I think he is asking the wrong question. A suggestion for a program isn't what he needs. He needs to look up a local college and take some night classes is CADing. There is the tool and then there is the thought process and currently he lacks the knowledge to even know what tool meets his needs when he tries them out.
And you think he needs a college class to figure this out? News flash! There are lots of people out there who can learn what they need to know with only a vague nudge in the right direction. On the cheapest end, a college level course will cost you several hundred dollars, and the only thing of value he is likely to glean is which tools to use? Sounds like an actual case of "Ask Slashdot saves hundreds of dollars!"
Not everything needs to be squeezed until it makes a buck, but as long as people keep seeing everything in the world with fucking dollar signs in their eyes the problem will continue.
As long as it requires money to eat, everything in this world will revolve around money. Any other belief is just self-delusion.
This company did it quite explicitly starting fifty-one years ago. There is a good chance you even have their product in your home right now. Is more than half a century long enough for you? Maybe it isn't. I always, always seek out that brand specifically because of their no-ad pledge.
They may not be serving up ads, but their site is selling visitor information to Google and Facebook among others. I know this because no-script showed both as being blocked...
The person who earns $5e6 a year is a person who can use the efforts of others 5 million dollars a year more effectively than anyone willing to work for much less. He adds at least $5e6 more value to his company than anyone else. The people he leads would produce $5e6 less if he were not at the helm, even if they worked just as hard. He, and not they, earned the money.
Do you believe that just anyone can run a company, that there's nothing special that a CEO can do to make a company successful? Do you believe that Carly Fiorina is just as good as Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard? No? Then re-evaluate what good leaders are worth.
90% of success is luck. Carly earned a lot of money, and was by almost any measure more successful than almost everyone I know. This was due to luck She did nothing any better than anyone else would have, and most things worse. The majority of poor and lower middle class people are only different from the 1% in terms of their opportunities. Bill gates may have dropped out of college to start Microsoft, but if he hadn't gone to college in the first place, it is a pretty safe bet he would never have met the people he needed to know to become successful. Ditto, the Zuck, and most every other successful entrepreneur.
Our society gives these people the opportunities, and that opportunity is worth far more than all the skill and hard work they have provided. There are millions of people out there with the hard work and skill to be wildly successful if they only get the chance, but for most of them, that chance will never come.
We are running a $1.6Trillion deficit per year right now and have been during the current administration. If you cut defense out completely we would have a $900 billion deficit PER YEAR!
Ummm, no, We are currently running about $1.0 Trillion, and that number will drop a bit as the economy recovers and tax revenue increases. Take 400 Billion out of the defense budget, and fix the tax loopholes that allow companies like Google and Microsoft to pay less than 5% taxes, and you will have closed almost the entire deficit. Moreover, as the economy recovers more, the remaining deficit will turn into a surplus that we can use to pay down some of the massive debt we racked up in the last decade. If you really want to go for the perfect game, jump the taxes on anyone making over $5 Mil back to 75%, and we won't have any more budget problems.
My point is, a lot of 'wasteful government spending' is just another form of Welfare for the United States. If you support welfare you should also support excessive gov spending (so long as that money stays in the USA of course).
My issue isn't with the defense welfare economy you described, my issue is with the millionaire and billionaire stock holders who make 40% profit margins off that same activity. If were gonna go with welfare, lets just do it already, and stop paying the middleman for the privilege...
But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come....
What’s really going on here?
Whats really going on here is that trust fund you mentioned has no cash in it. It is entirely funded by "special" government bonds to social security. The result is that the cash is gone, and the government owes itself the money back. The crisis isn't that social security will go bankrupt, the crisis is that social security loaned the money to the US government as a whole, and it looks like the US government might not be willing to pay back those bonds. The US government wants to pretend those bonds wont really need to be repaid so that they can renege on the payment of the bonds. The thinking is this, if Social security is changed so that it does not pay out as much benefit to each individual, then there truly has been a surplus over the last half century. That being the case, then congress would not have to repay those bonds (because social security wouldn't need all of the money to pay its obligations). By not having to repay all of those bonds, congress could wipe that expense off the budget and as such would have more money to waste on craptastic jet fighters and tax breaks for people and companies making more money than Cuba. Its a giant game of smoke and mirrors, and its complicated enough that very few people have yet realized that the money is already gone. The rich stole it from us in the form of tax breaks for the very wealthy.
Do you propose that the government not pay people the benefits they paid for as part of a contract?
There is no contract, there's just a law saying the government takes your money and will give it back later. That law can (and has) been changed.
You will find the courts have something to say about that. I believe that if push comes to shove, it will go to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS will make precedent by deciding that the U.S. government entered into an implied contract, and that the taxpayers upheld their end of the deal, so the government *must* uphold their end of the bargain. Anything less than that will likely foment revolution, and that wouldn't be good for anyone. My mother is in this boat. She is counting on social security (and the help of relatives) for her retirement because of a combination of poor life choices and bad luck. Without social security, she will have to rely 100% on relatives, and we will be very pissed off if we have to pay because the US government welched on its debts.
SS has never been a 'paid for' plan. It was always predicated on more and more current workers paying for the retiree benefits. Sometimes a surplus to be sure, but never 'fully funded' for an individual by that individual's contributions.
For 50 years, far more has been collected than was needed to pay current obligations. This was done so that the coming of the baby boomers wouldn't cause a financial crisis. Since the 80's, That process has been undercut by congress "loaning" then money to itself in the form of special bonds, and then using the proceeds to offset spending (such as excessive defense spending, welfare, and reducing taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans). As a result, we have effectively given the money to the defense contractors, the extremely poor, and the 1% (same as the defense contractors). We borrowed against the future social security income to do it. The end result is that we have exactly the social security funding crisis that was envisioned, but the solution that was put in place has been systematically destroyed and we have the crisis anyway. The only good way to fix it now is to cut defense spending down to the core, put taxes on the 1% back to 75%+ where it belongs, or go and get our money back at the point of a gun. The choice is yours.
Although the F-35 is the poster child for poor procurement processes, the simple fact of the matter is that entitlement spending dwarfs defense spending.
True, but entitlement spending is not a pure drain on society. It has a definite value to all of society. Defense spending at this level is just absurd and should be halted immediately. This kind of weapon is of no real use in anti-terror, or drug related warfare. The only real enemy these could be used against would be Chinese, and they have already made it abundantly clear they intend the nature of the war between the US and China will be virtual and economic, not combat. This is a Trillion dollar solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and hasn't for 20 years. If this, and a few other programs like it were to be cut, we wouldn't have a budget deficit anymore. 20% of our federal budget is "defense" spending. Cut this in half, and we no longer have any budget problems, even with keeping the Bush era tax cuts.
Those who advocate cutting entitlement spending and would leave this kind of spending in place do not understand the fundamentals of economics, nor do they have even the foggiest idea of what the hidden costs of not funding social programs are. We need to do whatever it takes to reinforce our economy as quickly as possible, because this will be our only effective defense against the Chinese threat in the next 30 years.
You do realize it's relatively trivial to convert an engine to work with Ethanol, right?
No it isn't. It involves changing out all of the gaskets and rubber parts in the engine and fuel system and replacing them with more chemically resistant varieties. Even if the cost of the new parts is trivial, the cost of the labor is not. Building new engines that are ethanol capable is fairly straightforward, retrofit on the other hand is prohibitively expensive (it would be cheaper to replace the vehicle).
Look, I love Tesla, and Elon Musk is a great guy doing wonderful things, and I would love a Tesla Roadster or Model S or Model X... but he's wrong. Tesla's logs don't prove shit.
I have seen the same graphs that you have presumably seen and they do in fact prove that Broders behavior was almost perfect in its ability to cause the car to fail. As for what the support folks told Broder and what he told them, there is no evidence one way or the other, but so far, large parts of Broders story do not correlate well with the only empirical evidence we have. This is what lawyers refer to as reasonable doubt, and is close to what lawyers refer to as perjury. Broder made false representations of check-able facts, so what else did he falsify? I highly doubt that anyone at Tesla told him to turn off the cruise control and alternately accelerate and brake, as this will only hurt the cars efficiency and as such its range. There is no scenario where that behavior is a good idea, and there is little chance that a Tesla tech support person would be so uneducated as to give that kind of advice. It is also highly unlikely that anyone at Tesla said to charge the car for an hour and then drive off with not enough range indicated. It is by far and gone likely that Broder was told that charging the car for an hour would restore the range meter to an accurate read. This would result from the battery being warmed by the charging process. It would by no means enable the car to have more charge than the meter indicates (excepting possibly an engineering margin for error which would not normally be made known to tech support people).
End of the day, the logs prove that Broder is an unreliable witness at best, and a deliberate liar at worst. Both are damning for a journalist.
Tesla is a shithole company and has this coming to them for LYING and pushing crappy gutless electric cars that NO ONE wants.
Are you aware that Tesla car orders are backlogged for more than three years and the waiting list gets longer every day? For a car that no one wants, they seem to be having no trouble selling lots of them in spite of the dishonestly bad reviews.
I beg to differ. With my vette set to high idle, I can and will happily idle down the street at 20 MPH in the biggest snow drifts. The secret is in the "snow plow" shaped front end. I just plow my own way...
And, of course, it can be used as an air conditioner in the summer - but then it uses a lot of power.
Actually, using them in heating mode typically uses more power. The bigger the differential between ambient temperature and the desired conditioned temperature, the more energy is required. Going from 90 to 70 is only 20 degrees difference. Going from 0 degrees to 70 is 70 degrees difference, so the heating mode uses a lot more energy. It is still always going to be better than a resistive heating element, but the bigger the temp differential, the closer the two options get in terms of "efficiency".
If Tesla is keeping tabs on consumers, then that's definitely a bigger sin than Broder lying through his teeth. Any proof they do this for everyone? I'd be more likely to believe they only do it if you're driving THEIR car which they loaned you for a test drive for you to report truthfully on. Probably not safe to just assume they respect your privacy more than your cell phone company does though.
There is no bigger danger to democracy than an individual who is tasked with educating the public knowingly falsifying reports. There is a reason in our society that journalists enjoy strong protections under the constitution, but that protection comes with responsibility, and Broder has violated the trust. If the NYT doesn't act, then they are complicit.
They showed what would almost certainly happen in reality, under a given set of circumstances.
Then why didn't they arrange to have that set of circumstances and film it rather than inventing lies whole cloth? If it allegedly would have happened then why didn't it, and why did they have to fake the breakdown?
It was an accurate review. The Tesla is a useless track day car. (unless your day is very short)
The only complaint Tesla could come up with is how they dramatized the out of power issue.
did you actually read the articles and ignore the parts you don't like, or are you genuinely not paying attention to reality. Top Gear was found to have done exactly what Tesla said they did, and only escaped having to pay damages because the judge determined that Tesla could not produce vehicles to meet demand and therefore not suffered any monetary loss (They sell every car long before its manufactured, and Tesla would be hard pressed to manufacture fast enough to keep up with demand). As for Top Gear, they are lying weasels of the worst variety. Anyone who trusts their word is either an idiot or a child.
The plots show a precipitous drop in charge level around the 400 mile mark that doesn't match the constant discharge slopes elsewhere. The only thing that happened at that time was the temperature increasing from 70F to 75F. It seems odd that at 35% charge the heaters would have that effect when nothing seemed to happen at other times with the temp above 74F.
I own an electric car (a Mitsubishi Miev in fact), and the heater sucks down a tremendous amount of power. The dash power draw meter indicates the total draw on the batteries, and in very cold weather, the heater draws as much power as cruising at 30 mph. If you sit in a parking lot for two hours with the heater set to 74 degrees (in 20 degree weather), you will use the same amount of power as driving 60 miles. Takes quite a chunk out of my battery life. It also happens to be a cheap and easy trick for messing with the range estimator on an electric car.
One person cannot be culpable for the failure of a test program to verify this equipment would function as intended. Testing is baked into the engineered procedures to design and install this system, and their work controls dictate that they be reviewed and approved. It's obvious you know little regarding electrical distribution and protection, in addition to not rtfa.
He or she is culpable if they put the wrong values in for the operating parameters. If this had gone the other way and caused a fire or worse, then there would be criminal negligence charges. Engineers get paid to do the job correctly. Where safety is at sake, they shouldn't be putting their name on something unless it has been properly verified. I can understand an engineer wanting to be conservative in these values so that a problem will tend to be a false positive rather than a failed safety, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a narrow "correct" range for these operating values that will allow the device to operate correctly without causing false positives. The fact that the values were not within that range indicates that the responsible engineer did not know what that range was, and consequently had not done his/her job.
How much redundancy do you want though? A complete redundant set of transmission lines and all the associated equipment to the stadium? Where are you going to put those lines? What do they cost? The last I knew, high voltage transmission lines were about $1million/mile in a rural area, and that was five years ago. I have no idea what they would cost in an urban area. If the football game is so important, maybe they should have their own power generation like hospitals do.
Something the size of a stadium might have redundant power supplies, or it might not, but no single piece of equipment should be capable of shutting down a supply line unless there really is danger. The offending piece of equipment should have had a failover / backup unit if needed. In fact it probably had such equipment, but it wasn't triggered because the problem was not equipment failure, but rather improper installation. No amount of redundancy can fully compensate for improper installations. There are just too many creative idiots out there. That having been said, the "idiot" here should be sent packing. When you're dealing with power levels that can cause major catastrophes, you really don't want someone with a track record of failure. Failures can be lethal in that business.
That the electric utility is called before a city council meeting to "answer for" a power outage at a football game is, frankly, laughable.
When its an event with that kind of money involved, you bet they get called in to explain it. Power outages are just not common in the U.S. and are normally only due to human error, or acts of nature. Devices that can fail should be introduced into systems in ways that provide redundancy. This is done for the sake of continued up-time, and safety. Not having sufficient redundancy can easily be referred to as human error. Saying that the task is "hard work" is an unacceptable excuse. If the system design was insufficient, then it should not have been used. If it was sufficient but was installed wrong, then the installer is at fault. Cutting costs is not an acceptable reason for a system failure. If the proper equipment and installation cost more than there was budget for, then the issue should have been escalated until it could be resolved by adding additional resources, or scrapping the project. Endangering a $100 million operation for the sake of saving $50,000 on an electrical installation is cause for an inquest, and given the severity, likely someone will loose their job as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he is asking the wrong question. A suggestion for a program isn't what he needs. He needs to look up a local college and take some night classes is CADing. There is the tool and then there is the thought process and currently he lacks the knowledge to even know what tool meets his needs when he tries them out.
And you think he needs a college class to figure this out? News flash! There are lots of people out there who can learn what they need to know with only a vague nudge in the right direction. On the cheapest end, a college level course will cost you several hundred dollars, and the only thing of value he is likely to glean is which tools to use? Sounds like an actual case of "Ask Slashdot saves hundreds of dollars!"
-=Geoskd
Not everything needs to be squeezed until it makes a buck, but as long as people keep seeing everything in the world with fucking dollar signs in their eyes the problem will continue.
As long as it requires money to eat, everything in this world will revolve around money. Any other belief is just self-delusion.
-=Geoskd
This company did it quite explicitly starting fifty-one years ago. There is a good chance you even have their product in your home right now. Is more than half a century long enough for you? Maybe it isn't. I always, always seek out that brand specifically because of their no-ad pledge.
They may not be serving up ads, but their site is selling visitor information to Google and Facebook among others. I know this because no-script showed both as being blocked...
-=Geoskd
I'm all for pornography/eroticism, but there's no need for that...
The free market economy would beg to differ...
The person who earns $5e6 a year is a person who can use the efforts of others 5 million dollars a year more effectively than anyone willing to work for much less. He adds at least $5e6 more value to his company than anyone else. The people he leads would produce $5e6 less if he were not at the helm, even if they worked just as hard. He, and not they, earned the money.
Do you believe that just anyone can run a company, that there's nothing special that a CEO can do to make a company successful? Do you believe that Carly Fiorina is just as good as Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard? No? Then re-evaluate what good leaders are worth.
90% of success is luck. Carly earned a lot of money, and was by almost any measure more successful than almost everyone I know. This was due to luck She did nothing any better than anyone else would have, and most things worse. The majority of poor and lower middle class people are only different from the 1% in terms of their opportunities. Bill gates may have dropped out of college to start Microsoft, but if he hadn't gone to college in the first place, it is a pretty safe bet he would never have met the people he needed to know to become successful. Ditto, the Zuck, and most every other successful entrepreneur.
Our society gives these people the opportunities, and that opportunity is worth far more than all the skill and hard work they have provided. There are millions of people out there with the hard work and skill to be wildly successful if they only get the chance, but for most of them, that chance will never come.
-=Geoskd
We are running a $1.6Trillion deficit per year right now and have been during the current administration. If you cut defense out completely we would have a $900 billion deficit PER YEAR!
Ummm, no, We are currently running about $1.0 Trillion, and that number will drop a bit as the economy recovers and tax revenue increases. Take 400 Billion out of the defense budget, and fix the tax loopholes that allow companies like Google and Microsoft to pay less than 5% taxes, and you will have closed almost the entire deficit. Moreover, as the economy recovers more, the remaining deficit will turn into a surplus that we can use to pay down some of the massive debt we racked up in the last decade. If you really want to go for the perfect game, jump the taxes on anyone making over $5 Mil back to 75%, and we won't have any more budget problems.
-=Geoskd
My point is, a lot of 'wasteful government spending' is just another form of Welfare for the United States. If you support welfare you should also support excessive gov spending (so long as that money stays in the USA of course).
My issue isn't with the defense welfare economy you described, my issue is with the millionaire and billionaire stock holders who make 40% profit margins off that same activity. If were gonna go with welfare, lets just do it already, and stop paying the middleman for the privilege...
-=Geoskd
Social Security isn't bankrupt.
To quote Paul Krugman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opinion/16krugman.html
But neither of these potential problems is a clear and present danger. Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come. ...
What’s really going on here?
Whats really going on here is that trust fund you mentioned has no cash in it. It is entirely funded by "special" government bonds to social security. The result is that the cash is gone, and the government owes itself the money back. The crisis isn't that social security will go bankrupt, the crisis is that social security loaned the money to the US government as a whole, and it looks like the US government might not be willing to pay back those bonds. The US government wants to pretend those bonds wont really need to be repaid so that they can renege on the payment of the bonds. The thinking is this, if Social security is changed so that it does not pay out as much benefit to each individual, then there truly has been a surplus over the last half century. That being the case, then congress would not have to repay those bonds (because social security wouldn't need all of the money to pay its obligations). By not having to repay all of those bonds, congress could wipe that expense off the budget and as such would have more money to waste on craptastic jet fighters and tax breaks for people and companies making more money than Cuba. Its a giant game of smoke and mirrors, and its complicated enough that very few people have yet realized that the money is already gone. The rich stole it from us in the form of tax breaks for the very wealthy.
Do you propose that the government not pay people the benefits they paid for as part of a contract?
There is no contract, there's just a law saying the government takes your money and will give it back later. That law can (and has) been changed.
You will find the courts have something to say about that. I believe that if push comes to shove, it will go to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS will make precedent by deciding that the U.S. government entered into an implied contract, and that the taxpayers upheld their end of the deal, so the government *must* uphold their end of the bargain. Anything less than that will likely foment revolution, and that wouldn't be good for anyone. My mother is in this boat. She is counting on social security (and the help of relatives) for her retirement because of a combination of poor life choices and bad luck. Without social security, she will have to rely 100% on relatives, and we will be very pissed off if we have to pay because the US government welched on its debts.
-=Geoskd
SS has never been a 'paid for' plan. It was always predicated on more and more current workers paying for the retiree benefits. Sometimes a surplus to be sure, but never 'fully funded' for an individual by that individual's contributions.
For 50 years, far more has been collected than was needed to pay current obligations. This was done so that the coming of the baby boomers wouldn't cause a financial crisis. Since the 80's, That process has been undercut by congress "loaning" then money to itself in the form of special bonds, and then using the proceeds to offset spending (such as excessive defense spending, welfare, and reducing taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans). As a result, we have effectively given the money to the defense contractors, the extremely poor, and the 1% (same as the defense contractors). We borrowed against the future social security income to do it. The end result is that we have exactly the social security funding crisis that was envisioned, but the solution that was put in place has been systematically destroyed and we have the crisis anyway. The only good way to fix it now is to cut defense spending down to the core, put taxes on the 1% back to 75%+ where it belongs, or go and get our money back at the point of a gun. The choice is yours.
-=Geoskd
Although the F-35 is the poster child for poor procurement processes, the simple fact of the matter is that entitlement spending dwarfs defense spending.
True, but entitlement spending is not a pure drain on society. It has a definite value to all of society. Defense spending at this level is just absurd and should be halted immediately. This kind of weapon is of no real use in anti-terror, or drug related warfare. The only real enemy these could be used against would be Chinese, and they have already made it abundantly clear they intend the nature of the war between the US and China will be virtual and economic, not combat. This is a Trillion dollar solution to a problem that doesn't exist, and hasn't for 20 years. If this, and a few other programs like it were to be cut, we wouldn't have a budget deficit anymore. 20% of our federal budget is "defense" spending. Cut this in half, and we no longer have any budget problems, even with keeping the Bush era tax cuts.
Those who advocate cutting entitlement spending and would leave this kind of spending in place do not understand the fundamentals of economics, nor do they have even the foggiest idea of what the hidden costs of not funding social programs are. We need to do whatever it takes to reinforce our economy as quickly as possible, because this will be our only effective defense against the Chinese threat in the next 30 years.
-=Geoskd
You do realize it's relatively trivial to convert an engine to work with Ethanol, right?
No it isn't. It involves changing out all of the gaskets and rubber parts in the engine and fuel system and replacing them with more chemically resistant varieties. Even if the cost of the new parts is trivial, the cost of the labor is not. Building new engines that are ethanol capable is fairly straightforward, retrofit on the other hand is prohibitively expensive (it would be cheaper to replace the vehicle).
-=Geoskd
Let me be the first to say it:
Wooooosh!
Look, I love Tesla, and Elon Musk is a great guy doing wonderful things, and I would love a Tesla Roadster or Model S or Model X... but he's wrong. Tesla's logs don't prove shit.
I have seen the same graphs that you have presumably seen and they do in fact prove that Broders behavior was almost perfect in its ability to cause the car to fail. As for what the support folks told Broder and what he told them, there is no evidence one way or the other, but so far, large parts of Broders story do not correlate well with the only empirical evidence we have. This is what lawyers refer to as reasonable doubt, and is close to what lawyers refer to as perjury. Broder made false representations of check-able facts, so what else did he falsify? I highly doubt that anyone at Tesla told him to turn off the cruise control and alternately accelerate and brake, as this will only hurt the cars efficiency and as such its range. There is no scenario where that behavior is a good idea, and there is little chance that a Tesla tech support person would be so uneducated as to give that kind of advice. It is also highly unlikely that anyone at Tesla said to charge the car for an hour and then drive off with not enough range indicated. It is by far and gone likely that Broder was told that charging the car for an hour would restore the range meter to an accurate read. This would result from the battery being warmed by the charging process. It would by no means enable the car to have more charge than the meter indicates (excepting possibly an engineering margin for error which would not normally be made known to tech support people).
End of the day, the logs prove that Broder is an unreliable witness at best, and a deliberate liar at worst. Both are damning for a journalist.
-=Geoskd
Tesla is a shithole company and has this coming to them for LYING and pushing crappy gutless electric cars that NO ONE wants.
Are you aware that Tesla car orders are backlogged for more than three years and the waiting list gets longer every day? For a car that no one wants, they seem to be having no trouble selling lots of them in spite of the dishonestly bad reviews.
-=Geoskd
Neither will any gas powered sports car.
I beg to differ. With my vette set to high idle, I can and will happily idle down the street at 20 MPH in the biggest snow drifts. The secret is in the "snow plow" shaped front end. I just plow my own way...
-=Geoskd
And, of course, it can be used as an air conditioner in the summer - but then it uses a lot of power.
Actually, using them in heating mode typically uses more power. The bigger the differential between ambient temperature and the desired conditioned temperature, the more energy is required. Going from 90 to 70 is only 20 degrees difference. Going from 0 degrees to 70 is 70 degrees difference, so the heating mode uses a lot more energy. It is still always going to be better than a resistive heating element, but the bigger the temp differential, the closer the two options get in terms of "efficiency".
-=Geoskd
That's like putting a gallon of gas into a car to drive 100 miles.
If my car actually used gas, it would do that...
I'm just sayin
If Tesla is keeping tabs on consumers, then that's definitely a bigger sin than Broder lying through his teeth. Any proof they do this for everyone? I'd be more likely to believe they only do it if you're driving THEIR car which they loaned you for a test drive for you to report truthfully on. Probably not safe to just assume they respect your privacy more than your cell phone company does though.
There is no bigger danger to democracy than an individual who is tasked with educating the public knowingly falsifying reports. There is a reason in our society that journalists enjoy strong protections under the constitution, but that protection comes with responsibility, and Broder has violated the trust. If the NYT doesn't act, then they are complicit.
-=Geoskd
They showed what would almost certainly happen in reality, under a given set of circumstances.
Then why didn't they arrange to have that set of circumstances and film it rather than inventing lies whole cloth? If it allegedly would have happened then why didn't it, and why did they have to fake the breakdown?
-=Geoskd
It was an accurate review. The Tesla is a useless track day car. (unless your day is very short)
The only complaint Tesla could come up with is how they dramatized the out of power issue.
did you actually read the articles and ignore the parts you don't like, or are you genuinely not paying attention to reality. Top Gear was found to have done exactly what Tesla said they did, and only escaped having to pay damages because the judge determined that Tesla could not produce vehicles to meet demand and therefore not suffered any monetary loss (They sell every car long before its manufactured, and Tesla would be hard pressed to manufacture fast enough to keep up with demand). As for Top Gear, they are lying weasels of the worst variety. Anyone who trusts their word is either an idiot or a child.
-=Geoskd
The plots show a precipitous drop in charge level around the 400 mile mark that doesn't match the constant discharge slopes elsewhere. The only thing that happened at that time was the temperature increasing from 70F to 75F. It seems odd that at 35% charge the heaters would have that effect when nothing seemed to happen at other times with the temp above 74F.
I own an electric car (a Mitsubishi Miev in fact), and the heater sucks down a tremendous amount of power. The dash power draw meter indicates the total draw on the batteries, and in very cold weather, the heater draws as much power as cruising at 30 mph. If you sit in a parking lot for two hours with the heater set to 74 degrees (in 20 degree weather), you will use the same amount of power as driving 60 miles. Takes quite a chunk out of my battery life. It also happens to be a cheap and easy trick for messing with the range estimator on an electric car.
-=Geoskd
One person cannot be culpable for the failure of a test program to verify this equipment would function as intended. Testing is baked into the engineered procedures to design and install this system, and their work controls dictate that they be reviewed and approved. It's obvious you know little regarding electrical distribution and protection, in addition to not rtfa.
He or she is culpable if they put the wrong values in for the operating parameters. If this had gone the other way and caused a fire or worse, then there would be criminal negligence charges. Engineers get paid to do the job correctly. Where safety is at sake, they shouldn't be putting their name on something unless it has been properly verified. I can understand an engineer wanting to be conservative in these values so that a problem will tend to be a false positive rather than a failed safety, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a narrow "correct" range for these operating values that will allow the device to operate correctly without causing false positives. The fact that the values were not within that range indicates that the responsible engineer did not know what that range was, and consequently had not done his/her job.
-=Geoskd
How much redundancy do you want though? A complete redundant set of transmission lines and all the associated equipment to the stadium? Where are you going to put those lines? What do they cost? The last I knew, high voltage transmission lines were about $1million/mile in a rural area, and that was five years ago. I have no idea what they would cost in an urban area. If the football game is so important, maybe they should have their own power generation like hospitals do.
Something the size of a stadium might have redundant power supplies, or it might not, but no single piece of equipment should be capable of shutting down a supply line unless there really is danger. The offending piece of equipment should have had a failover / backup unit if needed. In fact it probably had such equipment, but it wasn't triggered because the problem was not equipment failure, but rather improper installation. No amount of redundancy can fully compensate for improper installations. There are just too many creative idiots out there. That having been said, the "idiot" here should be sent packing. When you're dealing with power levels that can cause major catastrophes, you really don't want someone with a track record of failure. Failures can be lethal in that business.
-=Geoskd
That the electric utility is called before a city council meeting to "answer for" a power outage at a football game is, frankly, laughable.
When its an event with that kind of money involved, you bet they get called in to explain it. Power outages are just not common in the U.S. and are normally only due to human error, or acts of nature. Devices that can fail should be introduced into systems in ways that provide redundancy. This is done for the sake of continued up-time, and safety. Not having sufficient redundancy can easily be referred to as human error. Saying that the task is "hard work" is an unacceptable excuse. If the system design was insufficient, then it should not have been used. If it was sufficient but was installed wrong, then the installer is at fault. Cutting costs is not an acceptable reason for a system failure. If the proper equipment and installation cost more than there was budget for, then the issue should have been escalated until it could be resolved by adding additional resources, or scrapping the project. Endangering a $100 million operation for the sake of saving $50,000 on an electrical installation is cause for an inquest, and given the severity, likely someone will loose their job as a result.
-=Geoskd