to keep an open mind, without EITHER asserting that it is bound to be of Earthly origin OR certain to be extraterrestrial. The right answer at the moment is "we don't know because we haven't really looked yet in the ways likely to add weight to one side or the other" and theoretical arguments or statistical arguments all rely on Bayesian priors that themselves are a pure crap shoot, such as the prevalence of extraterrestrial life our the completeness of our knowledge of what could happen to extraterrestrial life after it falls into our highly bioactive oxidative environment.
Why? With genetic analysis almost routine at this point, I would expect that they could at the very least state that the bacterium(s) in question are/are not genetically congruent with known Earth species. If they find an E Coli on the outside of the station, it almost certainly came from Earth. If they find a bacterium with a genetic structure that is distinct from pretty much all known Earth species, it won't prove that it is extraterrestrial, but it would make it a lot less likely. At the very least, explaining how -- and when -- it got there will be more challenging.
If the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... hypothesis is correct (where this might be evidence supporting the hypothesis, or might not) then this will be only the first of many such observations, as "life" on Earth would have originated in an early population 1 stellar system in this galaxy and would then have been dispersed over billions of years after (say) that early P1 star went nova and/or some other cataclysm dispersed matter with biological travellers attached. We have recently directly observed that not only comets but large cold asteroids are knocking around that sometimes pass through on hyperbolic orbits. One expects a lot more (much) smaller objects are out there that pass through than ones large enough to observe from Earth, and it is by no means implausible that one would fall on early/primordial Earth and land ice cold to seed the planet, IF panspermia is in any sense approximately correct.
Note well I'm not endorsing it or arguing for it, just presenting it as one not unreasonable hypothesis and noting that that is really what all of this is about. Even if the bacteria is eventually labelled "probably/plausibly extraterrestrial" it doesn't prove panspermia, as it might have come from life originating on Mars, or a Jovian moon, or even a comet -- since we don't have a working model of biogenesis we cannot really exclude any particular possibilities for the origin of life. It could even have come first from the Earth, been blown into escape speed by e.g. a falling asteroid or a volcanic explosion, landed on a young Mars and evolved for a while there, and been blown BACK into space from Mars during an asteroid collision or whatever. Genetic testing ought to significantly favor one or more of the various alternative hypotheses, and if it is a common Earth bacteria, I'd say that this is nothing but probable contamination or some entirely mundane form of low orbit transport as suggested above. But if it is NOT related to an KNOWN Earth bacteria, then things get interesting...
FORTRAN? The syntactically incorrect statement "DO 10 I = 1.10" will parse and generate code creating a variable, DO10I, as follows: "DO10I = 1.10" If that doesn't terrify you, it should.
In other words, the fortune database contains a fair bit of wisdom, a lot that is very funny (it is SUPPOSED to be funny/ironic/satirical/wiseass), and a certain amount that is shocking just because.
What it is not supposed to be is boring. Or, for that matter, a fortune. I no longer generate a fortune on login or logout the way I did for some decades of the past -- mostly login to a single GUI and just pop up xterms, rarely logging into a remote host through one but much more often working on the system I'm on -- but back in the day, fortunes brightened many an otherwise dull day, sometimes many times over as I logged into many hosts, a lot.
And, I'm betting that Microsoft sponsored all of them, just to have SOMETHING ON THE LIST. But did M$ ever manage to bribe enough people to get 1 lousy percent of the top 500?
For most people, the extra HUMAN expense of making a cluster work at all, and the extra TIME expense of having it run like a pig when you get it to run at all, isn't worth even a massive M$ bribe free cluster (as long as you run Windows). It sort of depends on whether actually getting your work done is more important to you than pain.
I'm not even sure what you are asking here. Do you truly have no idea how a GPL works?
Anyway, you have this exactly backwards. The reason Linux became popular during the parallel supercomputing "revolution" (and I say this as a modest expert, at least at that time) is because it IS an open source operating system, so you could hack the kernel, write your own kernel drivers, fix things like networking bugs or system balance issues, and handle memory at a very primitive level. You got then, and can easily get now, the complete source of the OS and all of its device drivers, although the latter has been a constant source of contention between hardware mfrs who think that a device driver that makes their hardware run is some sort of "trade secret" and the keepers of the Linux kernel. Over decades (at this point) the mfrs have largely given up and actively help with kernel drivers instead of insisting on binary-only distributions. This played a critical role in the development of early parallel supercomputers once Linux had its first kernel capable of symmetric multiprocessing with two (and rapidly more) CPUs or (later) cores, or both. That would be roughly kernel 2.0, although there were still serious issues with race conditions, (network) driver interrupts and lockups, memory management, and so on, through 2.0.4+ -- really they went on forever as the 2.0 kernel wasn't truly symmetric, handled interrupt locking "badly", and took a lot of revision and some new paradigms to smooth out and stabilize. Ah, those were the days...
Microsoft, on the other hand, made you sign away your firstborn child in order to get a copy of the OS source -- even as a research institution. If (say) your network drivers were slow, or locked up while multiprocessing, you were SOL. You COULDN'T fix it. You couldn't even find the bug. And it wasn't worth the effort -- even if you sacrificed a goat and got the source -- to learn to work with the source because it changed at MS's whim and all your work could go down the tubes at any moment and if you DID develop anything that ran on their system in some "custom" fashion, you ran into serious issues if you wanted to share it. You COULDN'T share your work with anybody else, not unless they had a surplus of goats or firstborn children too.
"Anybody" (with a need and decent programming chops) could join the linux kernel list and communicate directly with the main kernel developers and report bugs, contribute fixes or drivers, etc. There was a lot of healthy debate about what needed to be fixed, or improved, first, second, third etc, as well as just how to go about fixing them -- sometimes it required substantial redesign and had to wait for a major bump (and a lot of testing). You could of course hack/fix your own kernels or add your own device drivers, or fix broken drivers, or mess with internal "tuning", and I and many others did, but behind the public scenes the actual kernel developers -- the heart of linux, as it were -- made steady, inexorable progress.
By the year 2000, Linux had made serious inroads into not only the top 500, but there were literally uncounted small clusters that weren't fast enough (or weren't architected correctly) to crack the top 500, which relied on things like the Linpack benchmark to determine who to include. There were lots of folks who didn't USE linear algebra in their computations who built massively parallel compute farms with many different architectures and purposes who didn't even have the benchmark software installed (or give a shit) about their "ranking". Both PVM and MPI were fully ported onto Linux and most of their ongoing development was taking place on Linux boxes. Additional tools for management and job distribution and much more were developed -- on mostly Linux boxes, but yeah, there were still SGIs and Sun Microsystems clusters and much more out there. They suffered -- badly suffered, terminally badly suffered in pretty much all cases -- from being much, much more expensive than over the counter Intel or AMD box
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Mine was much better. We were driving west on I40 and passing west of Winston-Salem when we saw -- my wife and I together -- a light that literally rippled in the sky, lights flashing like they were rolling around on some invisible shape. It flew first to the right of the road, then made an impossible turn and came back diagonally across the road in front of is, then rose and zipped back to the right and came directly towards us, parallel to the road, the lights growing brighter and brighter and with the whole thing literally glittering with rippling sparkles of light. I'm a physicist, she's a physician and at no time did we actually believe we were being visited by aliens following I40 in to attack Winston, but we certainly could not identify what we were seeing -- it was absolutely a Unidentified Flying Object!
Then it smoothly passed us on the right about a mile away, and we could see that it was a biplane towing an advertising display, heading back for another pass over some stadium where they were apparently playing football. We were barely too far away to see exactly what they were selling, but damn, that display rippled and sparkled in the night JUST LIKE lights spinning around on a flying disk, one that constantly tumbled or changed shape.
The moral of the story is mixed. Lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack, and one anecdote cannot address every UFO sighting in the history of mankind. However, as I've pointed out to my sons -- who are much more inclined to give credence to the idea that we are constantly being watched by aliens and that their experiences like this one HAVE no natural explanation -- during the 50's through the 80's, the US was more or less constantly under the threat of air attack and ICBM attack from the USSR and to a lesser extent China. SAC had every border lit up with radar that was being watched continuously for "unidentified flying objects" that without question would have been interpreted as an attack by the USSR, not visitation by snoopy space aliens. Every commercial airport was equipped with radar and flight control, (and still is today) and any object not identified by procedure and law would be immediately detected and in all probability investigated, especially post-9/11.
So sure, space aliens could be masters of stealth AND nefariously snoopy AND could be malevolent (spying us out To Serve Man) or constrained by THEIR laws and customs not to interfere while we rush to destroy each other, waiting to see if we survive long enough to build a peaceful global society. Science fiction novels delight in this kind of stuff. But Bayesian assessments of stacked arguments of this sort are never very convincing. Every special explanation required decreases the probability of the truth of the conclusion. Our governments -- all of them -- have to be members of a global conspiracy to hide "area 51" evidence. Reliable sightings have to be suppressed. The alien stealth has to be almost perfect to hide from civilian radar, or civilian radar has to be part of the conspiracy (which by now has grown to include the entire air force, NASA, the top levels of every government, all of the major intelligence and police services -- worldwide). AND we need psychotic aliens because REAL aliens intent on invasion would have crafted a killer virus long before now and collapsed civilization or would have just fired a few nukes at Russia and the US simultaneously and than sat back snacking on popcorn while we collapsed it for ourselves and left them some simply mopping up to do before they took over the rest of the world without credible opposition, and REAL aliens interested in making friend would have made friends long ago. But Bayesian reasoning is a bit difficult for most folks, sadly, and explosion of premises/priors (a.k.a. common sense, withholding a significant degree of belief in the absence of credible evidence AND a credible, evidence supported explanation) is all too rare.
After all, roughly 80% of the people on Earth believe in malevolent and beneficent
Or, install it on a VM under Linux, or on its own disk partition in parallel, or on its own SD disk, or on your OLD computer because if you are a geek worthy of the badge, you have at least two or three obsoleted/backup computers lying around that you no longer use as your primary system (I have, lessee, five immediately operable systems and a sixth and seventh I could use with a small bit of effort).
There are multiple VM alternatives available under linux -- I currently use virtualbox simply because I started with it as the best alternative back when VMware stopped being open and free. Building and installing a VM with an operating system is the work of a couple of hours as long as the OS has an easy network install. SDD is now cheap if your laptop has an open slot. HDD is cheap an enormous, ditto -- room to put four or five OS's in a line-em-up-and-boot them configuration all with 500 GB to TB scale disk allocations at roughly $30 to $50/TB in 4 TB form factors.
I'm avoiding the entire discussion about systemd per se, because while I personally am an Old Guy (tm) and was quite content with init, the various boot files, and so on largely because I understood it and could manage it or hack it armed with nothing but terminal interfaces (xterms) and an editor, I haven't really suffered as Linux moved over to systemd. It isn't as easy to hack down deep, perhaps, but then, Linux doesn't seem to need the down deep hacking it used to just to get it to work. And a lot of the management can still be done with an editor in a terminal, it is just arguably a bit more difficult to figure out what and where to do the editing.
Linux in the old days was enormously stable (once you worked at it a bit on your particular hardware as needed) but it was like all Unices "expert friendly". I was an expert, and for experts the OS and software stack provided and still provides enormous power and flexibility at the lowest possible price -- the cost of becoming expert enough to install and manage it, since "all systems" come preinstalled with WinX or IOS and "no systems" come preinstalled with Linux (I know, not all all, but close enough not to matter). I'm sure BSD would have worked or will work now as well, just like I know I could get by on any of a number of different flavors of linux. The only real problem even now is that for laptops and desktops (ignoring android devices, in other words) installing linux is too much for 95% of all of humanity. Hell, you could make it some sort of complex IQ test -- can you install linux from scratch on a new system, and do you dare to trash the preinstalled OS to find out?
This is unlikely to change, because of agreements between all of the major computer manufacturers and Microsoft, and Apple's agreement with itself. There isn't any significant economic advantage to changing it for the sellers. There isn't any demand for Linux systems, and in the current oligarchy-dominated marketplace, no consumer demand can possibly develop. Those smart enough and/or with a need do it themselves (usually after paying the Windows Tax when they buy their machines because what choice do they have?) and the rest of them are never presented with a floor display in Best Buy with preconfigured Linux systems ready to take home and puzzle over this whole "root" thing and how to create an account and how to get your printer to work with it and how to get your camera and phone to work with it and how to get your $#!)@ bluetooth speakers or headphones to work with it and... even as an "expert" with 30 years experience managing Unixoid systems, I STILL can't get my plantronics cans to work with Fedora.
So my advice -- stop worrying about systemd, as even most expert people just don't care, as long as it installs easily, manages adequately easily, and works. AFAICT, Fedora "just works" with systemd as much as it ever did with init. Fix the stuff that makes running Linux in almost any flavor (still) a PITA. Bluetooth! For gosh' sake, it's 2017! Printers. Installing a printer shouldn
Damn. A logician has to go ruin my paradox of the day...
Yeah, this is going to work really well in a state where telcoms donate roughly twice as much money to its senators' and reps' campaigns as all of the people in the state making less than $200,000 a year put together.
Which is -- wait for it -- most of the states in the US. That's the problem. With net neutrality, the playing field is not level and there are limits on competition that might or might not benefit the consumer. Without net neutrality, the playing field will not be level because there will be no limits on monopoly abuse that will definitely not benefit the consumer because the public utility near-monopolies in question own congress, the president, and will soon own a shit-pile of your money that they will collect as a target specific toll to reach parts of the internet that don't pay them off (and still charge you more to do so).
Damn, I posted above. Wasted "mod insightful" points again. Or is it "mod funny". Hard to say...:-)
Are you dramatically predicting that dramatic predictions never come true? Please tell me that you are...
No arguments from me. As I said and continue to say, Big Corporations (with the capital letters) are currently in control of 3/4 of our four tier government (and have disproportionate influence in the fifth estate as well) by virtue of being the primary funders of all candidates in all elections of significance in the country. They have effective veto power both inside the parties and in the elections because nobody can afford to run for office without the 90% or so of the total cost of running that they contribute, directly and indirectly.
The "freedom" of the market is a secondary issue, and it will be impossible to even begin to untangle things until we pass and enforce legislation outlawing corporate contributions to politicians, PACs, parties, and other things beginning with "P". Outlaw lobbying while we are at it -- paying somebody to advocate for or against a law again introduces a factor into lawmaking not covered in the Constitution and gives disproportionate influence to those wealthy enough to hire a lobbyist (in addition to its demonstrated potential to corrupt politicians by silently lining their pockets or drowning out reasoned opposition) -- and I mean lobbying by the Sierra Foundation as much as lobbying by the Alt-Right. No lobbying at all. Outlaw or stringently limit the amount any private citizen can contribute to a political candidate, political party, or all political parties and candidates put together -- again anything beginning with "P". Level the field for "campaigning" so that it does NOT cost a significant fraction of a billion dollars to run for President and so that third, or even fourth party or no party candidates are not effectively prevented from being a serious political force. Do all of this and wait a decade to vote out all of the rascals who have been sucking on the Oligarchic Plutocratic Tit for decades. Then we'll see what (if anything) we need to do about, or with, the freedom of the market, once it really IS a market and not an extra-constitutional political force that has long since diluted the "republican democracy" intended by the founders to where it is a sick joke.
Well said, sir! No mod points today, though, sorry, as I'm already commenting and don't do the AC swaparoo to do both.
I always liked it as a sound bite "Taxes buy me civilization", much as the liberty I give up -- such as the freedom to kill my neighbor, steal his sheep, and rape his daughter if I'm stronger than he is and can get away with it -- buys me freedom from murdering, raping, sheep rustlers in turn who just happen to be stronger than I am or who have a few more friends.
It is surprising how quickly the religious principles of the rabid libertarian evaporate, though, when confronted with the plain old bad luck of life that nobody ever insures against. Having any sort of public health care system is an insult to democracy and the freedom to die a pauper if you actually get sick -- right up to the day they have a single "accident" and find out the hard way that the emergency room, surgery, and two weeks in the ICU plus two weeks on the wards of the neighborhood hospital has left them backrupt and -- if it were not for the corrupt bankruptcy laws and social support network -- would leave them living under an overpass somewhere and panhandling on corners. Then you have things like Ayn Rand, the poster child for libertarianism, using medicare/medicaid when (after a lifetime of smoking and NOT buying insurance or saving money) she gets cancer.
What it really comes down to is a mix of spite and the kind of world you want to live in. If you want to live in a world dominated by the wealthy, the strong, and the ambitious, where the poor, the weak, the sickly, and the stupid are left to struggle, starve, and die young, by all means, rant on about the evils of taxes and the virtue of selfishness. Just remember that the real Midas Mulligans of the world, when confronted with an upstart who tries to start a bank to compete, hire some unemployed layabouts and have them pitch bottles of gasoline in through your new bank's windows, kidnap your children, and leave you notes pinned to your gutted Alsatian suggesting that you might want to sell out at 10 cents on the dollar to Mr. Mulligan. Or, in the case of the energy oligarchs, lean on the government so that they send in the army to take by force the right of way of a long oil pipeline.
Taxes do indeed buy me civilization, but the real problem with our current system is that "democracy" has been completely undermined by the absurdly wealthy who own the very restaurant where the menu of "column A and column B" is presented to the voters. It doesn't matter. Vote for either side. They all belong to the rich and powerful either way, or they wouldn't be on the menu in the first place.
According to reality, the "people" who make less than $200,000 a year "are" less than 10% of the government. The other 90% is made up of a comparatively few corporations, PACs, and people who work for those corporations and make over $200,000 a year. That's about how campaign money falls out. It costs around $11,000,000 to run for Senate, on average. Well over $100,000,000 to run for president. It costs a bit less than $2,000,000 to run for the House of Representatives. The oligarchs who own and manage (at a high level) the large, often multinational corporations that contribute tha vast bulk of this money have de facto veto power over who gets to run in the first place. By the time the "choice" is presented to the voters, it is reduced to the Whore of Babylon vs the Antichrist -- we the actual people are a loser either way, and no matter who wins, their soul will be owned by the people that bought and paid for their campaign an who they KNOW will have to continue their support for them to hold on to power.
That's the interesting thing. You see, the Constitution doesn't identify "the corporation" as a political entity at all. Unsurprisingly, as "corporations" in the modern sense almost didn't exist in America at the time and there wasn't that much by way of "old money" oligarchy in a country that had just thrown OFF the overseas monarch and his oligarchs that ran it immediately before. They also had no concept of the modern "political campaign" with its ever shifting base of paid advertisement, rumor, fake news, sly innuendo, attack ads, sound bites, billboards, and massively printed and distributed posters. They would have been shocked by the idea that someone running for president would target just a handful of "battleground" states for the bulk of their campaign activity and spending on the basis of pre-election "elections" by a tiny fraction of the people plus statistical extrapolations, neglecting to even show their face in dozens of other states full of the very people they would represent but that were supposedly "solidly" behind one candidate or the other.
Unless and until we muzzle the oligarchy that effectively controls the US electoral process from the ground up by the simple expedient of contributing money equally to BOTH candidates in many races -- if they avoid vocalizing things like the need to muzzle the non-constitutional oligarchy itself, if they both appear equally compliant and smart enough to understand what will happen if they ever vote to alter the situation -- we'll continue to have politicians effectively sell their votes on things like net neutrality for the contributions from the big telecoms and their executives. In North Carolina (where I live) for example, Burr got around $600,000 of his last election budget from households that make under $200,000. He got around $1,200,000 from communications companies and their top executives. Hmmm, you can talk about "votes" all you want, but money talks, bullshit walks, and telecommunications paid for almost 10% of his campaign, twice as much as he raised from the ordinary voters in the state combined.
Plutocracy, oligarchy, the recreation of a de facto feudal "nobility" in the form of the very rich (Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, etc) who control the jobs and livelihood of millions of voters with their billions of dollars -- they are not our forefather's democracy. Either we the people wake up and smell the shit in our Starbucks (metaphorically speaking) and alter from the ground up the way elections are funded and run -- banning outright ALL forms of corporate support for candidates, eliminating lobbying (all forms, the good, the bad, the ugly), eliminating PACs, maybe eliminating the need to obtain campaign contributions altogether -- something that is ENTIRELY within our capabilities in the Internet age -- or we will continue to yield complete control over who emerges as candidates to be voted on in the first place as well as the length and strength of the campaigns they run to the wealthy few at the expense of the ordinary American.
You are doing just fine on the mileage, I'll say that. My 10 cylinder Excursion would get 12 mpg or a hair over on mixed city/highway driving for a month or two after putting synthetic oil in it, but you could just watch its mileage eke away when it idled at a stop sign or light, especially when it was still cold. Since I drove it to work, and work was only 3 miles away, it would barely GET warm by the time I got there, especially in the winter. I wonder if some Einstein rebuilt/retuned the fuel delivery system of your truck to idle super low just to get that mileage boost. It might make it harder to start in the winter, but I'd get upper teens on level highway, and maybe 8 or 9 mpg in "normal" stop and go traffic. If I left the mileage computer alone for a year or more, it would eventually settle in at 11.2 and only move a point if I trucked a load up the blue ridge or got stuck in a traffic jam, or take a long flat trip to the coast.
I did love that car, all two tons of it. Sadly, I failed to get the cruise control replaced in time when Ford issued a late ownership recall, and it literally spontaneously caught fire in my driveway and burned out the motor. I got a replacement 8 cylinder gas Excursion for $5000, and it got a bit better mileage -- around 13 mpg IIRC -- but it also struggled to pull my boat and just didn't feel as good driving it. Eventually I traded it for my 4Runner, which pulls my boat almost as well, but which gets over 20 mpg when it isn't pulling the boat or a trailer, and still gets 16 to 18 pulling the boat. Basically, that's like getting 10 gallons for free every time I fill the tank in comparison. I drive to and from the NC coast almost weekly -- 400 miles round trip plus extra driving there as everything is spread out at the coast -- so I save well over $100/month compared to the Excursion.
If the heavens opened and somebody GAVE me an electric car with a range of 300 miles, I'd cheerfully leave the 4Runner AT the coast and use the second (really third) car to get back and forth -- why not? But when I run numbers on buying a small electric or used high mpg car just to commute so I could leave the 4Runner there and do the trip down in the Prius at 40+ mpg instead, there is simply no way this would pay for itself if I got something bigger/safer than maybe and Elf:
https://organictransit.com/
I'd seriously consider one IF it would go at least 45 mph, but running them at their peak speed of 30 down the 45 mph country road I have to drive on to get to Duke (where most people go 50 to 55, naturally) is just plain dangerous. They just aren't enough of a "car" to be road safe, even though the price and range are perfect for commuting IN the city where the speed limit is 35.
This is where the US car makers screw up. An electric commute car makes great sense, but only if:
a) The price point is under $10,000. I'd even say well under -- maybe $8000 for one that is decently accoutered.
b) It has a top speed of at least 45 mph.
c) It has a "car like" body that can be closed and locked and that protects one from rain and cold wind, and has proper lights and signals so one can drive it in the winter, on rainy days, in rush hour traffic, and feel at least moderately protected and comfortable.
d) It has enough "cargo" capacity to be able to carry some groceries, work materials (computer case, briefcase, backpack) and/or a passenger without losing much in torque or max speed.
e) It has at least 60 miles of range, ideally "adjustable" by e.g. adding a second battery pack. Personally, I'd put at least a square meter of solar panel on it integrated right into the roof so it would self-recharge when parked in the sun. Sadly, the most one could reasonably hope to accumulate over a day is around 0.5 to 1 KWH, but even that might be enough to manage a short commute "for free, forever" as far as fuel/charging is concerned.
The Elf isn't terrible in this regard. a), c) (could be better), d) (in one variant a
Right, and what this study says is that it's still cheaper to buy the EV because of what you will save on fuel costs.
And what I'm saying is that simple arithmetic says that if they put ALL of the fuel savings on the extra costs, they'd break even if the vehicles lasted for 300,000 miles. Or so. They are making a raft of assumptions about maintenance costs and more without any real data to back them with, and aside from the fact that comparable vehicles are unlikely to LAST to get 20 years/300,000 miles (the point where 30 mpg fuel economy breaks just about even), most people just plain can't afford a new EV, just like most people can't afford a new Lexus or a new 4Runner.
And (as somebody else pointed out on the thread) the economies are arguably the worst in an urban environment where one doesn't PUT 15,000 miles a year on a vehicle, which is exactly where they should be the most useful.
Except for the variety of EVs that cost around $6000 new for urban transport. Most of them are capped at around 30 mph and won't really work well out into the suburbs (or I'd own one already) but they are REALLY cheap to own and run. And more are coming. Sadly, one of the "best" ones is going to be built only in China, although I have hope of seeing it eventually in the US.
I'm not really arguing with any of that, only with the direct statement that they are, right now, cheaper out of pocket to most consumers. That is simply not correct. Many consumers can't afford the cheapest EV, but can still afford to make the payments (and buy the gasoline) for a new gas car and can EASILY buy a used gas car. As soon as you start talking about subsidies and externalities and so on, you may be right but you are missing the point, which is that a consumer has to be able to afford to pay for and operate whatever car they buy, and while EVs may be accessible to the comparatively well off professional, they are not really all that accessible to well over half the population of the US.
I actually doubt very much that any car is going to beat the Prius by much now that its price has come down to the same general range as normal gas cars. Not gas, not electric. I'm also very interested to see what Toyota makes of the general design as battery capacity and efficiency continue to mount. Smaller battery, lighter car, higher mileage still. Larger battery, smaller motor -- perhaps higher mileage still. Large enough battery, electric motor already in the car, add a plug and you have an electric car when you are in town and can easily charge to go short distances, and you still have gasoline and a hybrid when you are on the road and don't have to wait for charging times. That would be the best of both worlds, as far as cars go.
Sure, as I've said in other replies above, we have two, one 9 years old and one 3. I was presenting figures for the 9 year old one as we've owned and run it for the entire time in between. It is early to judge the Prius V that is much newer but it was $30,000 (down from $40,000+ for the original). We MIGHT break even on the V in the long run compared to similar size cars we might have bought at the time, but it will be close -- it only gets around 40 mpg compared to the originals 50 mpg (it's a bigger car, though, not apples to apples). The smaller Prius (C? can't remember) is cheaper and maybe a bit smaller than the original Prius and it might well be the best deal in its class year, a clear win. At $20K I suspect it would be, especially at 50 mpg, assuming it still has seating for 4-5 and decent cargo space like the original Prius.
A very good point, although I wouldn't say mpg isn't important or isn't the right measure. It is just what I was saying in my first statement -- you have to compare apples to apples, and you have to respect MARGINAL advantages. If you compare a 30 mpg compact car to a similarly compact electric car (and with similar outfitting of "luxuries" and "options" as well), of course you'll get a very different result from comparing a 10 loaded mpg SUV to a stripped electric car, and -- as you very correctly point out -- if a car or truck gets TERRIBLE gas mileage in the first place, you have low hanging fruit in the marginal cost game.
Not so very long ago, I owned a Ford Excursion that actually got a bit over 11 miles per gallon. You could carry three boys, two dogs, a mountain of luggage, and pull a trailer or boat -- in comfort -- but the mileage sucked. It also had one of those trip meters (early one, the ones in may cars now are much better) so that you could watch what was contributing to the poor mileage.
On the road, the Excursion's mileage wasn't anywhere nearly as bad. If you filled it up, reset it, and then drove on the Interstate for a few hundred miles, you'd average just under 20 mpg. But the MINUTE you stopped at a light, or a stop sign, the mileage would inexorably get sucked down. It had a 10 cylinder gasoline motor, and just keeping it running when stopped was almost half of its poor mileage, the rest being wasted energy from acceleration. I had fantasies about building a gas-gas hybrid -- basically sticking a lawnmower motor in front of the gas motor and tweaking it so that the lawnmower motor was the only thing running at stop signs but it was geared to kick the main motor back into function as you sped up when the light changed much the way the Prius electric motor does now. Just doing that would have made the mileage go up to maybe 16+ mpg, and of course a SMARTER gas-gas hybrid design would have regeared to avoid at least some of the speedup efficiency penalty and/or dropped back to fewer cylinders on the highway.
So I am perfectly happy to believe that electric actually makes MORE sense for poor mileage vehicles like trucks, that also have the advantage of more base weight to trade off into additional batteries. The 10 cylinder Excursion motor was huge, and heavy. Its 40 gallon tank was heavy when loaded. The whole car was extra-strong (F250 frame) to hold the heavy motor, gas tank, and "car" stuff. An electric motor of similar power would likely have been smaller and lighter, and all of that extra mass could have gone to batteries and range. Tesla looks like he gets that.
Well, our Prius hasn't cost significantly less in maintenance than a comparable all-gas car, and there is always the question of how much it will eventually cost to replace the entire primary battery too (ours hasn't needed it in about 8 years of use). Like any car, they have tricksy bits to them as well. For example, it costs $300 EACH to replace the front headlight bulbs because of the idiotic way they engineered the front end, requiring a partial disassembly of the engine to get the bulbs in and out. If you replace one or two of those over 8 years, it can pretty easily match brake replacements. But your point is well taken, and we do love our two Priuses (one older, one new Prius V). The V doesn't get the gas mileage of the original, but it was both cheaper and a bit nicer inside. But at 40 mpg, the marginal advantage over a 30 mpg gas car has all but disappeared.
I do agree about the insurance against gas price hits bit. But your mentioning of insurance reminded me that you are also paying a much higher premium for car insurance with the more expensive cars, AND are paying higher taxes on them, for longer.
According to a Forbes article published back in October (which curiously was trying to make all the same points) an electric vehicle costs about half as much as a gasoline car costs IN FUEL. To drive a full 300,000 miles in a 30 mpg gas car equates to 10,000 gallons of gas at a cost somewhere in the ballbark of $25,000. Half of this is $12,500, your expected cost (rough numbers, YMMV) in electricity. The difference is about equal to the up-front cost difference of a $25,000 30 mpg gas car and (say) a Chevy Volt. For the Volt you will also have just about half the range -- and most of its competitors are worse. You MAY have to replace the batteries in the timeframe required to reach 300,000 miles -- assuming you can reach it at all for either car -- which would completely cancel any advantage in maintenance in the meantime. Then there are the higher insurance, higher taxes, and the marginal costs of the extra money required to BUY the more expensive car up front. And assuming that you run the car(s) less than 300,000 miles just makes everything worse -- for the electric car.
So no, I still don't agree that electric cars are ready for prime time except as a luxury item, and even if they eventually get to where they ARE cheaper in the fifteen year of ownership lifetime (note that 300,000 miles is owning the car for 20 years at 15,000 miles per year, which honestly I think is pretty extreme anyway), having a higher up-front cost is going to place them out of reach for a lot of people who just can't afford to make the higher payments. In the meantime, they are going to continue to be a pain to keep charged and risky to take on long trips until we build a LOT more infrastructure to support them.
Note well that I'm not ragging on them for political reasons. As I said, I own two Priuses, and they ARE cheap to run. But my Toyota 4Runner gets 21+ mpg as an SUV, can pull a boat, can hold way more than either Prius, I can drive it anywhere in the US, anytime, without worrying about finding some way to fuel it along the way and I'm fond of it too. Tesla's next round of cars may finally hit the price/range point where I'd seriously consider one -- maybe by the time one of my existing cars finally wears out. But I absolutely need 300 to 400 miles of range before I'd consider one -- all of my gas cars have an easy 400 (almost 500 for the original Prius) miles of range and I can fill them up in five minutes anywhere.
In the city, as a short range commute car, electric may make more sense. Gas cars get their worst mileage in stop and go in-town driving (Priuses less so, but still). Having long range between fills/charges is less important, especially if you can charge at home. But in my SMALL city, where I drive 3 whole miles to work each way, it would take me an eternity to pay off the marginal cost difference, and short of the 300 mile Teslas wouldn't have the range to do the country driving I also do a lot of.
Sure, but note that his point still stands. You can't ignore opportunity cost. In the case at hand, it might be the difference between financing $35,000 and financing $20,000. Over (say) five years, you will be making much higher payments in the former case than the latter case in addition to the proportional increase in total interest paid. That money you failed to pay out remains in your pocket. Whether or not you invest it (his original point, valid enough if you are trying to compare costs) or use it to live on because the car you are buying is all you can afford, either way it isn't just the cost differential, it is the cost differential plus the cost of (as YOU note) borrowing the cost differential plus the marginal cost of the extra out of pocket money you have to spend to make the payments.
This becomes clear if you imagine that -- in order to make the higher payments -- one had to borrow money to make them. Then you accumulate additional debt during the payout period, which basically makes you take longer to pay off the car and pay out more than the marginal difference in interest and capital cost on the loans. There really is no way around it in a fair CBA.
It's the difference between 15 year and 30 year loans, for example. If you buy a cheap house, you can afford a payment that pays it off in 15 years. If you buy a more expensive house, the same payment might pay it off, but you might need a 30 year loan to keep the payment low enough to afford. You will pay a lot more money out in the latter case, and even if you CAN afford to buy the more expensive house on a 15 year loan, you can't pretend that the extra money you have to pay out to do so is "free".
Yeah, and I strongly suspect that somebody just can't do arithmetic as well. Perhaps SOME electric cars are less expensive than SOME gasoline cars, but there is a huge range of prices for gas cars, even in a given class. If you compare a high end luxury gas car to the cheapest electric, add in the subsidy, and make negatory assumptions about the probable price of gasoline over the expected lifetime of the car, you can probably fudge it to make it come out a win, but if you compare apples to apples without subsidies, it isn't so clear. Suppose a car goes 12,000 miles in a year. At 20 mpg, that costs 600 gallons of gasoline, or around $1500/year. Over a ten year lifetime, fuel costs are only around $15,000, so if electric cars ran FREE you'd need price points for CHEAP electric cars to match those of CHEAP gasoline cars within around $12,000, allowing for the cost of money. But the cheapest electric cars are easily this much more than the cheapest gasoline cars, and even the study only allows for a 10% difference in maintenance costs, which really remains to be seen as these costs are highly variable by manufacturer. But electricity is NOT free -- even if it is being provided "free" in some places it is really just another subsidy, and costs SOMEBODY somewhere between $0.10 and $0.20 per KWH.
I ran into the same difficulty with our Priuses. The first Prius we bought was $40,000. At the time, we could have easily gotten a similar size/class car for maybe $20,000 to $25,000, one that got around 30 mpg. There is no way we paid off the difference in financing costs over the lifetime of the car with the marginal savings on gasoline at around 50 mpg. New cheap Priuses are better -- close to break even -- but electric cars IMO have a ways to go.
Why? If a space bacterium fell to earth now, how long would it last? Chances are not terrible that it would be eaten almost immediately, or that it would fail to reproduce and eventually oxidize. I mean, you could be right and space bacteria could be falling to the Earth all the time but there isn't anything LIKE a guarantee that we'd see them, as we have a hard enough time finding and classifying the bacteria that we already have -- or separating out ones that might be falling from space all the time from the home-evolved sort.
Again, I'm not trying to start an argument here -- only to point out that once any sort of genetic sequencing of the bacteria is done (if it CAN be done) then we'll know a lot more than we know now. In the meantime, pretending that we can be certain that it is/isn't an Earthly bacterium is a waste of time, because we can't, and won't be either way until a lot more work is done. Which is pretty much what the top article says as well.
In the meantime, it might be wise to keep an open mind, without EITHER asserting that it is bound to be of Earthly origin OR certain to be extraterrestrial. The right answer at the moment is "we don't know because we haven't really looked yet in the ways likely to add weight to one side or the other" and theoretical arguments or statistical arguments all rely on Bayesian priors that themselves are a pure crap shoot, such as the prevalence of extraterrestrial life our the completeness of our knowledge of what could happen to extraterrestrial life after it falls into our highly bioactive oxidative environment.
Why? With genetic analysis almost routine at this point, I would expect that they could at the very least state that the bacterium(s) in question are/are not genetically congruent with known Earth species. If they find an E Coli on the outside of the station, it almost certainly came from Earth. If they find a bacterium with a genetic structure that is distinct from pretty much all known Earth species, it won't prove that it is extraterrestrial, but it would make it a lot less likely. At the very least, explaining how -- and when -- it got there will be more challenging.
If the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... hypothesis is correct (where this might be evidence supporting the hypothesis, or might not) then this will be only the first of many such observations, as "life" on Earth would have originated in an early population 1 stellar system in this galaxy and would then have been dispersed over billions of years after (say) that early P1 star went nova and/or some other cataclysm dispersed matter with biological travellers attached. We have recently directly observed that not only comets but large cold asteroids are knocking around that sometimes pass through on hyperbolic orbits. One expects a lot more (much) smaller objects are out there that pass through than ones large enough to observe from Earth, and it is by no means implausible that one would fall on early/primordial Earth and land ice cold to seed the planet, IF panspermia is in any sense approximately correct.
Note well I'm not endorsing it or arguing for it, just presenting it as one not unreasonable hypothesis and noting that that is really what all of this is about. Even if the bacteria is eventually labelled "probably/plausibly extraterrestrial" it doesn't prove panspermia, as it might have come from life originating on Mars, or a Jovian moon, or even a comet -- since we don't have a working model of biogenesis we cannot really exclude any particular possibilities for the origin of life. It could even have come first from the Earth, been blown into escape speed by e.g. a falling asteroid or a volcanic explosion, landed on a young Mars and evolved for a while there, and been blown BACK into space from Mars during an asteroid collision or whatever. Genetic testing ought to significantly favor one or more of the various alternative hypotheses, and if it is a common Earth bacteria, I'd say that this is nothing but probable contamination or some entirely mundane form of low orbit transport as suggested above. But if it is NOT related to an KNOWN Earth bacteria, then things get interesting...
This was just a yoke, you know, a yoke, to make you forget how screwed you are...
FORTRAN? The syntactically incorrect statement "DO 10 I = 1.10" will parse and
generate code creating a variable, DO10I, as follows: "DO10I = 1.10" If that
doesn't terrify you, it should.
In other words, the fortune database contains a fair bit of wisdom, a lot that is very funny (it is SUPPOSED to be funny/ironic/satirical/wiseass), and a certain amount that is shocking just because.
What it is not supposed to be is boring. Or, for that matter, a fortune. I no longer generate a fortune on login or logout the way I did for some decades of the past -- mostly login to a single GUI and just pop up xterms, rarely logging into a remote host through one but much more often working on the system I'm on -- but back in the day, fortunes brightened many an otherwise dull day, sometimes many times over as I logged into many hosts, a lot.
And, I'm betting that Microsoft sponsored all of them, just to have SOMETHING ON THE LIST. But did M$ ever manage to bribe enough people to get 1 lousy percent of the top 500?
For most people, the extra HUMAN expense of making a cluster work at all, and the extra TIME expense of having it run like a pig when you get it to run at all, isn't worth even a massive M$ bribe free cluster (as long as you run Windows). It sort of depends on whether actually getting your work done is more important to you than pain.
I'm not even sure what you are asking here. Do you truly have no idea how a GPL works?
Anyway, you have this exactly backwards. The reason Linux became popular during the parallel supercomputing "revolution" (and I say this as a modest expert, at least at that time) is because it IS an open source operating system, so you could hack the kernel, write your own kernel drivers, fix things like networking bugs or system balance issues, and handle memory at a very primitive level. You got then, and can easily get now, the complete source of the OS and all of its device drivers, although the latter has been a constant source of contention between hardware mfrs who think that a device driver that makes their hardware run is some sort of "trade secret" and the keepers of the Linux kernel. Over decades (at this point) the mfrs have largely given up and actively help with kernel drivers instead of insisting on binary-only distributions. This played a critical role in the development of early parallel supercomputers once Linux had its first kernel capable of symmetric multiprocessing with two (and rapidly more) CPUs or (later) cores, or both. That would be roughly kernel 2.0, although there were still serious issues with race conditions, (network) driver interrupts and lockups, memory management, and so on, through 2.0.4+ -- really they went on forever as the 2.0 kernel wasn't truly symmetric, handled interrupt locking "badly", and took a lot of revision and some new paradigms to smooth out and stabilize. Ah, those were the days...
Microsoft, on the other hand, made you sign away your firstborn child in order to get a copy of the OS source -- even as a research institution. If (say) your network drivers were slow, or locked up while multiprocessing, you were SOL. You COULDN'T fix it. You couldn't even find the bug. And it wasn't worth the effort -- even if you sacrificed a goat and got the source -- to learn to work with the source because it changed at MS's whim and all your work could go down the tubes at any moment and if you DID develop anything that ran on their system in some "custom" fashion, you ran into serious issues if you wanted to share it. You COULDN'T share your work with anybody else, not unless they had a surplus of goats or firstborn children too.
"Anybody" (with a need and decent programming chops) could join the linux kernel list and communicate directly with the main kernel developers and report bugs, contribute fixes or drivers, etc. There was a lot of healthy debate about what needed to be fixed, or improved, first, second, third etc, as well as just how to go about fixing them -- sometimes it required substantial redesign and had to wait for a major bump (and a lot of testing). You could of course hack/fix your own kernels or add your own device drivers, or fix broken drivers, or mess with internal "tuning", and I and many others did, but behind the public scenes the actual kernel developers -- the heart of linux, as it were -- made steady, inexorable progress.
By the year 2000, Linux had made serious inroads into not only the top 500, but there were literally uncounted small clusters that weren't fast enough (or weren't architected correctly) to crack the top 500, which relied on things like the Linpack benchmark to determine who to include. There were lots of folks who didn't USE linear algebra in their computations who built massively parallel compute farms with many different architectures and purposes who didn't even have the benchmark software installed (or give a shit) about their "ranking". Both PVM and MPI were fully ported onto Linux and most of their ongoing development was taking place on Linux boxes. Additional tools for management and job distribution and much more were developed -- on mostly Linux boxes, but yeah, there were still SGIs and Sun Microsystems clusters and much more out there. They suffered -- badly suffered, terminally badly suffered in pretty much all cases -- from being much, much more expensive than over the counter Intel or AMD box