"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
They talk about the militia being well regulated. The second part of the sentence is rather hard to work around.
Also, back then 'regulated' meant more along the lines of mechanical function; A regulated clock would be one that meets standards of operation. It was along the lines of specifying that the militia would actually show up with functioning weapons and an adequate supply of ball&powder. That wasn't guarenteed at the time.
Even if you go along with the regulated part, how do you justify the effective banning of current issue military small arms for sale to citizens?
Thank you. That does indeed look like a closer match.
Specifically targeting search engines is overboard. Having the word 'Sears' redirect you to target would be overboard, but I don't think that that's much of a problem.
Of course, fraud statutes exist to take care of true imitators.
"wide interpretation"? Just how many ways can you interpret...no law...? The interpretations we've been getting are way too narrow, and just plain wrong.
Maybe I'm a bit jaded; but if you look at my sig, you'll see that I'm a 2nd amendment advocate. I mean, they manage to work their way around 'shall not be infringed' just fine.
I was playing devil's advocate a bit. Explaining a particular viewpoint.
The actual transactions, at least until you reach the epic level stuff, are so penny-ante to not be worth the effort.
My viewpoint remains the same; treat it like an investment or work in progress; IE it remains untaxed until you start making a living off from it(IE more than garage sale amounts, $2k at least). Only consider 'real world' transactions with real currency. Sells an item? Income. ISP/account fees? Deductible as long as you meat the 'intent' requirement. Treat it something like the worker is working commisions for foreign investors. At some point the money has to hit a native account.
By the sound of it, it doesn't actually ban keyword advertising, it just limits a bit.
Returning Bob's Hardware in a search for 'Dan's Hardware' based off from the word 'hardware' might be ok. 'hardware' is a rather generic word, after all. Walmart buying a link based off of 'Target', 'Sears', or 'K-Mart' would not be.
Still, I could easily see this law being struck down by a judge with a wide interpretation of the 1st, as long as no actual misrepresentation is made.
Please note - I only played WoW for a few months. I'm not much for online games.
what's the base price?. Auction House price?. Vendor price?. A blue (rare) item can go for a few hundred golds on AH yet sells for 5 or 6 gold to vendors.
Note the 'blue book' remark. To continue on that theme, vender sales would be what the used car dealer or maybe even what the scrap dealer will pay for the item. Auction House prices would be private party sales.
What about BoP items (bind on pickup, become soulbound when you pick them up. Most of the better stuff work this way)? Can't sell them on ebay unless I sell the entire character, and they're not worth much in gold to vendors.
Soul bound items, being non-transferable, would have virtually no value other than scrap prices from the merchants. Of course, Blizzard never intended to have the gold farmers around, which has had the effect of artificially raising the gold supply, resulting in increased prices. I think that the proliferation of soul bound items is intended to prevent somebody from just buying all the greatest stuff, make them actually play if they want something.
And what happend when a new expansion comes out?. When TBC came out you could get green (uncommon) items out of simple quests or drops from regular monsters that were better than epic items you got from endgame bosses beforehand. Or what if Blizzard decides to release a patch tomorrow that changes the value of gold at all, or just decide to shut down WoW at all?. That's without going into international servers or people from other countries (I'm from Venezuela, for example, and play on european servers).
Same deal as with anybody who's invested in Zimbabwe in the last decade. Even real-world assets come with risk. They could discover contamination and have to evacuate you from your home tomorrow. Your country could decide to nationalize the businesses you have stock in and pay sub-standard prices for them. Or even just decide to run the mint non-stop and increase inflation 1500%. New regulations could make your business illegal or at least unprofitable. They could discover that a company you have stock in had a group of embezzelers in control, now they find out that the corporation is bankrupt. A fatal flaw could be found in your car, the manufacturer goes belly up, your warrenty with it, causing it's blue book value to go into the ditch.
If you loose money because of something like this, you write it off. It's only when you convert it to real currency(IE cash out) that you're taxed. If they went further in, a market crash would result in lower payments.
Just happened to be a fark link today, but it's relevent in this post. Zimbabwe might have pegged their money at $250 ZD to $1 USD, but due to economic realities it's closer to $20k to $1 on the black market.
Just because something's illegal doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. Indeed, in the case of drugs, it frequently increases their value.
You could make a good case for the companies that sell WoW gold to pay the normal taxes of a commercial organisation, however i strongly suspect most of them are outside US jurisdiction.
And there's the rub. Americans play WoW for entertainment, not profit. Even those that sell probably don't make enough to cover their expenses(Key, subscription, ISP fees) and make even minimum wage.
IANAA*, but my parents are. Believe it or not, yes, you could deduct all those things. Uncle Sam's going to want receipts, of course, but billing records suffice.
As long as it's used in your money making efforts and the applicable taxes are paid, you're good.
Developing the SL object - cash expenses you're good for, but not your own labor. Hire an artist to create some of the overlay? Deductable. Do it yourself - not, but the cost of your editing software might be.
It's an example of an extreme point, such as may be proposed by a extreme taxer. Later on she talks about applying taxes only when 'cashing out' into real money.
I wonder about the usage of the word 'lindons'. I assumed this meant Lindon B Johnson, but he doesn't have any currency to his name. 'Franklins' would have been clearer.
Or is lindons the currency of second life? - Oops, turns out it is!
But it's a little clearer here, as there looks to be an official method to translate lindons into dollars. $250 Lindons to a USD is actually better than many economies.
No, her point is that the player could theoretically put said sword up on EBay*, and sell it for real world dollars.
A step more distant would be to say that since you can establish a trade rate between game 'gold' and US dollars and you can also find the average going rate of said sword in gold**, you can, through an amount of wrangling, find the sword's value in US Dollars.
Example: 10k 'Gold' goes for $20, on average. Some smucks pay $50, some pay $5-10. But the average is $20
Said sword goes, on average, for 1k gold. It's 'real world' value could be assessed at $2.
The thing is, it's scarily easy how real world markets interface with these virtual ones. Then again, I own thousands in mutual funds, and my only representation of said funds is by my online accounts and the occasional statement mailed to me.
On the other hand, consider the market, right now, for Blueray/HD: Rich technogeeks and videophiles. Both of which are much more likely to be within the.01% of the market that cares about DRM. Heck, many of the videophiles may have been burned with DAT. Most people with the money do be dumping $3k into an entertainment system will be older, old enough to remember VHS vs Betamax.
From what I understand, even many of the early HDTVs don't have the correct plugs for these players for full resolution.
Format War: Not good Having to buy movies again(at 2X the price): NG DRM: NG ~$2k to see the difference at home: NG (yes, I'm including the price for a HDTV; market penetration for those are still bad, after all).
Result: Slow adoption. Could even be termed 'niche market', at least for now. The analysts may have said that blue ray is catching on as fast as DVD, but not faster if you look at it as a percentage. Most of that came from Casino Royale sales. I think that an important point would be that the HD standards require a new TV, DVD didn't. So I think that you have will see a brief surge of (rich or spendthrift) buyers to help justify the HDTVs they already purchased. After that, it'll be much more difficult.
I'd like to have HDTV, ps3, etc... But I baulk at the price tag every time. I could go cheaper if I was willing to have HDTV in monitor sizes (27"), but I want one at least as big as my current 32" TV. Add in that I don't have cable or satellite and you'll see that my available content is limited and expensive. Not time to adopt yet.
Heck, with the whole casino royale best seller thing I wonder how many people bought the HD discs by mistake, thinking they were getting some kind of deluxe version, but still playable on their DVD player?
Yes they do. They're designed differently, but then, they'd have to be. You have less room to crumple, but then, you also have more room for shoving the engine underneath the passangers.
CAFE standards have been pretty constant since the late 1980s. CAFE did not have high mileage requirements. Meeting these minimal standards is not difficult - other countries have far better average fuel consumption.
They still disallow the types of vehicles many consumers want.
My whole point is that SUVs fulfill a demand. If there wasn't a demand, no amount of fiddling would have the domestic manufacturers being able to sell high-margin large vehicles while under competition from foreign manufacturers making efficient and high quality cars.
And the whole 'body on frame' vs unibody construction has it's own tradeoffs. Body on frame makes more sense for larger vehicles, but most SUVs are unibody today anyways.
Look at the market today. We've gone from nearly 100% 'full size' SUVs to a majority of mid-size to small SUVs, built more like cars. Clearly, despite the lower gas milage and higher cost, there are reasons for people to select the SUV over even a mid-size car. Higher gas prices have depressed, but not killed, the market.
Unless this demand of the market is addressed, you're not going to get rid of the 'gas-guzzler' SUV. Though producing hybrid SUVs are at least a stop-gap. It'll be less efficient than a car type hybrid, but the purchaser of a hybrid SUV is more likely to purchase a gas SUV instead of a hybrid anyways.
The problem with reducing weight is that the majority of the increased weight is due to increased safety requirements. While crumple zones don't have to be heavy, there are still mass requirements.
Oddly enough; I blame CAFE standards for driving people to SUVs. By requiring such high milage requirements, the car companies economized in ways that drove many people away from them. Simple things like sitting too low for somebody with limited mobility* to comfortably enter/exit them. The increase in available storage space; flexible useage of passanger/cargo area.
*And I'm not talking about seriously limited mobilitiy.
I'll agree. If somebody's making $15/hour, that's their compensation. But when you figure the hourly cost of an employee, the taxes, insurance, etc all figure in as expenses.
While the figures vary, 30-50% of hourly compensation as 'additional expenses' is a frequent figure. After all, you have to add 7.5% for SS alone. Many states also require a tax be paid for employees that goes into an unemployment fund.
Dirt Cheap Programmer: $10/hour Cost per standard week: $400 5% performance increase savings:$20/week Time needed to pay for additional monitor: 10-20 weeks.
Quitting smoking is easy. It's got no real downsides besides the addiction factor*. It doesn't even necessarily cost money to quit.
The equivalents to quitting smoking have mostly already been done, because they make sense. It's like how they now sell the crud recovered from smokestacks, because it contains valuable chemicals. Energy star appliances are, in many cases, orders of magnitude cheaper to run than those of our grandparents.
Quiting coal and oil use, that's a whole different story. Civilization has always depended upon power. For example, we'd have to rebuild most of our cities to eliminate just half the usage of cars. People would be living in tighter conditions, and there'd probably be an increase in crime. On the other hand, it can cost $100k to build a house, discounting the land, and even more to build a comparable multilevel apartment/condo. That's spending Billions to eliminate a few million. Attrition would be the more correct way to handle it, but that takes decades/centuries.
The net metering in my area is one of those 'avoided cost' areas, you get paid the same per kw/h as their other bulk sources, such as the coal plants. It's something like 3 cents per kw/h.
So you're best off sizing any personal energy sources just right or even a bit low, rather than over.
Unless you're going to be a professional energy provider and build something that produces gigawatts and economy of scale to actually make 3-5 cents per kw/hour profitable. You might be able to get a better deal because they'll pay more for peak power than base power, and if your power source is green they'll pay a bonus for that(paid for through various government bonuses to them for meeting green power levels).
Ouch, $10 thousand for the stuff(DC kit, light manual transmission)? Ouch... that's 3.3k gallons of gasoline @ $3/gallon. Or 100k miles worth of gasoline at 30mpg. That's not even including batteries.
Doesn't look like I'm going to be doing a conversion anytime soon...
Well, maybe if I can find a car body in good condition for around a thousand, but beyond that...
Being really honest, at least half of the fun is the project itself.
Just as long as you aren't kidding yourself. I consider 'fun' as plenty of justification for doing uneconomical things. I've considered making an electric vehicle for much the same reason(part of why I know so much). Still, I need a donor vehicle first, and my minimum range would be around 120 miles, or at least 80 at highway velocities. I know full well that this would double the cost of my battery pack versus yours.
30 minute average for 7 miles? That's only a 14mph average. You have to traverse roads with speeds in excess of 40mph? No redlight?
*scratches head* SoCal is messed up. My commute is 30 minutes, for 30 miles(reason for large range requirement).
Just keep in mind that when I'm evaluating the economy of things like EVs that I'm considering the average educated consumer, one capable of conducting a basic cost/benefit analysis. As it makes more sense, you'll have more adoptors. Especially for large capital cost items like vehicles, I lean towards existing technology. When you look at fast adoption items like MP3 players, their new functionality overwhelms the older equivalents (radios, CD and tape players, in this case). For MP3 players you have shock resistance, user selected playlists, smaller sizes, massive storage, etc...
A new lead-acid traction pack will cost about $3000, so that's about $0.03-$0.06/mile spent on the batteries.
From what I've read, 3k is for a HV, not an EV. EV packs have to be substantially larger. And 6 cents/mile is what a efficient compact car uses per mile in gasoline, and that's not an up front price, so it's effectivly cheaper.
To be honest, though, nobody doing their own conversion will use NiMH cause big NiMH batteries are simply too expensive.
Still, they're looking at installing NiMH for consumer vehicles, and people converting their own vehicles won't ever be a major factor.
Sorry, but that's bunk. I'm in the process of converting a 1998 Saturn SW2 station wagon to an EV and according to the system specs I'll conservatively get between 85-90 miles per charge with a (full charge: 12 hours of 20A @ 110V or about $4 in SoCal). Since my commute is 7 miles one way, 85 miles/day leaves lots of range left over for errands, rides for kids, short trips (to places with plugs), whatever. And we've got the Jeep with the 30 gallon tank (only 20 mpg FWIW) for longer trips.
Or about $.04 per mile by your(conservative) estimates for electric. Add in your battery amortization costs of.03 and you're up to.07. A good compact car would cost you ~.06 per mile in gasoline without any conversion costs. How many thousands are you sinking into the conversion? From what I've seen the controller and electric motor can't be had for less than $1500.
With only seven miles for your commute, you'd be better off in most situations with a bicycle, or at most one of those overgrown golf carts.
I meant power to run the systems involved in the algae farm. For example, you need some system to collect the algae once it's grown. You need a system to aeroate the water. Pumps to move fresh water in, waste water out.
The algae farm itself is to provide biomass for conversion into biodiesel or ethanol.
Slashdot Mirror
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
They talk about the militia being well regulated. The second part of the sentence is rather hard to work around.
Also, back then 'regulated' meant more along the lines of mechanical function; A regulated clock would be one that meets standards of operation. It was along the lines of specifying that the militia would actually show up with functioning weapons and an adequate supply of ball&powder. That wasn't guarenteed at the time.
Even if you go along with the regulated part, how do you justify the effective banning of current issue military small arms for sale to citizens?
Thank you. That does indeed look like a closer match.
Specifically targeting search engines is overboard. Having the word 'Sears' redirect you to target would be overboard, but I don't think that that's much of a problem.
Of course, fraud statutes exist to take care of true imitators.
"wide interpretation"? Just how many ways can you interpret ...no law...? The interpretations we've been getting are way too narrow, and just plain wrong.
Maybe I'm a bit jaded; but if you look at my sig, you'll see that I'm a 2nd amendment advocate. I mean, they manage to work their way around 'shall not be infringed' just fine.
Thus my statement.
I was playing devil's advocate a bit. Explaining a particular viewpoint.
The actual transactions, at least until you reach the epic level stuff, are so penny-ante to not be worth the effort.
My viewpoint remains the same; treat it like an investment or work in progress; IE it remains untaxed until you start making a living off from it(IE more than garage sale amounts, $2k at least). Only consider 'real world' transactions with real currency. Sells an item? Income. ISP/account fees? Deductible as long as you meat the 'intent' requirement. Treat it something like the worker is working commisions for foreign investors. At some point the money has to hit a native account.
By the sound of it, it doesn't actually ban keyword advertising, it just limits a bit.
Returning Bob's Hardware in a search for 'Dan's Hardware' based off from the word 'hardware' might be ok. 'hardware' is a rather generic word, after all. Walmart buying a link based off of 'Target', 'Sears', or 'K-Mart' would not be.
Still, I could easily see this law being struck down by a judge with a wide interpretation of the 1st, as long as no actual misrepresentation is made.
Please note - I only played WoW for a few months. I'm not much for online games.
what's the base price?. Auction House price?. Vendor price?. A blue (rare) item can go for a few hundred golds on AH yet sells for 5 or 6 gold to vendors.
Note the 'blue book' remark. To continue on that theme, vender sales would be what the used car dealer or maybe even what the scrap dealer will pay for the item. Auction House prices would be private party sales.
What about BoP items (bind on pickup, become soulbound when you pick them up. Most of the better stuff work this way)? Can't sell them on ebay unless I sell the entire character, and they're not worth much in gold to vendors.
Soul bound items, being non-transferable, would have virtually no value other than scrap prices from the merchants. Of course, Blizzard never intended to have the gold farmers around, which has had the effect of artificially raising the gold supply, resulting in increased prices. I think that the proliferation of soul bound items is intended to prevent somebody from just buying all the greatest stuff, make them actually play if they want something.
And what happend when a new expansion comes out?. When TBC came out you could get green (uncommon) items out of simple quests or drops from regular monsters that were better than epic items you got from endgame bosses beforehand. Or what if Blizzard decides to release a patch tomorrow that changes the value of gold at all, or just decide to shut down WoW at all?. That's without going into international servers or people from other countries (I'm from Venezuela, for example, and play on european servers).
Same deal as with anybody who's invested in Zimbabwe in the last decade. Even real-world assets come with risk. They could discover contamination and have to evacuate you from your home tomorrow. Your country could decide to nationalize the businesses you have stock in and pay sub-standard prices for them. Or even just decide to run the mint non-stop and increase inflation 1500%. New regulations could make your business illegal or at least unprofitable. They could discover that a company you have stock in had a group of embezzelers in control, now they find out that the corporation is bankrupt. A fatal flaw could be found in your car, the manufacturer goes belly up, your warrenty with it, causing it's blue book value to go into the ditch.
If you loose money because of something like this, you write it off. It's only when you convert it to real currency(IE cash out) that you're taxed. If they went further in, a market crash would result in lower payments.
Black market money exchange thrives in Zimbabwe, where soda costs $40 at official rate
Just happened to be a fark link today, but it's relevent in this post. Zimbabwe might have pegged their money at $250 ZD to $1 USD, but due to economic realities it's closer to $20k to $1 on the black market.
Just because something's illegal doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. Indeed, in the case of drugs, it frequently increases their value.
You could make a good case for the companies that sell WoW gold to pay the normal taxes of a commercial organisation, however i strongly suspect most of them are outside US jurisdiction.
And there's the rub. Americans play WoW for entertainment, not profit. Even those that sell probably don't make enough to cover their expenses(Key, subscription, ISP fees) and make even minimum wage.
IANAA*, but my parents are. Believe it or not, yes, you could deduct all those things. Uncle Sam's going to want receipts, of course, but billing records suffice.
As long as it's used in your money making efforts and the applicable taxes are paid, you're good.
Developing the SL object - cash expenses you're good for, but not your own labor. Hire an artist to create some of the overlay? Deductable. Do it yourself - not, but the cost of your editing software might be.
*I am not an accountant
It's an example of an extreme point, such as may be proposed by a extreme taxer. Later on she talks about applying taxes only when 'cashing out' into real money.
I wonder about the usage of the word 'lindons'. I assumed this meant Lindon B Johnson, but he doesn't have any currency to his name. 'Franklins' would have been clearer.
Or is lindons the currency of second life? - Oops, turns out it is!
But it's a little clearer here, as there looks to be an official method to translate lindons into dollars. $250 Lindons to a USD is actually better than many economies.
Still, some scary stuff.
traded IN GAME for a virtual currency
No, her point is that the player could theoretically put said sword up on EBay*, and sell it for real world dollars.
A step more distant would be to say that since you can establish a trade rate between game 'gold' and US dollars and you can also find the average going rate of said sword in gold**, you can, through an amount of wrangling, find the sword's value in US Dollars.
Example: 10k 'Gold' goes for $20, on average. Some smucks pay $50, some pay $5-10. But the average is $20
Said sword goes, on average, for 1k gold. It's 'real world' value could be assessed at $2.
The thing is, it's scarily easy how real world markets interface with these virtual ones. Then again, I own thousands in mutual funds, and my only representation of said funds is by my online accounts and the occasional statement mailed to me.
*Or competitor
**Think blue book
On the other hand, consider the market, right now, for Blueray/HD: Rich technogeeks and videophiles. Both of which are much more likely to be within the .01% of the market that cares about DRM. Heck, many of the videophiles may have been burned with DAT. Most people with the money do be dumping $3k into an entertainment system will be older, old enough to remember VHS vs Betamax.
From what I understand, even many of the early HDTVs don't have the correct plugs for these players for full resolution.
Format War: Not good
Having to buy movies again(at 2X the price): NG
DRM: NG
~$2k to see the difference at home: NG (yes, I'm including the price for a HDTV; market penetration for those are still bad, after all).
Result: Slow adoption. Could even be termed 'niche market', at least for now. The analysts may have said that blue ray is catching on as fast as DVD, but not faster if you look at it as a percentage. Most of that came from Casino Royale sales. I think that an important point would be that the HD standards require a new TV, DVD didn't. So I think that you have will see a brief surge of (rich or spendthrift) buyers to help justify the HDTVs they already purchased. After that, it'll be much more difficult.
I'd like to have HDTV, ps3, etc... But I baulk at the price tag every time. I could go cheaper if I was willing to have HDTV in monitor sizes (27"), but I want one at least as big as my current 32" TV. Add in that I don't have cable or satellite and you'll see that my available content is limited and expensive. Not time to adopt yet.
Heck, with the whole casino royale best seller thing I wonder how many people bought the HD discs by mistake, thinking they were getting some kind of deluxe version, but still playable on their DVD player?
Why do you think I said stuff? I thought 'hunt and mount' at first, but then, this is /., bound to be trouble.
The moment they add on a rider making it legal to hunt and stuff lawyers.
What BS. Most SUVs do not have crumple zones.
Yes they do. They're designed differently, but then, they'd have to be. You have less room to crumple, but then, you also have more room for shoving the engine underneath the passangers.
CAFE standards have been pretty constant since the late 1980s. CAFE did not have high mileage requirements. Meeting these minimal standards is not difficult - other countries have far better average fuel consumption.
They still disallow the types of vehicles many consumers want.
My whole point is that SUVs fulfill a demand. If there wasn't a demand, no amount of fiddling would have the domestic manufacturers being able to sell high-margin large vehicles while under competition from foreign manufacturers making efficient and high quality cars.
And the whole 'body on frame' vs unibody construction has it's own tradeoffs. Body on frame makes more sense for larger vehicles, but most SUVs are unibody today anyways.
Look at the market today. We've gone from nearly 100% 'full size' SUVs to a majority of mid-size to small SUVs, built more like cars. Clearly, despite the lower gas milage and higher cost, there are reasons for people to select the SUV over even a mid-size car. Higher gas prices have depressed, but not killed, the market.
Unless this demand of the market is addressed, you're not going to get rid of the 'gas-guzzler' SUV. Though producing hybrid SUVs are at least a stop-gap. It'll be less efficient than a car type hybrid, but the purchaser of a hybrid SUV is more likely to purchase a gas SUV instead of a hybrid anyways.
Toyota's Prius is in fact mechanically simpler than a conventional vehicle
Are you sure about that? After all, it does still have a gasoline engine in addition to all the electric parts.
I'll fully admit that a full EV is far simpler mechanically than a gasoline vehicle, but hybrids; not so much.
The problem with reducing weight is that the majority of the increased weight is due to increased safety requirements. While crumple zones don't have to be heavy, there are still mass requirements.
Oddly enough; I blame CAFE standards for driving people to SUVs. By requiring such high milage requirements, the car companies economized in ways that drove many people away from them. Simple things like sitting too low for somebody with limited mobility* to comfortably enter/exit them. The increase in available storage space; flexible useage of passanger/cargo area.
*And I'm not talking about seriously limited mobilitiy.
I'll agree. If somebody's making $15/hour, that's their compensation. But when you figure the hourly cost of an employee, the taxes, insurance, etc all figure in as expenses.
While the figures vary, 30-50% of hourly compensation as 'additional expenses' is a frequent figure. After all, you have to add 7.5% for SS alone. Many states also require a tax be paid for employees that goes into an unemployment fund.
Thus my 'remember taxes!' line.
probably thought you were attempting to be sarcastic.
Yeah, I love dual monitors when I program. Reference materials on one screen with the code on the other.
My brain just isn't set up to handle desktop switches well, I tend to loose my train of thought vs just looking from one screen to another.
Dirt Cheap Programmer: $10/hour :$20/week
Cost per standard week: $400
5% performance increase savings
Time needed to pay for additional monitor: 10-20 weeks.
More realistic:
DCP $30/hour (remember taxes!)
CpSW: $1200
5% increase: $60/week
Payback: 3-5 weeks.
easy justification.
Quitting smoking is easy. It's got no real downsides besides the addiction factor*. It doesn't even necessarily cost money to quit.
The equivalents to quitting smoking have mostly already been done, because they make sense. It's like how they now sell the crud recovered from smokestacks, because it contains valuable chemicals. Energy star appliances are, in many cases, orders of magnitude cheaper to run than those of our grandparents.
Quiting coal and oil use, that's a whole different story. Civilization has always depended upon power. For example, we'd have to rebuild most of our cities to eliminate just half the usage of cars. People would be living in tighter conditions, and there'd probably be an increase in crime. On the other hand, it can cost $100k to build a house, discounting the land, and even more to build a comparable multilevel apartment/condo. That's spending Billions to eliminate a few million. Attrition would be the more correct way to handle it, but that takes decades/centuries.
The net metering in my area is one of those 'avoided cost' areas, you get paid the same per kw/h as their other bulk sources, such as the coal plants. It's something like 3 cents per kw/h.
So you're best off sizing any personal energy sources just right or even a bit low, rather than over.
Unless you're going to be a professional energy provider and build something that produces gigawatts and economy of scale to actually make 3-5 cents per kw/hour profitable. You might be able to get a better deal because they'll pay more for peak power than base power, and if your power source is green they'll pay a bonus for that(paid for through various government bonuses to them for meeting green power levels).
Ouch, $10 thousand for the stuff(DC kit, light manual transmission)? Ouch... that's 3.3k gallons of gasoline @ $3/gallon. Or 100k miles worth of gasoline at 30mpg. That's not even including batteries.
Doesn't look like I'm going to be doing a conversion anytime soon...
Well, maybe if I can find a car body in good condition for around a thousand, but beyond that...
Being really honest, at least half of the fun is the project itself.
Just as long as you aren't kidding yourself. I consider 'fun' as plenty of justification for doing uneconomical things. I've considered making an electric vehicle for much the same reason(part of why I know so much). Still, I need a donor vehicle first, and my minimum range would be around 120 miles, or at least 80 at highway velocities. I know full well that this would double the cost of my battery pack versus yours.
30 minute average for 7 miles? That's only a 14mph average. You have to traverse roads with speeds in excess of 40mph? No redlight?
*scratches head* SoCal is messed up. My commute is 30 minutes, for 30 miles(reason for large range requirement).
Just keep in mind that when I'm evaluating the economy of things like EVs that I'm considering the average educated consumer, one capable of conducting a basic cost/benefit analysis. As it makes more sense, you'll have more adoptors. Especially for large capital cost items like vehicles, I lean towards existing technology. When you look at fast adoption items like MP3 players, their new functionality overwhelms the older equivalents (radios, CD and tape players, in this case). For MP3 players you have shock resistance, user selected playlists, smaller sizes, massive storage, etc...
A new lead-acid traction pack will cost about $3000, so that's about $0.03-$0.06/mile spent on the batteries.
.03 and you're up to .07. A good compact car would cost you ~.06 per mile in gasoline without any conversion costs. How many thousands are you sinking into the conversion? From what I've seen the controller and electric motor can't be had for less than $1500.
From what I've read, 3k is for a HV, not an EV. EV packs have to be substantially larger. And 6 cents/mile is what a efficient compact car uses per mile in gasoline, and that's not an up front price, so it's effectivly cheaper.
To be honest, though, nobody doing their own conversion will use NiMH cause big NiMH batteries are simply too expensive.
Still, they're looking at installing NiMH for consumer vehicles, and people converting their own vehicles won't ever be a major factor.
Sorry, but that's bunk. I'm in the process of converting a 1998 Saturn SW2 station wagon to an EV and according to the system specs I'll conservatively get between 85-90 miles per charge with a (full charge: 12 hours of 20A @ 110V or about $4 in SoCal). Since my commute is 7 miles one way, 85 miles/day leaves lots of range left over for errands, rides for kids, short trips (to places with plugs), whatever. And we've got the Jeep with the 30 gallon tank (only 20 mpg FWIW) for longer trips.
Or about $.04 per mile by your(conservative) estimates for electric. Add in your battery amortization costs of
With only seven miles for your commute, you'd be better off in most situations with a bicycle, or at most one of those overgrown golf carts.
I meant power to run the systems involved in the algae farm. For example, you need some system to collect the algae once it's grown. You need a system to aeroate the water. Pumps to move fresh water in, waste water out.
The algae farm itself is to provide biomass for conversion into biodiesel or ethanol.