So, you may legitimately be part of the 10% for whom current EV tech is simply not good enough (yet).
I'm in the same boat for a different reason - I don't live in America. The only EVs you can buy in South Africa right now are the Nissan Leaf and the BMW I3. The leaf starts at half-a-million rand (for refference, 5 years ago I bought an appartment near the beach in Cape Town in such a select neighbourhood that the rent I charge on it covers the entire bond payment for the same amount as they want for a frickin car - which is not an investment). The BMW is even worse. I looked at second hand, a 2013 leaf is still R250K - that's more than a quarter of my (top-5% of the population) salary for a year !
It's just not practical because there just isn't enough competition in the market. Right now in SA electric cars are only sold in the very high-end luxury market - even the supposed economy models sell for luxury prices. The model-S (the only one actually WORTH that much) is not even available here - self-importing one would cost around 3 million rand. Musk has promised the model 3 will be available here - I doubt it will be affordable but it will be two years before that's even an option anyway.
My AUDI is on it's last legs (or last wheels) I really, really wanted an EV for my next car - by every practical measure it would be absolutely perfect for me. My car only does city driving and commutes and EVs are simply perfect for that - but I simply cannot get one at a sane price in my country at this time.
Hopefully we will see more car manufacturers actually selling their EVs here - and in 5 years my next next car can be electric.
What I don't do is imagine that my situation is universal - EVs aren't viable for me right now - that doesn't mean they aren't viable for most people, and the viability is purely an availability issue - by every other metric I'm a prime candidate for an EV.
You dont actually use your car during those hours anyway. Nobody uses a car 24/7. You cannot lose what you have never had. Who cares if the car needs 2 hours to recharge when the driver needs 8 ?
That's almost an hour a week of your life (and your 5 minutes doesn't count having to drive to the gas station - that takes time, wait for a pump, wait to pay etc. etc. etc). Now sure, it's not a huge gain - but then, nobody said it was - the point is that the alternative is not a huge loss.
Its time the car is not useful anyway and he gets to spend it on other things. He loses less personal time to charging than we do to filling up. That is actually pretty obvious.
>We've had a hundred years to build up the infrastructure to refuel IC engine vehicles pretty much anywhere.
The first real internal combustion engine was only built in 1860 (that's not 'hundreds of years' ago). And that is a very generous measurement. The first commercially available car was the Benz Motor Wagen which was released in 1893 - that's a mere 123 years ago)... oh and it didn't have gas stations. Petrol and Diesel as fuels were still a ways off. Hell the first Porsche was an electric car- because petrol wasn't available yet (a later petrol version of essentially the same design was the first car Porsche made commercially). In fact, gas stations wouldn't started becoming common around the time of the Ford Model T when cars went from an esoteric rich man's plaything to something lots of people could buy. That was in 1908. A mere 108 year ago. In Europe they were delayed further by the advent of world war one. Though many vehicles were used in that war - they weren't refueled from gas stations (and those would be destroyed quickly if anybody tried to build one).
In reality the world we know with a gas station in every time and a bunch all over every suburb - that world only really happened after world war 2. It may well have happened sooner but world war 2 delayed it.
The thing is - once the market existed, gas stations sprung up like mushrooms. We didn't take hundreds of years to build it, it took less than 5 to build a massive network and we just expanded it ever since as car use grew. If not for the red car conspiracy it's quite likely that cars would be far, far rarer than they are today and gas stations much fewer and further apart. A huge chunk of US car sales were too people who had no need for one until the car companies went out of their way to buy up and dismantle the competition. EV infrastructure should go FASTER than gas stations anyway - they are far simpler to build and we have much better construction techniques today.
You need to up your reading comprehension. The 'few seconds' is the time he is actually involved: i.e. plugging in and out, the charge happens without him having to be present and waiting.
Considering what you save in fuel and maintenance EV's don't really cost more than comparable ICE's (and can even cost less) even if the upfront costs are higher. As for your example - assuming that's once or twice a year as is typical - why not just rent an ICE for those rare occasions ? It will cost less than fueling and maintaining one all year when you only need that range once or twice a year.
>It's exactly how real estate development works now. No, not really - because in real estate the developer resells the resulting properties shortly afterwards and a normal market can resume. Also: real estate is not a natural monopoly since you can make your investment back quite rapidly. You simply cannot compare a market failure to a non-market failure and expect the results to have anything whatsoever in common. Even in a develop-to-rent model the rental prices are set by competition. It's very unlikely to reach a situation where every conceivable place to live in a city is owned by the same company.
>That's the US implementation of Broadband. Other models exist which are better. Not for natural monopolies.
>But I'm not proposing a pure market solution. It's hybrid model where you get all the governance and accountability of government oversight, but the efficiency of public delivery. Public delivery is NOT efficient by default, it is only efficient when there is competition - in the absence of competition it is far less efficient than government operated services. Now that's not to say government should have every skill in the world. Letting government pay companies with expertise to do the construction is fine - but letting them operate it afterwards is generally a disaster. In fact, until 1918 in the US this was the only scenario where a corporation could exist. It would be founded to raise capital for a single large project, which government would pay for when done, and then disbanded with the profits shared among the shareholders. Government would make it's money back by actually operating the infrastructure (or for non-money generating infrastructure like roads and bridges it would just be maintained as it was bought: with taxes). That was the last GOOD model of having corporations at all and the only scenario where limited liability is not a massive fraud on the population.
>The MTR in Hong Kong is a great example of a massive public/private project that delivered high quality results The exact same model with the Gautrain in South Africa ended up with a company getting profit gaurantees from government which now means taxpayers are subsidising the operation of the thing. Overall it could be called a success but the ticket prices are way above what they ought to be for something subsidized by tax money. Considering taxpayers paid to build the thing - they ought to get to ride it at cost. So even assuming the MTR managed to avoid these pitfalls, it's clearly not a guarantee even with projects like these.
The only time public/private partnerships really work is when the government operates the results and the private part ends after construction. You can see a similar example with the Eurotunnel. The French side was government funded, privately built, government run. The English side was operated by a private company who had partly funded construction. That company went bankrupt after 3 years. It took several more operating companies one after the other before one was profitable. Even with a natural monopoly industry simply could not operate a public service where taxpayers were not ripped off and still make profit until all the construction costs were recouped (mostly by their predecessors)... the French side has been humming along nicely all these years, no messy changes of ownership, no weird fluctuations in ticket prices, consistent, efficient and affordable.
True we have no historical analogy for that in roads - but we have dozens with other infrastructure, and it's a universal disaster. That is the worst of all worlds. You have all the extra costs of the profit motive (by definition if you add a markup to something it costs more), all the overheads of government bureaucracy and none of the advantages of competitive industry to offset these downsides a little.
In the pure government model - at least the people in charge of the operation are accountable to the taxpayers whose money they are spending. In the pure profit model, when it works, the companies are constrained by competitors. In the hybrid model you get companies who are not accountable to taxpayers having all the power of a governmental service and no competition. The result is the US broadband industry - which slashdot hates so much. There's no reason to believe that roads will be any better.
The reason these things are difficult is because a pure market solution *cannot* work - they are natural monopolies by definition, which makes them market failures. There will never be a competitive free market for them. Historically the BEST way to deal with natural monopolies is to simply have government services provide them. This comes with all the downsides of a government service (including making government a bit bigger) - but those downsides are far smaller than the downsides of any other system we've tried in such a scenario.
A natural monopoly is designed as any business where you need a massive upfront capital investment to get going, but the margin on sales is relatively small so that it takes decades to break even and start making a profit. In such an industry - where you need a fortune to get started and decades to make your investment back - competition simply never happens.
1) I haven't been earning that for very long - my salary only got that high in the last 2 years. 2) The taxman takes 45% of it. 3) Currently about 80% of the rest goes to paying debt installments due to last year's misfortunes. Which is an improvement, there were several months when I had to keep adding debt to pay the installments on previous debts. Debt is a trap that can swallow up *any* income - when you're forced to take large debts to deal with things you could not have foreseen that's a problem.
You know the worst bit ? 18 months ago I was basically debt free, the only debts I had was my car payment and the bond on my home.
Yeah...ironic isn't it, libertarians used to be the greatest proponents of UBI, F.A. Hayek (one of the libertarian's favorite economists - second only to Von Mises) declared that WITHOUT it the labour market can never be a free market.
Yet today libertarians overwhelmingly oppose it because the little bit of compassion they once had got destroyed when they read Ayn Rand. I'm not surprised there are a few left over who still believe in it - but I'll be convinced libertarians in general still support it when the LP puts it in their party platform. Hell even their current candidate Gary Johnson which is about as close to a moderate as any libertarian can be hasn't done that and didn't attempt it in the state he governs.
I am giving a needy person what that person says they need. Now they may be wrong about what they need, they may even be lying, these are both possibilities - but those odds are far smaller than the 100% chance that what anybody else says they need is wrong.
The one thing libertarians got right is that the government can't know what individuals need - but neither can anybody else. The ONLY person with any chance at all is that person himself. So I am wagering on that chance to try and help, I don't want to bet on a guaranteed failure. And the list of people who cannot possibly make a good decision about somebody else's life does include myself.
>Roads were not all privately built before 1920s. Far from it. Governments have been taking private land (often without compensation) since time immemorial to build roads and bridges.
I said in the US - which was, indeed, the only place I know off where that was ever attempted. It doesn't change the results of the experiment.
Funny how libertarians always remember the anarchic governments of iceland and forget the anarchic governments of Southern spain which, unlike iceland, were industrial cities in recent times (early 20th century) and were by *every possible* metric far more successful. Must be because libertarians today really, really want to pretend the word doesn't actually mean anarcho-SOCIALIST.
I remember the story, I actually tried your 'this is evidence against the everybody should have a gun' argument - the response I got was 'It only happened BECAUSE a mlitary base is actually a gun-free zone since all the guns are locked up in the armory'.
I think they technically already got CRAY since Cray was bought by SGI after Seymore died. A lot of the last generation of real SGI machines were designed by ex-Cray engineers.
I remember sometime circa 2003 a headline on/. that Linux had replaced more NT systems than commercial unix systems that year - this was big news because until then, Linux was mostly growing by killing of every unix systems company. The real SCO sold their unix business to Caldera (a Linux company) who would later go on to sue IBM over Unix, Sun died a most inglorious death despite trying very hard to reinvent itself in the naughties, SGI and IRIX went the way of the dodo, even HPUX got relegated to little more than maintaining legacy systems. AIX seemed to survive but mostly as a massive virtualization platform for running Linux VMs on - a market that amazon has now effectively destroyed.
Maybe I should have cheered Fiorina's presidential bid after all. I've always said that great generally* CEOs make terrible presidents (contrary to what republicans seem to believe) since the two jobs have almost diametrically opposed definitions of "success" - but does that mean horrible CEOs will make great presidents ?
*There are a few, rare, exceptions both in the US and globally - but generally these are people who are naturally gifted at learning very different careers and skillsets and approach the political job as a brand new career in which their past experience has very little value. The entire nature of the organisation you are now heading up is different, it's economics work according to completely different rules - and even the techniques by which you organise and motivate people are entirely different since the incentive structure is nothing alike (and neither can nor should be similar).
I earn well over half a million - and me and my family very nearly were homeless last year, just because of a spate of bad luck. In April I changed jobs - it was a much better opportunity but it came with a year of contract work first, a risk I thought was worth taking because of how great an opportunity it was, in May my daughter had an accident and needed surgery, insurance refused to pay - and I was out many thousands. This was followed by a whole sequence of similar unpredictable and unavoidable massive expenses - the last of which was November. One of the many things I hadn't been able to pay while going deeper and deeper into debt to service these disasters was servicing my car (which I need to make money). In November the cambelt shattered and the engine was destroyed, the cost of that repair was almost as much as my daughter's surgery.
By the end of November I had more debt on ONE credit card than 10% of my annual brute income !
I was on the verge of bankruptcy and homelessness. The only reason I could avoid it was one tiny bit of good luck -I had family able to help.
That is the kind of story behind MOST people who end up homeless.
Don't worry - a year later, I am well within my means again, and life is getting better for us every month - but it was seriously close and without family with money, we'd not have been able to weather that storm.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you may legitimately be part of the 10% for whom current EV tech is simply not good enough (yet).
I'm in the same boat for a different reason - I don't live in America. The only EVs you can buy in South Africa right now are the Nissan Leaf and the BMW I3.
The leaf starts at half-a-million rand (for refference, 5 years ago I bought an appartment near the beach in Cape Town in such a select neighbourhood that the rent I charge on it covers the entire bond payment for the same amount as they want for a frickin car - which is not an investment).
The BMW is even worse. I looked at second hand, a 2013 leaf is still R250K - that's more than a quarter of my (top-5% of the population) salary for a year !
It's just not practical because there just isn't enough competition in the market. Right now in SA electric cars are only sold in the very high-end luxury market - even the supposed economy models sell for luxury prices. The model-S (the only one actually WORTH that much) is not even available here - self-importing one would cost around 3 million rand.
Musk has promised the model 3 will be available here - I doubt it will be affordable but it will be two years before that's even an option anyway.
My AUDI is on it's last legs (or last wheels) I really, really wanted an EV for my next car - by every practical measure it would be absolutely perfect for me. My car only does city driving and commutes and EVs are simply perfect for that - but I simply cannot get one at a sane price in my country at this time.
Hopefully we will see more car manufacturers actually selling their EVs here - and in 5 years my next next car can be electric.
What I don't do is imagine that my situation is universal - EVs aren't viable for me right now - that doesn't mean they aren't viable for most people, and the viability is purely an availability issue - by every other metric I'm a prime candidate for an EV.
You dont actually use your car during those hours anyway. Nobody uses a car 24/7. You cannot lose what you have never had. Who cares if the car needs 2 hours to recharge when the driver needs 8 ?
That's actually a pretty cool idea... *rushes to patent office*
Correction: 4 hours a year
That's almost an hour a week of your life (and your 5 minutes doesn't count having to drive to the gas station - that takes time, wait for a pump, wait to pay etc. etc. etc). Now sure, it's not a huge gain - but then, nobody said it was - the point is that the alternative is not a huge loss.
And if you read the rest of the post you'd see me debunking the idea that we took a hundred years as well - despite my misreading that line.
Its time the car is not useful anyway and he gets to spend it on other things. He loses less personal time to charging than we do to filling up. That is actually pretty obvious.
>We've had a hundred years to build up the infrastructure to refuel IC engine vehicles pretty much anywhere.
The first real internal combustion engine was only built in 1860 (that's not 'hundreds of years' ago). And that is a very generous measurement. The first commercially available car was the Benz Motor Wagen which was released in 1893 - that's a mere 123 years ago) ... oh and it didn't have gas stations. Petrol and Diesel as fuels were still a ways off. Hell the first Porsche was an electric car- because petrol wasn't available yet (a later petrol version of essentially the same design was the first car Porsche made commercially).
In fact, gas stations wouldn't started becoming common around the time of the Ford Model T when cars went from an esoteric rich man's plaything to something lots of people could buy. That was in 1908. A mere 108 year ago. In Europe they were delayed further by the advent of world war one. Though many vehicles were used in that war - they weren't refueled from gas stations (and those would be destroyed quickly if anybody tried to build one).
In reality the world we know with a gas station in every time and a bunch all over every suburb - that world only really happened after world war 2. It may well have happened sooner but world war 2 delayed it.
The thing is - once the market existed, gas stations sprung up like mushrooms. We didn't take hundreds of years to build it, it took less than 5 to build a massive network and we just expanded it ever since as car use grew. If not for the red car conspiracy it's quite likely that cars would be far, far rarer than they are today and gas stations much fewer and further apart. A huge chunk of US car sales were too people who had no need for one until the car companies went out of their way to buy up and dismantle the competition.
EV infrastructure should go FASTER than gas stations anyway - they are far simpler to build and we have much better construction techniques today.
You need to up your reading comprehension. The 'few seconds' is the time he is actually involved: i.e. plugging in and out, the charge happens without him having to be present and waiting.
You know you can RENT a non-EV car for that other 10% right ?
No need to buy two.
Considering what you save in fuel and maintenance EV's don't really cost more than comparable ICE's (and can even cost less) even if the upfront costs are higher. As for your example - assuming that's once or twice a year as is typical - why not just rent an ICE for those rare occasions ? It will cost less than fueling and maintaining one all year when you only need that range once or twice a year.
>It's exactly how real estate development works now.
No, not really - because in real estate the developer resells the resulting properties shortly afterwards and a normal market can resume. Also: real estate is not a natural monopoly since you can make your investment back quite rapidly. You simply cannot compare a market failure to a non-market failure and expect the results to have anything whatsoever in common. Even in a develop-to-rent model the rental prices are set by competition. It's very unlikely to reach a situation where every conceivable place to live in a city is owned by the same company.
>That's the US implementation of Broadband. Other models exist which are better.
Not for natural monopolies.
>But I'm not proposing a pure market solution. It's hybrid model where you get all the governance and accountability of government oversight, but the efficiency of public delivery.
Public delivery is NOT efficient by default, it is only efficient when there is competition - in the absence of competition it is far less efficient than government operated services. Now that's not to say government should have every skill in the world. Letting government pay companies with expertise to do the construction is fine - but letting them operate it afterwards is generally a disaster. In fact, until 1918 in the US this was the only scenario where a corporation could exist. It would be founded to raise capital for a single large project, which government would pay for when done, and then disbanded with the profits shared among the shareholders. Government would make it's money back by actually operating the infrastructure (or for non-money generating infrastructure like roads and bridges it would just be maintained as it was bought: with taxes).
That was the last GOOD model of having corporations at all and the only scenario where limited liability is not a massive fraud on the population.
>The MTR in Hong Kong is a great example of a massive public/private project that delivered high quality results
The exact same model with the Gautrain in South Africa ended up with a company getting profit gaurantees from government which now means taxpayers are subsidising the operation of the thing. Overall it could be called a success but the ticket prices are way above what they ought to be for something subsidized by tax money. Considering taxpayers paid to build the thing - they ought to get to ride it at cost. So even assuming the MTR managed to avoid these pitfalls, it's clearly not a guarantee even with projects like these.
The only time public/private partnerships really work is when the government operates the results and the private part ends after construction. You can see a similar example with the Eurotunnel. The French side was government funded, privately built, government run. The English side was operated by a private company who had partly funded construction. That company went bankrupt after 3 years. It took several more operating companies one after the other before one was profitable. Even with a natural monopoly industry simply could not operate a public service where taxpayers were not ripped off and still make profit until all the construction costs were recouped (mostly by their predecessors)... the French side has been humming along nicely all these years, no messy changes of ownership, no weird fluctuations in ticket prices, consistent, efficient and affordable.
Even if your claim is true - this is about a piece of code written in C - so by your own claim it's pretty unambiguous.
So privately funded but government controlled ?
True we have no historical analogy for that in roads - but we have dozens with other infrastructure, and it's a universal disaster. That is the worst of all worlds. You have all the extra costs of the profit motive (by definition if you add a markup to something it costs more), all the overheads of government bureaucracy and none of the advantages of competitive industry to offset these downsides a little.
In the pure government model - at least the people in charge of the operation are accountable to the taxpayers whose money they are spending. In the pure profit model, when it works, the companies are constrained by competitors.
In the hybrid model you get companies who are not accountable to taxpayers having all the power of a governmental service and no competition. The result is the US broadband industry - which slashdot hates so much. There's no reason to believe that roads will be any better.
The reason these things are difficult is because a pure market solution *cannot* work - they are natural monopolies by definition, which makes them market failures. There will never be a competitive free market for them. Historically the BEST way to deal with natural monopolies is to simply have government services provide them. This comes with all the downsides of a government service (including making government a bit bigger) - but those downsides are far smaller than the downsides of any other system we've tried in such a scenario.
A natural monopoly is designed as any business where you need a massive upfront capital investment to get going, but the margin on sales is relatively small so that it takes decades to break even and start making a profit. In such an industry - where you need a fortune to get started and decades to make your investment back - competition simply never happens.
1) I haven't been earning that for very long - my salary only got that high in the last 2 years.
2) The taxman takes 45% of it.
3) Currently about 80% of the rest goes to paying debt installments due to last year's misfortunes. Which is an improvement, there were several months when I had to keep adding debt to pay the installments on previous debts. Debt is a trap that can swallow up *any* income - when you're forced to take large debts to deal with things you could not have foreseen that's a problem.
You know the worst bit ? 18 months ago I was basically debt free, the only debts I had was my car payment and the bond on my home.
Yeah...ironic isn't it, libertarians used to be the greatest proponents of UBI, F.A. Hayek (one of the libertarian's favorite economists - second only to Von Mises) declared that WITHOUT it the labour market can never be a free market.
Yet today libertarians overwhelmingly oppose it because the little bit of compassion they once had got destroyed when they read Ayn Rand. I'm not surprised there are a few left over who still believe in it - but I'll be convinced libertarians in general still support it when the LP puts it in their party platform. Hell even their current candidate Gary Johnson which is about as close to a moderate as any libertarian can be hasn't done that and didn't attempt it in the state he governs.
I am giving a needy person what that person says they need. Now they may be wrong about what they need, they may even be lying, these are both possibilities - but those odds are far smaller than the 100% chance that what anybody else says they need is wrong.
The one thing libertarians got right is that the government can't know what individuals need - but neither can anybody else. The ONLY person with any chance at all is that person himself. So I am wagering on that chance to try and help, I don't want to bet on a guaranteed failure. And the list of people who cannot possibly make a good decision about somebody else's life does include myself.
>Roads were not all privately built before 1920s. Far from it. Governments have been taking private land (often without compensation) since time immemorial to build roads and bridges.
I said in the US - which was, indeed, the only place I know off where that was ever attempted. It doesn't change the results of the experiment.
Funny how libertarians always remember the anarchic governments of iceland and forget the anarchic governments of Southern spain which, unlike iceland, were industrial cities in recent times (early 20th century) and were by *every possible* metric far more successful. Must be because libertarians today really, really want to pretend the word doesn't actually mean anarcho-SOCIALIST.
I remember the story, I actually tried your 'this is evidence against the everybody should have a gun' argument - the response I got was 'It only happened BECAUSE a mlitary base is actually a gun-free zone since all the guns are locked up in the armory'.
Well I never said it was perfect proof, just said it was strong evidence.
I think they technically already got CRAY since Cray was bought by SGI after Seymore died. A lot of the last generation of real SGI machines were designed by ex-Cray engineers.
I remember sometime circa 2003 a headline on /. that Linux had replaced more NT systems than commercial unix systems that year - this was big news because until then, Linux was mostly growing by killing of every unix systems company. The real SCO sold their unix business to Caldera (a Linux company) who would later go on to sue IBM over Unix, Sun died a most inglorious death despite trying very hard to reinvent itself in the naughties, SGI and IRIX went the way of the dodo, even HPUX got relegated to little more than maintaining legacy systems.
AIX seemed to survive but mostly as a massive virtualization platform for running Linux VMs on - a market that amazon has now effectively destroyed.
Maybe I should have cheered Fiorina's presidential bid after all. I've always said that great generally* CEOs make terrible presidents (contrary to what republicans seem to believe) since the two jobs have almost diametrically opposed definitions of "success" - but does that mean horrible CEOs will make great presidents ?
*There are a few, rare, exceptions both in the US and globally - but generally these are people who are naturally gifted at learning very different careers and skillsets and approach the political job as a brand new career in which their past experience has very little value. The entire nature of the organisation you are now heading up is different, it's economics work according to completely different rules - and even the techniques by which you organise and motivate people are entirely different since the incentive structure is nothing alike (and neither can nor should be similar).
If you poured water on the sun it would only make it hotter.
I earn well over half a million - and me and my family very nearly were homeless last year, just because of a spate of bad luck. In April I changed jobs - it was a much better opportunity but it came with a year of contract work first, a risk I thought was worth taking because of how great an opportunity it was, in May my daughter had an accident and needed surgery, insurance refused to pay - and I was out many thousands.
This was followed by a whole sequence of similar unpredictable and unavoidable massive expenses - the last of which was November. One of the many things I hadn't been able to pay while going deeper and deeper into debt to service these disasters was servicing my car (which I need to make money). In November the cambelt shattered and the engine was destroyed, the cost of that repair was almost as much as my daughter's surgery.
By the end of November I had more debt on ONE credit card than 10% of my annual brute income !
I was on the verge of bankruptcy and homelessness. The only reason I could avoid it was one tiny bit of good luck -I had family able to help.
That is the kind of story behind MOST people who end up homeless.
Don't worry - a year later, I am well within my means again, and life is getting better for us every month - but it was seriously close and without family with money, we'd not have been able to weather that storm.