Those were not the only choices, as should be obvious from the fact that even the summary graph has three sections. All "true" answers together add up to right around 40% and all "false" likewise.
From the link in my other post (again, ), we see that the main problem with CDs is not a fundamental aspect of using them, but simply that their overall transmittance varies depending on how thick the metalized coating is, which can be assessed in advance by looking at the filament of an incandescent bulb. Beyond that, their stats seem to be impressive. The standard recommendation for looking at the sun is #14 welding filter, which is way out of the range for potential eye damage. For a CD or stack of CDs with equivalent visible light attenuation, the UVA level is 2.5x the welding filter and the UVB level is approximately the same - easily in the safe range. The CD actually slightly outperforms the welding filter in IR blocking.
Not surprisingly, there was a wide range in the attenuation of visible light by these filter materials. Even among the "safe" filters, there was considerable variation in transmission levels. For example, the differences in processing methods and chemistry resulted in considerable variation in optical density of the silver-bearing black-and-white film emulsions. The double-layer filters had shade numbers between 11 and 16.
I have recently also found a wide range of optical density between individual audio and data compact disks (CD and CD-ROM) because of variations in manufacturing processes. Some compact disks have aluminum films which are so thin that they appear semi-transparent at normal room illumination levels. These CDs are unsuitable for use as solar filters. Higher quality CDs are suitable for use if the aluminum coating is dense enough that the glowing filament of an incandescent light bulb is just barely visible through it.
Floppy disk media have a marginally safe infrared transmission, and produce poor quality images of the solar disk. The magnetic media scatters visible light to the extent that one sees a dull red disk surrounded by a broad halo of red light. I would not recommend using this material for a solar filter.
The most consistent performance was found with the polyester and glass filters. I would avoid aluminized polyester which is used in wrappers for food products and collector cards because of the inconsistent optical quality, but even my sample of Poptarts wrapper performed surprisingly well in terms of protection from optical radiation. (It rated as marginally safe.) However, most of the filter materials specifically designed for eye protection easily met all of the transmittance criteria for safe filters.
Unsafe filters include any image-bearing photographic emulsion, chromogenic (non-silver-bearing) black-and-white film, black processed color film, photographic neutral density filters and polarizing filters. Although these materials have very low luminous transmittance levels, they transmit an unacceptably high level of near-infrared radiation. The black color film is a good example, having a shade number of 15 for visible light, but transmitting almost 50% of the infrared radiation!
Infrared transmittance levels shown in Table 2 should be regarded as the upper limit of transmittance in the waveband 780 to 1400 nm. The signal-to-noise ratio for low-level measurements in this waveband is extremely low, and thus these data are less reliable than those in the shorter wavebands. Note that even some glass filters with very good safety performance histories such as the Questar and Thousand Oaks glass filters showed infrared transmission levels up to 0.4%.
Smoked glass had very good performance in terms of transmission of visible light and infrared radiation. However, it is a dangerous filter material for two reasons. First, it is very difficult to produce a heavy uniform coating of soot on glass. Second, the coating is very fragile. It is very easy to destroy the filter by handling it. Much of the soot on my sample came off because of contact with its protective wrapping. It also made quite a mess.
the US was the second lowest in the OECD in terms of evolution acceptance, with just 14% saying "definitely true" and a third saying "absolutely false" (as a side note, Iceland, where I live, is #1 in terms of acceptance - whoo!)
Until the public can come to grips with the basic tenets of science, yes, America is lagging way behind.
And I'm sorry, this "Americans suck at standardized testing" excuse is one of the flimsiest I've ever heard. Their only counterevidence -- that which has been accomplished in the US and the quality of US universities -- is hardly pinned on the understanding of science of the average American. It's a combination of the understanding of science of the top percentiles of Americans combined with research and venture capital networks and a strong H1B program (scaled by a population of over 300 million).
Not exactly something you can do on short notice on a weekday in Reykjavík. Most stores will be closed by the time I get off work, and there's not a lot of options for places to get "real filters" anyway. Heck, I couldn't find a place in town that sold a digital pH meter; they had to special order it. And just to find a place that would do that took being bounced between three stores. Even making a proper pinhole camera would be kind of a pain. Can't be flimsy like just holding two sheets of paper near each other -- this being Iceland, it's probably going to be windy in the evening. Don't have any tissue boxes. I mean, I could probably scrounge together something, but...
Also, I think flatly saying "no" seems to be an overstatement. I see lots of people saying "(blank) doesn't work" but never with evidence to back it up. For example, a CD. CDs are polycarbonate. Polycarbonate is opaque to UV and far IR. It's one of the reasons that it's used in skylights, for example. So what's the problem, given that UV is the main risk of eye damage? Visible is readily gauged by how bright it looks, so that's a no-brainer to assess. And if you're blocking visible light with the metalized filter (aka, a CD), you should also be blocking IR, because metals tend to reflect IR very well (which is why spacecraft use metal foil insulation). And saying all this, given that *unfiltered* views of the sun rarely result in permanent damage....
Really, I just expect better from Slashdot than to basically say, in so many words, "it's not possible to block light".
I'd like to view it here in Reykjavík late this evening, but I don't have any proper eye protection.:P Are there any easy ways to make some improvised eye protection?
And while it doesn't apply to the asker, if the person is trying to sync from an android device (say, a cell phone camera), BotSync is a good way to do basically that automagically, in a loop whenever there's new files to transfer.
While that's sort of a flamebait topic, there is at least some truth to the concept. I saw an interview with some subsistence farmers once for whom Bono had been campaigning to "save their indigenous lifestyle" or something like that. And their take on it was, what you call a lifestyle, we call poverty.
It should be up to each culture to decide what elements of modern life they want to incorporate and which elements of their traditional life they want to preserve. Now, as for what the Aboriginees think of the changes in their society, I have no idea; I don't know any.
People here only wish it was like that with the smelters. The last smelter (and more significantly, its associated dam at Kárahnjúkar, the largest in Europe) drove people mad. Approval was rushed through without much public discussion, an environmental impact statement (which proved completely inaccurate, as in "the largest lake in eastern Iceland completely changed color" inaccurate) was approved with little review, and construction (the main source of jobs) was done with workers brought in on a temporary basis, mainly from Poland. Most of the people working there now (much smaller than the construction times) are also immigrants**. Honestly, it was so egregious that I think it helped galvanize people here to pay more attention and resist things like that more.
Interesting to see your insights on construction.:) Thanks!
** -- Not that I have much ground to stand on in regards to that objection, as I myself immigrated to Iceland... although because I love the place, not because I make more money here (just the opposite).
Fertilizer production isn't big up here. I don't know why. It's aluminum, and to a lesser extent, ferrosilicon, and there's lots of datacenter plans, too. And actually, the smelters aren't that big of employers. Aluminum is almost as much of our exports as fish, but it's a much smaller chunk of the employment picture.
I think it's a strange notion that on one hand, it seems that you're saying that the cable is going to take a ton of maintenance, but on the other, that there won't be many maintenance jobs. Which is it? This isn't my field, so I'm simply asking you, but it clearly can't be both ways!:) Or, I hope you're not trying to say that Icelanders aren't skilled enough to maintain a cable... And also in the jobs picture on our side is the power exploration, development, and production, which is no small factor.
I think you're overplaying losses. I read a thing from Seimens before which quoted the losses on one HVDC system they were working on at 3% per 1000km (I don't know the details like voltage, conductor thickness, etc). Reykjavík to London is under 1900km. Even if you double the losses from that figure, you're still not talking about that huge of losses.
Concerning your comment about electrical power transmission being more mature... actually I know enough about this field to register a strong disagreement. The surge in HVDC transmission is specifically due to the rapid advance of increasingly affordable, increasingly high power switching electronics in recent years (which has also fuelled a boom in increasingly small, increasingly high power AC induction motors, which is what made vehicles like the Tesla Roadster possible). This advance is, of course, a huge boon not just to long distance power transmission in general, but also specifically to undersea cables, since AC losses on a cable in saltwater are huge.
Sorry for the "press puff pieces", it was just a quick google search to get you some breadcrumbs so you could see that this is actually being seriously discussed, including official visits between government officials.
Again, though, the difficulty of constructing and maintaining such a cable? Not my field. It seems strange, though, that it would be considered so much more difficult than undersea data cables, given that all of the problems you quoted apply to them as well (scouring, currents, shifting, depth, weather, etc). And we've got several already running to Iceland. I mean, you're dealing with a much fatter line for power, but I'd think that would only help, not hurt. Could you elaborate on why power cables are so much more difficult?
Residential power here in Iceland is 6-7 US cents per kilowatt hour, so I can only imagine that industrial-scale power is even cheaper. We're really sitting on more power production potential than we know what to do with, it's almost ridiculous. I mean, hot water goes to 90% of houses and people waste it like crazy, there's huge heated pools, etc... and a quarter of this hot water comes just from downtown alone, little sheds mixed in with the buildings. In Öskjuhlíð they drilled a 90 meter pipe into the ground, put a choke in the top, a water drip... and it's now an artificial geyser. Heat is just everywhere. 1/3rd of the lava on the planet in the past 500 years has come from Iceland. Traditionally, we've "exported" this power by making stuff here with it, like aluminum (importing all the inputs and exporting the metal). There are three smelters in the country, and even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. But we're still only using about 20% of our conventional high temperature geo (not counting using magma as an input, which was recently shown to be feasable at Krafla, not counting EGS, etc - and geo exploration has been quite minimal due to there being so much available already), virtually none of our low temperature geo (2/3rds of the country's primary energy is geothermal waters at 100-150C, and the target distribution temperature is 80C, but it just gets mixed with cold to bring it down that low), about 15% of our hydro, essentially none of our huge wind (makes the midwestern US look tame, but there's only one turbine in the entire country), tides (also quite large), etc. This country has just huge amounts of generation potential but nothing to use it on.
I'm sure you know more about the difficulties involved than I. But it's a very serious subject that's been discussed for decades, and now seems to finally be making some headway. There's even a conference going on right now about it.
Now, that's not to say that it's not without controversy on this side. Namely, because people here love having massive amounts of unspoiled wilderness, and up here, even geothermal is controversial just because you have to build roads and lines into it. And people also worry about our cheap electricity getting more expensive if we start selling to the UK.
Solar is not the wrong tech for, for example, Spain, which is well within HVDC distance for the UK. And claiming that in the entire UK there's no suitable land for the relatively small amount of area required for pumped hydro is just plain silly. And, FYI, it's already started.
Pence. So you're in the UK. In a decade, you may be buying cheap, reliable carbon-free electricity from us en masse;) (hint: you'd be paying in krónur)
I've been all over the UK. Yes, the London area is flat as a pancake. The rest of the country isn't, and it's not that big of a country. Most of China's population lives in flat areas, too. But the simple fact is, it doesn't take that much land area * altitude change to store a ton of power. With a water depth of 20m and an altitude change of ~120 meters (which there are even places near *London* like that, like the oceanic cliffs near Eastborne, let alone in Wales, let alone in Scotland), after accounting for losses, that's about 6 kWh per square meter, and thus, the average British home-day energy consumption is stored by 4 square meters. So the amount of land required to store 100% of the electricity for British homes for an entire day is actually notably smaller than the area taken up by the homes themselves, which are dozens to hundreds of square meters on average! In Scotland, the altitude differences to the lochs can be a kilometer or more. Heck, even Wales has *natural* lakes at ~600m not far from the sea.
Those can't be done to a scale sufficient to provide all energy needs of the country.
"We can't repel unsupported assertions of that magnitude!"
In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:
* An elevation change
* Enough water input to account for evaporation
That's pretty much it. And it's cheap. As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of plants with such a design; it's not an extra. When you see price per kWh quoted on such a solar thermal power plant, that's the price you pay. And solar thermal prices have been dropping pretty quickly over the years.
Over here in Iceland, with NOVA, I can't get unlimited text, and even getting a fixed number of "free" texts a month is absurdly expensive. The per-text cost is something like $0.08.
Back in the US, I never texted. It was a total rip off, I contended, and I refused to do it. Over here, I've totally changed. I read and write Icelandic much better than I speak it, and over a phone call, it's almost impossible for me to carry on a proper conversation in Icelandic. Everyone has cell phones. So spending a couple dozen cents here and there is worth it to me. I use Viber wherever possible to avoid the charges.
Again, SMS is still a rip off. But sometimes, you just pay for the rip-off if it makes your life easier.
Enough with nanny laws. Let people do what they want to their own bodies. What's hard about that concept? I mean, unless you're talking about public health issues (like, say, antibiotic overuse), it's not really anyone else's business. Doctors should be doctors, not gatekeepers.
And as for "misdiagnosis", the more people you remove from the equation, the less people there are to sue. Eventually it comes down to just you and the store you bought it from - and what are you going to do, sue them for selling you something that's perfectly legal to sell because you used it stupidly? Think you'd have much success suing Home Depot for selling you the saw that you used to accidentally cut off your finger because you used it wrong?
People are thinking about this all wrong anyway. It's not going to be "gas stations" that are going to be installing these. It's going to be stores. Just one or two in the parking lot, possibly even as a loss leader just so that they can have you as a captive audience for 10-15 minutes.
Gas stations have many pumps per station because there's high capital costs installing that tank and for reasons of distribution simplicity (gasoline deliveries, etc) that simply don't apply to EV chargers (esp. if the charger has its own battery bank to pull from -- if it does, you could install one in the middle of the desert with nothing more than a dirt road to it and a solar panel on top of it;) )
Gasoline engines of around 100 HP are at efficiency from 25% to 30%.
Please show me your gasoline car that spends all of its time operating at its nominal optimal efficiency, aka, in its optimal RPM/torque band.
then we can say that the car takes 110 kW to run at 80 mph
You would be grossly incorrect. A typical electric car will take 50kW or so to run at 80mph. Vehicles have to have motors that are way more powerful than is needed at cruising speeds in order to handle acceleration and changes in altitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Those were not the only choices, as should be obvious from the fact that even the summary graph has three sections. All "true" answers together add up to right around 40% and all "false" likewise.
Exactly. Would they except this standard with anything else? 65% of students being literate, for example?
From the link in my other post (again, ), we see that the main problem with CDs is not a fundamental aspect of using them, but simply that their overall transmittance varies depending on how thick the metalized coating is, which can be assessed in advance by looking at the filament of an incandescent bulb. Beyond that, their stats seem to be impressive. The standard recommendation for looking at the sun is #14 welding filter, which is way out of the range for potential eye damage. For a CD or stack of CDs with equivalent visible light attenuation, the UVA level is 2.5x the welding filter and the UVB level is approximately the same - easily in the safe range. The CD actually slightly outperforms the welding filter in IR blocking.
Finally, no more having to rely on flat assertions about "everything but welders glass and eclipse filters is dangerous for you!"
Link
The summary section:
There you go :)
the US was the second lowest in the OECD in terms of evolution acceptance, with just 14% saying "definitely true" and a third saying "absolutely false" (as a side note, Iceland, where I live, is #1 in terms of acceptance - whoo!)
Until the public can come to grips with the basic tenets of science, yes, America is lagging way behind.
And I'm sorry, this "Americans suck at standardized testing" excuse is one of the flimsiest I've ever heard. Their only counterevidence -- that which has been accomplished in the US and the quality of US universities -- is hardly pinned on the understanding of science of the average American. It's a combination of the understanding of science of the top percentiles of Americans combined with research and venture capital networks and a strong H1B program (scaled by a population of over 300 million).
Not exactly something you can do on short notice on a weekday in Reykjavík. Most stores will be closed by the time I get off work, and there's not a lot of options for places to get "real filters" anyway. Heck, I couldn't find a place in town that sold a digital pH meter; they had to special order it. And just to find a place that would do that took being bounced between three stores. Even making a proper pinhole camera would be kind of a pain. Can't be flimsy like just holding two sheets of paper near each other -- this being Iceland, it's probably going to be windy in the evening. Don't have any tissue boxes. I mean, I could probably scrounge together something, but...
Also, I think flatly saying "no" seems to be an overstatement. I see lots of people saying "(blank) doesn't work" but never with evidence to back it up. For example, a CD. CDs are polycarbonate. Polycarbonate is opaque to UV and far IR. It's one of the reasons that it's used in skylights, for example. So what's the problem, given that UV is the main risk of eye damage? Visible is readily gauged by how bright it looks, so that's a no-brainer to assess. And if you're blocking visible light with the metalized filter (aka, a CD), you should also be blocking IR, because metals tend to reflect IR very well (which is why spacecraft use metal foil insulation). And saying all this, given that *unfiltered* views of the sun rarely result in permanent damage....
Really, I just expect better from Slashdot than to basically say, in so many words, "it's not possible to block light".
I'd like to view it here in Reykjavík late this evening, but I don't have any proper eye protection. :P Are there any easy ways to make some improvised eye protection?
And while it doesn't apply to the asker, if the person is trying to sync from an android device (say, a cell phone camera), BotSync is a good way to do basically that automagically, in a loop whenever there's new files to transfer.
While that's sort of a flamebait topic, there is at least some truth to the concept. I saw an interview with some subsistence farmers once for whom Bono had been campaigning to "save their indigenous lifestyle" or something like that. And their take on it was, what you call a lifestyle, we call poverty.
It should be up to each culture to decide what elements of modern life they want to incorporate and which elements of their traditional life they want to preserve. Now, as for what the Aboriginees think of the changes in their society, I have no idea; I don't know any.
People here only wish it was like that with the smelters. The last smelter (and more significantly, its associated dam at Kárahnjúkar, the largest in Europe) drove people mad. Approval was rushed through without much public discussion, an environmental impact statement (which proved completely inaccurate, as in "the largest lake in eastern Iceland completely changed color" inaccurate) was approved with little review, and construction (the main source of jobs) was done with workers brought in on a temporary basis, mainly from Poland. Most of the people working there now (much smaller than the construction times) are also immigrants**. Honestly, it was so egregious that I think it helped galvanize people here to pay more attention and resist things like that more.
Interesting to see your insights on construction. :) Thanks!
** -- Not that I have much ground to stand on in regards to that objection, as I myself immigrated to Iceland... although because I love the place, not because I make more money here (just the opposite).
Fertilizer production isn't big up here. I don't know why. It's aluminum, and to a lesser extent, ferrosilicon, and there's lots of datacenter plans, too. And actually, the smelters aren't that big of employers. Aluminum is almost as much of our exports as fish, but it's a much smaller chunk of the employment picture.
I think it's a strange notion that on one hand, it seems that you're saying that the cable is going to take a ton of maintenance, but on the other, that there won't be many maintenance jobs. Which is it? This isn't my field, so I'm simply asking you, but it clearly can't be both ways! :) Or, I hope you're not trying to say that Icelanders aren't skilled enough to maintain a cable... And also in the jobs picture on our side is the power exploration, development, and production, which is no small factor.
I think you're overplaying losses. I read a thing from Seimens before which quoted the losses on one HVDC system they were working on at 3% per 1000km (I don't know the details like voltage, conductor thickness, etc). Reykjavík to London is under 1900km. Even if you double the losses from that figure, you're still not talking about that huge of losses.
Concerning your comment about electrical power transmission being more mature... actually I know enough about this field to register a strong disagreement. The surge in HVDC transmission is specifically due to the rapid advance of increasingly affordable, increasingly high power switching electronics in recent years (which has also fuelled a boom in increasingly small, increasingly high power AC induction motors, which is what made vehicles like the Tesla Roadster possible). This advance is, of course, a huge boon not just to long distance power transmission in general, but also specifically to undersea cables, since AC losses on a cable in saltwater are huge.
Sorry for the "press puff pieces", it was just a quick google search to get you some breadcrumbs so you could see that this is actually being seriously discussed, including official visits between government officials.
Again, though, the difficulty of constructing and maintaining such a cable? Not my field. It seems strange, though, that it would be considered so much more difficult than undersea data cables, given that all of the problems you quoted apply to them as well (scouring, currents, shifting, depth, weather, etc). And we've got several already running to Iceland. I mean, you're dealing with a much fatter line for power, but I'd think that would only help, not hurt. Could you elaborate on why power cables are so much more difficult?
Am I the only one who saw the comment about space pirates and thought, "awesome!"?
Residential power here in Iceland is 6-7 US cents per kilowatt hour, so I can only imagine that industrial-scale power is even cheaper. We're really sitting on more power production potential than we know what to do with, it's almost ridiculous. I mean, hot water goes to 90% of houses and people waste it like crazy, there's huge heated pools, etc... and a quarter of this hot water comes just from downtown alone, little sheds mixed in with the buildings. In Öskjuhlíð they drilled a 90 meter pipe into the ground, put a choke in the top, a water drip... and it's now an artificial geyser. Heat is just everywhere. 1/3rd of the lava on the planet in the past 500 years has come from Iceland. Traditionally, we've "exported" this power by making stuff here with it, like aluminum (importing all the inputs and exporting the metal). There are three smelters in the country, and even the smallest uses more power than all the homes and businesses combined. But we're still only using about 20% of our conventional high temperature geo (not counting using magma as an input, which was recently shown to be feasable at Krafla, not counting EGS, etc - and geo exploration has been quite minimal due to there being so much available already), virtually none of our low temperature geo (2/3rds of the country's primary energy is geothermal waters at 100-150C, and the target distribution temperature is 80C, but it just gets mixed with cold to bring it down that low), about 15% of our hydro, essentially none of our huge wind (makes the midwestern US look tame, but there's only one turbine in the entire country), tides (also quite large), etc. This country has just huge amounts of generation potential but nothing to use it on.
I'm sure you know more about the difficulties involved than I. But it's a very serious subject that's been discussed for decades, and now seems to finally be making some headway. There's even a conference going on right now about it.
Now, that's not to say that it's not without controversy on this side. Namely, because people here love having massive amounts of unspoiled wilderness, and up here, even geothermal is controversial just because you have to build roads and lines into it. And people also worry about our cheap electricity getting more expensive if we start selling to the UK.
Solar is not the wrong tech for, for example, Spain, which is well within HVDC distance for the UK. And claiming that in the entire UK there's no suitable land for the relatively small amount of area required for pumped hydro is just plain silly. And, FYI, it's already started.
Pence. So you're in the UK. In a decade, you may be buying cheap, reliable carbon-free electricity from us en masse ;) (hint: you'd be paying in krónur)
Nah, petrol costs about $7.50 a gallon here. And I'm renting part of a house right now, and am in the market for buying a house.
"Nice for you that you can."
Given that I just proved a counterexample to the concept that electricity = carbon, and you accepted it, I'm glad to see that we've resolved this one.
Electricity != carbon. *Some forms* of electricity generation equal carbon, but there's no reason to say that they must always dominate.
I've been all over the UK. Yes, the London area is flat as a pancake. The rest of the country isn't, and it's not that big of a country. Most of China's population lives in flat areas, too. But the simple fact is, it doesn't take that much land area * altitude change to store a ton of power. With a water depth of 20m and an altitude change of ~120 meters (which there are even places near *London* like that, like the oceanic cliffs near Eastborne, let alone in Wales, let alone in Scotland), after accounting for losses, that's about 6 kWh per square meter, and thus, the average British home-day energy consumption is stored by 4 square meters. So the amount of land required to store 100% of the electricity for British homes for an entire day is actually notably smaller than the area taken up by the homes themselves, which are dozens to hundreds of square meters on average! In Scotland, the altitude differences to the lochs can be a kilometer or more. Heck, even Wales has *natural* lakes at ~600m not far from the sea.
My power is about six cents per kilowatt hour and has never gone out on me.
You were saying?
Those can't be done to a scale sufficient to provide all energy needs of the country.
"We can't repel unsupported assertions of that magnitude!"
In China, pumped hydro is being done on a massive scale simply to avoid building *conventional* power plants, by leveling out the day/night curve. The requirements are:
* An elevation change
* Enough water input to account for evaporation
That's pretty much it. And it's cheap. As for solar thermal storage, that's built into the cost of the plant of plants with such a design; it's not an extra. When you see price per kWh quoted on such a solar thermal power plant, that's the price you pay. And solar thermal prices have been dropping pretty quickly over the years.
Because carbon equals electricity, right?
Hmm, now when was the last time I used carbon-based electricity? Think that was about a month ago...
Should we operate on the assumption that the UK assumes that it won't get built?
Over here in Iceland, with NOVA, I can't get unlimited text, and even getting a fixed number of "free" texts a month is absurdly expensive. The per-text cost is something like $0.08.
Back in the US, I never texted. It was a total rip off, I contended, and I refused to do it. Over here, I've totally changed. I read and write Icelandic much better than I speak it, and over a phone call, it's almost impossible for me to carry on a proper conversation in Icelandic. Everyone has cell phones. So spending a couple dozen cents here and there is worth it to me. I use Viber wherever possible to avoid the charges.
Again, SMS is still a rip off. But sometimes, you just pay for the rip-off if it makes your life easier.
Enough with nanny laws. Let people do what they want to their own bodies. What's hard about that concept? I mean, unless you're talking about public health issues (like, say, antibiotic overuse), it's not really anyone else's business. Doctors should be doctors, not gatekeepers.
And as for "misdiagnosis", the more people you remove from the equation, the less people there are to sue. Eventually it comes down to just you and the store you bought it from - and what are you going to do, sue them for selling you something that's perfectly legal to sell because you used it stupidly? Think you'd have much success suing Home Depot for selling you the saw that you used to accidentally cut off your finger because you used it wrong?
People are thinking about this all wrong anyway. It's not going to be "gas stations" that are going to be installing these. It's going to be stores. Just one or two in the parking lot, possibly even as a loss leader just so that they can have you as a captive audience for 10-15 minutes.
Gas stations have many pumps per station because there's high capital costs installing that tank and for reasons of distribution simplicity (gasoline deliveries, etc) that simply don't apply to EV chargers (esp. if the charger has its own battery bank to pull from -- if it does, you could install one in the middle of the desert with nothing more than a dirt road to it and a solar panel on top of it ;) )
Please show me your gasoline car that spends all of its time operating at its nominal optimal efficiency, aka, in its optimal RPM/torque band.
You would be grossly incorrect. A typical electric car will take 50kW or so to run at 80mph. Vehicles have to have motors that are way more powerful than is needed at cruising speeds in order to handle acceleration and changes in altitude.