In quite a lot of Europe you simply cannot do that without substantial changes to a lot of things, which is why EV's and hybrids have quite some way to go yet.
Actually, it sounds like Europe has "quite some way to go yet."
If EVs continue to develop, and become cost-effective, they will be widely adopted, and it will be Europe that lags behind and at a disadvantage, not EVs.
as a workplace who wants to support plug-in EVs is that, in doing so, you are becoming a refueler-- a gas station. You're entering another business with costs, time demands, enforcement requirements, and drama.
You could... OR you could hire a company, let them lease the space from you, and leave them to own the equipment, manage/police the equipment and the users/customers.
Oh, and plug in EVs aren't zero emissions. We're still on the hook for the power generation emissions that result from the electricity demand.
That depends on your locale. Some areas have lots of cheap hydro-power. Some areas have lots of nuclear power. Some have lots of wind, and a few have lots of solar.
Finally, there's a major equity issues. The vast majority of EV buyers are rich
That was true of automobiles at the start, too. In fact, that's probably true of damn-near any early adopter. If you think about it, those rich people are subsidizing the R&D, and will be lowering the cost for those who come after, including, eventually, the poor.
The low-income population by and large lives in apartments whose landlords are not even considering installing EV chargers.
This is a "city" problem, rather than a rich/poor problem. I've lived in plenty of apartments, where my car parked a short distance from at least one of my windows, and it would have been no trouble for me to run an extension cord out to my vehicle.
In a high-rent area, where apartments are high-rises, that becomes more difficult. But honestly, ANYBODY who can afford to live in those high rent areas, even in an apartment, is pretty well-off, themselves.
The faster you charge an EV, the more waste electricity.
High-speed charging is only needed near highways. In most situations, including yours, much lower speed charging is fine. Even if a few people might WANT high-speed charging, nothing forces to accommodate them. Certainly businesses would generally be happy to force people to stay around a little longer.
the future is in either hydrogen fuel cells or battery-swapping EVs.
That's a pretty idiotic thing to stay, for someone who has supposedly studied the problem in-depth.
Hydrogen fuel-cells are a non-starter. Horribly inefficient, difficult to store, astronomically expensive, etc.
Battery swapping would basically require an end to car ownership. Swapping the battery that you bought with your car, means you're getting the depreciated value of whoever showed-up at the station before you. It means you have to trust the fuel station you're paying $10 to, with he much of the value of your vehicle, and hope they don't completely rip you off, or otherwise just screw-up.
There's no way in hell anybody with more than a single-digit IQ would ever consent to battery swapping. It just can't work, unless we all switch to renting our EVs, making the cost of charging, and depreciation of the batteries something the company has to handle, and we can always get a new one for no extra cost, at any time, no matter what.
No you weren't, because you were using numbers for ALL gas stations. The distribution for EV charging stations would be completely different, and not as simple as just multiplying the number of gas stations by the added charging time, for so-many reasons I don't know where to start.
make the station just the pumps with card paying and they can be incredibly compact.
Not a chance. They're all large, including the ones that have NO convenience store, because of both the large fuel storage tanks that have to be installed underground, and for fire-safety, so when you have a fueling accident, it doesn't burn down the businesses right next to it.
Calculate the cost of adding that to almost every parking spot on a lot
Nope. You only need to install a few. Those who need a charge will park there. Those who don't will choose a non-charger spot. You're still hung-up on the idea of a gas station, which is not what the future looks like.
I'm not talking about the occasional Tesla vehicle going by. I'm talking about a future where this is the dominant form of transport.
It's BS to jump from the today to 100% EVs. The future gets built-out slowly... The first few charging stations will pay themselves off, and keep working, and help pay for the installation of the next few. That's vastly different than pretending that a company needs to install hundreds of them, immediately.
And for this future of yours, that's decades from now, for some reason you're using the high, early-adopter prices of these charging stations, today. Even you can't pretend that's fair.
Not only do you have to plan your driving based on where you can find a suitable outlet,
Give them a little bit of time to develop, and they'll be everywhere. They'll get the infrastructure developed even faster, since it just requires existing power lines, and little no-maintenance boxes at the corner of regular parking spaces.
waiting for half an hour every two hours isn't very competitive
I'd say that's about half-way there... Maybe a bit closer. You're already likely to stop every 4 hours or so, for food and restroom breaks. There just needs to be a charging station next to a few of those parking spots, and you'll get fueled up with zero waiting. You sure won't have to go hunt down a gas station and stand around like an idiot, waiting for it to fuel-up.
Saying how wonderful and convenient gas stations are, is like complaining that nobody runs their own steam boilers anymore... It's so wrongheaded and backwards that I can't even process it.
One of the biggest advantages of EVs and plug-in hybrids is that you can fuel-up AT HOME, overnight, drastically reducing the number of times you have to suffer through stopping at a gas station.
Replace all the cars on the long-distance highway with EVs and you'll need a service station about an order of magnitude larger in size (i.e. your typical 12-pump gas station becomes a parking lot with over 100 chargers).
Complete brain-damaged nonsense. With fossil fuels, you HAVE TO fuel-up at a station, every single time.
With electric, MOST people will fuel up, slowly, overnight, at home.
In addition, gas stations MUST be large and separate facilities you have to go out of your way to drive to/from.
EV charging stations can be (and ARE) just regular parking spaces with a small device at one corner. That means you just stop for your normal food and restroom breaks, and incidentally, your vehicle is getting fueled up with no extra time or effort from you.
It took 11 days to install the six charging stalls in Goodland, Kansas. If you thought it was a quick process to build a Supercharger station, you were clearly wrong.
And for comparison, just how long does it take to build a gas station?
Well - the only data players where I live are Verizon FIOS and Cox. Both of which will charge you $70 per month for data only.
I had Cox at pretty good speeds for about $30/month.
That was true of FIOS, but they currently have a $30/month option with 25/25Mbit symmetric service with 2-yr contract. They also force a $5/month router rental on you, but if you do things right, you can send it back right after installation:
Blame your government. They allowed the merger, and their screwy "culture" laws are the only thing keeping you from signing-up with other DBS services in the first place.
. I'm less than 30 miles from one set of towers and about 40 from the other, and I have far fewer dropouts from DirecTV than from antenna.
I didn't say crap TV antennas don't exist.
Buy a Winegard 8800 and a Boost XT preamp, and that distance should be no problem. I happen to be 50 miles away from the towers, with mountains in the way, and lots of local interference, and still get very good reception.
That's patently false. The digital switch was a knife to the back of anyone using an antenna.
No, it was a huge improvement. I use an antenna, and there was no knife in my back.
I can tell you first hand at our cabin - we got about 20 channels. Since the digital switch, none of them work.
Is it a VHF-only antenna? Did all your local VHF channels switch over to UHF where your antenna doesn't work?
Or was it an indoor set-top antenna with a little tuner knob on top of it, that badly distorts the signal and makes it impossible to pick-up digital signals, where you just need a $6 replacement?
Or are you using a very old 1st gen ATSC tuner? They get better every few years, better at picking up weak signals and better at rejecting interference.
With digital, you either get it, or you don't. There's nothing in between. That means if you were remotely on the edge of the signal before, you're getting nothing now.
No, it goes the other way. When you were getting a mess before, that could barely be distinguished from the background static video and audio, now you can get a crystal-clear picture.
And I can tell you at least where we're at, the broadcast signal strength they're using for digital is significantly lower than it was before.
I find it hard to believe that 20 different channels all reduced their broadcast power. Maybe one or two would do that, but it's more likely you've run into some other reception problem that you haven't figured out.
One ISP in my area that provides anything beyond DSL speeds.
DSL isn't dial-up. I don't see why people act like 5Mbps internet access is unacceptable, substandard and inhuman.
Besides, they know people want better, and keep their prices low to compensate... That should help you negotiate a better deal with your cable company, who doesn't know you really want the higher speeds.
most of us don't have a choice. It's Comcast or no TV.
TV antennas have worked since the 1940s. With the digital switchover is the 2000s, people even further out can get a digitally-perfect picture in higher quality with less artifacts than any cable or satellite provider offers. And you probably have several times more TV channels available to you than you would expect, possibly several good ones that are not even carried on cable.
Since the 90s, direct broadcast satellite has been an option for the overwhelming majority of people. If you've got any way to put a tiny dish where it'll have a view towards the equator, you can get subscription TV while avoiding your local cable monopoly.
And today, with high speed DSL and FIOS, you may be able to get more content than you can watch, for under $10/month. Even if you choose not to go this route, the threat of it is likely to keep your cable co in-line and behaving themselves.
call your supervisor over, I'd like to speak to them immediately. Inform them that if THEY can't disconnect my service, I'll be asking for their manager as well
There's no legal obligation for them to transfer you to their supervisor. You can ask a dozen times, and the "supervisor" or "manager" you get, will keep being the guy in the next cubicle over.
"[W]hite western women" are not "the most privileged creatures on this planet", as things like wage disparity
What wage disparity exists, comes as a result of what career paths women choose to take. So says a number of studies. Giving women the same wages as men, despite them being in less demanding jobs, is pure man-hating, women-are-perfect, political correctness gone completely awry.
sexual abuse
Huge populations of men are doing long jail terms and then being made unemployable and homeless for the rest of their lives, due to ever more strict laws that conflate rape with any and every other legal infraction that happens to have any minor sexual component.
access to healthcare
Men pay considerably more for health insurance, specifically to subsidize the higher cost of providing health care for women. Whatever the problems with the US health care system system, women aren't being disproportionally affected by it.
It's not incredibly HOME-user or POWER-user friendly...
But locked-down CORPORATE-user friendly? HELL YEAH.
Your IT department sets-up a computer with just 5 big bright icons on the desktop. These are the only applications you use for your job. You can't do anything else but launch these applications. It just keeps working like that 99.999% of the time. When something doesn't work, you call IT about it, move yourself to another computer and resume your work there. There is no way for any computer to possibly be more user-friendly than that.
If you spend more than 2 days total over the course of an employees time at a company to convert them from MS Windows and Office to Linux you've lost money, even on the lowest paid employee you have.
Unless you're at EOL on your Windows and Office version... Then you're going to have-to upgrade them to a new version that works completely differently, anyhow. ANY time spent training them on the new version of Windows and Office is money lost, in addition to the license fees, with NO benefit.
At least the time/money lost on training to use Linux has a payoff period.
The Microsoft party-line has always been that retraining employees to use Linux is far more expensive than paying those license fees... It was always a ridiculous argument, since Microsoft products make major UI changes between versions that require just as much training.
But here, the employees are trained and working on Linux. So how is it that the fees for all that Microsoft software, PLUS the retraining fees, PLUS the undeniable reports of money savings, are still going to make a switch to Windows somehow worthwhile?
Slashdot Mirror
"As of June 2014, the U.S. is the world's leader in plug-in electric car sales with a 45% share of global sales"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually, it sounds like Europe has "quite some way to go yet."
If EVs continue to develop, and become cost-effective, they will be widely adopted, and it will be Europe that lags behind and at a disadvantage, not EVs.
You're still getting your fuel at a station, you're just batching the process into fewer trips and higher up-front costs.
The in-home alternative would be to have home heating-oil deliveries, which you (illegally) use to power your truck.
No, I'm pretty sure I can't... I don't have vegetable oil lines coming into my house, so I'm no better off.
You could... OR you could hire a company, let them lease the space from you, and leave them to own the equipment, manage/police the equipment and the users/customers.
That depends on your locale. Some areas have lots of cheap hydro-power. Some areas have lots of nuclear power. Some have lots of wind, and a few have lots of solar.
That was true of automobiles at the start, too. In fact, that's probably true of damn-near any early adopter. If you think about it, those rich people are subsidizing the R&D, and will be lowering the cost for those who come after, including, eventually, the poor.
This is a "city" problem, rather than a rich/poor problem. I've lived in plenty of apartments, where my car parked a short distance from at least one of my windows, and it would have been no trouble for me to run an extension cord out to my vehicle.
In a high-rent area, where apartments are high-rises, that becomes more difficult. But honestly, ANYBODY who can afford to live in those high rent areas, even in an apartment, is pretty well-off, themselves.
High-speed charging is only needed near highways. In most situations, including yours, much lower speed charging is fine. Even if a few people might WANT high-speed charging, nothing forces to accommodate them. Certainly businesses would generally be happy to force people to stay around a little longer.
That's a pretty idiotic thing to stay, for someone who has supposedly studied the problem in-depth.
Hydrogen fuel-cells are a non-starter. Horribly inefficient, difficult to store, astronomically expensive, etc.
Battery swapping would basically require an end to car ownership. Swapping the battery that you bought with your car, means you're getting the depreciated value of whoever showed-up at the station before you. It means you have to trust the fuel station you're paying $10 to, with he much of the value of your vehicle, and hope they don't completely rip you off, or otherwise just screw-up.
There's no way in hell anybody with more than a single-digit IQ would ever consent to battery swapping. It just can't work, unless we all switch to renting our EVs, making the cost of charging, and depreciation of the batteries something the company has to handle, and we can always get a new one for no extra cost, at any time, no matter what.
No you weren't, because you were using numbers for ALL gas stations. The distribution for EV charging stations would be completely different, and not as simple as just multiplying the number of gas stations by the added charging time, for so-many reasons I don't know where to start.
Not a chance. They're all large, including the ones that have NO convenience store, because of both the large fuel storage tanks that have to be installed underground, and for fire-safety, so when you have a fueling accident, it doesn't burn down the businesses right next to it.
Nope. You only need to install a few. Those who need a charge will park there. Those who don't will choose a non-charger spot. You're still hung-up on the idea of a gas station, which is not what the future looks like.
It's BS to jump from the today to 100% EVs. The future gets built-out slowly... The first few charging stations will pay themselves off, and keep working, and help pay for the installation of the next few. That's vastly different than pretending that a company needs to install hundreds of them, immediately.
And for this future of yours, that's decades from now, for some reason you're using the high, early-adopter prices of these charging stations, today. Even you can't pretend that's fair.
Give them a little bit of time to develop, and they'll be everywhere. They'll get the infrastructure developed even faster, since it just requires existing power lines, and little no-maintenance boxes at the corner of regular parking spaces.
I'd say that's about half-way there... Maybe a bit closer. You're already likely to stop every 4 hours or so, for food and restroom breaks. There just needs to be a charging station next to a few of those parking spots, and you'll get fueled up with zero waiting. You sure won't have to go hunt down a gas station and stand around like an idiot, waiting for it to fuel-up.
Saying how wonderful and convenient gas stations are, is like complaining that nobody runs their own steam boilers anymore... It's so wrongheaded and backwards that I can't even process it.
One of the biggest advantages of EVs and plug-in hybrids is that you can fuel-up AT HOME, overnight, drastically reducing the number of times you have to suffer through stopping at a gas station.
Complete brain-damaged nonsense. With fossil fuels, you HAVE TO fuel-up at a station, every single time.
With electric, MOST people will fuel up, slowly, overnight, at home.
In addition, gas stations MUST be large and separate facilities you have to go out of your way to drive to/from.
EV charging stations can be (and ARE) just regular parking spaces with a small device at one corner. That means you just stop for your normal food and restroom breaks, and incidentally, your vehicle is getting fueled up with no extra time or effort from you.
And for comparison, just how long does it take to build a gas station?
I had Cox at pretty good speeds for about $30/month.
That was true of FIOS, but they currently have a $30/month option with 25/25Mbit symmetric service with 2-yr contract. They also force a $5/month router rental on you, but if you do things right, you can send it back right after installation:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/ind...
Blame your government. They allowed the merger, and their screwy "culture" laws are the only thing keeping you from signing-up with other DBS services in the first place.
I didn't say crap TV antennas don't exist.
Buy a Winegard 8800 and a Boost XT preamp, and that distance should be no problem. I happen to be 50 miles away from the towers, with mountains in the way, and lots of local interference, and still get very good reception.
No, it was a huge improvement. I use an antenna, and there was no knife in my back.
Is it a VHF-only antenna? Did all your local VHF channels switch over to UHF where your antenna doesn't work?
Or was it an indoor set-top antenna with a little tuner knob on top of it, that badly distorts the signal and makes it impossible to pick-up digital signals, where you just need a $6 replacement?
Or are you using a very old 1st gen ATSC tuner? They get better every few years, better at picking up weak signals and better at rejecting interference.
No, it goes the other way. When you were getting a mess before, that could barely be distinguished from the background static video and audio, now you can get a crystal-clear picture.
I find it hard to believe that 20 different channels all reduced their broadcast power. Maybe one or two would do that, but it's more likely you've run into some other reception problem that you haven't figured out.
DSL isn't dial-up. I don't see why people act like 5Mbps internet access is unacceptable, substandard and inhuman.
Besides, they know people want better, and keep their prices low to compensate... That should help you negotiate a better deal with your cable company, who doesn't know you really want the higher speeds.
TV antennas have worked since the 1940s. With the digital switchover is the 2000s, people even further out can get a digitally-perfect picture in higher quality with less artifacts than any cable or satellite provider offers. And you probably have several times more TV channels available to you than you would expect, possibly several good ones that are not even carried on cable.
Since the 90s, direct broadcast satellite has been an option for the overwhelming majority of people. If you've got any way to put a tiny dish where it'll have a view towards the equator, you can get subscription TV while avoiding your local cable monopoly.
And today, with high speed DSL and FIOS, you may be able to get more content than you can watch, for under $10/month. Even if you choose not to go this route, the threat of it is likely to keep your cable co in-line and behaving themselves.
There's no legal obligation for them to transfer you to their supervisor. You can ask a dozen times, and the "supervisor" or "manager" you get, will keep being the guy in the next cubicle over.
http://www.icmi.com/Resources/...
"My God! It's full of plankton!"
They may be the "dark matter" we've been searching for.
Took 5-seconds to find:
http://www.zdnet.com/the-true-...
http://www.biznix.org/whylinux...
What wage disparity exists, comes as a result of what career paths women choose to take. So says a number of studies. Giving women the same wages as men, despite them being in less demanding jobs, is pure man-hating, women-are-perfect, political correctness gone completely awry.
Huge populations of men are doing long jail terms and then being made unemployable and homeless for the rest of their lives, due to ever more strict laws that conflate rape with any and every other legal infraction that happens to have any minor sexual component.
Men pay considerably more for health insurance, specifically to subsidize the higher cost of providing health care for women. Whatever the problems with the US health care system system, women aren't being disproportionally affected by it.
Who said it was? Rape jokes directed at men are banned now, too.
How it'll actually pan-out remains to be seen, and I can only hope it doesn't turn into the man-hating women's club everyone is expecting.
It wasn't that long ago that Fark stopped posting nudie pics every day, and spun that off to a separate Foobies site that next to nobody visits.
No, that's completely different than the scenario I described, and completely useless and unnecessary.
It's not incredibly HOME-user or POWER-user friendly...
But locked-down CORPORATE-user friendly? HELL YEAH.
Your IT department sets-up a computer with just 5 big bright icons on the desktop. These are the only applications you use for your job. You can't do anything else but launch these applications. It just keeps working like that 99.999% of the time. When something doesn't work, you call IT about it, move yourself to another computer and resume your work there. There is no way for any computer to possibly be more user-friendly than that.
Linux does it, Windows doesn't.
Unless you're at EOL on your Windows and Office version... Then you're going to have-to upgrade them to a new version that works completely differently, anyhow. ANY time spent training them on the new version of Windows and Office is money lost, in addition to the license fees, with NO benefit.
At least the time/money lost on training to use Linux has a payoff period.
That's a good move for KDE, and it helps users a bit, but does nothing to help you find and install the applications you want in the first place.
Photoshop is the big exception, and it probably only worked because of "photo" right in the same.
I've never heard of someone "iTunesing" or "Winamping". Nobody has ever "Firefoxed" the web, or "Outlooked" their e-mail.
The Microsoft party-line has always been that retraining employees to use Linux is far more expensive than paying those license fees... It was always a ridiculous argument, since Microsoft products make major UI changes between versions that require just as much training.
But here, the employees are trained and working on Linux. So how is it that the fees for all that Microsoft software, PLUS the retraining fees, PLUS the undeniable reports of money savings, are still going to make a switch to Windows somehow worthwhile?