I have been a loyal user of K-Cups for years now...
I will never buy a DRM coffee machine...
The whole idea is just stupid. I get that they are trying to make money from every cup sold, just like the razor model, but frankly that is a boardroom fantasy...
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The same issue with music happened... once Amazon started selling DRM free music, I started buying, now having a collection of hundreds of "CDs" all downloaded to all my devices.
I don't pirate any of them, nor do I share them outside my family. Sell me a product I control at a reasonable price and I'll pay you money.
One of our HTPCs is rocking an Athlon64 with an All-in-Wonder 9800 AGP card. One of the last ones to support component video out. Plugged into a 27" CRT. Works great for Plex Web client (via Google Chrome).
Nothing wrong with any of that... other than perhaps the 27" CRT.:) How you can stand to look at that anymore is beyond me, but to each their own...
And that computer is fine for SDTV, but if you were running HDTV it probably would have issues.
If I was the manager of that Pizza Hut, I'd give her a month of free pizza... Why? Because that woman went through hell and it would be a very small token of humanity to remind her that good people exist.
Yes, it's like all those career lawyers in the law or career doctors in medicine. What do they know about Real Life TM?
If you actually believe that, then that is sad...
Part of the reason America exists is to break away from being ruled by people out of touch with average citizens. The idea was to have citizen leaders who would leave their private lives, go serve the country for a few years, then return home...
Instead you now have people who have never actually lived in the private sector, who know nothing about building a business, paying bills, and living within your means...
These people have spent their entire adult lives spending "other people's money", they do not know what a $10/hr job is really like, what it is like to hire and train employees is like, etc.
In fairness, that really isn't the fault of those title loan places...
Those people are there because they have made a whole series of really bad choices prior to that last bad one...
I have a family member who does that, and no matter how much money you give him, he ends up broke. He'll always be broke, and he has a college education. He simply can't hold on to money.
My family stopped giving him money a long time ago (he is about 50 now), and he currently rents a single room from someone and works a $12/hr job and drives a 10 year old beater.
And somebody might. I saw that 4 people were killed in a random shooting in Wisconsin. I know of many cases of abortion-related violence. There's plenty of professed Christians who talk trash.
And they are all wrong as well...
Freedom of speech is for both the stuff you like, and the stuff you don't...
Heck, even the riots in Baltimore show that to be false.
While the people there do have honest concerns about police being racist, the reality is that many of them are just "black vs. white" rather than addressing the issue itself.
And violent protests aren't helping. MLK made great progress for blacks without using violence, cudos to him.
Millions of Americans working for less than $10/hr and millions more Americans unemployed would tend to disagree with that.
The economy is fine for the upper 25%, it sucks for the bottom 50%.
I'm in the 3%, I'm doing great.. but I can see from my lofty perch that it sucks for a whole lot of people...
I took my kids for ice cream to ColdStone yesterday, we ate outside at the park that is next to the store, it is lovely... and I commented to my kids that if they don't learn useful skills, that job is what'll they'll end up doing... We make in about two weeks what the kid in there makes all year... and that kid's job will be replaced in our lifetimes by a robot, I have no doubt...
It is a problem that no one wants to talk about solutions that would actually work... (just taking my money and giving it to the kid isn't a solution, do it too much and I'll leave)
She was also a U.S. Senator for New York for eight years (i.e. Elected twice). But of course, that was also a job that she only got for being Bill Clinton's wife and not because she holds a law degree from Yale University, not because she was a professor of Law at the University of Arkansas, not because she was she was on the congressional legal advisory staff in the Watergate impeachment process, and not because she played an important role in organizing the Carter presidential campaign. Facts.
That may all be true, but it also isn't the reason she got elected to the Senate... She was the first Lady and Bill's wife, that is why...
Keep in mind that she has been in government for most of her life now, electing her is exactly the problem, career politicians.
The fact that Carly has no elected experience actually makes it an interesting idea, even if I wouldn't personally vote for her. She really has no chance, I hope she knows that.
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Note: I don't want Jeb Bush either, that is more of the same as well. I'd rather have someone from outside of government.
You may be right, but how is that any different from Hillary?
Frankly, we've had a Clinton in Washington for more than 20 years now, can Carly do any worse?
One of the problems is that we keep electing the same people over and over. Jeb Bush is just more of the same as George, Hillary is just more of the same, and so on...
I thought it was pretty damned nice of Nimoy to bring her back for that cameo.
Nimoy was pretty dammed nice all around...
For Star Trek 6, he pushed the studio to give DeForest a big raise to $1 millon as thanks for all that he had done. DeForest had never been paid much and was actually rather poor, driving an old beat up car and living in a small home without much savings.
If you look into it, Nimoy has a history of looking out for other people. A real nice person. Hopefully he was beamed right up, where it is we all go...
our freedom of speech expression apparently explicitly puts the BBQ in a synagogue. Unless you somehow got permission to do so, it's likely that you would be trespassing and - with the smoke from the BBQ - damaging property.
You could certainly hold your BBQ outside the synagogue, but then it would probably be just a BBQ. I'd imagine there's hot dog carts nearby synagogues in NYC, for example, without any particular issue.
And just to make the point CLEAR...
EVEN if you broke into the synagogue and even if you were trespassing and even if the smoke caused property damage...
THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT IS OK TO KILL PEOPLE OVER IT.
Ok, I know you get that, but I'm replying to you because... well, you're there...
What if France wanted to build an oceanic research station on the D-Day beaches where the Allies landed and died?
That strikes me as just fine.
Maybe it would be reasonable to ask them to add a small section as a memorial to those who fought and died to free France and perhaps those people could be honored by future research done in their name, since such a research station only exists built by the French because of it.
So sure, go ahead... dedicate the building to the allied soldiers, it would be a nice tribute.
What if Poland wanted to build a university on some of the land that is currently the preserved concentration camps?
What a great way to slap the face of the Nazi's by building our future on top of their evil. You could use it as a learning opportunity for all future students. You could put a memorial to the whole thing right in the center of the common grounds of the university. Millions of students over the years would have direct contact with it and be forced to see it on a regular basis, rather than once in a lifetime on a field trip during high school.
What about all the outrage when some company wants to mine in some nature preserve?
That's fine, all of Earth is one big nature preserve... Perhaps 25% of all the profit from the mining could be used to double the size of the preserve and establish a fund to return the land to better condition when they are done.
Why don't we build office towers in Arlington Nation Cemetery?
You could, but it would be pointless, there is perfectly good land half a mile over that works as well, and no one is asking to do that.
Yep, and it stores a WHOLE 39 MW... that is nice, but it is noise in the grand scheme of things.
That hill is also taller than anything within 500 miles of where I live.
This one is not on an artificial hill either, but only has a few meters difference between the upper and the lower reservoir: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
A "few meters"? Really? It is 128 meters higher... That isn't a "few meters", that is a lot!
That is 300 meters difference in height. As I said, there is a LOT of elevation changes in Germany. I'd have to travel a thousand miles to find a hill that high here.
So for 155 million euros, power is provided for 1600 homes...
That is a TERRIBLE investment...
There are about 5 MILLION homes in the Dallas, TX area...
This is all a nice idea, but you really are off by 3 orders of magnitude in what would be required to provide such power storage for a large number of people.
However wind is cheaper than coal... we are already closing coal plants, new built ones, because they can not compete with the price on the market.
In Texas, we're slowly shutting down coal and it is largely being replaced by natural gas. That being said, we're the largest state for wind power in the US, so we're doing a decent amount of that too.
Wind is much cheaper than solar, but of course it kills a lot of birds, so go figure. No free lunch.:(
If you don't remember, my flat is only 100sqm... but the size should have no effect on electric bills. As like you: I only have one kitchen, e.g.
The cost per sqm is only relevant for heating and in your case AC. The rooms that are not in use should not use energy, pretty simple.
Not quite that simple. I have 5 people who live in my home, that uses far more energy than a single person in a small flat would. Also, my ceilings are more than 20 feet tall in the main rooms, that makes my heating/cooling bills much higher than yours (unless you also have two story rooms). My family room, living room, dining room, front entrance, and hallway are all two stories. In addition, it is open concept, so the upstairs kids playroom is open to the house below as is the upstairs hallway, so keeping warm air down low and cold air up high is nearly impossible, forcing additional heating a cooling that a more closed house would not require.
Now you could argue that is bad design, but my point is simply that sqm alone or how many kitchens a home has doesn't indicate the power bill.
And for the standard of living, it is common knowledge:D no citations needed. But perhaps my percentage is wrong and the amount of americans living on the standard of an european is much lower.
Or you could be wrong and it is much higher.:)
Far more American's likely have fully AC homes than Europeans, for example. We have more food at lower prices, we have more cars, we have more gadgets...
I suppose it depends on what you consider to be a higher standard of living. If it is "who has the most stuff", then Americans win by a landslide.
Need a GPU in your phone? Fuck carrying one around. Fuckin powering the thing. I want to rent one, on an as-needed basis, sitting in a dark underground data center two states away where the weather is cooler and the power is cheaper.
Sound absurd today? Yep! Could arbitrary, on-demand, on-the-fly-provisioned remote computation be the next multi-billlion dollar idea? Could be if bandwidth was plentiful and cheap!
Isn't that what the game streaming services for the PS4 and XB1 are supposed to be doing?
Actually, it is rather smart... You could provide far more GPU power for less money, if everyone had enough bandwith... Same with CPU power...
Frankly, my internet connection is faster than my USB 2.0 memory sticks, which tend to read and write at about 10mb/s, while my internet is 18mb/s. When it comes to moving files around the house, my wired gigabit ethernet connection is FAR faster than copying stuff to USB and moving it by hand.
If I went with AT&T's new GigaFiber service, the same would be true there as well, assuming the speed is as stable as FIOS has been.
You left off the most important qualifier... today.
That dude's usage is the future if 100+ symmetric mbps becomes the norm. HIs particulars are not, but the general idea absolutely is. Ask any middle class mother in America -- she's got thousands of photos of her kids and would absolutely love to have thousands of video clips of her kids. Making sure that she never loses a single one of them would be a big deal. Making sure her extended family can see them at a moment's notice would be a big deal. And that's just one application. If you build it, they will come.
^ That too...
My Mom's upload speed is terrible, but she is on Carbonite and while it took a long time to upload the first time, it finally got uploaded (she had no backups before then).
She takes a lot of digital pictures, now they are also backed up to the cloud.
She also has a link to a folder on my wife's OneDrive that has our family pictures, she (and my wife's Mom) can go online and view them any time they want.
Backup has become cheap, $60 a year or so, $5 a month. A lot of people currently don't backup, but that will change as people lose their files and pictures and learn their lesson. I know it happened to me.:(
I am not sold on how it works with the current utility grid model.
It probably works if 10% of the customers install it. It probably doesn't if 100% install it.
That being said, with such a system, why do you need a grid tie?
The interesting part of this becomes... put enough solar on your roof and put a half dozen of these in your garage... and be free of the power company...
A year ago I would have thought such an idea was further off, 10-20 years... now it appears it could be done this year.
With realistic estimates for the technology, a best-case estimate for almost everything else, and no capital costs, you need a $0.15 price difference just to break even. If the price for these things goes down, that's bad news for you, the early adopter who paid the current price, because then more people will buy them, and that increases demand when the price is low and reduces demand when the price is high.
All true, but if no one is an early adopter, then it will never happen.:)
I'm probably one of the people who SHOULD be doing it, being in the upper brackets of income...
Maybe a better way would be to say the last 2% or 3% of driving cases not already covered. Even the Leaf covers probably 70% of driving cases (random percent guess). But it's easy to think of very common use cases that it would not reasonably cover that are not in that last few percent. The current Tesla models do.
Driving cross country in a Tesla is doable *now* depending on your requirements (i.e. minimum stops and can't be stopped more than 10 minutes). I guess those use cases are things like you have to drive to a wedding 10 hours away and overslept. You can make it, but....
Actually, from a "technical" point of view, I agree with you. Most of the driving cases are already covered by EVs. Even those like the Leaf.
My point is that people by and large don't make car purchasing decisions based on the technical data, they buy emotionally.
You need EVs that are WAY beyond what most people "need" before they'll "want" them.
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That being said, I just noticed that Tesla a few weeks ago upgraded their base car from a 60kwh to a 70kwh and made some other changes, it is now four wheel drive for example.
Looking at the base model, which is no longer quite so bare... the purchase price and lease cost is no longer as crazy as it once was.
I don't want a "car", so it really isn't of interest to me... but if it were in the shape of a SUV, I might be more interested. Yes, I saw the Model X, it is probably too small for me.
As I sit here at my computer looking at my Yukon XL parked out front, it seems to me that if you remove the big 6.2L V8 engine, the transmission, the differental, and all the other parts needed to make a gas car work, you could put the motors from the P85 version of the Tesla on there and get about the same, if not better performance. The battery wouldn't be good for as much range, maybe down to 150-170 miles, but that would be enough most of the time.
How much would it cost? How much of the price of my truck is the engine and gas parts and how much is the sheet metal, interior, etc? I honestly don't know.
I paid $73,000 for my truck last year, it is fully loaded with everything you could want. Would I pay "more" to get an EV version? Meh, I don't want to, but if we had supercharger stations and places to plug in everywhere, I might consider it.
The only real place to charge would be at home. However 150 miles of range would be plenty for driving around town. I-20 and I-30 don't have superchargers, so frankly it doesn't work here yet, but I imagine they'll get them at some point.
Frankly, I don't understand why gas stations don't install them, I would pay for power, I don't expect it for free. And a 15-20 min recharge time gives me a reason to go inside and eat something.
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So to sum it up, if the cost was similar, if the range was 150+ miles, and if you could put the Tesla EV tech into my Yukon, I might become interested...
That is a lot of "ifs", to be sure. But it is quite possible that in 20 years, it will be a no-brainer.
While you are right that 10/10 is not enough for some use cases, it is sufficient for the great majority of people and a good baseline. Netflix at the highest bit-rate is only about 6 megabit. 10Mb would allow a comfortable amount of headroom.
Today, for right now, at the 720p or crappy 1080p they are streaming...
What about 4k? Give it 5 years, that'll be more common..
We have 3 large TVs in the house, it is not uncommon that the adults are watching something on one and the kids on another. Sometimes two of the kids are on one TV and the third kid is on the iPad watching something.
So 3 HD streams.
Then we have about.... 20 some odd devices that like to auto-update... Say the PC or PS4 or whatever wants to download something while we're watching TV?
25 meg would do it, barely, with no headroom, but 10? Not even close.
I think there are a lot of homes today that would go to streaming, if they had 25 meg, but at 3, 6, or 10 meg? It isn't enough for multiple streams.
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Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're saying, and yes universal 10/10 next year is probably better than universal 25/25 in 5 years. But I'd suggest both are crap.
We rolled out national telephone lines a very long time ago and provided for universal service.
We now have good quality fiber, there is no reason to do any of this slow stuff, be prepared for the entire next century and roll out gigabit to everyone in the country.
Lack of access to technology and the Internet will only hurt America going forward.
Put a battery pack on your home, like one of these. Get an inverter which feeds excess to the battery and NEVER exports to the grid. The power company loses their only technical reason to gripe, because you are no longer doing Net Metering. At that point, it's all about the Benjamins.
Indeed, if you get to the point where your home is truly Net Zero, long-term, you can go completely off-grid. At which point they no longer have a say in the matter.
Except, of course, my local co-op provides both my power and my natural gas, so I can't ditch them even if I wanted to.
Actually, I don't know if they would sell me JUST natural gas, I've never looked into it. Since they are a co-op, they might, I really don't know.
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As a side note, I've always viewed natural gas as superior to electricity due to the lower cost. My natural gas dryer, cooktop, HVAC, etc. use less... well, money, than electric versions would.
But they burn fossil fuel, which won't last forever.
So the question becomes, at what point do we switch from gas to electric? I'll miss my "instant on" cooktop.:(
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I have been a loyal user of K-Cups for years now...
I will never buy a DRM coffee machine...
The whole idea is just stupid. I get that they are trying to make money from every cup sold, just like the razor model, but frankly that is a boardroom fantasy...
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The same issue with music happened... once Amazon started selling DRM free music, I started buying, now having a collection of hundreds of "CDs" all downloaded to all my devices.
I don't pirate any of them, nor do I share them outside my family. Sell me a product I control at a reasonable price and I'll pay you money.
Simple.
One of our HTPCs is rocking an Athlon64 with an All-in-Wonder 9800 AGP card. One of the last ones to support component video out. Plugged into a 27" CRT. Works great for Plex Web client (via Google Chrome).
Nothing wrong with any of that... other than perhaps the 27" CRT. :) How you can stand to look at that anymore is beyond me, but to each their own...
And that computer is fine for SDTV, but if you were running HDTV it probably would have issues.
No, it is not.
Yes it is, and at the end of the day, you don't know that much about investments and the cost of capital.
But that's ok, you won't listen and your mind is made up, so carry on with your silly thinking. :)
If I was the manager of that Pizza Hut, I'd give her a month of free pizza... Why? Because that woman went through hell and it would be a very small token of humanity to remind her that good people exist.
Yes, it's like all those career lawyers in the law or career doctors in medicine. What do they know about Real Life TM?
If you actually believe that, then that is sad...
Part of the reason America exists is to break away from being ruled by people out of touch with average citizens. The idea was to have citizen leaders who would leave their private lives, go serve the country for a few years, then return home...
Instead you now have people who have never actually lived in the private sector, who know nothing about building a business, paying bills, and living within your means...
These people have spent their entire adult lives spending "other people's money", they do not know what a $10/hr job is really like, what it is like to hire and train employees is like, etc.
In fairness, that really isn't the fault of those title loan places...
Those people are there because they have made a whole series of really bad choices prior to that last bad one...
I have a family member who does that, and no matter how much money you give him, he ends up broke. He'll always be broke, and he has a college education. He simply can't hold on to money.
My family stopped giving him money a long time ago (he is about 50 now), and he currently rents a single room from someone and works a $12/hr job and drives a 10 year old beater.
You can't fix it, you really can't...
And somebody might. I saw that 4 people were killed in a random shooting in Wisconsin. I know of many cases of abortion-related violence. There's plenty of professed Christians who talk trash.
And they are all wrong as well...
Freedom of speech is for both the stuff you like, and the stuff you don't...
Heck, even the riots in Baltimore show that to be false.
While the people there do have honest concerns about police being racist, the reality is that many of them are just "black vs. white" rather than addressing the issue itself.
And violent protests aren't helping. MLK made great progress for blacks without using violence, cudos to him.
The economy already is fixed. That's the problem.
Millions of Americans working for less than $10/hr and millions more Americans unemployed would tend to disagree with that.
The economy is fine for the upper 25%, it sucks for the bottom 50%.
I'm in the 3%, I'm doing great.. but I can see from my lofty perch that it sucks for a whole lot of people...
I took my kids for ice cream to ColdStone yesterday, we ate outside at the park that is next to the store, it is lovely... and I commented to my kids that if they don't learn useful skills, that job is what'll they'll end up doing... We make in about two weeks what the kid in there makes all year... and that kid's job will be replaced in our lifetimes by a robot, I have no doubt...
It is a problem that no one wants to talk about solutions that would actually work... (just taking my money and giving it to the kid isn't a solution, do it too much and I'll leave)
She was also a U.S. Senator for New York for eight years (i.e. Elected twice). But of course, that was also a job that she only got for being Bill Clinton's wife and not because she holds a law degree from Yale University, not because she was a professor of Law at the University of Arkansas, not because she was she was on the congressional legal advisory staff in the Watergate impeachment process, and not because she played an important role in organizing the Carter presidential campaign. Facts.
That may all be true, but it also isn't the reason she got elected to the Senate... She was the first Lady and Bill's wife, that is why...
Keep in mind that she has been in government for most of her life now, electing her is exactly the problem, career politicians.
The fact that Carly has no elected experience actually makes it an interesting idea, even if I wouldn't personally vote for her. She really has no chance, I hope she knows that.
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Note: I don't want Jeb Bush either, that is more of the same as well. I'd rather have someone from outside of government.
Like or hate Hilary, she has way more government experience (for better or worse) in her little pinky than Carly Fiorina.
I agree with you, which is why voting for Hilary is just voting for more of the same government we've had for years.
Is that what you want?
Carly "The Ego" Fiorina.
Her ego covers a land mass the size of Maine.
You may be right, but how is that any different from Hillary?
Frankly, we've had a Clinton in Washington for more than 20 years now, can Carly do any worse?
One of the problems is that we keep electing the same people over and over. Jeb Bush is just more of the same as George, Hillary is just more of the same, and so on...
I thought it was pretty damned nice of Nimoy to bring her back for that cameo.
Nimoy was pretty dammed nice all around...
For Star Trek 6, he pushed the studio to give DeForest a big raise to $1 millon as thanks for all that he had done. DeForest had never been paid much and was actually rather poor, driving an old beat up car and living in a small home without much savings.
If you look into it, Nimoy has a history of looking out for other people. A real nice person. Hopefully he was beamed right up, where it is we all go...
our freedom of speech expression apparently explicitly puts the BBQ in a synagogue. Unless you somehow got permission to do so, it's likely that you would be trespassing and - with the smoke from the BBQ - damaging property.
You could certainly hold your BBQ outside the synagogue, but then it would probably be just a BBQ. I'd imagine there's hot dog carts nearby synagogues in NYC, for example, without any particular issue.
And just to make the point CLEAR...
EVEN if you broke into the synagogue and even if you were trespassing and even if the smoke caused property damage...
THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT IS OK TO KILL PEOPLE OVER IT.
Ok, I know you get that, but I'm replying to you because... well, you're there...
What if France wanted to build an oceanic research station on the D-Day beaches where the Allies landed and died?
That strikes me as just fine.
Maybe it would be reasonable to ask them to add a small section as a memorial to those who fought and died to free France and perhaps those people could be honored by future research done in their name, since such a research station only exists built by the French because of it.
So sure, go ahead... dedicate the building to the allied soldiers, it would be a nice tribute.
What if Poland wanted to build a university on some of the land that is currently the preserved concentration camps?
What a great way to slap the face of the Nazi's by building our future on top of their evil. You could use it as a learning opportunity for all future students. You could put a memorial to the whole thing right in the center of the common grounds of the university. Millions of students over the years would have direct contact with it and be forced to see it on a regular basis, rather than once in a lifetime on a field trip during high school.
What about all the outrage when some company wants to mine in some nature preserve?
That's fine, all of Earth is one big nature preserve... Perhaps 25% of all the profit from the mining could be used to double the size of the preserve and establish a fund to return the land to better condition when they are done.
Why don't we build office towers in Arlington Nation Cemetery?
You could, but it would be pointless, there is perfectly good land half a mile over that works as well, and no one is asking to do that.
This one is build on the tip of a natural hill: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... around 1919 already
Yep, and it stores a WHOLE 39 MW... that is nice, but it is noise in the grand scheme of things.
That hill is also taller than anything within 500 miles of where I live.
This one is not on an artificial hill either, but only has a few meters difference between the upper and the lower reservoir: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
A "few meters"? Really? It is 128 meters higher... That isn't a "few meters", that is a lot!
This one is close to what I meant: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
That is 300 meters difference in height. As I said, there is a LOT of elevation changes in Germany. I'd have to travel a thousand miles to find a hill that high here.
This one is on an artificial hill: http://www.swr.de/kaffee-oder-... easy to see on the pictures
So for 155 million euros, power is provided for 1600 homes...
That is a TERRIBLE investment...
There are about 5 MILLION homes in the Dallas, TX area...
This is all a nice idea, but you really are off by 3 orders of magnitude in what would be required to provide such power storage for a large number of people.
However wind is cheaper than coal ... we are already closing coal plants, new built ones, because they can not compete with the price on the market.
In Texas, we're slowly shutting down coal and it is largely being replaced by natural gas. That being said, we're the largest state for wind power in the US, so we're doing a decent amount of that too.
Wind is much cheaper than solar, but of course it kills a lot of birds, so go figure. No free lunch. :(
If you don't remember, my flat is only 100sqm ... but the size should have no effect on electric bills. As like you: I only have one kitchen, e.g.
The cost per sqm is only relevant for heating and in your case AC. The rooms that are not in use should not use energy, pretty simple.
Not quite that simple. I have 5 people who live in my home, that uses far more energy than a single person in a small flat would. Also, my ceilings are more than 20 feet tall in the main rooms, that makes my heating/cooling bills much higher than yours (unless you also have two story rooms). My family room, living room, dining room, front entrance, and hallway are all two stories. In addition, it is open concept, so the upstairs kids playroom is open to the house below as is the upstairs hallway, so keeping warm air down low and cold air up high is nearly impossible, forcing additional heating a cooling that a more closed house would not require.
Now you could argue that is bad design, but my point is simply that sqm alone or how many kitchens a home has doesn't indicate the power bill.
And for the standard of living, it is common knowledge :D no citations needed. But perhaps my percentage is wrong and the amount of americans living on the standard of an european is much lower.
Or you could be wrong and it is much higher. :)
Far more American's likely have fully AC homes than Europeans, for example. We have more food at lower prices, we have more cars, we have more gadgets...
I suppose it depends on what you consider to be a higher standard of living. If it is "who has the most stuff", then Americans win by a landslide.
No, I don't and the proof of that is:
Yes, you do... your reading comprehension is terrible.
Go back and reread what I wrote, you really, really misunderstood like all of it...
Need a GPU in your phone? Fuck carrying one around. Fuckin powering the thing. I want to rent one, on an as-needed basis, sitting in a dark underground data center two states away where the weather is cooler and the power is cheaper.
Sound absurd today? Yep! Could arbitrary, on-demand, on-the-fly-provisioned remote computation be the next multi-billlion dollar idea? Could be if bandwidth was plentiful and cheap!
Isn't that what the game streaming services for the PS4 and XB1 are supposed to be doing?
Actually, it is rather smart... You could provide far more GPU power for less money, if everyone had enough bandwith... Same with CPU power...
Frankly, my internet connection is faster than my USB 2.0 memory sticks, which tend to read and write at about 10mb/s, while my internet is 18mb/s. When it comes to moving files around the house, my wired gigabit ethernet connection is FAR faster than copying stuff to USB and moving it by hand.
If I went with AT&T's new GigaFiber service, the same would be true there as well, assuming the speed is as stable as FIOS has been.
You left off the most important qualifier ... today.
That dude's usage is the future if 100+ symmetric mbps becomes the norm. HIs particulars are not, but the general idea absolutely is. Ask any middle class mother in America -- she's got thousands of photos of her kids and would absolutely love to have thousands of video clips of her kids. Making sure that she never loses a single one of them would be a big deal. Making sure her extended family can see them at a moment's notice would be a big deal. And that's just one application. If you build it, they will come.
^ That too...
My Mom's upload speed is terrible, but she is on Carbonite and while it took a long time to upload the first time, it finally got uploaded (she had no backups before then).
She takes a lot of digital pictures, now they are also backed up to the cloud.
She also has a link to a folder on my wife's OneDrive that has our family pictures, she (and my wife's Mom) can go online and view them any time they want.
Backup has become cheap, $60 a year or so, $5 a month. A lot of people currently don't backup, but that will change as people lose their files and pictures and learn their lesson. I know it happened to me. :(
I am not sold on how it works with the current utility grid model.
It probably works if 10% of the customers install it. It probably doesn't if 100% install it.
That being said, with such a system, why do you need a grid tie?
The interesting part of this becomes... put enough solar on your roof and put a half dozen of these in your garage... and be free of the power company...
A year ago I would have thought such an idea was further off, 10-20 years... now it appears it could be done this year.
I'll admit, I'm impressed...
With realistic estimates for the technology, a best-case estimate for almost everything else, and no capital costs, you need a $0.15 price difference just to break even. If the price for these things goes down, that's bad news for you, the early adopter who paid the current price, because then more people will buy them, and that increases demand when the price is low and reduces demand when the price is high.
All true, but if no one is an early adopter, then it will never happen. :)
I'm probably one of the people who SHOULD be doing it, being in the upper brackets of income...
Maybe a better way would be to say the last 2% or 3% of driving cases not already covered. Even the Leaf covers probably 70% of driving cases (random percent guess). But it's easy to think of very common use cases that it would not reasonably cover that are not in that last few percent. The current Tesla models do.
Driving cross country in a Tesla is doable *now* depending on your requirements (i.e. minimum stops and can't be stopped more than 10 minutes). I guess those use cases are things like you have to drive to a wedding 10 hours away and overslept. You can make it, but ....
Actually, from a "technical" point of view, I agree with you. Most of the driving cases are already covered by EVs. Even those like the Leaf.
My point is that people by and large don't make car purchasing decisions based on the technical data, they buy emotionally.
You need EVs that are WAY beyond what most people "need" before they'll "want" them.
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That being said, I just noticed that Tesla a few weeks ago upgraded their base car from a 60kwh to a 70kwh and made some other changes, it is now four wheel drive for example.
Looking at the base model, which is no longer quite so bare... the purchase price and lease cost is no longer as crazy as it once was.
I don't want a "car", so it really isn't of interest to me... but if it were in the shape of a SUV, I might be more interested. Yes, I saw the Model X, it is probably too small for me.
As I sit here at my computer looking at my Yukon XL parked out front, it seems to me that if you remove the big 6.2L V8 engine, the transmission, the differental, and all the other parts needed to make a gas car work, you could put the motors from the P85 version of the Tesla on there and get about the same, if not better performance. The battery wouldn't be good for as much range, maybe down to 150-170 miles, but that would be enough most of the time.
How much would it cost? How much of the price of my truck is the engine and gas parts and how much is the sheet metal, interior, etc? I honestly don't know.
I paid $73,000 for my truck last year, it is fully loaded with everything you could want. Would I pay "more" to get an EV version? Meh, I don't want to, but if we had supercharger stations and places to plug in everywhere, I might consider it.
If you look at Dallas:
http://www.teslamotors.com/fin...
The only real place to charge would be at home. However 150 miles of range would be plenty for driving around town. I-20 and I-30 don't have superchargers, so frankly it doesn't work here yet, but I imagine they'll get them at some point.
Frankly, I don't understand why gas stations don't install them, I would pay for power, I don't expect it for free. And a 15-20 min recharge time gives me a reason to go inside and eat something.
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So to sum it up, if the cost was similar, if the range was 150+ miles, and if you could put the Tesla EV tech into my Yukon, I might become interested...
That is a lot of "ifs", to be sure. But it is quite possible that in 20 years, it will be a no-brainer.
Well that is California, what do you expect? :)
http://www.dovetailsolar.com/S...
Average of $3.77 per watt for residential systems, as low as $2.50 for large commercial installations.
California is paying stupid prices.
http://www.dovetailsolar.com/g...
While you are right that 10/10 is not enough for some use cases, it is sufficient for the great majority of people and a good baseline. Netflix at the highest bit-rate is only about 6 megabit. 10Mb would allow a comfortable amount of headroom.
Today, for right now, at the 720p or crappy 1080p they are streaming...
What about 4k? Give it 5 years, that'll be more common..
We have 3 large TVs in the house, it is not uncommon that the adults are watching something on one and the kids on another. Sometimes two of the kids are on one TV and the third kid is on the iPad watching something.
So 3 HD streams.
Then we have about.... 20 some odd devices that like to auto-update... Say the PC or PS4 or whatever wants to download something while we're watching TV?
25 meg would do it, barely, with no headroom, but 10? Not even close.
I think there are a lot of homes today that would go to streaming, if they had 25 meg, but at 3, 6, or 10 meg? It isn't enough for multiple streams.
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Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're saying, and yes universal 10/10 next year is probably better than universal 25/25 in 5 years. But I'd suggest both are crap.
We rolled out national telephone lines a very long time ago and provided for universal service.
We now have good quality fiber, there is no reason to do any of this slow stuff, be prepared for the entire next century and roll out gigabit to everyone in the country.
Lack of access to technology and the Internet will only hurt America going forward.
Put a battery pack on your home, like one of these. Get an inverter which feeds excess to the battery and NEVER exports to the grid. The power company loses their only technical reason to gripe, because you are no longer doing Net Metering. At that point, it's all about the Benjamins.
Indeed, if you get to the point where your home is truly Net Zero, long-term, you can go completely off-grid. At which point they no longer have a say in the matter.
Except, of course, my local co-op provides both my power and my natural gas, so I can't ditch them even if I wanted to.
Actually, I don't know if they would sell me JUST natural gas, I've never looked into it. Since they are a co-op, they might, I really don't know.
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As a side note, I've always viewed natural gas as superior to electricity due to the lower cost. My natural gas dryer, cooktop, HVAC, etc. use less... well, money, than electric versions would.
But they burn fossil fuel, which won't last forever.
So the question becomes, at what point do we switch from gas to electric? I'll miss my "instant on" cooktop. :(