Private energy systems won't be able to compete on price, making autarkic electric power systems an expensive toy for people with too much money at hand or too much paranoia in the brain.
Private energy systems won't be able to compete on price, as long as the electric company's rates stay reasonable. If the power company gets greedy, suddenly the alternatives start to become competitive and the power company starts to lose customers -- a possibility that I'm sure the power company will be well aware of.
So even if almost nobody ever actually buys a home-battery system, the fact that they could buy one would serve to place a ceiling on how much the electric company can gouge people. And the cheaper the home systems get, lower that ceiling is.
Would the penalty for not connecting to the grid be interpreted as a "tax" in the same way that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the penalty for not signing up for insurance that conforms to the Affordable Care Act is?
I don't know. Would the taxpayers be on the hook to provide off-gridders with electricity during emergencies, the same way they currently have to pay for emergency-room care for the uninsured?
For some time, repair of electrics is going to be the province of dealers and perhaps larger shops
OTOH, one of the (purported) advantages of an electric car is that (outside of replacing tires, and, after 8-12 years, the battery) there shouldn't be much in it that needs repair.
Of course, with a redneck, they just sling a generator in the back if worried about range.
This is actually a good point -- an electric pickup could operate like a Volt, without the Volt's requirement to always carry around a weighty gasoline engine even on trips where you don't actually need it.
Please. Anyone paranoid enough to take the battery out of their phone to avoid being tracked would simply not bring the phone with them, which is both easy and effective.
Unless you want to, you know, use the phone later. (Presumably at some time and location where you're no longer worried about being tracked).
Swap "internet vapors" with "vague promises by lying bureaucrats" and you've aptly described the US Dollar.
And yet billions of people successfully use the US Dollar every day to complete transactions, and it remains the world's most popular and useful currency. Inexplicable!
The least painful (usually) technique is simply to eat lunch with one or more of your co-workers most days. You'd be surprised how much useful information gets shared that way.
Go watch YouTube's biggest star with the largest channel -- PewDiePie. More than 15,000,000 subscribers
Of course, the beauty of the Internet is that the stupidity of YouTube's top N channels doesn't effect me one bit. The content I find interesting is all there and available as well, and I never need to see (or even know about the existence of) any of the silly channels listed in the parent post.
Contrast that with television, where almost every show has to be dumbed down to appeal to a wide audience.
However, I do my programing in C [...] Since I have no particular desire to learn C++
I think if you learned just the basic parts of C++ you'd find it's much quicker and easier to get things working reliably than using straight C. The trick is to ignore the 253 different categories of nifty/obscure feature you don't want to deal with -- rather, only use the parts that you want to use. In particular, constructors/destructors, inheritance, virtual methods, and basic templates can all be huge time-savers once you're used to them. I started in my programming career using C, but after using C++ for a few years, writing a program in C now feels like driving a car that's stuck in first gear.
so we are looking at them harder than if, say, Chevy Volts were bursting into flames.
If Chevy Volts were bursting into flames, we'd be hearing about it. There's a whole swath of American politicians ready to pounce on anything negative regarding the Volt because, you know, Obama.
I've played with one and let me tell you, depending on the size, they can hold some serious voltages - I've held one with 5M volts stored. Insane.
The world doesn't run on volts, it runs on kilowatts. You can store up 25,000 volts just by shuffling your feet on the carpet, but that doesn't mean you can power your home that way.
Where would you put this set of battery cells? [...] So do German's have a extra space in their garage for something that may take up the floor space of a water heater or furnace?
Well, the obvious thing to do would be to put it in the garage, and put an electric motor, wheels, seats, etc around it so that you could also use it for transportation.
In fact, I think Germany already has some companies selling batteries like that, they just need to standardize on a bi-directional electrical interface to the home's electrical system.:^)
Who knows, it could very much end up a repeat of HDTV, with some new photovoltaic chemistry coming out of some little lab which renders all previous PV technologies obsolete.
That certainly could happen, but the HDTV comparison is misleading.
With television, you have compatibility issues -- the receivers and the transmitters have to work together, otherwise the technology doesn't work. Therefore when the television stations decided to go with digital transmission, all of the analog gear became useless because it could only process analog signals that were no longer being transmitted by anyone.
Solar panels, OTOH, don't need to be compatible with anything except the sun. If I buy a solar array for my house this year, and some much-improved solar technology comes out next year, my solar array will still continue to work just as well as it ever did. It's true I would have saved some money if I had correctly guessed the future and waited, but it's not a total loss of investment like analog HDTV or DVD-HD players were.
It's that unsupervised, these things and things like it will be vandalized, stolen, and used as public toilets.
They could mitigate this problem by requiring a credit card to enter, and keeping a video camera trained on the occupants. People misbehave less when they know they'll be held accountable.
I think if 100 Corollas spontaneously burst into flames each year (and realistically, more like 2-300 given that production in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s will be far lower than in recent years)... we'd probably have heard about it by now. Don't you?
Sure. But we're not talking about cars "spontaneously bursting into flames", we're talking about cars catching fire after having been damaged in an accident. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 100 Corollas a year do that, and nobody bats an eye.
How long does it take you to download a movie over your speaker?
Assuming a movie is 2GB and the data can be transferred at phone-modem speeds (say 57kb/sec), about 3 days.
Of course, nobody was suggesting transmitting a movie via sound waves; malware (and/or the data it wants to exfiltrate) would be much smaller than that.
And I can't understand how that's a premium worth paying for, unless you actually need it for some reason.
The alternatives are Windows (which I can't stand), or some flavor of Linux/Unix/BSD, which work okay, but aren't particularly user-friendly, and don't have much commercial software support.
Whether or not paying extra for MacOS/X is worth it will also depend on how much money you have available. If you're scraping by, it might be better to pay less up front, and put up with the shortcomings of an alternative. OTOH, if you've got enough money (or your employer is paying for it), then you may prefer to spring for 3-7 years of hassle-free computing experience, rather than a one-time savings of a few hundred dollars.
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Private energy systems won't be able to compete on price, making autarkic electric power systems an expensive toy for people with too much money at hand or too much paranoia in the brain.
Private energy systems won't be able to compete on price, as long as the electric company's rates stay reasonable. If the power company gets greedy, suddenly the alternatives start to become competitive and the power company starts to lose customers -- a possibility that I'm sure the power company will be well aware of.
So even if almost nobody ever actually buys a home-battery system, the fact that they could buy one would serve to place a ceiling on how much the electric company can gouge people. And the cheaper the home systems get, lower that ceiling is.
Would the penalty for not connecting to the grid be interpreted as a "tax" in the same way that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the penalty for not signing up for insurance that conforms to the Affordable Care Act is?
I don't know. Would the taxpayers be on the hook to provide off-gridders with electricity during emergencies, the same way they currently have to pay for emergency-room care for the uninsured?
Well, OTOH that likely means when anything goes wrong with the engine you need an entire new engine
Agreed -- a whole new electric motor, to be exact. So hopefully the electric motors will be durable.
For some time, repair of electrics is going to be the province of dealers and perhaps larger shops
OTOH, one of the (purported) advantages of an electric car is that (outside of replacing tires, and, after 8-12 years, the battery) there shouldn't be much in it that needs repair.
Of course, with a redneck, they just sling a generator in the back if worried about range.
This is actually a good point -- an electric pickup could operate like a Volt, without the Volt's requirement to always carry around a weighty gasoline engine even on trips where you don't actually need it.
Please. Anyone paranoid enough to take the battery out of their phone to avoid being tracked would simply not bring the phone with them, which is both easy and effective.
Unless you want to, you know, use the phone later. (Presumably at some time and location where you're no longer worried about being tracked).
Related question: how do you stay in the loop if you can't afford to go out to lunch with them and have to brown-bag it?
There's nothing stopping you from bringing your brown-bag to the restaurant.
Swap "internet vapors" with "vague promises by lying bureaucrats" and you've aptly described the US Dollar.
And yet billions of people successfully use the US Dollar every day to complete transactions, and it remains the world's most popular and useful currency. Inexplicable!
The least painful (usually) technique is simply to eat lunch with one or more of your co-workers most days. You'd be surprised how much useful information gets shared that way.
Go watch YouTube's biggest star with the largest channel -- PewDiePie. More than 15,000,000 subscribers
Of course, the beauty of the Internet is that the stupidity of YouTube's top N channels doesn't effect me one bit. The content I find interesting is all there and available as well, and I never need to see (or even know about the existence of) any of the silly channels listed in the parent post.
Contrast that with television, where almost every show has to be dumbed down to appeal to a wide audience.
However, I do my programing in C [...] Since I have no particular desire to learn C++
I think if you learned just the basic parts of C++ you'd find it's much quicker and easier to get things working reliably than using straight C. The trick is to ignore the 253 different categories of nifty/obscure feature you don't want to deal with -- rather, only use the parts that you want to use. In particular, constructors/destructors, inheritance, virtual methods, and basic templates can all be huge time-savers once you're used to them. I started in my programming career using C, but after using C++ for a few years, writing a program in C now feels like driving a car that's stuck in first gear.
so we are looking at them harder than if, say, Chevy Volts were bursting into flames.
If Chevy Volts were bursting into flames, we'd be hearing about it. There's a whole swath of American politicians ready to pounce on anything negative regarding the Volt because, you know, Obama.
I've played with one and let me tell you, depending on the size, they can hold some serious voltages - I've held one with 5M volts stored. Insane.
The world doesn't run on volts, it runs on kilowatts. You can store up 25,000 volts just by shuffling your feet on the carpet, but that doesn't mean you can power your home that way.
Where would you put this set of battery cells? [...] So do German's have a extra space in their garage for something that may take up the floor space of a water heater or furnace?
Well, the obvious thing to do would be to put it in the garage, and put an electric motor, wheels, seats, etc around it so that you could also use it for transportation.
In fact, I think Germany already has some companies selling batteries like that, they just need to standardize on a bi-directional electrical interface to the home's electrical system. :^)
Who knows, it could very much end up a repeat of HDTV, with some new photovoltaic chemistry coming out of some little lab which renders all previous PV technologies obsolete.
That certainly could happen, but the HDTV comparison is misleading.
With television, you have compatibility issues -- the receivers and the transmitters have to work together, otherwise the technology doesn't work. Therefore when the television stations decided to go with digital transmission, all of the analog gear became useless because it could only process analog signals that were no longer being transmitted by anyone.
Solar panels, OTOH, don't need to be compatible with anything except the sun. If I buy a solar array for my house this year, and some much-improved solar technology comes out next year, my solar array will still continue to work just as well as it ever did. It's true I would have saved some money if I had correctly guessed the future and waited, but it's not a total loss of investment like analog HDTV or DVD-HD players were.
It is no surprise that the oil lobby is jumping on this
What evidence do we have that the oil lobby is jumping on this?
It's that unsupervised, these things and things like it will be vandalized, stolen, and used as public toilets.
They could mitigate this problem by requiring a credit card to enter, and keeping a video camera trained on the occupants. People misbehave less when they know they'll be held accountable.
I think if 100 Corollas spontaneously burst into flames each year (and realistically, more like 2-300 given that production in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s will be far lower than in recent years)... we'd probably have heard about it by now. Don't you?
Sure. But we're not talking about cars "spontaneously bursting into flames", we're talking about cars catching fire after having been damaged in an accident. I wouldn't be at all surprised if 100 Corollas a year do that, and nobody bats an eye.
But I thought fuel cells were what was unsafe not Tesla cars? Isn't that what Musk wanted us all to believe?
Fuel cell cars are extremely safe -- since nobody can afford to buy one, nobody can get hurt in one.
So never go to a restaurant again?
Yes, nothing says "freedom" like being afraid to go to restaurants because your country doesn't have adequate food safety laws.
That's an interesting point, however what does Ender's Game have to do with homosexuality?
In Ender's Game, the human race is in acute danger of being destroyed by "buggers". Just sayin'....
Tesla swap stations don't exist yet and when they do, they're not a swap so much as an expensive rental with lots of fine print.
Citation? Your post is the first place I've heard of any time-limit rules like that.
An alchemist never reveals their tricks
It's pretty straightforward if you have access to a particle accelerator and some lead...
How long does it take you to download a movie over your speaker?
Assuming a movie is 2GB and the data can be transferred at phone-modem speeds (say 57kb/sec), about 3 days.
Of course, nobody was suggesting transmitting a movie via sound waves; malware (and/or the data it wants to exfiltrate) would be much smaller than that.
And I can't understand how that's a premium worth paying for, unless you actually need it for some reason.
The alternatives are Windows (which I can't stand), or some flavor of Linux/Unix/BSD, which work okay, but aren't particularly user-friendly, and don't have much commercial software support.
Whether or not paying extra for MacOS/X is worth it will also depend on how much money you have available. If you're scraping by, it might be better to pay less up front, and put up with the shortcomings of an alternative. OTOH, if you've got enough money (or your employer is paying for it), then you may prefer to spring for 3-7 years of hassle-free computing experience, rather than a one-time savings of a few hundred dollars.