I half agree with you. Half. None of our grandchildren are ever going to fly at 600 miles per hour. There isn't enough energy, and they won't be able to afford to use it.
I disagree. If they get a serious energy crunch, they'll adjust. I don't think high speed flight is going away, it might get a tad rarer for the population, but it's not going away.
Big, mostly full planes going 600 odd mph for a couple thousand miles or more are actually very fuel efficient - especially when you're looking at overseas travel and saving weeks on a cruise liner.
They're also experimenting with bio-jet fuel, they're testing it right now for B-52s.
For the land, high speed rail, a good mesh of it with 'micro-locomotives' so you're hauling the equivalent of a plane, not 10 planes, would help. I'd want at least 120 mph, so it can compete with planes. Even then, I'm not sure about the fuel efficiency. Trains can be surprisingly inefficient, mostly due to low utilization.
Good point, I'd also wonder how much work would be needed to take care of abnormal events with an electric vehicle, e.g. a collision disturbing the integrity of the battery and wiring. This wuld be less of a problem with compressed air.
It'd be truer to say that it depends. Quite a few people have died in steam explosions, thought not as many lately.
Compromise a tank of gasoline and the reaction is limited by the availability of oxygen.
Compromise a lead acid battery and you have an acid/burning problem. The hazards are different for a LiIon, but on the same order.
Compromise a canister of air, especially one carrying a useful amount of air for powering a car, and you have a dangerous situation.
While the crust percentages does make a difference, there's also factors like ease of mining, demand, etc...
Iron/Copper/Aluminum are somewhat interchangable; depending on the application.
Looking it up, Uranium averages 2.7 mg/kg in the crust. Iron is 5.63x10^4. Gold is 4.0x10^-3. Copper is actually lower than Uranium, at only 6.0x10^-1.
So Uranium is about five times more prevalent than copper.
On the market, copper is $6.80/kg. Uranium is around $40, with far less economy of scale. Raise the price to $130(or more), and there's a lot more reserves out there.
if it were possible to mine more economically given current market prices do you think the companies investing billions every year in exploration and geographical/geochemical surveys every year would pass up that opportunity?
The market is too small, currently. The number of reactors aren't exactly exploding, the 40kton/year is only a $1.6B/year market.
The thing to remember is that, for nuclear reactors, fuel cost is mostly considered 'insignificant'. You can easily bust $100/kg and still increase the final cost per kwh by less than half a cent.
I'm not saying that the cost per kg wouldn't go up a bit; I'm saying that there shouldn't really be any problems meeting the demand. If the nuclear plants have to pay twice as much per kg, they'll shrug and do it.
No, but you might be. I was drawing some parallels between Copper/Iron mining to show the sheer difference in scale. IE there are copper/iron mines that produce more metal in one year than the amount of Uranium used.
It's not like Uranium mining can't be scaled up, and given it's current scale ramping up shouldn't be too difficult. Depending on method, there's a lot of commonality of equipment. Heck, there's even mines that closed because the price of the metal was too low to continue operation - they shouldn't be too difficult to reopen.
Gold mining, checking, is only around 2,500 tons/year. Silver was 23kton. Helps explain why it's expensive.
Personally, I'd go for a 'type accreditation' - where you have a more or less cookie-cutter system that meets requirements, then not allow construction shut downs on the basis of vaguely worded letters sent by people completely ignorant of the issue.
Why hasn't anybody implemented such a brilliant idea?
While the reactor at the center of the solar system was constructed cheaply enough, indeed, it's fully depreciated at this point, the receivers to convert it to electricity are rather expensive, such that it's actually cheaper to generate electricity via other means.
It seems to boil down to "we're not getting much uranium out of the ground right now while prices are low and we have massive stockpiles keeping prices low.... hence somehow people won't start mining more as the price of uranium goes up again....."
My concern would be that the industry wouldn't be able to scale up quickly enough as the stockpile runs out. After all, oil wells generally take well over a year from initial surveys to full production.
On the other hand, 40k tons right now, 25k additional tons necessary. Or a bit over 50% more. Thing is, a random search showed that a single Chile copper mine produced 165k tonnes in a year... Konkola in Zambia has a capacity of 200k tonnes of copper a year. China's mining millions of tons of iron ore a year.
It might simply be the addition of another shift at a few of the mines to increase production the necessary amount. It just goes to show how tiny uranium mining really is.
The US stockpiles a significant quantity of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. However, it is nowhere near a trillion barrels (a trillion barrels is something like 120 years of US oil consumption).
I know that, that's why I said trillions. If we had had a trillion barrels in our 'oil reserve' at the end of the cold war, we wouldn't have been drilling like we have been, and we'd really be in trouble when it ran out - artificially low prices would encourage oil consumption and discourage exploration.
The same thing happened with Uranium. We had a glut of production for weapons use, which is now being released back into the system, keeping prices artificially low. Regardless, the biggest cost of a nuclear power plant isn't the fuel, so it isn't as big of a deal as oil would be.
So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
To be even more specific, there are a number of reactor designs that don't require enrichment at all for usage in a nuclear power plant. There are efficiency gains to be had using higher enriched stuff, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Right now the Civilian uranium mining and enrichment industry is supressed due to the materials flowing out of our former stockpiles. It'd be like if during the cold war we built up trillions and trillions of barrels of oil as an 'emergency war stockpile' and now are releasing it - we wouldn't be bothering much with drilling for oil at the moment.
From my readings, fuel cost is pathetically cheap and even if we have to mine the stuff it won't raise the cost of electricity by a penny per kwh.
To be fair, the 3times price is compared against a 4 pack of normal light bulbs which are not sold in single packaging here.
Ah, okay. I was automatically applying a/4 to the price of a 4 pack. That modifies the multiplier to x12, which is 'close' to my x10. Especially when you consider how across the board a 4 pack of incandescent bulbs varies.
For CR website, looking at it gives a very bad first impression, as they look like many scam site, not offering much on the first look beside ways to hand out your credit card. I had to look it up on google to make sure it was the real site and not just a phishing page.
Huh, I don't have that impression, then again, I was reading CR before it had a website. Looking at the front page right now, it doesn't look like a scam site to me, though they do make it rather obvious that they want you to sign up. Remember - it's their sole revenue source other than magazine subscriptions. Of course, if you log in with a paid account(which I have), those go away.
But the major driver for bringing in businesses is overall economic health in the community. I'd argue that well run community likely has better roads because they know how to run the community... Whereas, I don't believe that good roads will lead to a well run community.
Personally, I'm mostly a libertarian, but I consider a mixture of gas taxes and property taxes reasonable for the road system.
A major thouroughfare or highway can easily be paid for via gas taxes, but the intra-community roads not so much. You reach a point where weathering is a higher destructive force than wear from vehicles. In such a case, since roads are still useful even if you don't have a vehicle, property taxes to pay for the road system that enables the fire, police to get to your house is reasonable.
Of course, I'm also interested in funding alternatives that I think have a chance of working - like personal rapid transit. In order to compete with vehicles, you have to beat them on as many fronts as possible - Cost, speed, and convenience. If you can get it so that your system is faster than cars(due to not having to stop all the time or deal with rush hour traffic), more convenient(drop you off IN the mall, not in a parking lot with a hundred meter walk), and cheaper(regenerating electric, not gasoline), you're golden.
Back on neighborhoods - You might be surprised at what a good road layout can do to help a community. Modern 'funnel' systems actually tend to marginalize neighborhood interaction because it emphasizes driving. You actually need more interconnects, not less.
OK, I was referring to the ICE plus electric kind. They do make an alternative, the hydraulic hybrid boost (and/or complete hydraulic drive), that is already out there in some city delivery trucks and buses.
I was being fairly generic. EVs for short range, hybrids for mid to long range. I know about the hydraulic boost, they're best for inner city delivery services.
As for the conversions - such is easily possible for those that build their own EV, even using a kit, but a tad much for somebody using a commercial EV from the start. The possibility has to be built into the vehicle to avoid extensive modification of the charging system to include charging while operating. Somebody who can modify an IC vehicle into a EV isn't going to have trouble slapping a generator trailer together.
The rest of your post? Did you think I was disagreeing with you? I agree, a trailer for extending the range of an EV for a long trip is a very good idea, as is making the trailer a bit bigger so that it can hold some extra cargo along with the generator and fuel. I fully agree that an EV with a 50 mile range would be able to handle 95% of most people's trips while being far less expensive, and you either rent the generator trailer or buy it and use it as a standby generator at home as a bonus.
The only thing I would do different with those trailers is make them a scosh bigger with some additional cargo room for that long trip, for your luggage and camping gear or whatever.
I've seen people suggest putting the modular engine into the trunk before; my response has been 'When do you need trunk space the most? Tooling around town, or going on a long multiple day trip?'. I generally get an 'oh, yeah...' reaction.
I very much agree with that. It shouldn't be too hard to make the trailer a little longer or taller and give the people the ability to double their storage for long trips.
The ability to use the generator for a home standby system is also a bonus that would likely be the tipping factor for a lot of people like me. I like multiple uses for big ticket items.
I think on board hybrids are a dead end, that's just too much weight and complexity having to haul around two different styles of drivetrains all the time on the same axles. All electric + the modular "makes it a hybrid" genny trailer is the way to go.
I disagree some; hybrids still have a place on the road where charging an EV would be too expensive, too inconvenient, too impractical, etc... My scenario would be those that drive a lot - hybrid semis, cop cars, ambulances, UPS trucks, etc would be the ones with hybrids. To put it another way, the hybrid is for the poor guy who needs to drive 80 miles a day and can't charge at work. Or for that delivery vehicle that you can't economically get to be 100% battery powered.
wow, our efficiency seems to be regressing then. Bring back the 80's tech?
The problems with increasing efficiency has been that engines are being required to be tuned/built to reduce pollution, not gas mileage; safety systems and construction that increase weight, and increased consumer requirements for acceleration and top speed.
I wouldn't necessarily be too happy with an '80s era vehicle.
I've figured it out before, but generally speaking, if you need a vehicle that can perform duty X once or twice a month, it's still worth trading up to the larger vehicle to be able to do that than trying to rent or otherwise mess around.
Then, since you have the larger vehicle, generally speaking due to insurance, registration, cost of capital and such, it's cheaper to have one vehicle that can do everything than to try to get by with two vehicles.
Unless your super-duper vehicle is something like a crew cab monster-truck that gets 6 mpg, your commuter is a used geo metro that you drive 5 days a week 60 miles a day and carry only liability on.
Too bad most upcoming EVs don't have trailer hitches.
You should be able to retrofit a hitch on one to haul that small of a trailer fairly easily. The bigger problem would be the electrical connections and whether the car will freak out at being charged while driving.
Not an issue to a guy who built the EV, the trailer, and everything else, but for the average type driver?
Some EVs are even worse than Tesla. The Nissan Leaf's 100 miles range is on the LA-4 city cycle, which is even gentler than the FTP-75 cycle that our cars' city mpg rating is based on. And the Mitsubishi MiEV's 100 mile range is based on the Japanese 10-15 cycle, which is also exceedingly gentle.
I once read on Tesla's site that they actually argued with the EPA to*lower* the roadster's rated range because 'it wasn't realistic'.
Considering it's an electric sports car, I think they have a point - who, other than those out to prove a point, is going to drive the thing for maximum mileage, not performance?
That is a great idea! I might start doing that too. If many people do that, in a couple of years we will start to have some sweet real-world longevity data.
Got the idea here, actually. Of course, my first love for the bulbs was that I didn't have to replace the suckers(anywhere near as often). With traditional incandescents I was having to replace a bulb every week. It got annoying.
It would also be good to establish a brightness measure at the beginning and once a year thereafter, to see how much they have dimmed.
I haven't noticed any fading, but you'd really need a light measure - a webcam will automatically adjust for brightness like our eyes do. Still, I'll fully admit that my standard is 'still bright enough to see what I want to see'.
I fully understand your reluctance to want to change lights frequently on a boat. Especially the idea of possibly needing to do so in a storm. That's an ideal usage for the more expensive but more durable bulb. It's like street lights - it makes more sense to spend the money for a quality bulb that'll last longer because it costs more to get the crew and equipment out there to replace it as the bulb itself costs.
Anything funded by the federal government including private work should be considered the property of the people and thus released into the public domain.
I'll generally agree with you, but there is privately developed software in use by the government, and the military in particular that isn't going to be released on the basis that releasing it would help our enemies more than it'd help citizens of the United States. Stuff like nuclear explosion simulation programs, ballistic missile targeting/flight programs, etc...
Now, things like the NSA linux build is available.
There's other software available, if you know where to look, but most of it isn't that useful to the average person.
Then again, such private work isn't exactly going to be 'free use' for the contractor either - it's developed for the government, with all rights handed over to the government.
I hate to say it, but at 'only' 3x the cost, you (probably)weren't buying good bulbs, I tend to pay 10x the cost of incandescent for my bulbs.
For example, I have a pair of 60W equivalent bulbs that have lasted in my garage for over a year - in my garage door opener, in North Dakota. AKA that garage gets well below zero. They don't light up as much in the winter - but I don't exactly need much light, just enough to get to my truck/door in the darkness.
Then, about consumer reports, they are a company built for profit (well, they charge to check their reports!) and it's a bit hard to put all our trusts in those kind of things.
Think about it a moment. Even a non-profit needs income to pay salary for it's staff, rent offices, publish a paper, run a website. Which would you trust more:
1. A company that gets it's revenues by selling advertising, often for the very products it reviews? 2. A company that requests samples from the manufacturers? 3. A company that gets it's money by selling the review results, who doesn't accept advertising, sponsorship or anything from the companies whose products it reviews, which goes out on the retail market and BUYS random samples from the stores?
Personally, I think #3 is far more reliable. Heck, for #1 just look at gaming/sports magazines; note how glowing all the reviews are for products who's producers advertise in that magazine. #2 can sometimes work, but also gives the producer the ability to send you a altered sample. A laptop that's been extensively tested before it's sent to the reviewer. A car that has a team do a 'special tuneup', altering the engine and tightening up bodywork before it goes to the review team. That sort of stuff.
#3, well, they get they money from the consumer. If the consumer buys something CR recommends, they're likely to be pissed off at CR and drop their subscription. It's the consumer that needs to be pleased, and that they do by providing unbiased, accurate reports.
Finally, there's a reason I said 'reasonably unbiased'. It's very, very difficult for any source to be completely unbiased. I think that CR does better than most. So yeah, I'm kinda pleased that CR charges for their reviews. I trust them a heck of a lot more than many other review sites.
Not at first, no... give it a minute or two and yes. but by then you are accustomed to the brightness and less sensitive to the difference.
Heh, for that 100W bathroom light, I considered that a 'feature', not a detriment. Especially for those midnight visits.
It was also the only lightbulb with a noticable warmup period, but then, I'm probably pretty tolerant of variable light levels. My pupils simply adjust to compensate.
Of course, being aware of lighting conditions and setting them up to be efficient helps. I've seen people attempt to pour more light into a situation where it's the bad placement of light causing you to see too much light from areas other than where you're looking at causing even more problems. You want to illuminate what you're looking at - so your eyes don't simply adapt to the higher light levels and make what you're looking at seem even dimmer.
Consider the difference between viewing ranges for a candle and a 1M candle light. You certainly can't see a million times as much - your eyes adjust to keep perceived levels within tolerances.
There's an obvious reason why it won't work for classified stuff; if a disk on the classified network fails it doesn't go back for warranty repair, it gets smashed with a sledge hammer and then melted with thermite and the failure rate is taken into consideration when deciding to buy from that manufacturer again.
Failure rate is considered for ALL equipment, especially if it's too bad, but believe it or not the feds get warranty replacements for failed drives on classified systems.
As an absolutely huge business purchasing LOTS of systems, they can bargain a bit on things like returning failed hard drives to the sellers. Consider, the reason for returning the failed drive is mostly to prevent fraud - it's not like they're going to recondition the HD and send it out again. Thus, when in a partnership with somebody like the Feds, they report a failed X, Dell(or whoever) sends them a replacement X, and if due to the sensative nature of their information they don't want to give back the failed device because it might still contain information, it's not like they can't simply track the failure rates to see that it's within tolerances with the rest of the product line.
Even with personal drives, I've heard of people getting authorization to destroy them before return. Just, like any 'contract', make sure you get the authorization in writing/recording beforehand.
So how many billions of dollars will U.S. and EU citizens waste trying to get their wiring up to spec?
Another question would be how many billions of dollars of equipment replacement/repair will be saved? Incandescent bulbs are pretty tough; but what about the electronics in your computer, TV, microwave, refridgerator, etc?
I installed a water softener because by my calculations it'll save me money by increasing the lifespans of my water heater, dish and clothes washers. Not to mention the time and cleaning agents saved trying to clean up the deposits around my faucets.
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I half agree with you. Half. None of our grandchildren are ever going to fly at 600 miles per hour. There isn't enough energy, and they won't be able to afford to use it.
I disagree. If they get a serious energy crunch, they'll adjust. I don't think high speed flight is going away, it might get a tad rarer for the population, but it's not going away.
Big, mostly full planes going 600 odd mph for a couple thousand miles or more are actually very fuel efficient - especially when you're looking at overseas travel and saving weeks on a cruise liner.
They're also experimenting with bio-jet fuel, they're testing it right now for B-52s.
For the land, high speed rail, a good mesh of it with 'micro-locomotives' so you're hauling the equivalent of a plane, not 10 planes, would help. I'd want at least 120 mph, so it can compete with planes. Even then, I'm not sure about the fuel efficiency. Trains can be surprisingly inefficient, mostly due to low utilization.
Good point, I'd also wonder how much work would be needed to take care of abnormal events with an electric vehicle, e.g. a collision disturbing the integrity of the battery and wiring. This wuld be less of a problem with compressed air.
It'd be truer to say that it depends. Quite a few people have died in steam explosions, thought not as many lately.
Compromise a tank of gasoline and the reaction is limited by the availability of oxygen.
Compromise a lead acid battery and you have an acid/burning problem. The hazards are different for a LiIon, but on the same order.
Compromise a canister of air, especially one carrying a useful amount of air for powering a car, and you have a dangerous situation.
Why do you think theres a difference in scale?
While the crust percentages does make a difference, there's also factors like ease of mining, demand, etc...
Iron/Copper/Aluminum are somewhat interchangable; depending on the application.
Looking it up, Uranium averages 2.7 mg/kg in the crust. Iron is 5.63x10^4. Gold is 4.0x10^-3. Copper is actually lower than Uranium, at only 6.0x10^-1.
So Uranium is about five times more prevalent than copper.
On the market, copper is $6.80/kg. Uranium is around $40, with far less economy of scale. Raise the price to $130(or more), and there's a lot more reserves out there.
if it were possible to mine more economically given current market prices do you think the companies investing billions every year in exploration and geographical/geochemical surveys every year would pass up that opportunity?
The market is too small, currently. The number of reactors aren't exactly exploding, the 40kton/year is only a $1.6B/year market.
The thing to remember is that, for nuclear reactors, fuel cost is mostly considered 'insignificant'. You can easily bust $100/kg and still increase the final cost per kwh by less than half a cent.
I'm not saying that the cost per kg wouldn't go up a bit; I'm saying that there shouldn't really be any problems meeting the demand. If the nuclear plants have to pay twice as much per kg, they'll shrug and do it.
Are you completely stupid ?
No, but you might be. I was drawing some parallels between Copper/Iron mining to show the sheer difference in scale. IE there are copper/iron mines that produce more metal in one year than the amount of Uranium used.
It's not like Uranium mining can't be scaled up, and given it's current scale ramping up shouldn't be too difficult. Depending on method, there's a lot of commonality of equipment. Heck, there's even mines that closed because the price of the metal was too low to continue operation - they shouldn't be too difficult to reopen.
Gold mining, checking, is only around 2,500 tons/year. Silver was 23kton. Helps explain why it's expensive.
Personally, I'd go for a 'type accreditation' - where you have a more or less cookie-cutter system that meets requirements, then not allow construction shut downs on the basis of vaguely worded letters sent by people completely ignorant of the issue.
Why hasn't anybody implemented such a brilliant idea?
While the reactor at the center of the solar system was constructed cheaply enough, indeed, it's fully depreciated at this point, the receivers to convert it to electricity are rather expensive, such that it's actually cheaper to generate electricity via other means.
At least at the moment.
It seems to boil down to "we're not getting much uranium out of the ground right now while prices are low and we have massive stockpiles keeping prices low.... hence somehow people won't start mining more as the price of uranium goes up again....."
My concern would be that the industry wouldn't be able to scale up quickly enough as the stockpile runs out. After all, oil wells generally take well over a year from initial surveys to full production.
On the other hand, 40k tons right now, 25k additional tons necessary. Or a bit over 50% more. Thing is, a random search showed that a single Chile copper mine produced 165k tonnes in a year... Konkola in Zambia has a capacity of 200k tonnes of copper a year. China's mining millions of tons of iron ore a year.
It might simply be the addition of another shift at a few of the mines to increase production the necessary amount. It just goes to show how tiny uranium mining really is.
Consider that coffee shops, B&N, various malls, etc... All offer open hot spots.
THEY aren't liable for what a customer does with their wifi service, they're acting as a (free) ISP.
I don't see why the courthouse would be any different.
The US stockpiles a significant quantity of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. However, it is nowhere near a trillion barrels (a trillion barrels is something like 120 years of US oil consumption).
I know that, that's why I said trillions. If we had had a trillion barrels in our 'oil reserve' at the end of the cold war, we wouldn't have been drilling like we have been, and we'd really be in trouble when it ran out - artificially low prices would encourage oil consumption and discourage exploration.
The same thing happened with Uranium. We had a glut of production for weapons use, which is now being released back into the system, keeping prices artificially low. Regardless, the biggest cost of a nuclear power plant isn't the fuel, so it isn't as big of a deal as oil would be.
So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
To be even more specific, there are a number of reactor designs that don't require enrichment at all for usage in a nuclear power plant. There are efficiency gains to be had using higher enriched stuff, but it's not absolutely necessary.
Right now the Civilian uranium mining and enrichment industry is supressed due to the materials flowing out of our former stockpiles. It'd be like if during the cold war we built up trillions and trillions of barrels of oil as an 'emergency war stockpile' and now are releasing it - we wouldn't be bothering much with drilling for oil at the moment.
From my readings, fuel cost is pathetically cheap and even if we have to mine the stuff it won't raise the cost of electricity by a penny per kwh.
To be fair, the 3times price is compared against a 4 pack of normal light bulbs which are not sold in single packaging here.
Ah, okay. I was automatically applying a /4 to the price of a 4 pack. That modifies the multiplier to x12, which is 'close' to my x10. Especially when you consider how across the board a 4 pack of incandescent bulbs varies.
For CR website, looking at it gives a very bad first impression, as they look like many scam site, not offering much on the first look beside ways to hand out your credit card. I had to look it up on google to make sure it was the real site and not just a phishing page.
Huh, I don't have that impression, then again, I was reading CR before it had a website. Looking at the front page right now, it doesn't look like a scam site to me, though they do make it rather obvious that they want you to sign up. Remember - it's their sole revenue source other than magazine subscriptions. Of course, if you log in with a paid account(which I have), those go away.
But the major driver for bringing in businesses is overall economic health in the community. I'd argue that well run community likely has better roads because they know how to run the community... Whereas, I don't believe that good roads will lead to a well run community.
Personally, I'm mostly a libertarian, but I consider a mixture of gas taxes and property taxes reasonable for the road system.
A major thouroughfare or highway can easily be paid for via gas taxes, but the intra-community roads not so much. You reach a point where weathering is a higher destructive force than wear from vehicles. In such a case, since roads are still useful even if you don't have a vehicle, property taxes to pay for the road system that enables the fire, police to get to your house is reasonable.
Of course, I'm also interested in funding alternatives that I think have a chance of working - like personal rapid transit. In order to compete with vehicles, you have to beat them on as many fronts as possible - Cost, speed, and convenience. If you can get it so that your system is faster than cars(due to not having to stop all the time or deal with rush hour traffic), more convenient(drop you off IN the mall, not in a parking lot with a hundred meter walk), and cheaper(regenerating electric, not gasoline), you're golden.
Back on neighborhoods - You might be surprised at what a good road layout can do to help a community. Modern 'funnel' systems actually tend to marginalize neighborhood interaction because it emphasizes driving. You actually need more interconnects, not less.
OK, I was referring to the ICE plus electric kind. They do make an alternative, the hydraulic hybrid boost (and/or complete hydraulic drive), that is already out there in some city delivery trucks and buses.
I was being fairly generic. EVs for short range, hybrids for mid to long range. I know about the hydraulic boost, they're best for inner city delivery services.
As for the conversions - such is easily possible for those that build their own EV, even using a kit, but a tad much for somebody using a commercial EV from the start. The possibility has to be built into the vehicle to avoid extensive modification of the charging system to include charging while operating. Somebody who can modify an IC vehicle into a EV isn't going to have trouble slapping a generator trailer together.
The rest of your post? Did you think I was disagreeing with you? I agree, a trailer for extending the range of an EV for a long trip is a very good idea, as is making the trailer a bit bigger so that it can hold some extra cargo along with the generator and fuel. I fully agree that an EV with a 50 mile range would be able to handle 95% of most people's trips while being far less expensive, and you either rent the generator trailer or buy it and use it as a standby generator at home as a bonus.
Don't cleaner-burning engines necessarily have to accomplish more complete combustion? So, shouldn't that imply more available power?
Only if your 'pollution' is CO2. Leaner burning engines tend to be more fuel efficient, but they also produce more NOx compounds.
Then you add the weight and restrictions of other pollution controls, it can get interesting.
The only thing I would do different with those trailers is make them a scosh bigger with some additional cargo room for that long trip, for your luggage and camping gear or whatever.
I've seen people suggest putting the modular engine into the trunk before; my response has been 'When do you need trunk space the most? Tooling around town, or going on a long multiple day trip?'. I generally get an 'oh, yeah...' reaction.
I very much agree with that. It shouldn't be too hard to make the trailer a little longer or taller and give the people the ability to double their storage for long trips.
The ability to use the generator for a home standby system is also a bonus that would likely be the tipping factor for a lot of people like me. I like multiple uses for big ticket items.
I think on board hybrids are a dead end, that's just too much weight and complexity having to haul around two different styles of drivetrains all the time on the same axles. All electric + the modular "makes it a hybrid" genny trailer is the way to go.
I disagree some; hybrids still have a place on the road where charging an EV would be too expensive, too inconvenient, too impractical, etc... My scenario would be those that drive a lot - hybrid semis, cop cars, ambulances, UPS trucks, etc would be the ones with hybrids. To put it another way, the hybrid is for the poor guy who needs to drive 80 miles a day and can't charge at work. Or for that delivery vehicle that you can't economically get to be 100% battery powered.
wow, our efficiency seems to be regressing then. Bring back the 80's tech?
The problems with increasing efficiency has been that engines are being required to be tuned/built to reduce pollution, not gas mileage; safety systems and construction that increase weight, and increased consumer requirements for acceleration and top speed.
I wouldn't necessarily be too happy with an '80s era vehicle.
I've figured it out before, but generally speaking, if you need a vehicle that can perform duty X once or twice a month, it's still worth trading up to the larger vehicle to be able to do that than trying to rent or otherwise mess around.
Then, since you have the larger vehicle, generally speaking due to insurance, registration, cost of capital and such, it's cheaper to have one vehicle that can do everything than to try to get by with two vehicles.
Unless your super-duper vehicle is something like a crew cab monster-truck that gets 6 mpg, your commuter is a used geo metro that you drive 5 days a week 60 miles a day and carry only liability on.
Too bad most upcoming EVs don't have trailer hitches.
You should be able to retrofit a hitch on one to haul that small of a trailer fairly easily. The bigger problem would be the electrical connections and whether the car will freak out at being charged while driving.
Not an issue to a guy who built the EV, the trailer, and everything else, but for the average type driver?
Some EVs are even worse than Tesla. The Nissan Leaf's 100 miles range is on the LA-4 city cycle, which is even gentler than the FTP-75 cycle that our cars' city mpg rating is based on. And the Mitsubishi MiEV's 100 mile range is based on the Japanese 10-15 cycle, which is also exceedingly gentle.
I once read on Tesla's site that they actually argued with the EPA to*lower* the roadster's rated range because 'it wasn't realistic'.
Considering it's an electric sports car, I think they have a point - who, other than those out to prove a point, is going to drive the thing for maximum mileage, not performance?
That is a great idea! I might start doing that too. If many people do that, in a couple of years we will start to have some sweet real-world longevity data.
Got the idea here, actually. Of course, my first love for the bulbs was that I didn't have to replace the suckers(anywhere near as often). With traditional incandescents I was having to replace a bulb every week. It got annoying.
It would also be good to establish a brightness measure at the beginning and once a year thereafter, to see how much they have dimmed.
I haven't noticed any fading, but you'd really need a light measure - a webcam will automatically adjust for brightness like our eyes do. Still, I'll fully admit that my standard is 'still bright enough to see what I want to see'.
I fully understand your reluctance to want to change lights frequently on a boat. Especially the idea of possibly needing to do so in a storm. That's an ideal usage for the more expensive but more durable bulb. It's like street lights - it makes more sense to spend the money for a quality bulb that'll last longer because it costs more to get the crew and equipment out there to replace it as the bulb itself costs.
Anything funded by the federal government including private work should be considered the property of the people and thus released into the public domain.
I'll generally agree with you, but there is privately developed software in use by the government, and the military in particular that isn't going to be released on the basis that releasing it would help our enemies more than it'd help citizens of the United States. Stuff like nuclear explosion simulation programs, ballistic missile targeting/flight programs, etc...
Now, things like the NSA linux build is available.
There's other software available, if you know where to look, but most of it isn't that useful to the average person.
Then again, such private work isn't exactly going to be 'free use' for the contractor either - it's developed for the government, with all rights handed over to the government.
I hate to say it, but at 'only' 3x the cost, you (probably)weren't buying good bulbs, I tend to pay 10x the cost of incandescent for my bulbs.
For example, I have a pair of 60W equivalent bulbs that have lasted in my garage for over a year - in my garage door opener, in North Dakota. AKA that garage gets well below zero. They don't light up as much in the winter - but I don't exactly need much light, just enough to get to my truck/door in the darkness.
Then, about consumer reports, they are a company built for profit (well, they charge to check their reports!) and it's a bit hard to put all our trusts in those kind of things.
Think about it a moment. Even a non-profit needs income to pay salary for it's staff, rent offices, publish a paper, run a website. Which would you trust more:
1. A company that gets it's revenues by selling advertising, often for the very products it reviews?
2. A company that requests samples from the manufacturers?
3. A company that gets it's money by selling the review results, who doesn't accept advertising, sponsorship or anything from the companies whose products it reviews, which goes out on the retail market and BUYS random samples from the stores?
Personally, I think #3 is far more reliable. Heck, for #1 just look at gaming/sports magazines; note how glowing all the reviews are for products who's producers advertise in that magazine. #2 can sometimes work, but also gives the producer the ability to send you a altered sample. A laptop that's been extensively tested before it's sent to the reviewer. A car that has a team do a 'special tuneup', altering the engine and tightening up bodywork before it goes to the review team. That sort of stuff.
#3, well, they get they money from the consumer. If the consumer buys something CR recommends, they're likely to be pissed off at CR and drop their subscription. It's the consumer that needs to be pleased, and that they do by providing unbiased, accurate reports.
Finally, there's a reason I said 'reasonably unbiased'. It's very, very difficult for any source to be completely unbiased. I think that CR does better than most. So yeah, I'm kinda pleased that CR charges for their reviews. I trust them a heck of a lot more than many other review sites.
Not at first, no... give it a minute or two and yes. but by then you are accustomed to the brightness and less sensitive to the difference.
Heh, for that 100W bathroom light, I considered that a 'feature', not a detriment. Especially for those midnight visits.
It was also the only lightbulb with a noticable warmup period, but then, I'm probably pretty tolerant of variable light levels. My pupils simply adjust to compensate.
Of course, being aware of lighting conditions and setting them up to be efficient helps. I've seen people attempt to pour more light into a situation where it's the bad placement of light causing you to see too much light from areas other than where you're looking at causing even more problems. You want to illuminate what you're looking at - so your eyes don't simply adapt to the higher light levels and make what you're looking at seem even dimmer.
Consider the difference between viewing ranges for a candle and a 1M candle light. You certainly can't see a million times as much - your eyes adjust to keep perceived levels within tolerances.
There's an obvious reason why it won't work for classified stuff; if a disk on the classified network fails it doesn't go back for warranty repair, it gets smashed with a sledge hammer and then melted with thermite and the failure rate is taken into consideration when deciding to buy from that manufacturer again.
Failure rate is considered for ALL equipment, especially if it's too bad, but believe it or not the feds get warranty replacements for failed drives on classified systems.
As an absolutely huge business purchasing LOTS of systems, they can bargain a bit on things like returning failed hard drives to the sellers. Consider, the reason for returning the failed drive is mostly to prevent fraud - it's not like they're going to recondition the HD and send it out again. Thus, when in a partnership with somebody like the Feds, they report a failed X, Dell(or whoever) sends them a replacement X, and if due to the sensative nature of their information they don't want to give back the failed device because it might still contain information, it's not like they can't simply track the failure rates to see that it's within tolerances with the rest of the product line.
Even with personal drives, I've heard of people getting authorization to destroy them before return. Just, like any 'contract', make sure you get the authorization in writing/recording beforehand.
So how many billions of dollars will U.S. and EU citizens waste trying to get their wiring up to spec?
Another question would be how many billions of dollars of equipment replacement/repair will be saved? Incandescent bulbs are pretty tough; but what about the electronics in your computer, TV, microwave, refridgerator, etc?
I installed a water softener because by my calculations it'll save me money by increasing the lifespans of my water heater, dish and clothes washers. Not to mention the time and cleaning agents saved trying to clean up the deposits around my faucets.