But now you're just backpedaling as quickly as you can... Until now, you weren't talking about distribution.
I'm not particularly impressed with your quotation of single sentences out of context. But let's review my very first response : "Did you not notice the energy problem of having enough electricity at the charging station at the right amperage to do 30 minute charging?"
That's generic, and covers both transmission and generation.
Next, there are limits to the transmission of energy. My state, California, is notorious for not building power plants in state (save the environment!) and buying power from out of state; on the flip side, it hosts a large number of the early adopters of EV.
For EVs to be widespread in my state would really need more generators built *somewhere*, or power outages and high prices will result. Smart grids help with distribution, but perfect distribution is not attainable; at some point you have to increase the capacity - both for the generation and transmission. (read the article - power company is working HARD to prevent outage caused by EVs!)
I don't know why you're so desperate to try and discredit EVs, and I don't care.
Not trying to discredit EVs. Trying to cleanup the bullshit optimism that is unhinged from reality. There was the off chance you might listen and correct - in either case, 3rd parties can read our discussion and be educated or amused.
"researchers at the U.S. Department of EnergyÃ(TM)s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have calculated that the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States."
Followed IMMEDIATELY by, "But there's a catch. While power plants and transmission lines have excess capacity, things can get tight when it comes to distributing power to individual neighborhoods. And this is especially the case since electric vehicle sales aren't evenly distributed." [bold emphasis added].
The researcher calculation also probably uses favorable assumptions, such as the existence of a wide-spread smart grid that manages demand, with everyone following optimal group behavior to make the cars work efficiently with the grid.
A problem is that cars exist to move people when they want to go somewhere. Cars do not exist to be charged efficiently by the grid. Hence, the DOCUMENTED challenges in the article - the addition of a single quick car charger requires the power company to plan an upgrade to a neighborhood's power grid.
Real world experience trumps theoretical extrapolation. The challenge does not make widespread EV use impossible, but it shows that adoption requires a lot more work than you're acknowledging.
Solar power installations are happening in CA, but it has NOTHING specifically to do with EVs. That's your own imagination, and/or reading comprehension failure.
You brought it up in response to my challenge to show how the power grid is going to handle the increased demand caused by widespread EVs. Based on the context, I thought you wanted to make a serious response to my point, rather than bringing up a red herring with no relation to the discussion.
It should go without saying that charging EVs at night is not going to be helped by daylight power generation. (if you'd like to suggest batteries/supercaps to store the energy, that costs money and reduces efficiency)
Nope... EV chargers have built-in timer, and instructions direct owners to set it for 8pm or so. If a good number of people don't voluntarily do so, then power companies will just have to expand peak/off-peak billing. Should be easy enough to make the change with all the "smart" meters they're installing, everywhere.
In other words, the power companies have to do a lot of extra work to integrate a *small* number of electrical cars. Not that it's impossible to scale it further, but it's harder than you're thinking.
"Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in Californiaâ"where the largest number of electric vehicles are soldâ"scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages."
Just a single dedicated EV charger in a neighborhood forces the power company to adjust, and it's paid by everyone, not the EV owner. It uses subsidies, not cost-savings, to build that infrastructure. That makes it a luxury, not an inevitable improvement.
Electrical demand is currently FALLING. More-efficient appliances, cheaper prices on new, efficient devices thanks to China, automation, etc. And new technology like improved CFLs, and now LEDs that use half as much power still for lighting.
Never-the-less, more power plants are being built all over the country, all the time. Wind turbines are being installed at break-neck speed all over the place. And California at least is expanding their solar power installations (PV and thermal) as fast as they reasonably can.
Electrical demand is down at the same time that a recession/depression has been sustained for 4 odd years. (which reduces demand, as well as the manufacturing done to profit off that demand)
Are you just mindlessly reciting talking points now? You argue that EVs will be charged after 8pm; and then point to solar power installations as a development to meet such an increased demand... I'll leave it to you to figure out what's wrong with that thinking.
EVs will NOT be a sudden spike in demand, anyhow. They will be a small, gradual increase in demand on the grid, that will not need to be addressed for years, and will be handled in the same manner as increasing demand for any other reasons.
Which is fine as long as EV adoption is not paid for with taxpayer subsidies. Let the rich kids pay for their own bloody toys and status markers.
Do your own damn research...
From the guy who seriously suggested that airlines would be happy to switch to *solar* powered airplanes.
I guess if the future market of flyers are willing to pay multiple thousands of dollar for a ride in a two-person plane that travels slower than a car.
Completely false logic. The overwhelming majority of people will charge up at home the overwhelming majority of the time, off-peak and all, so minimal new electrical generating capacity will be necessary.
Sure. Those blackouts during summer when everyone turns on their AC will not happen because electrical cars charged at home cause no significant extra load on the power grid. No overlap at all between the times people are at home using AC and charging the electrical car.
Worst case planning trumps wishful thinking. Yes, electrical car power demand would drive a need for more power plants - where are those in the pipeline? Where is that infrastructure being built to handle the future demand? You said it's minimal - provide a ballpark number to demonstrate how minimal it ought to be.
Several times cheaper isn't "minor". Much of the infrastructure is already there. You keep paying for much more expensive infrastructure by driving a gasoline burning vehicle. And the cost of charging stations will be borne by the folks using them, not spread around, and they can decide if the per-KW price on the sign is worth it or not.
Batteries are not cheap. The premium for the electrical vehicle parts exceeds the per-mile cost-savings for most vehicles for most driving patterns. (personally cheaper for an individual due to subsidies is not the same as actually being cheaper)
There's a chance that new tech will close that gap in the future, but we're not there yet - and may never - like solar powered commercial aircraft.
No, I see no problem there at all... Lots of office buildings have higher-power service than we're talking about, and you're acting as if it's some sort of insurmountable goal. Sure, it's more power than a private home has available, but every shopping mall, and passenger airport in the country should be able to provide several parking spaces with the kind of power without trouble. Maybe your average fast food restaurants don't typically have that kind of power, but running a 3-phase circuit to them isn't terribly expensive.
If you're only assuming a tiny minority of electric cars while everyone else drives ICEs, sure.
If everyone's running electric cars, that's a huge spike in electrical demand that requires a corresponding power generation increase, sited whereever it needs to be. See how many cars at a typical gas station? Make each of those 5 minute fillups into 30 minute charges, across dozens of vehicles per station.
Is the minor per mile cost-savings of electric vehicles going to fund that widescale infrastructure overhaul?
A couple more price increases, and airlines wouldn't mind, at all, switching to solar-powered electric aircraft.
I have severe doubts that the amount of sunlight that hits the surface area of an aircraft will be sufficient to keep it flying, at least for anything that carries commercial quantities of passengers and cargo
Good for you. I have a brick...
Solar powered airplane in cloudy weather. What's the plan?
Let's do a brief overview of the first solar airplane google links:
Solar Impulse: Wingspan of a 747, two passengers. Travels around 20~30 MPH per Wiki article. "power of a scooter". 3,500 lbs.
Boeing 747: 500~ passengers. Travels at 500~ MPH. 380,000-700,000 lbs. (empty/max flying weights)
Even being ridiculously generous and allowing that a Boeing 747 can maybe fit say 10x as many solar panels of the Solar Impulse, solar power can't do it. 1% of the passengers; 0.5~1% of the weight, 7~% of the speed. (which is maybe 5% of the power)
Solar powered airplanes might have some use in some niche solutions, such as long duration UAV monitoring of weather/environment. But solar powered for general commercial use? You can't be serious.
That's utter nonsense. Once charging times get down to about 30 minutes for every 5.5 hours of driving, EVs will be able to exceed the limits of most human drivers, who have to stop for bathroom breaks and food anyhow, and might just as well plug-in to that charger in the parking space while they're doing that. Many truck stops have similar arrangements.
How do you plan to get those charging times down? Did you not notice the energy problem of having enough electricity at the charging station at the right amperage to do 30 minute charging?
A couple more price increases, and airlines wouldn't mind, at all, switching to solar-powered electric aircraft.
I have severe doubts that the amount of sunlight that hits the surface area of an aircraft will be sufficient to keep it flying, at least for anything that carries commercial quantities of passengers and cargo. That's before we even get into the safety issues of a plane that can't guarantee it has the fuel to get to its own destination.
How are you going to determine if someone has insurance if they would die if not treated immediately? Sorry, emergency care has to be free. Unless you want to encourage poor parents not to drive their child to the emergency room because it would bankrupt them.
If only there was a way for people to receive the life-saving healthcare first and then pay for it after the fact. People would promise to pay, and then pay it back over time, maybe with a small amount of interest. Something like a credit card or a mortgage. Or maybe the government could pay ERs for every single patient they force doctors to treat for free.
Emergency care is not free - unless you think the doctors and nurses who provide that life-saving treatment do not deserve to be paid a cent for their skills and time.
you are ignoring the fact that people without insurance get treatment regardless of whether they have insurance or not.
Car insurance is insurance. If you get in a car accident, does your car get fixed independent of whether or not you have insurance? Or perhaps more precisely - does it get fixed without payment?
No, outside of a very charitable mechanic.
Emergency care can be handled quite well with health insurance - insure against an emergency; and when a legit emergency occurs, the insurance covers it. Don't buy insurance, you pay for the ER treatment yourself. That ERs are forced by law to treat regardless of payment is a government introduced market distortion - one that probably introduced more harm than it prevented. (such as rising healthcare costs and increased insurance premiums)
None of what you said contradicts my claim: Insurance is not subsidies - it is individuals paying for their own expected healthcare costs.
If you don't see the connection between the two than you have spent no time actually thinking about the law. People who could buy insurance but don't are usually healthy. Take them out of the risk pool, and insurance becomes more expensive for everyone, increasing the incentive not to get insurance for everyone who can do without. But even though they are healthy and don't want insurance, you know that at some point, maybe 10 years down the line, maybe 20, they will also need health care.
If you think *your* health insurance costs are dependent upon the activity of everyone else in the pool, you don't understand what insurance *is*.
Health insurance is a gamble where you bet against your health. If you get sick, you get a payout that will help you cover the healthcare costs; if you don't get sick, "the house wins". Every premium is calculated to pay more than your expected value of healthcare costs. On average, you always "lose", but you mitigate catastrophic risk. Everyone else's healthiness only matters as far as they affect the average and the degree your insurance company judges you to be average.
Think of car insurance - if you get into major accidents every year, you're a high risk driver, and insurance will charge you more, or might not even bother selling you a policy. If you're a safe driver with a 100% clean record, insurance can treat you as a lower risk driver and give you lower premiums. The average young male driver is a higher risk driver; but we don't tell older drivers to insure for the sake of lowering the insurance costs for young males; we just charge young drivers more because they do cost more.
Insurance is not "healthy/low risk" people subsidizing (!) "unhealthy/high risk" people. It is everyone, high risk or low risk, paying for their own average costs. (with some overhead to keep insurance company sustainable and able to handle unexpected payout surges)
Many times, you'll see prices at the pump increase for no apparent reason, you'll even hear regulatory agencies ask the oil companies and only be answered by shrugs. The answer is that they'll jack up price ahead of things like vacation weekends in order to make more money off people going out. Fuel competes against nothing; for most Americans, you NEED fuel to do just about everything. Even with rising gas prices, you still get the fuel.
You answered your own "no apparent reason" claim. "vacation weekends" means more people are planning to drive around and use more gas. if the supply doesn't fluctuate much day to day, but the demand does - what does Econ 101 predict?
Vacation weekend driving tells you that there is a lot more "luxury" driving (for personal entertainment/recreation) - if higher gas prices make it not worth it, that's a price signal that perhaps the vacation should be limited to closer locations, or maybe the family should just stay at home.
Another recent example is construction works, particularly public sector. There are massive collusion networks that artificially raise prices by 5-15% (perhaps even more) and buy the silence of politicians and government workers. They set prices together, they decide who is going to get which contract, and if a newcomer decides not to play ball, they suffocate it until they leave or go bankrupt.
Political corruption with public sector projects is not "free market collusion", the supposed evil we need gov't to protect us against.
Your first example is not an example of collusion. Your second example is not free market, as the gov't is a party to the transaction. Do you have any examples at all?
If we'd actually allow such a thing, you'd see a lot of goods suddenly inflate in price for no reason whatsoever because by colluding corporations can lock you out of any alternative. Collusion breaks the principle of a free market by removing competition.
Citation needed.
As in, where historically has this type of collusion been used? How long was it sustained before it was stopped? Because even a cabal of corporations have very little control over the competition their products will get.
Products don't just compete against their own category. They compete against everything else. Food, entertainment, housing, transportation - name it, there's enough alternatives that it'd take more than collusion amongst a few (or many) companies to "shut down" competition.
If Buffet wanted to pay more in taxes he could, he could declare his investment income as regular income or he could simply overpay every year. He doesn't because he doesn't really want to. He is smart enough to realize that taxing the income of the 1%er at 100% won't solve the spending issues in DC. He also knows that every time we raise taxes on "the wealthy" everybody gets included as well.
Warren Buffet also happens to have several lines of business that greatly benefit from the types of regulations he pushes.
Ex: He pushes for higher estate taxes
1. He owns businesses that sell life insurance policies, which are a tax shelter used in estate planning.
2. Some family businesses failed to plan ahead sufficiently for estate taxes, resulting in them being sold at bargain prices to pay the tax. Buffet has profited form the purchases of such companies.
Those facts, and the fact that he doesn't voluntarily pay more taxes, demonstrate that Buffet isn't really pushing for the general welfare; that's just the marketing for his self interest.
Slave labor is hardly free: You need enough coercive violence to keep them motivated(and away from your throat), they have the same subsistence requirements as anybody else, they need training suitable to their assigned function, and you either need to allocate additional subsistence expenses for non-working pregnant women and children(if you wish to produce replacement slaves in-house) or factor in the cost of hunting and enslaving replacements from suitable human populations.
Versus the robots that run with no maintenance, obsolescence, energy requirements, or design flaws?
Of course that hypothetical robot will replace an "average" human being. It's fantasized to be perfect, infinitely capable, and despite all of that human design/engineering, cheap. (but not so cheap that anyone outside the 0.0001% can own them)
But before trying to restructure society on that notion, it should be noted that hypothetical perfect robot does not exist (yet?). What is a real world robot's potential? How far can it really scale before it hits natural limits?
People who think that the benefits of increased automation will magically accrue to everyone are... questionably balanced... but the notion that an increasing number of tasks will be sufficiently well automated that even literal slave labor can't beat machines on price seems much harder to dispute.
Slave labor is free. Who's paying you to take their robots?
The benefits of increased automation will accrue to everyone because the technology increases productivity and makes goods cheaper. The average person today has access to goods that would have been decadent luxuries generations ago. Did someone wave a magic wand? Did someone pass a law to make goods available and cheap? No, but yet the outcome is plain to see.
Robotics technology is not going to mature overnight, and unless they develop human-level AI, there will be limits to what any robotic system is capable of doing, meaning that there will be something that humans can do better. Thus, no replacement of robots for humans for every task.
Since humans are running the robots (unless AI enables completely autonomous robots), we end up with humans competing with humans - that's no different than what we have now.
But the problem is that until now technology has generally acted as a productivity multiplier for the general population. What will happen at some point is probably that humans are in fact not needed any more.
Until robotics can make decisions (AI), you need humans in the loop to see the data, analyze, and choose.
That just makes the robotic system a productivity multiplier for the human running it. Increased human productivity is not going to destroy human society, though it will change how things are done.
I don't really understand the point of "demonstrating your skills" by killing some harmless creature. That is just killing for fun which is frankly rather barbaric and certainly not very respectful of the life that was just ended.
Because building skills develops character?
There's preparation, tracking, knowledge of the prey, having a plan, executing it...
Even if the person doesn't "really need" the deer meat, it's not like the food is really wasted. It feeds scavengers in the ecosystem, which happens in the wild with any other predator.
It's not like hunters are eager to drag out the kill and torture their target - they want to drop the animal with one well placed shot, which is a quick death.
It's certainly more productive than playing FPSes on a console.
Using a rifle that can kill at several hundred yards to hunt a woodland creature is not exactly a huge challenge.
So if one has any sort of ethical dilemma with harvesting stem cells from embryos under the notion that such willful destruction of embryos is equivalent to premeditated homicide, this particular technique shouldn't make those people breathe any easier, and in fact, may be cause for them to scream even more outrage at the notion that, to use words they might throw around, "they are creating even more people to deliberately murder".
Oddly, from reading the article on what's actually done, I'm not sure calling the result an embryonic stem cell is accurate. Digging to the actual study excerpt, they use an oocyte, which if I'm parsing the relevant wiki article correctly, is an unfertilized egg.
The definition of an embyro is that it's the first stage of life, which eventually grows into a mature lifeform. An unfertilized egg is not an embryo, and I don't think the process of inserting a skin cell results in a cell capable of growing into a human being. If it's not an embryo, calling its resulting stem cell "embryonic" seems like false advertising.
In other words, the process doesn't sound objectionable, but the label seems to be deliberately controversial. What purpose does that serve?
If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations, it will teach them more.
Spending money on "education" != improved education. I can spend $10 eating out, or $1 for self prepared food; the $10 meal is not necessarily 10x as filling or tasty.
Yes, we do want an educated citizenry, but raw money spent is not the way to measure that.
Too late. Slashdot long ago made the transition from tech site to tech culture site. (Why do you think there are so many "wtf is bitcoin" posts on every Bitcoin thread? Could it be because Slashdot no longer attracts a particularly tech-savvy constituency?)
Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.
In that there is less gun crime? Maybe. In that there is less violence? No. Compare UK's crime rate to the US's crime rate, seeing how the US is the standard of "gun crazy", while UK has successfully disarmed its citizenry.
Thorough gun control is analogous to bomb control. Anyone can build a bomb with instructions on the internet, but most of us don't. Why? The public has decided that bombs kill way too many people and the law (in the United States, at least), severely punishes people who, successfully or otherwise, blow up a bomb. Like all other hazardous items (with the curious exception of guns), individuals have to be licensed to handle bombs and there is probably a federal registry that lists all of them and where they store their bomb-building supplies.
I'm sure the 250 people directly injured from the Boston marathon bombings will be glad to hear that bomb control laws protected them.
People in the United States don't have lots of bombs in their houses. Why, then, would gun control enforcement pose any particular challenge?
The reason why people don't have bombs isn't because of the laws on the books, it's because they don't have a desire to inflict mass destruction on their fellow citizens. Your idea of cause and effect is utterly wrong. Every act of terrorism in Western countries were against the law - the laws don't stop criminals, they just provide us a standardized way of punishing them (with the hopes that the standard will provide deterrence).
Guns are different than bombs because they are personal self defense weapons. You can't protect yourself from a mugging with a bomb (without a high risk of collateral damage), but you can with a gun.
Yes it bothers me, I just can't see a working alternative. The "invisible hand" is blocked by opaque decision making and info.
Gov't makes that problem worse, because it is the primary blocker of the "invisible hand".
If you can't see a working alternative, you need to realize the status quo is another option. You want to expand gov't power when it's been demonstrated that gov't is part of the problem - that is an irrational position.
Agreed. But the attempt should be made. There has to be someone you can appeal too. The courts don't cut it, the current US system is might (money) is right.
You want to regulate "influence"? Who is the mind-reading omnipresent omniscient individual you're going to put into power to "do something"? And having given him such absolute power, how do you plan to keep him from abusing it?
I'd rather be "gouged" on my consumer goods than to be subject to the thought police. I can buy from another company - the thought police are resisted with violence.
My limited understanding is that there was no effective competition. I believe that Standard was thought to be so powerful that they could effectively shutdown whole sections of countries.
Read the wikipedia article - not that it should be treated as an authority, but it gives a broad enough overview and does have sources.
At the time of its breakup, Standard Oil had 60~65% of the national refining capacity. That does make it a powerful company, but again, prices were DROPPING (if this is monopoly abuse, let's have MORE of it). 40~45% of capacity is not "ineffective competition".
Furthermore, "shutting down" sections of the country means not selling product. That is giving away market share to the competition, and is something that undermines any "monopoly" power a company might have. There's short term harm, but feedback forces mitigate long term damage and discourage the short term harm from happening at all.
It's not that I think companies are angels; it's that your cure is worse than the problem. Rule of law and free markets are preferable to any type of top-down centralized micro-management by gov't entities.
But who is to say that life HAS to function by DNA? That is how we developed, sure, but just because one planet in one spot with one kind of conditions developed that way does NOT mean that all life HAS to evolve that way.
There's only so many chemical elements to work with, and those elements have certain observed properties. Maybe there's an undiscovered exotic configuration of common elements that could be used for life inside molten lava or the sun - but the more likely reality is that there isn't. A chemist or physicist might come up with good explanation why life is impossible given that level of energy (involving chemical reactions and atomic bonds), but I'm content to approximate it as "very unlikely"
If life finds a way, we should find life anywhere we look - yet we can find and create sterile environments. Why is that? Life is a complex system built upon certain prerequisites. Violate those prerequisites, and life quickly becomes dead.
When you treat life as an information system (which it is), then you recognize that for every working configuration, there are vastly more non-working ones. There's no particular reason why there must exist a working configuration, because failure is a common and easy option. (ex: non-compiling buggy code)
This is one of the reasons Neil DeGrasse is pushing for better exploration of Mars and Europa, as he says until we find actual alien life, even if its just the size of a single flea, we just won't know if life follows a single 'roadmap" or if there are many ways to get to the same place just depending on conditions.
Or maybe this whole notion that life is merely an accidental self-assembling self-improving system of systems is fundamentally flawed.
Sure it may not be the kind of life you can sit down and discuss the laws of physics with but it IS life and to say we know for sure what planets can and can't support life when we haven't even explored the planets in our own solar system well enough to say for sure there is no life on them? That isn't science, that is arrogance.
Pay attention to what the actual data is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile
However, it is thought unlikely that microbes could survive at temperatures above 150ÂC, as the cohesion of DNA and other vital molecules begins to break down at this point.
Temperature of Lava: 700-1200 deg C. Surface of Sun: Estimated 5505 deg C
Are you claiming that life has found or will find a way in those environments?
If yes, you are making a claim with no data - ignorant claims are not superior to "arrogant" claims. If no, then you have conceded that are limits on "life finds a way".
Difficult, will change with situation, matter for courts/regulator.
You're writing a blank check to the entity with a monopoly on force - the government. You hate monopolies, but that doesn't bother you?
No that's OK, but you shouldn't be able to force a supplier to charge more for a new competitor or force a vendor to use your product.
Force rising to the level of violence is a crime. Force that is not violence is more accurately described as "influence", and measuring abuse there is difficult and extremely vulnerable to corruption.
What's your opinion on Bell's breakup?
You dodged the question on Standard Oil. Why was its breakup as a "monopoly" a good thing when its existence had benefited customers (lower prices, [i]Standard[/i]ized oil) and there was plenty of market competition at the time of the decision?
As for Bell, I don't have much of an opinion - gov't granted a monopoly and then took it back. The loss of the monopoly seems to have improved customer options and prices, though some will still mourn Bell's R&D labs.
Slashdot Mirror
But now you're just backpedaling as quickly as you can... Until now, you weren't talking about distribution.
I'm not particularly impressed with your quotation of single sentences out of context. But let's review my very first response : "Did you not notice the energy problem of having enough electricity at the charging station at the right amperage to do 30 minute charging?"
That's generic, and covers both transmission and generation.
Next, there are limits to the transmission of energy. My state, California, is notorious for not building power plants in state (save the environment!) and buying power from out of state; on the flip side, it hosts a large number of the early adopters of EV.
For EVs to be widespread in my state would really need more generators built *somewhere*, or power outages and high prices will result. Smart grids help with distribution, but perfect distribution is not attainable; at some point you have to increase the capacity - both for the generation and transmission. (read the article - power company is working HARD to prevent outage caused by EVs!)
I don't know why you're so desperate to try and discredit EVs, and I don't care.
Not trying to discredit EVs. Trying to cleanup the bullshit optimism that is unhinged from reality. There was the off chance you might listen and correct - in either case, 3rd parties can read our discussion and be educated or amused.
So, how about those solar-powered airplanes?
"researchers at the U.S. Department of EnergyÃ(TM)s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have calculated that the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States."
Followed IMMEDIATELY by, "But there's a catch. While power plants and transmission lines have excess capacity, things can get tight when it comes to distributing power to individual neighborhoods. And this is especially the case since electric vehicle sales aren't evenly distributed." [bold emphasis added].
The researcher calculation also probably uses favorable assumptions, such as the existence of a wide-spread smart grid that manages demand, with everyone following optimal group behavior to make the cars work efficiently with the grid.
A problem is that cars exist to move people when they want to go somewhere. Cars do not exist to be charged efficiently by the grid. Hence, the DOCUMENTED challenges in the article - the addition of a single quick car charger requires the power company to plan an upgrade to a neighborhood's power grid.
Real world experience trumps theoretical extrapolation. The challenge does not make widespread EV use impossible, but it shows that adoption requires a lot more work than you're acknowledging.
Solar power installations are happening in CA, but it has NOTHING specifically to do with EVs. That's your own imagination, and/or reading comprehension failure.
You brought it up in response to my challenge to show how the power grid is going to handle the increased demand caused by widespread EVs. Based on the context, I thought you wanted to make a serious response to my point, rather than bringing up a red herring with no relation to the discussion.
It should go without saying that charging EVs at night is not going to be helped by daylight power generation. (if you'd like to suggest batteries/supercaps to store the energy, that costs money and reduces efficiency)
So, how about those solar-powered planes?
Nope... EV chargers have built-in timer, and instructions direct owners to set it for 8pm or so. If a good number of people don't voluntarily do so, then power companies will just have to expand peak/off-peak billing. Should be easy enough to make the change with all the "smart" meters they're installing, everywhere.
In other words, the power companies have to do a lot of extra work to integrate a *small* number of electrical cars. Not that it's impossible to scale it further, but it's harder than you're thinking.
"Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in Californiaâ"where the largest number of electric vehicles are soldâ"scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages."
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518066/could-electric-cars-threaten-the-grid/
Just a single dedicated EV charger in a neighborhood forces the power company to adjust, and it's paid by everyone, not the EV owner. It uses subsidies, not cost-savings, to build that infrastructure. That makes it a luxury, not an inevitable improvement.
Electrical demand is currently FALLING. More-efficient appliances, cheaper prices on new, efficient devices thanks to China, automation, etc. And new technology like improved CFLs, and now LEDs that use half as much power still for lighting.
Never-the-less, more power plants are being built all over the country, all the time. Wind turbines are being installed at break-neck speed all over the place. And California at least is expanding their solar power installations (PV and thermal) as fast as they reasonably can.
Electrical demand is down at the same time that a recession/depression has been sustained for 4 odd years. (which reduces demand, as well as the manufacturing done to profit off that demand)
Are you just mindlessly reciting talking points now? You argue that EVs will be charged after 8pm; and then point to solar power installations as a development to meet such an increased demand ... I'll leave it to you to figure out what's wrong with that thinking.
EVs will NOT be a sudden spike in demand, anyhow. They will be a small, gradual increase in demand on the grid, that will not need to be addressed for years, and will be handled in the same manner as increasing demand for any other reasons.
Which is fine as long as EV adoption is not paid for with taxpayer subsidies. Let the rich kids pay for their own bloody toys and status markers.
Do your own damn research...
From the guy who seriously suggested that airlines would be happy to switch to *solar* powered airplanes.
I guess if the future market of flyers are willing to pay multiple thousands of dollar for a ride in a two-person plane that travels slower than a car.
Completely false logic. The overwhelming majority of people will charge up at home the overwhelming majority of the time, off-peak and all, so minimal new electrical generating capacity will be necessary.
Sure. Those blackouts during summer when everyone turns on their AC will not happen because electrical cars charged at home cause no significant extra load on the power grid. No overlap at all between the times people are at home using AC and charging the electrical car.
Worst case planning trumps wishful thinking. Yes, electrical car power demand would drive a need for more power plants - where are those in the pipeline? Where is that infrastructure being built to handle the future demand? You said it's minimal - provide a ballpark number to demonstrate how minimal it ought to be.
Several times cheaper isn't "minor". Much of the infrastructure is already there. You keep paying for much more expensive infrastructure by driving a gasoline burning vehicle. And the cost of charging stations will be borne by the folks using them, not spread around, and they can decide if the per-KW price on the sign is worth it or not.
Batteries are not cheap. The premium for the electrical vehicle parts exceeds the per-mile cost-savings for most vehicles for most driving patterns. (personally cheaper for an individual due to subsidies is not the same as actually being cheaper)
There's a chance that new tech will close that gap in the future, but we're not there yet - and may never - like solar powered commercial aircraft.
No, I see no problem there at all... Lots of office buildings have higher-power service than we're talking about, and you're acting as if it's some sort of insurmountable goal. Sure, it's more power than a private home has available, but every shopping mall, and passenger airport in the country should be able to provide several parking spaces with the kind of power without trouble. Maybe your average fast food restaurants don't typically have that kind of power, but running a 3-phase circuit to them isn't terribly expensive.
If you're only assuming a tiny minority of electric cars while everyone else drives ICEs, sure.
If everyone's running electric cars, that's a huge spike in electrical demand that requires a corresponding power generation increase, sited whereever it needs to be. See how many cars at a typical gas station? Make each of those 5 minute fillups into 30 minute charges, across dozens of vehicles per station.
Is the minor per mile cost-savings of electric vehicles going to fund that widescale infrastructure overhaul?
A couple more price increases, and airlines wouldn't mind, at all, switching to solar-powered electric aircraft.
I have severe doubts that the amount of sunlight that hits the surface area of an aircraft will be sufficient to keep it flying, at least for anything that carries commercial quantities of passengers and cargo
Good for you. I have a brick...
Solar powered airplane in cloudy weather. What's the plan?
Let's do a brief overview of the first solar airplane google links:
http://www.manufacturing.net/articles/2013/10/across-america-in-12000-solar-cells
Solar Impulse: Wingspan of a 747, two passengers. Travels around 20~30 MPH per Wiki article. "power of a scooter". 3,500 lbs.
Boeing 747: 500~ passengers. Travels at 500~ MPH. 380,000-700,000 lbs. (empty/max flying weights)
Even being ridiculously generous and allowing that a Boeing 747 can maybe fit say 10x as many solar panels of the Solar Impulse, solar power can't do it. 1% of the passengers; 0.5~1% of the weight, 7~% of the speed. (which is maybe 5% of the power)
Solar powered airplanes might have some use in some niche solutions, such as long duration UAV monitoring of weather/environment. But solar powered for general commercial use? You can't be serious.
That's utter nonsense. Once charging times get down to about 30 minutes for every 5.5 hours of driving, EVs will be able to exceed the limits of most human drivers, who have to stop for bathroom breaks and food anyhow, and might just as well plug-in to that charger in the parking space while they're doing that. Many truck stops have similar arrangements.
How do you plan to get those charging times down? Did you not notice the energy problem of having enough electricity at the charging station at the right amperage to do 30 minute charging?
A couple more price increases, and airlines wouldn't mind, at all, switching to solar-powered electric aircraft.
I have severe doubts that the amount of sunlight that hits the surface area of an aircraft will be sufficient to keep it flying, at least for anything that carries commercial quantities of passengers and cargo. That's before we even get into the safety issues of a plane that can't guarantee it has the fuel to get to its own destination.
How are you going to determine if someone has insurance if they would die if not treated immediately? Sorry, emergency care has to be free. Unless you want to encourage poor parents not to drive their child to the emergency room because it would bankrupt them.
If only there was a way for people to receive the life-saving healthcare first and then pay for it after the fact. People would promise to pay, and then pay it back over time, maybe with a small amount of interest. Something like a credit card or a mortgage. Or maybe the government could pay ERs for every single patient they force doctors to treat for free.
Emergency care is not free - unless you think the doctors and nurses who provide that life-saving treatment do not deserve to be paid a cent for their skills and time.
you are ignoring the fact that people without insurance get treatment regardless of whether they have insurance or not.
Car insurance is insurance. If you get in a car accident, does your car get fixed independent of whether or not you have insurance? Or perhaps more precisely - does it get fixed without payment?
No, outside of a very charitable mechanic.
Emergency care can be handled quite well with health insurance - insure against an emergency; and when a legit emergency occurs, the insurance covers it. Don't buy insurance, you pay for the ER treatment yourself. That ERs are forced by law to treat regardless of payment is a government introduced market distortion - one that probably introduced more harm than it prevented. (such as rising healthcare costs and increased insurance premiums)
None of what you said contradicts my claim: Insurance is not subsidies - it is individuals paying for their own expected healthcare costs.
If you don't see the connection between the two than you have spent no time actually thinking about the law. People who could buy insurance but don't are usually healthy. Take them out of the risk pool, and insurance becomes more expensive for everyone, increasing the incentive not to get insurance for everyone who can do without. But even though they are healthy and don't want insurance, you know that at some point, maybe 10 years down the line, maybe 20, they will also need health care.
If you think *your* health insurance costs are dependent upon the activity of everyone else in the pool, you don't understand what insurance *is*.
Health insurance is a gamble where you bet against your health. If you get sick, you get a payout that will help you cover the healthcare costs; if you don't get sick, "the house wins". Every premium is calculated to pay more than your expected value of healthcare costs. On average, you always "lose", but you mitigate catastrophic risk. Everyone else's healthiness only matters as far as they affect the average and the degree your insurance company judges you to be average.
Think of car insurance - if you get into major accidents every year, you're a high risk driver, and insurance will charge you more, or might not even bother selling you a policy. If you're a safe driver with a 100% clean record, insurance can treat you as a lower risk driver and give you lower premiums. The average young male driver is a higher risk driver; but we don't tell older drivers to insure for the sake of lowering the insurance costs for young males; we just charge young drivers more because they do cost more.
Insurance is not "healthy/low risk" people subsidizing (!) "unhealthy/high risk" people. It is everyone, high risk or low risk, paying for their own average costs. (with some overhead to keep insurance company sustainable and able to handle unexpected payout surges)
Many times, you'll see prices at the pump increase for no apparent reason, you'll even hear regulatory agencies ask the oil companies and only be answered by shrugs. The answer is that they'll jack up price ahead of things like vacation weekends in order to make more money off people going out. Fuel competes against nothing; for most Americans, you NEED fuel to do just about everything. Even with rising gas prices, you still get the fuel.
You answered your own "no apparent reason" claim. "vacation weekends" means more people are planning to drive around and use more gas. if the supply doesn't fluctuate much day to day, but the demand does - what does Econ 101 predict?
Vacation weekend driving tells you that there is a lot more "luxury" driving (for personal entertainment/recreation) - if higher gas prices make it not worth it, that's a price signal that perhaps the vacation should be limited to closer locations, or maybe the family should just stay at home.
Another recent example is construction works, particularly public sector. There are massive collusion networks that artificially raise prices by 5-15% (perhaps even more) and buy the silence of politicians and government workers. They set prices together, they decide who is going to get which contract, and if a newcomer decides not to play ball, they suffocate it until they leave or go bankrupt.
Political corruption with public sector projects is not "free market collusion", the supposed evil we need gov't to protect us against.
Your first example is not an example of collusion. Your second example is not free market, as the gov't is a party to the transaction. Do you have any examples at all?
If we'd actually allow such a thing, you'd see a lot of goods suddenly inflate in price for no reason whatsoever because by colluding corporations can lock you out of any alternative. Collusion breaks the principle of a free market by removing competition.
Citation needed.
As in, where historically has this type of collusion been used? How long was it sustained before it was stopped? Because even a cabal of corporations have very little control over the competition their products will get.
Products don't just compete against their own category. They compete against everything else. Food, entertainment, housing, transportation - name it, there's enough alternatives that it'd take more than collusion amongst a few (or many) companies to "shut down" competition.
If Buffet wanted to pay more in taxes he could, he could declare his investment income as regular income or he could simply overpay every year. He doesn't because he doesn't really want to. He is smart enough to realize that taxing the income of the 1%er at 100% won't solve the spending issues in DC. He also knows that every time we raise taxes on "the wealthy" everybody gets included as well.
Warren Buffet also happens to have several lines of business that greatly benefit from the types of regulations he pushes.
Ex: He pushes for higher estate taxes
1. He owns businesses that sell life insurance policies, which are a tax shelter used in estate planning.
2. Some family businesses failed to plan ahead sufficiently for estate taxes, resulting in them being sold at bargain prices to pay the tax. Buffet has profited form the purchases of such companies.
http://grassrootsne.com/warren-buffett-crazy-like-a-fox/
Those facts, and the fact that he doesn't voluntarily pay more taxes, demonstrate that Buffet isn't really pushing for the general welfare; that's just the marketing for his self interest.
Slave labor is hardly free: You need enough coercive violence to keep them motivated(and away from your throat), they have the same subsistence requirements as anybody else, they need training suitable to their assigned function, and you either need to allocate additional subsistence expenses for non-working pregnant women and children(if you wish to produce replacement slaves in-house) or factor in the cost of hunting and enslaving replacements from suitable human populations.
Versus the robots that run with no maintenance, obsolescence, energy requirements, or design flaws?
Of course that hypothetical robot will replace an "average" human being. It's fantasized to be perfect, infinitely capable, and despite all of that human design/engineering, cheap. (but not so cheap that anyone outside the 0.0001% can own them)
But before trying to restructure society on that notion, it should be noted that hypothetical perfect robot does not exist (yet?). What is a real world robot's potential? How far can it really scale before it hits natural limits?
...
1000 AD: Europe. Middle of the Dark Ages. A few wealthy people and a large number of worker-slaves.
2000 AD: United States. A few wealthy people, and a large number of worker-slaves.
Oh, those poor worker slaves in the US. Air conditioning, smartphones, Internet, cable TV, abundant and diverse food choices ... the inhumanity!
People who think that the benefits of increased automation will magically accrue to everyone are... questionably balanced... but the notion that an increasing number of tasks will be sufficiently well automated that even literal slave labor can't beat machines on price seems much harder to dispute.
Slave labor is free. Who's paying you to take their robots?
The benefits of increased automation will accrue to everyone because the technology increases productivity and makes goods cheaper. The average person today has access to goods that would have been decadent luxuries generations ago. Did someone wave a magic wand? Did someone pass a law to make goods available and cheap? No, but yet the outcome is plain to see.
Robotics technology is not going to mature overnight, and unless they develop human-level AI, there will be limits to what any robotic system is capable of doing, meaning that there will be something that humans can do better. Thus, no replacement of robots for humans for every task.
Since humans are running the robots (unless AI enables completely autonomous robots), we end up with humans competing with humans - that's no different than what we have now.
But the problem is that until now technology has generally acted as a productivity multiplier for the general population. What will happen at some point is probably that humans are in fact not needed any more.
Until robotics can make decisions (AI), you need humans in the loop to see the data, analyze, and choose.
That just makes the robotic system a productivity multiplier for the human running it. Increased human productivity is not going to destroy human society, though it will change how things are done.
I don't really understand the point of "demonstrating your skills" by killing some harmless creature. That is just killing for fun which is frankly rather barbaric and certainly not very respectful of the life that was just ended.
Because building skills develops character?
There's preparation, tracking, knowledge of the prey, having a plan, executing it ...
Even if the person doesn't "really need" the deer meat, it's not like the food is really wasted. It feeds scavengers in the ecosystem, which happens in the wild with any other predator.
It's not like hunters are eager to drag out the kill and torture their target - they want to drop the animal with one well placed shot, which is a quick death.
It's certainly more productive than playing FPSes on a console.
Using a rifle that can kill at several hundred yards to hunt a woodland creature is not exactly a huge challenge.
How many deer have you successfully hunted?
So if one has any sort of ethical dilemma with harvesting stem cells from embryos under the notion that such willful destruction of embryos is equivalent to premeditated homicide, this particular technique shouldn't make those people breathe any easier, and in fact, may be cause for them to scream even more outrage at the notion that, to use words they might throw around, "they are creating even more people to deliberately murder".
Oddly, from reading the article on what's actually done, I'm not sure calling the result an embryonic stem cell is accurate. Digging to the actual study excerpt, they use an oocyte, which if I'm parsing the relevant wiki article correctly, is an unfertilized egg.
The definition of an embyro is that it's the first stage of life, which eventually grows into a mature lifeform. An unfertilized egg is not an embryo, and I don't think the process of inserting a skin cell results in a cell capable of growing into a human being. If it's not an embryo, calling its resulting stem cell "embryonic" seems like false advertising.
In other words, the process doesn't sound objectionable, but the label seems to be deliberately controversial. What purpose does that serve?
If you spend more on education, not just tertiary, but primary and secondary, it will nurture youth to have higher aspirations, it will teach them more.
Spending money on "education" != improved education. I can spend $10 eating out, or $1 for self prepared food; the $10 meal is not necessarily 10x as filling or tasty.
Yes, we do want an educated citizenry, but raw money spent is not the way to measure that.
Too late. Slashdot long ago made the transition from tech site to tech culture site. (Why do you think there are so many "wtf is bitcoin" posts on every Bitcoin thread? Could it be because Slashdot no longer attracts a particularly tech-savvy constituency?)
It certainly explains the Luddites.
Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.
In that there is less gun crime? Maybe. In that there is less violence? No. Compare UK's crime rate to the US's crime rate, seeing how the US is the standard of "gun crazy", while UK has successfully disarmed its citizenry.
Thorough gun control is analogous to bomb control. Anyone can build a bomb with instructions on the internet, but most of us don't. Why? The public has decided that bombs kill way too many people and the law (in the United States, at least), severely punishes people who, successfully or otherwise, blow up a bomb. Like all other hazardous items (with the curious exception of guns), individuals have to be licensed to handle bombs and there is probably a federal registry that lists all of them and where they store their bomb-building supplies.
I'm sure the 250 people directly injured from the Boston marathon bombings will be glad to hear that bomb control laws protected them.
People in the United States don't have lots of bombs in their houses. Why, then, would gun control enforcement pose any particular challenge?
The reason why people don't have bombs isn't because of the laws on the books, it's because they don't have a desire to inflict mass destruction on their fellow citizens. Your idea of cause and effect is utterly wrong. Every act of terrorism in Western countries were against the law - the laws don't stop criminals, they just provide us a standardized way of punishing them (with the hopes that the standard will provide deterrence).
Guns are different than bombs because they are personal self defense weapons. You can't protect yourself from a mugging with a bomb (without a high risk of collateral damage), but you can with a gun.
Yes it bothers me, I just can't see a working alternative. The "invisible hand" is blocked by opaque decision making and info.
Gov't makes that problem worse, because it is the primary blocker of the "invisible hand".
If you can't see a working alternative, you need to realize the status quo is another option. You want to expand gov't power when it's been demonstrated that gov't is part of the problem - that is an irrational position.
Agreed. But the attempt should be made. There has to be someone you can appeal too. The courts don't cut it, the current US system is might (money) is right.
You want to regulate "influence"? Who is the mind-reading omnipresent omniscient individual you're going to put into power to "do something"? And having given him such absolute power, how do you plan to keep him from abusing it?
I'd rather be "gouged" on my consumer goods than to be subject to the thought police. I can buy from another company - the thought police are resisted with violence.
My limited understanding is that there was no effective competition. I believe that Standard was thought to be so powerful that they could effectively shutdown whole sections of countries.
Read the wikipedia article - not that it should be treated as an authority, but it gives a broad enough overview and does have sources.
At the time of its breakup, Standard Oil had 60~65% of the national refining capacity. That does make it a powerful company, but again, prices were DROPPING (if this is monopoly abuse, let's have MORE of it). 40~45% of capacity is not "ineffective competition".
Furthermore, "shutting down" sections of the country means not selling product. That is giving away market share to the competition, and is something that undermines any "monopoly" power a company might have. There's short term harm, but feedback forces mitigate long term damage and discourage the short term harm from happening at all.
It's not that I think companies are angels; it's that your cure is worse than the problem. Rule of law and free markets are preferable to any type of top-down centralized micro-management by gov't entities.
But who is to say that life HAS to function by DNA? That is how we developed, sure, but just because one planet in one spot with one kind of conditions developed that way does NOT mean that all life HAS to evolve that way.
There's only so many chemical elements to work with, and those elements have certain observed properties. Maybe there's an undiscovered exotic configuration of common elements that could be used for life inside molten lava or the sun - but the more likely reality is that there isn't. A chemist or physicist might come up with good explanation why life is impossible given that level of energy (involving chemical reactions and atomic bonds), but I'm content to approximate it as "very unlikely"
If life finds a way, we should find life anywhere we look - yet we can find and create sterile environments. Why is that? Life is a complex system built upon certain prerequisites. Violate those prerequisites, and life quickly becomes dead.
When you treat life as an information system (which it is), then you recognize that for every working configuration, there are vastly more non-working ones. There's no particular reason why there must exist a working configuration, because failure is a common and easy option. (ex: non-compiling buggy code)
This is one of the reasons Neil DeGrasse is pushing for better exploration of Mars and Europa, as he says until we find actual alien life, even if its just the size of a single flea, we just won't know if life follows a single 'roadmap" or if there are many ways to get to the same place just depending on conditions.
Or maybe this whole notion that life is merely an accidental self-assembling self-improving system of systems is fundamentally flawed.
Sure it may not be the kind of life you can sit down and discuss the laws of physics with but it IS life and to say we know for sure what planets can and can't support life when we haven't even explored the planets in our own solar system well enough to say for sure there is no life on them? That isn't science, that is arrogance.
Pay attention to what the actual data is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile
However, it is thought unlikely that microbes could survive at temperatures above 150ÂC, as the cohesion of DNA and other vital molecules begins to break down at this point.
Temperature of Lava: 700-1200 deg C. Surface of Sun: Estimated 5505 deg C
Are you claiming that life has found or will find a way in those environments?
If yes, you are making a claim with no data - ignorant claims are not superior to "arrogant" claims. If no, then you have conceded that are limits on "life finds a way".
Difficult, will change with situation, matter for courts/regulator.
You're writing a blank check to the entity with a monopoly on force - the government. You hate monopolies, but that doesn't bother you?
No that's OK, but you shouldn't be able to force a supplier to charge more for a new competitor or force a vendor to use your product.
Force rising to the level of violence is a crime. Force that is not violence is more accurately described as "influence", and measuring abuse there is difficult and extremely vulnerable to corruption.
What's your opinion on Bell's breakup?
You dodged the question on Standard Oil. Why was its breakup as a "monopoly" a good thing when its existence had benefited customers (lower prices, [i]Standard[/i]ized oil) and there was plenty of market competition at the time of the decision?
As for Bell, I don't have much of an opinion - gov't granted a monopoly and then took it back. The loss of the monopoly seems to have improved customer options and prices, though some will still mourn Bell's R&D labs.