It's amazing how well your incentives align when your shareholders are also your customers.
When some of the shareholders are the only customers, and the rest of the shareholders are required to invest by force of law. It's amazing how cheap internet can be when the "company" providing it doesn't have to worry about a profit or keeping the shareholders happy, and they don't have to provide service to everyone who is putting money into the system.
I got a post office box. That was two years before Amazon started shipping orders in multiple boxes.
Amazon has always shipped orders in multiple boxes when the circumstances warranted it. It has nothing to do with you getting a PO box.
Two orders delivered in eight boxes suggest that they don't have their shit together.
They didn't delivery two orders in eight boxes. They delivered the orders in a couple of boxes which got stolen, so they had to send them again. They can't predict when you're going to have things stolen, and they don't save money by sending everything you order to one central fulfillment center just so it gets to you in one box. And NOTHING they could have done would have made this set of "two orders" ever get to you in ONE box, since you had to have it redelivered at least once.
Your example is just ridiculous (and thus dishonest) since it conflates your complaint about not honoring a "minimize shipments" option on the original order with you having things delivered to an insecure location and they were stolen.
They must be squeezing their suppliers if they can afford to send an extra six boxes and packing materials for two orders.
It's called "insurance", and they had no way of preventing the extra costs by consolidating the reshipments into the original. It is stupid to expect them to be able to ship "everything" in one box when "everything" includes both items from different parts of the country AND sending them again when they were stolen from where YOU had them delivered.
Now your local Sheriff gets to find out when you text your buddy about smoking a bowl, and unlike the NSA, he does care and might have decide to pay you a visit.
A bowl of what? Cheerios? You mean pot? If my local Sheriff wants a hit, I'll tell him to go buy his own. No, he can't have any of mine.
I had replacement packages that got shipped Same Day Express across the country to be delivered at 9PM at night. That isn't cheap.
Replacing lost or stolen packages has nothing to do with how many packages they ship or from where. Amazon is NOT going to waste money shipping one item to another fulfillment center just so it can be put in the same box as something else you ordered. It doesn't matter if you want them to ship it all in one box, if the items are coming from two different places there will be two different boxes.
If you have a problem with things being stolen from your front step, don't have them delivered to your front step. That's a different issue altogether from how many boxes they ship things in.
Amazon need to get their logistical shit together.
They have it together. They understand their costs better than you do.
That leads to a huge increase in logistics for them, and an increase in cost. Ship something twice so it can be delivered once? It certainly costs them a lot less to ship from two different places in two different boxes than to ship a total of three times.
I had a recent order that got shipped immediately and an older order that got shipped a few days later.
What do you think that proves? The recent order was in stock; the older order wasn't, probably. Or fulfilled from two different places.
That's really more a consequence of Amazon's delivery contract with UPS.
No, it's a consequence of which fulfillment center has the stuff in stock. You don't really expect Amazon to ship a widget from their warehouse in Kentucky to a warehouse in California just so they put two widgets into one box, do you? And, of course, if one or more of the items aren't fulfilled by Amazon, you aren't going to get them all in one box no matter what.
As for the nonsense that Amazon has little incentive to consolidate orders, that's just nuts. Being able to put everything in one box saves money, even if it is just the cost of the box and space on the packaging line. They'd do it if they can. Sometimes they can't.
Look into Playstation VUE. For $35/mo..they pretty much have everything you want to watch from "cable channels"....and they have built in DVR too.
I don't know why you think I should look into a streaming service when I don't intend on subscribing to one anytime soon, but ok. When I do, I see the same thing as Sling -- packaged cable channels that mean I have to pay for a lot of channels I don't want to watch just to get one that I do. It's tied into a Playstation, which I don't have. And to get "the latest movies", it's an additional $27/month for HBO and Showtime on top of the $30 for cable channels I don't want.
What is supposed to be better/different about this?
Google Fiber is an internet service, not a cable TV service.
Anyplace they managed to build out the price of the monopoly internet magically dropped by half. So the monopolies are fighting tooth and nail to prevent Google from competing.
Of course they are, and of course prices drop when there is direct competition of similar services. That doesn't prove that the cable TV company has a government-granted monopoly.
If it were really such a bad deal they'd welcome upstarts and watch as they fail on their own.
You really don't understand the economics of the system, do you? Google has a billion dollars to dump into building infrastructure. When they get a subscriber, it is almost always going to be an ex-cable customer. That means that the cable system loses revenue. When the incumbent is forced to drop prices to compete, they lose even more money. It could turn out that the incumbent actually loses money on their operation.
So of COURSE cable companies are fighting Google Fiber, because they know that they will lose money when Google takes subs from them. They can't wait for Google to go bankrupt because Google has the money for the long battle. It isn't a given that it will be Google that goes bankrupt. But it is enough of a long shot that it keeps Fred from creating his own cable company, because Fred can't afford the money to compete.
The solution is simple: force the ISPs to divest everything except the "pipes" then force them to sell access to whoever wants to purchase.
Unfortunately, you have to have internet service to use those pipes to get to an alternative ISP. it's part of the pipe system. It's not like electricity where every electron is the same and when you buy from an alternative energy company you are just counting how many electrons you use and they are getting paid for putting electrons on the wire; internet service "electrons" are specific to the source and destination. If there is no internet service to start with, then the concept of routing and gateways goes away.
Just like they did in the old days with long distance voice phone.
Long distance phone requires you to have local phone service before you can get access to the LD carrier of your choice. The "pipe" to your house is still bound to your local phone company, it's just the LD side that goes a different way. If this is your analogy, then I will point out that you can get Comcast internet on the Comcast pipe and then pay for access to internet services from other companies. That's exactly like getting CenturyLink local phone service and then paying another long distance company for LD calls.
Of course local governments encouraged an exclusive franchise system. But it wasn't because they were corrupt. It was because they could use that system to force cable companies to provide free internet connections to the schools and government offices, production facilities in various places (like schools, so schools could teach TV production classes), multiple PEG channels.
And on top of that, the local government could have local regulatory control over the cable company service, including customer support AND PRICES. I've been on the cable commission for two of the cities I've lived in. Groups composed of citizens who had the ability to prod the giants into following the franchise agreements regarding customer service response time, etc.
In the past, the cable commission had oversite on the prices, and could enforce things like notification times. If they wanted a cost-based increase, we could say "show us the books", and they did. The franchises I worked under had a mandatory thirty-day notice for any price increases. We actually held the cable company to that mandate -- until the deregulation removed our teeth. Comcast now routinely gives us notice in the bill prior to the change, which considering the delay in printing and mailing may mean 15 or fewer days notice. I long for the good old days.
Yes, there were franchise fees involved, but there are still franchise fees even in the non-exclusive franchises.
This is especially true in the U.S. where most of the cable TV companies have a monopoly granted by the local government.
Please stop. The US federal government has prohibited exclusive franchises for cable TV for such a long time that there are no longer any exclusive franchises in operation. The local governments have been prohibited from granting monopolies, it is now a case of defacto monopoly status based on economics and not dejure monopolies granted by the government.
You'll still get ripped off on Internet service since that's a government-granted monopoly in most of the U.S.,
There is even less of an excuse to claim government-granted monopoly status for ISPs or internet service, since there has never been an exclusive franchise system in place for that. If you can't get internet service from more than only company where you live it isn't because of a government-granted monopoly, it's because nobody thinks it would be profitable to provide you an alternative. And I expect that you could get internet service from some other company, it would just cost a lot more than you want to pay for it. You not wanting to pay what it would cost to get service doesn't mean the government has granted a monopoly to the one company you can afford.
Those services are both designed to function like a regular cable service,
Every time I see the Sling ad I wonder why the FTC hasn't stepped in. Their claim that "if you don't want to pay for a channel you don't have to" (or words to that effect, I can't do a verbatim quote) is just patent bullshit. You have to "buy the package". If all you want is SyFy (for some reason only God knows) you have to buy the "Sling Blue" package of "40+" channels. Paying for 39 channels you don't want just to get the one you do.
And if you want Turner Classic Movies only, you have to buy a base level package and then add "Hollywood Extra", a set of seven (it looks like) channels.
Another of their claims is that you can watch the latest movies for $20/month. Unfortunately, none of the channels in their $20/month package is a "pay" movie channel, which is where the latest movies show up first. They're all standard cable services that don't get movies until after the theatrical and pay channels runs are over.
So, while Sling looks like a good alternative to cable, their advertising is a bit too, umm, false for my tastes. They also can give you such great rates because they have zero infrastructure to maintain outside their data center, so they are hoping you ignore the costs for the Internet you need to use them. (Great for "at work" people who get Internet to the desktop for free; not so good for rural people who pay a lot.)
As long as cable companies are allowed to run local monopolies, they're going to get you one way or another.
Here's how you solve this problem. Get together a billion dollars or so, go through the franchise process for some large city, pour a billion dollars or so into building infrastructure, and then find out that you are in a naturally limited market and are now fighting with the incumbent for the fixed subscriber base.
Cable companies are not "allowed" to be a monopoly. The ability of a government to grant exclusive franchises to cable systems went away a long time ago. They are a monopoly because nobody is stupid enough to dump a buttload of money into a new franchise just to lose it all.
Allowing cable company monopolies was one of the most anti-consumer things the government did in regards to entertainment.
Allowing exclusive franchises gave the LOCAL GOVERNMENT the ability to attract cable companies that would otherwise not bother competing in a market. There are places that don't have cable simply because even with an exclusive franchise there weren't enough potential subscribers to make it profitable. Imagine how many more places wouldn't have cable if two or more companies tried competing, couldn't survive, and went bankrupt? If you want to blame "the government" for cable monopolies, it is the local governments that are to blame -- the ones closest to the people who elected them.
But exclusive franchises have been illegal for a very long time now. The federal government took that ability away from the local governments, and any exclusive franchises have long ago expired.
Let me get this straight: if a browser in default mode uses more power than others - you want the test to hide that fact, because that would be unfair?
I don't want anything other than a good relative test of battery life. Who cares if a browser "in default mode" uses more battery on one model or another? This is a BATTERY TEST. You shouldn't be using the browser at all to do the testing, there are just too many variables that aren't being accounted for when you do that.
Because consumers aren't actually interested in "consumer's experience" but some "fair and balanced" reporting bullshit?
So you'd rather there be an unfair, unbalanced testing regime where the actual battery life isn't tested, but the power consumption of some specific browser (that the user may never use at all) uses in "default mode" (which any user can change)? Sorry, but when I look at a battery life test, I expect it to relate to the battery system and not the browser of the day.
And I expect most consumers assume that a battery test result will relate somehow to the battery, too. I know that I'd be very unhappy with a testing report that shows that model A has twice the battery life of model B, but when I strip the Windows nonsense off of model A and install Linux it turns out that the reason B lost is because Edge was set to some default mode that ran B's battery down really fast, and B was actually a better buy.
Neither. It is a comparison test that removes variables as much as possible so all laptops are on the same playing field. From CR itself:
... our battery tests are not designed to be a direct simulation of a consumer's experience. Rather, we look to control as many variables as possible, then perform a test that gives potential users a reasonable expectation of battery life when a computer's processors, screen, memory, and antennas are under a light to moderate workload. This test has served as a good proxy for battery life on the hundreds of laptops in our ratings.
If your testing relies on going to a bunch of web pages that may or may not have a lot of cached content depending on when the test is done, or the caching is set differently between models by default, then the caching is a variable that could make a model with lower battery capacity show up as being better than a model with more capacity. Battery life is not an absolute measure that you can depend on because users do different things. But battery comparisons are relative -- a model with double the lifetime in CR's tests should last twice as long as the other model in real life, too. That's what "a good proxy" means.
If you're saving money by owning an EV through less maintenance and repair costs, why shouldn't those cost savings be applied to the cost of battery replacement?
Because the cost of the maintenance of battery replacement is not lessened by other, presumably lower costs. I'm sorry, you just don't get to tell the battery dealer that you're only paying $3000 for a new battery because you saved $2500 in other places. You still spend the $5500 plus labor and tax, AND you spend the other money that you spent on maintenance. And no, you can't subtract the maintenance costs of one car from the other and then compare the result to the maintenance costs of the other car.
Because I took the maintenance and repair costs of the Civic and subtracted the maintenance and repair costs of the Leaf, I've factored that in.
You just don't understand. You started with the Leaf battery replacement cost (at least $6000, but more like $6500-$6800 because you need to add in the cost of the turn-in, labor, and tax) and ADDED other costs to wind up with a number lower than $6000. It just doesn't work that way.
Actually, I take issue with your metrics here as 5000 miles in a year is not a typical amount of driving in a year.
The OP bought a two year old car that had 11,000 miles on it. That's strictly 5500 miles per year average, but "two year old" car can be a bit older than that. We're talking round numbers. He also said that he would not use the vehicle for long trips (out of range of his garage charger) or for days when he was going to cover a lot of miles. This biases the average DOWN from whatever it would be for a gasoline vehicle.
As you can see, I'm not spending $1200 in electricity costs, I'm actually spending $372.82.
Sigh. I used the number you provided before. I give up.
I used about:config to disable image loading (preferences.image.default = 2) and I see only one tiny difference between the previous version of this page and the one I see now: the two little 64x64 icons at the bottom of the page attached to the previous and next stories are gone. That's all.
Oh, and the "Slashdot" logo is gone. That's not very large compared to the page itself, which is useless if I use a cached version.
Unless you were visiting using Lynx, it's hard to believe that you didn't benefit from having all the CSS and image files that make up every page on Slashdot cached.
I can't speak to the CSS because that is normally invisible, but I can speak to "image files that make up every page". They are invisible here. A banner at the top, a couple of small icons at the bottom, but other than that -- what images?
When I visit a/. page I explicitly refresh the page because I want to see everything that is new. If I wanted to see the same things over and over I'd just print the page and tack it up on the wall.
You've misunderstood what I've done. I took the maintenance and repair costs of a Honda Civic ($7516), and subtracted the maintenance and repair costs of the Nissan Leaf ($5822) over 10 years.
No, I understand exactly what you did. You assigned less than the cost of the battery replacement as the cost of maintenance and repair of the EV so it would look like it was cheaper to own and operate. You can't start with a cost of $6500 plus tax and labor for expected maintenance costs and magically lower that to $5800.
Unless you're referring to something other than maintenance and repair, I'm not sure what you mean by "incidental costs".
I mean you assume there are drive train maintenance costs associated with a normal car but 0 costs in the same category for an EV. The drive trains are different, but that doesn't mean that one of them as zero cost associated with it. The mechanical parts of an EV don't live forever, you know.
Though, I suppose I could have been harder on you and factored in how much you save per year on buying electricity instead of gasoline (about $1200/year, in my region).
I already included the cost of gasoline in the evaluation. That's the part about "assuming $2.50 per gallon", and how I came up with a 14 year break even point. Did you not bother to read what I wrote at all?
Actually, in just gas savings, you'll have made back your $6000 to replace the battery in 5 years.
Five years at 5000 miles per year is 25000 miles. Thirty MPG makes that 834 gallons. To break even with a $6000 battery replacement (ignoring electricity costs) you'd have to pay $7.20 per gallon of gas. Add in the $1200 in electricity that you'll be paying for, you'd have to pay $8.63/gallon for gas. So no, you will NOT be "making back" battery replacement costs in just five years. Not even close.
So let's look at your $1200 in electricity costs. At $2.50 a gallon, you could buy 480 gallons of gas for that money. At 30 MPG, that's 14,400 miles. That's almost three times the number of miles driven per year in the analysis. To call the electricity costs "break even", you have to assume -- $7.20 per gallon for gasoline. You're still way ahead on the costs using a normal car. (Remember, the $1200/year for electricity is your number.)
As I'm not the OP, I don't support the "fear mongering" assessment made by him/her.
I didn't say you did. That was why I was explicit in referring to the OP when I commented on that.
So, to really compare apples to apples, you've got to also factor in maintenance costs of your ICE vs maintenance costs of the EV.
Yes, you do. And there are so many possible failures for either vehicle type that the only reasonable analysis is based on "all things being equal". That is, all four wheels could fall off your normal car and you have to pay to fix that at a bundle of money, but so could all four wheels fall off the EV.
Then instead of inflating your numbers by rounding up to $6000
From here, "It's a surprisingly low $5,499 (after a $1,000 credit for turning in the old pack, which is required), plus installation fees and tax. The installation is estimated at roughly 3 hours of labor." So, $5500 plus tax and labor (3 hours) plus the $1000 trade-in. That's more that $6500, so I think it is fair to round to $6000 as the true cost.
then subtract the maintenance and repair costs of a Nissan Leaf, and you'll have $1694 in the bank.
It's interesting that you subtract an amount that is LESS than the cost of the battery replacement. You've forgotten to add in all the incidental costs of operating the EV in your analysis.
and you get 9.13 years of driving before you need to replace the battery.
You managed to lower the TBO by about 9% by adding in a lot of incidental costs to the normal car and ignoring the total cost of the battery replacement and ALL of the incidental costs for the EV. And you still wind up past the warranty for the battery.
As for the charge of "fear mongering" that the OP made -- don't be silly. I am not trying to make you afraid of anything. I'm simply questioning, with supporting numbers, the surface level cost analysis you did that leaves you claiming that it saves you money.
Every U.S. specification Nissan LEAF is backed by a New Vehicle Limited Warranty providing:... 96 months/100,000 miles (whichever occurs earlier) Lithium-Ion Battery coverage.
In July 2015 I bought a certified-used 2013 Nissan LEAF with 11K miles on it for ~$15K.... because the bottom line is it saves us money.
The current price for a Leaf replacement battery is $5500 plus install etc., so say $6000 ballpark. At $2.50/gallon, that's 2400 gallons of gas. Say you get a car that does 30MPG, that's 72,000 miles.
Your used car was driven 5000 miles per year. To go 72,000 miles, that would be 14 years of driving. The expected lifetime of the battery pack is 10 years. You're four years short of breaking even.
You already limit your driving due to range, relying on a second car for longer trips, or just a lot of small trips in a day. That car costs money that you haven't factored in. Yes, you might claim that you need a second car anyway so the cost doesn't add in, but every time you are using that second car you prevent it from being used for its original purpose, and so the costs do add in.
Is your electric car really saving you money in the long run? Yeah, you get to laugh at people who have stopped at the gas station as you drive by, but they'll be laughing at you when you complain about a $6000 battery change. And it will be even funnier in five years as you sit by the side of the highway wondering why you didn't get the same range from your battery that you got today, and how could you have miss-planned this trip so badly?
No, that's how you die. Relevant words: "before its time".
I see nothing about "before its time" in anything you wrote. And as I said, the market is already breaking open, all it takes is a source that people can afford and more people will buy them.
Henry Ford broke open the automobile market by using standardized production lines to make a car that people could afford. I don't think "Ford Motor Company" died because he did that. Do you? Did "Volkswagon" die when they produced "the people's car"? Or did both companies get a good position in the future market?
Why do you do that? The market does not exist yet.
Because that's how you get a position on that future market. If you wait until it exists you're already behind. "Behind" is not the position that any company wants to be in.
But in truth, the market does exist. There are already EVs. The poor don't buy them because they can't afford to. The rich already buy them. You want to get into the market, you make a car the poor can afford, because there are so many of them compared to rich. You don't do that by building cars with the best acceleration numbers of any EV.
If you want a position in a future market, you start making what that market will bear. For a future market where everyone buys electric, rich and poor, you make an inexpensive electric car with acceptable performance, not a high priced electric that is not really "Super Fast" at all. (60MPH is NOT super-fast.) None of the poor people are going to buy your cheap cars after you make a name for yourself as an expensive car manufacturer -- you're going to capitalize on your brand name and your prices will be higher than they should be.
So no, they're looking for a position in the rich market by having "super fast" attached to their name.
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It's amazing how well your incentives align when your shareholders are also your customers.
When some of the shareholders are the only customers, and the rest of the shareholders are required to invest by force of law. It's amazing how cheap internet can be when the "company" providing it doesn't have to worry about a profit or keeping the shareholders happy, and they don't have to provide service to everyone who is putting money into the system.
I got a post office box. That was two years before Amazon started shipping orders in multiple boxes.
Amazon has always shipped orders in multiple boxes when the circumstances warranted it. It has nothing to do with you getting a PO box.
Two orders delivered in eight boxes suggest that they don't have their shit together.
They didn't delivery two orders in eight boxes. They delivered the orders in a couple of boxes which got stolen, so they had to send them again. They can't predict when you're going to have things stolen, and they don't save money by sending everything you order to one central fulfillment center just so it gets to you in one box. And NOTHING they could have done would have made this set of "two orders" ever get to you in ONE box, since you had to have it redelivered at least once.
Your example is just ridiculous (and thus dishonest) since it conflates your complaint about not honoring a "minimize shipments" option on the original order with you having things delivered to an insecure location and they were stolen.
They must be squeezing their suppliers if they can afford to send an extra six boxes and packing materials for two orders.
It's called "insurance", and they had no way of preventing the extra costs by consolidating the reshipments into the original. It is stupid to expect them to be able to ship "everything" in one box when "everything" includes both items from different parts of the country AND sending them again when they were stolen from where YOU had them delivered.
Now your local Sheriff gets to find out when you text your buddy about smoking a bowl, and unlike the NSA, he does care and might have decide to pay you a visit.
A bowl of what? Cheerios? You mean pot? If my local Sheriff wants a hit, I'll tell him to go buy his own. No, he can't have any of mine.
I had replacement packages that got shipped Same Day Express across the country to be delivered at 9PM at night. That isn't cheap.
Replacing lost or stolen packages has nothing to do with how many packages they ship or from where. Amazon is NOT going to waste money shipping one item to another fulfillment center just so it can be put in the same box as something else you ordered. It doesn't matter if you want them to ship it all in one box, if the items are coming from two different places there will be two different boxes.
If you have a problem with things being stolen from your front step, don't have them delivered to your front step. That's a different issue altogether from how many boxes they ship things in.
Amazon need to get their logistical shit together.
They have it together. They understand their costs better than you do.
Based on my experience, yes.
That leads to a huge increase in logistics for them, and an increase in cost. Ship something twice so it can be delivered once? It certainly costs them a lot less to ship from two different places in two different boxes than to ship a total of three times.
I had a recent order that got shipped immediately and an older order that got shipped a few days later.
What do you think that proves? The recent order was in stock; the older order wasn't, probably. Or fulfilled from two different places.
That's really more a consequence of Amazon's delivery contract with UPS.
No, it's a consequence of which fulfillment center has the stuff in stock. You don't really expect Amazon to ship a widget from their warehouse in Kentucky to a warehouse in California just so they put two widgets into one box, do you? And, of course, if one or more of the items aren't fulfilled by Amazon, you aren't going to get them all in one box no matter what.
As for the nonsense that Amazon has little incentive to consolidate orders, that's just nuts. Being able to put everything in one box saves money, even if it is just the cost of the box and space on the packaging line. They'd do it if they can. Sometimes they can't.
they've gotten pretty good at detecting and preventing these kinds of drive by installs.
After gaining a large amount of market share by BEING a drive-by install (as part of java, IIRC), they ought to be good at detecting them.
Look into Playstation VUE. For $35/mo..they pretty much have everything you want to watch from "cable channels"....and they have built in DVR too.
I don't know why you think I should look into a streaming service when I don't intend on subscribing to one anytime soon, but ok. When I do, I see the same thing as Sling -- packaged cable channels that mean I have to pay for a lot of channels I don't want to watch just to get one that I do. It's tied into a Playstation, which I don't have. And to get "the latest movies", it's an additional $27/month for HBO and Showtime on top of the $30 for cable channels I don't want.
What is supposed to be better/different about this?
Ridiculous. We've see this with Google Fiber.
Google Fiber is an internet service, not a cable TV service.
Anyplace they managed to build out the price of the monopoly internet magically dropped by half. So the monopolies are fighting tooth and nail to prevent Google from competing.
Of course they are, and of course prices drop when there is direct competition of similar services. That doesn't prove that the cable TV company has a government-granted monopoly.
If it were really such a bad deal they'd welcome upstarts and watch as they fail on their own.
You really don't understand the economics of the system, do you? Google has a billion dollars to dump into building infrastructure. When they get a subscriber, it is almost always going to be an ex-cable customer. That means that the cable system loses revenue. When the incumbent is forced to drop prices to compete, they lose even more money. It could turn out that the incumbent actually loses money on their operation.
So of COURSE cable companies are fighting Google Fiber, because they know that they will lose money when Google takes subs from them. They can't wait for Google to go bankrupt because Google has the money for the long battle. It isn't a given that it will be Google that goes bankrupt. But it is enough of a long shot that it keeps Fred from creating his own cable company, because Fred can't afford the money to compete.
The solution is simple: force the ISPs to divest everything except the "pipes" then force them to sell access to whoever wants to purchase.
Unfortunately, you have to have internet service to use those pipes to get to an alternative ISP. it's part of the pipe system. It's not like electricity where every electron is the same and when you buy from an alternative energy company you are just counting how many electrons you use and they are getting paid for putting electrons on the wire; internet service "electrons" are specific to the source and destination. If there is no internet service to start with, then the concept of routing and gateways goes away.
Just like they did in the old days with long distance voice phone.
Long distance phone requires you to have local phone service before you can get access to the LD carrier of your choice. The "pipe" to your house is still bound to your local phone company, it's just the LD side that goes a different way. If this is your analogy, then I will point out that you can get Comcast internet on the Comcast pipe and then pay for access to internet services from other companies. That's exactly like getting CenturyLink local phone service and then paying another long distance company for LD calls.
And the local governments encouraged.
Of course local governments encouraged an exclusive franchise system. But it wasn't because they were corrupt. It was because they could use that system to force cable companies to provide free internet connections to the schools and government offices, production facilities in various places (like schools, so schools could teach TV production classes), multiple PEG channels.
And on top of that, the local government could have local regulatory control over the cable company service, including customer support AND PRICES. I've been on the cable commission for two of the cities I've lived in. Groups composed of citizens who had the ability to prod the giants into following the franchise agreements regarding customer service response time, etc.
In the past, the cable commission had oversite on the prices, and could enforce things like notification times. If they wanted a cost-based increase, we could say "show us the books", and they did. The franchises I worked under had a mandatory thirty-day notice for any price increases. We actually held the cable company to that mandate -- until the deregulation removed our teeth. Comcast now routinely gives us notice in the bill prior to the change, which considering the delay in printing and mailing may mean 15 or fewer days notice. I long for the good old days.
Yes, there were franchise fees involved, but there are still franchise fees even in the non-exclusive franchises.
None of that is corruption.
This is especially true in the U.S. where most of the cable TV companies have a monopoly granted by the local government.
Please stop. The US federal government has prohibited exclusive franchises for cable TV for such a long time that there are no longer any exclusive franchises in operation. The local governments have been prohibited from granting monopolies, it is now a case of defacto monopoly status based on economics and not dejure monopolies granted by the government.
You'll still get ripped off on Internet service since that's a government-granted monopoly in most of the U.S.,
There is even less of an excuse to claim government-granted monopoly status for ISPs or internet service, since there has never been an exclusive franchise system in place for that. If you can't get internet service from more than only company where you live it isn't because of a government-granted monopoly, it's because nobody thinks it would be profitable to provide you an alternative. And I expect that you could get internet service from some other company, it would just cost a lot more than you want to pay for it. You not wanting to pay what it would cost to get service doesn't mean the government has granted a monopoly to the one company you can afford.
Those services are both designed to function like a regular cable service,
Every time I see the Sling ad I wonder why the FTC hasn't stepped in. Their claim that "if you don't want to pay for a channel you don't have to" (or words to that effect, I can't do a verbatim quote) is just patent bullshit. You have to "buy the package". If all you want is SyFy (for some reason only God knows) you have to buy the "Sling Blue" package of "40+" channels. Paying for 39 channels you don't want just to get the one you do.
And if you want Turner Classic Movies only, you have to buy a base level package and then add "Hollywood Extra", a set of seven (it looks like) channels.
Another of their claims is that you can watch the latest movies for $20/month. Unfortunately, none of the channels in their $20/month package is a "pay" movie channel, which is where the latest movies show up first. They're all standard cable services that don't get movies until after the theatrical and pay channels runs are over.
So, while Sling looks like a good alternative to cable, their advertising is a bit too, umm, false for my tastes. They also can give you such great rates because they have zero infrastructure to maintain outside their data center, so they are hoping you ignore the costs for the Internet you need to use them. (Great for "at work" people who get Internet to the desktop for free; not so good for rural people who pay a lot.)
As long as cable companies are allowed to run local monopolies, they're going to get you one way or another.
Here's how you solve this problem. Get together a billion dollars or so, go through the franchise process for some large city, pour a billion dollars or so into building infrastructure, and then find out that you are in a naturally limited market and are now fighting with the incumbent for the fixed subscriber base.
Cable companies are not "allowed" to be a monopoly. The ability of a government to grant exclusive franchises to cable systems went away a long time ago. They are a monopoly because nobody is stupid enough to dump a buttload of money into a new franchise just to lose it all.
Allowing cable company monopolies was one of the most anti-consumer things the government did in regards to entertainment.
Allowing exclusive franchises gave the LOCAL GOVERNMENT the ability to attract cable companies that would otherwise not bother competing in a market. There are places that don't have cable simply because even with an exclusive franchise there weren't enough potential subscribers to make it profitable. Imagine how many more places wouldn't have cable if two or more companies tried competing, couldn't survive, and went bankrupt? If you want to blame "the government" for cable monopolies, it is the local governments that are to blame -- the ones closest to the people who elected them.
But exclusive franchises have been illegal for a very long time now. The federal government took that ability away from the local governments, and any exclusive franchises have long ago expired.
Let me get this straight: if a browser in default mode uses more power than others - you want the test to hide that fact, because that would be unfair?
I don't want anything other than a good relative test of battery life. Who cares if a browser "in default mode" uses more battery on one model or another? This is a BATTERY TEST. You shouldn't be using the browser at all to do the testing, there are just too many variables that aren't being accounted for when you do that.
Because consumers aren't actually interested in "consumer's experience" but some "fair and balanced" reporting bullshit?
So you'd rather there be an unfair, unbalanced testing regime where the actual battery life isn't tested, but the power consumption of some specific browser (that the user may never use at all) uses in "default mode" (which any user can change)? Sorry, but when I look at a battery life test, I expect it to relate to the battery system and not the browser of the day.
And I expect most consumers assume that a battery test result will relate somehow to the battery, too. I know that I'd be very unhappy with a testing report that shows that model A has twice the battery life of model B, but when I strip the Windows nonsense off of model A and install Linux it turns out that the reason B lost is because Edge was set to some default mode that ran B's battery down really fast, and B was actually a better buy.
Was it a stress test? Or a typical usage test?
Neither. It is a comparison test that removes variables as much as possible so all laptops are on the same playing field. From CR itself:
If your testing relies on going to a bunch of web pages that may or may not have a lot of cached content depending on when the test is done, or the caching is set differently between models by default, then the caching is a variable that could make a model with lower battery capacity show up as being better than a model with more capacity. Battery life is not an absolute measure that you can depend on because users do different things. But battery comparisons are relative -- a model with double the lifetime in CR's tests should last twice as long as the other model in real life, too. That's what "a good proxy" means.
If you're saving money by owning an EV through less maintenance and repair costs, why shouldn't those cost savings be applied to the cost of battery replacement?
Because the cost of the maintenance of battery replacement is not lessened by other, presumably lower costs. I'm sorry, you just don't get to tell the battery dealer that you're only paying $3000 for a new battery because you saved $2500 in other places. You still spend the $5500 plus labor and tax, AND you spend the other money that you spent on maintenance. And no, you can't subtract the maintenance costs of one car from the other and then compare the result to the maintenance costs of the other car.
Because I took the maintenance and repair costs of the Civic and subtracted the maintenance and repair costs of the Leaf, I've factored that in.
You just don't understand. You started with the Leaf battery replacement cost (at least $6000, but more like $6500-$6800 because you need to add in the cost of the turn-in, labor, and tax) and ADDED other costs to wind up with a number lower than $6000. It just doesn't work that way.
Actually, I take issue with your metrics here as 5000 miles in a year is not a typical amount of driving in a year.
The OP bought a two year old car that had 11,000 miles on it. That's strictly 5500 miles per year average, but "two year old" car can be a bit older than that. We're talking round numbers. He also said that he would not use the vehicle for long trips (out of range of his garage charger) or for days when he was going to cover a lot of miles. This biases the average DOWN from whatever it would be for a gasoline vehicle.
As you can see, I'm not spending $1200 in electricity costs, I'm actually spending $372.82.
Sigh. I used the number you provided before. I give up.
There's more than you think.
I used about:config to disable image loading (preferences.image.default = 2) and I see only one tiny difference between the previous version of this page and the one I see now: the two little 64x64 icons at the bottom of the page attached to the previous and next stories are gone. That's all.
Oh, and the "Slashdot" logo is gone. That's not very large compared to the page itself, which is useless if I use a cached version.
Unless you were visiting using Lynx, it's hard to believe that you didn't benefit from having all the CSS and image files that make up every page on Slashdot cached.
I can't speak to the CSS because that is normally invisible, but I can speak to "image files that make up every page". They are invisible here. A banner at the top, a couple of small icons at the bottom, but other than that -- what images?
When I visit a /. page I explicitly refresh the page because I want to see everything that is new. If I wanted to see the same things over and over I'd just print the page and tack it up on the wall.
You've misunderstood what I've done. I took the maintenance and repair costs of a Honda Civic ($7516), and subtracted the maintenance and repair costs of the Nissan Leaf ($5822) over 10 years.
No, I understand exactly what you did. You assigned less than the cost of the battery replacement as the cost of maintenance and repair of the EV so it would look like it was cheaper to own and operate. You can't start with a cost of $6500 plus tax and labor for expected maintenance costs and magically lower that to $5800.
Unless you're referring to something other than maintenance and repair, I'm not sure what you mean by "incidental costs".
I mean you assume there are drive train maintenance costs associated with a normal car but 0 costs in the same category for an EV. The drive trains are different, but that doesn't mean that one of them as zero cost associated with it. The mechanical parts of an EV don't live forever, you know.
Though, I suppose I could have been harder on you and factored in how much you save per year on buying electricity instead of gasoline (about $1200/year, in my region).
I already included the cost of gasoline in the evaluation. That's the part about "assuming $2.50 per gallon", and how I came up with a 14 year break even point. Did you not bother to read what I wrote at all?
Actually, in just gas savings, you'll have made back your $6000 to replace the battery in 5 years.
Five years at 5000 miles per year is 25000 miles. Thirty MPG makes that 834 gallons. To break even with a $6000 battery replacement (ignoring electricity costs) you'd have to pay $7.20 per gallon of gas. Add in the $1200 in electricity that you'll be paying for, you'd have to pay $8.63/gallon for gas. So no, you will NOT be "making back" battery replacement costs in just five years. Not even close.
So let's look at your $1200 in electricity costs. At $2.50 a gallon, you could buy 480 gallons of gas for that money. At 30 MPG, that's 14,400 miles. That's almost three times the number of miles driven per year in the analysis. To call the electricity costs "break even", you have to assume -- $7.20 per gallon for gasoline. You're still way ahead on the costs using a normal car. (Remember, the $1200/year for electricity is your number.)
As I'm not the OP, I don't support the "fear mongering" assessment made by him/her.
I didn't say you did. That was why I was explicit in referring to the OP when I commented on that.
So, to really compare apples to apples, you've got to also factor in maintenance costs of your ICE vs maintenance costs of the EV.
Yes, you do. And there are so many possible failures for either vehicle type that the only reasonable analysis is based on "all things being equal". That is, all four wheels could fall off your normal car and you have to pay to fix that at a bundle of money, but so could all four wheels fall off the EV.
Then instead of inflating your numbers by rounding up to $6000
From here, "It's a surprisingly low $5,499 (after a $1,000 credit for turning in the old pack, which is required), plus installation fees and tax. The installation is estimated at roughly 3 hours of labor." So, $5500 plus tax and labor (3 hours) plus the $1000 trade-in. That's more that $6500, so I think it is fair to round to $6000 as the true cost.
then subtract the maintenance and repair costs of a Nissan Leaf, and you'll have $1694 in the bank.
It's interesting that you subtract an amount that is LESS than the cost of the battery replacement. You've forgotten to add in all the incidental costs of operating the EV in your analysis.
and you get 9.13 years of driving before you need to replace the battery.
You managed to lower the TBO by about 9% by adding in a lot of incidental costs to the normal car and ignoring the total cost of the battery replacement and ALL of the incidental costs for the EV. And you still wind up past the warranty for the battery.
As for the charge of "fear mongering" that the OP made -- don't be silly. I am not trying to make you afraid of anything. I'm simply questioning, with supporting numbers, the surface level cost analysis you did that leaves you claiming that it saves you money.
the battery has a warranty for 10 years
From here:
Ninety-six months is 8 years.
In July 2015 I bought a certified-used 2013 Nissan LEAF with 11K miles on it for ~$15K. ... because the bottom line is it saves us money.
The current price for a Leaf replacement battery is $5500 plus install etc., so say $6000 ballpark. At $2.50/gallon, that's 2400 gallons of gas. Say you get a car that does 30MPG, that's 72,000 miles.
Your used car was driven 5000 miles per year. To go 72,000 miles, that would be 14 years of driving. The expected lifetime of the battery pack is 10 years. You're four years short of breaking even.
You already limit your driving due to range, relying on a second car for longer trips, or just a lot of small trips in a day. That car costs money that you haven't factored in. Yes, you might claim that you need a second car anyway so the cost doesn't add in, but every time you are using that second car you prevent it from being used for its original purpose, and so the costs do add in.
Is your electric car really saving you money in the long run? Yeah, you get to laugh at people who have stopped at the gas station as you drive by, but they'll be laughing at you when you complain about a $6000 battery change. And it will be even funnier in five years as you sit by the side of the highway wondering why you didn't get the same range from your battery that you got today, and how could you have miss-planned this trip so badly?
No, that's how you die. Relevant words: "before its time".
I see nothing about "before its time" in anything you wrote. And as I said, the market is already breaking open, all it takes is a source that people can afford and more people will buy them.
Henry Ford broke open the automobile market by using standardized production lines to make a car that people could afford. I don't think "Ford Motor Company" died because he did that. Do you? Did "Volkswagon" die when they produced "the people's car"? Or did both companies get a good position in the future market?
Why do you do that? The market does not exist yet.
Because that's how you get a position on that future market. If you wait until it exists you're already behind. "Behind" is not the position that any company wants to be in.
But in truth, the market does exist. There are already EVs. The poor don't buy them because they can't afford to. The rich already buy them. You want to get into the market, you make a car the poor can afford, because there are so many of them compared to rich. You don't do that by building cars with the best acceleration numbers of any EV.
So no, they're looking for a position in the rich market by having "super fast" attached to their name.