On the one hand, are you under some delusion that your health insurance company is somehow doing a better job? With greater reliability, efficiency, and accountability? Fewer errors, fewer denied valid claims?? Do you just take it on faith, or do you have any evidence at all that your insurance company is doing a better job?
Well they're making tons of money, so they must be doing something right! =D
Bullshit. By your definition, anything you can do to someone should be legal if the victim is too terrified to resist.
Bullshit, because at no point did he argue that non-violent crimes should not be crimes.
I disagree with his opinion, because I think it is extremely obvious that rape of the victim-is-not-consenting kind normally associated with the word is inherently violent.
But he was not in any way arguing that "non-violent" rape should be legal. That's a ludicrous strawman you built so that you could burn it.
No, sorry. Your example about statutory rape where the 'victim' is in fact consenting is an example of a non-violent crime.
Rape against a non-consenting victim is sexual violence. There is violence inherent in the act of violating someone's body. Think for two seconds about what is actually entailed and this should be obvious.
With with only one tower in range you can (of course) be located as being in its service area and which "pie wedge" you're in. If it exports the distance from the timing handshake (and you're not in a signal shadow and communicating using a reflection) that can be narrowed to an arc around it.
Interesting. How does it figure direction from only one tower... *remembers what cell towers look like* *lightbulb goes on* duh from which of the antennae receives the signal.
So yeah they can narrow down your location to an extent with just one tower. Also means they can do a much better job of determining your location with just two towers.
Running the GPS on a phone eats up the battery, I wouldn't assume any phone company would be purposefully sabotaging the battery life of its own products to piss off its customers.
You may already realize this, but for clarity's sake: GPS isn't needed to track phones. They can be tracked simply from their signal as long as there are multiple towers within range to receive it. So probably in any city you can be tracked.
It may be controversial when some scientists announce that they're going to be using tracking data. That doesn't mean you aren't quietly being tracked anyway. Hell, carriers are required to give your position to law enforcement or emergency services. Since this kind of tracking is more or less passive -- it's based on your normal cell signal, no extra data is being sent by your phone -- then unlike with the Palm Pre's GPS you have no direct way of knowing if you're being tracked or not. You just know it's possible.
Well that's why you feed them, so they don't get too exhausted to move.:P
What are you planning to do, otherwise? Physically pick up the immobile bees and place them close enough to the nectar to eat but not so close they drown?
That, and you'll end up with an army of ants swarming the sugary concoction. Pretty much all insects will find it tasty.
A simple trick from hummingbird feeders is to have a cup of water the ants would have to swim through to get to the nectar, likea so. Ants can't swim, so they can't get to it. Okay, some species can form ant-bridges to cross water. Hopefully those kind aren't around where you're keeping your bees.:)
This is obviously a plot by the Society of Birds to make more food for their feathered friends.
Maybe! Certainly hummingbirds will like the sugar water as much as bees do.
Here's another trick that would probably work if you are only interested in attracting bees to your feeder: Paint it yellow. Hummingbirds are attracted to the color red, not so much to yellow. That's why hummingbird feeders are red. Some though have yellow "flowers", and I've learned that you should avoid those if you don't want bees and wasps on your feeder because they like yellow. Flip that around, and you have a feeder that should attract bees (and wasps) but not hummingbirds.
If you could build a shuttle for free and only have to pay for the fuel then space travel would still be insanely expensive.
That's simply not true. Fuel costs are a very tiny portion of the overall costs to develop, build, maintain and operate rockets. That's why liquid fuel rockets aren't actually any cheaper to launch than solid fuel even though the fuel itself is much cheaper.
If fuel costs were the only cost space travel would be orders of magnitude cheaper. But when you're making a tiny fleet of ships under government contract, then the rest of the costs balloon and can't be amortized over a large number of ships/launches. That is definitely something these investments can help with.
Space is, by definition, a vacuum. A large empty hole filled with a whole lot of nothing.
Hehe. Yeah, that's a definition, but another definition includes all the not-nothing stuff that's off the earth. I mean you mention a bunch of stuff that's "in space", or at least you have to go through space to get to it.
But yeah. What could we get with cheap access to space?
Solar radiation unfiltered by atmosphere? Okay. And after transferring to microwaves and building ground stations... why not just build solar cells on Earth?
Because unlike the light frequencies photovoltaics operate at, the microwave beam isn't attenuated by the atmosphere, giving as much as an order of magnitude improvement in energy. Because unlike ground-based solar, it will work anywhere on the globe year round for most of the day. Come on, this one is a no-brainer.
Rocks and ores? Yes, but getting rocks down the well would either require expensive heavy-lift capacity or would be indistinguishable from orbital bombing, so creates a whole new category of weapon of mass destruction. And the ores we're likely to run out of soon on Earth are finnicky things like copper and cadmium and uranium. Are huge asteroids of boring nickel-iron actually *useful* except as a way of wiping continents off the map?
You don't have to be in danger of running out of a material on earth. You just have to be able to multiply the output by an order of magnitude or two by harvesting a couple asteroids. There are tons of rare elements in near earth asteroids. A lot of them, despite not "running out" on earth, are very expensive to acquire. So, make getting out and into our gravity well cheaper, getting to NEOs is already easy, figure out how to process small asteroids, and you have a profitable scheme. This one isn't a "no-brainer" as in it isn't clearly something we should be doing right now, but it is very likely to be profitable if we tried.
Helium-3! We'll mine the Moon for it and later scoop Jupiter! Okay... but you need functioning fusion before Helium-3 is useful. We might get warp drive first. And even then, it might not pay for itself.
Lol. Sure. Maybe we'll come up with whatever crazy new revelation of physics allows warp drive before we figure out the engineering problems of fusion. Anyway, yeah, if fusion works, He-3 will be incredibly profitable. Hopefully we aren't still waiting on cheap access to space when it comes online!
BTW you forgot to mention same-day travel/delivery to anywhere on earth. This we're closer to achieving than anything else.
No, the people who blythely say things, like, "Finally, zero-emissions transportation I can afford!" are disengenuous in the extreme. Because most of them do (sort of) know that they're burning a trainload of coal
So... they know it, you know it, I know it... Apparently everyone knows it, but it's still disengenuous to say something completely true -- the car is zero emission -- because apparently someone might not know that this doesn't mean there's no pollution involved ever even though everyone actually knows exactly what is meant.
Got it.
And of course they get to have a chuckle at the poor fools who can't personally afford to buy a new vehicle chock full of toxic batteries, but who none the less are subsidizing Mr. Cool Green's purchase by having several thousand dollars of his tax dollars pushed over onto them. So progressive to make lower middle class people who can't play the same game help buy your car for you.
And how the hell do you expect the "poor" (and lol, I know actual poor people, "lower middle class" isn't poor sorry) to ever be able to afford any of this stuff in nobody buys it, both to reduce production cost and to introduce these cars into the used market? Subsidies are there to actually make these cars (well not the Volt but e.g. Civic Hybrid) affordable to even to the lower middle class. Maybe if you hadn't bought that shiny new Explorer as soon as gas dropped below $4, you'd be able to take advantage of the incentives yourself.
People on a forum like this should be exactly the ones to universally downplay developments like this, because when they wax poetic about their coal-powered car, they're contributing to a larger conversation in the wider culture that generally picks up on the "zero emissions" part and doesn't have a clue about the reality of burning those fossile fuels on the other end of the grid.
No. Absolutely not. Because this development IS a huge improvement. That is not debatable. You can babble about toxic batteries (cluephone: The whole LiIon battery pack is vastly, vastly less toxic than the Lead-acid battery in your smog emitter) and coal power (which still ends up being vastly superior in terms of emissions) all you want, fact is this is a great development. Only the retarded -- or the retarded by choice -- would want to downplay a positive development.
But I'm glad to see that you're concerned about hypothetical retards who don't read slashdot. Even though I've seen semi-literates on non-slashdot spout the same stuff about how EVs don't do anything because it just moves the pollution to the power plant. Who are these people who don't know coal plants burn coal exactly? Because even the dumbest people I can think of know that. In fact, the only case I can think of where what you claim happens actually happened was when you pretended someone else didn't know that when they said "zero emissions" even though you knew that wasn't the case and they actually knew it. Made-up people are not a good argument.
In any case, at best that means be realistic about what you're claiming an EV accomplishes. It does not mean that this development should be downplayed. Because it's a good development. Say otherwise, and demonstrate ignorance or disingenuity.
When it comes to actually reducing emissions, cars like this are lost in the noise, compared to just using more insulation in the attics of older houses, or replacing the windows on older commercial structures. But that's SO not cool, compared to talking about a vehicle that has built-in MiFi, and so it goes un-talked-about.
It's not noise, vehicle emissions are a huge problem, but yes those are great ideas. Great ideas I've heard a thousand times, anyone who is buying a new house, getting work done on their house, building a new office building, or otherwise will hear about a lot. I've heard it on Fox News segments about saving energy -- "upgrade your insulation, buy new windows!" So yeah, surpr
As I pointed out elsewhere, if you were concerned with "greenness" rather than finance or fashion, buying a new car would be the last thing you would consider. Manufacturing new cars is a very dirty process.
As I said in another post what you say is true for the individual. But if everyone who bought a Prius, Golf, or other efficient new car in the last ten years had instead bought a used car, then the only cars in the used market would be gas guzzlers. As evidenced by a friend of mine who could only afford used and who wanted an efficient car but ended up with a light truck because there weren't any suitable econo-cars around -- they're very popular, you see, and there are essentially not enough cars entering the used market to satisfy the demand.
Cars only last so long. Used cars become less efficient and more emmissive over time (and if you don't live in Cali or similar places you aren't obligated to fix it). You can't not build new cars. That's unsustainable. So if you're going to buy a new car then buying a green one does, in fact, help improve the overall greenness of our vehicle fleet over time.
That's not an excuse for conspicuous consumption in the name of "greeness". Anyone who bought a Prius or other efficient car recently should still be driving it, not rushing out to buy a Volt the second it comes out.:P But eventually they have to replace it, and thus someone else can buy an efficient used car instead of a gas-guzzler.
Maybe he's talking to the people who use phrases like "zero emissions" in discussions, right here on this very web site. Or the people who are politically aligned (for other reasons) with people who do, and who thus don't correct them for social discomfort reasons. You know who you are.
And... you're too stupid to know that "zero emissions" is referring to the car itself? Or you're assuming that the person saying it is too stupid? Or you're pretending to be stupid enough to not know that, then point out that emissions are happening elsewhere, and thereby prove that the person who never intended what you fallaciously pretended to think they meant is too stupid to know what you were pretending to not know?
I'm just trying to figure out how, when everyone involved in the discussion knows exactly what is being said and what it means, there ends up being some confusion that needs to be corrected.
And at what point does that justify not being excited and happy about the actual advancement being made toward reducing emissions? "My strawman version of what you claim is happening isn't true. Therefore nothing good is actually happening..." is that the logic? I don't think so, so what exactly are you trying to say?
Screw the motorcycle. Drive a $1000 shittermobile. It's pretty easy to buy one that gets 30 mpg. Drive it for a year or two and either junk it, or sell it for a couple hundred dollars. You'll never approach the efficiency of that compared to buying any new car, hybrid or not as there will be no new manufacturing required.
That's true at the individual level.
But there's a finite number of cheap used cars with good gas mileage, and they don't necessarily last very long. Case in point a friend of mine with a very limited budget ended up having to buy a light truck because used econo-cars are so popular they couldn't find one in their area. So instead they end up getting something less efficient.
So to make the used market sustainable, people do need to buy new cars too. If the used market is going to have fuel efficient cars in it, people need to buy new efficient cars. If everyone who has bought a new Prius or new Golf or other new, efficient car had instead bought an old, efficient clunker, then the only used cars on sale today would be SUVs, destroying the whole argument.
That's still not an economic justification for buying new cars; nobody who is in used-car price ranges should buy a new *whatever* and think they're saving money. But it is true that to make our fleet as a whole more efficient, we do need to replace existing cars with more efficient ones and that means buying new ones.
If you have the cheddar to drop $40k on a commuter car, you probably don't think twice about the price at the pump. Let's hope there are enough people buying this for the novelty value that it will stay afloat long enough that production efficiency can improve to the $25k/unit level.
Novelty? Try never having to factor a stop at the gas station into my morning commute.
The math works out pretty close to making up for the extra cost of the vehicle. Depending on your assumptions on where gas prices are going (if you pick down, though, you lose), it could work out to a real savings in 5 years or still a couple grand in the hole after 10.
If you can afford the car, then the convenience factor starts to look worth it.
Also if you can afford the car, then regardless of the economics, you'll be using a lot less gas and causing a lot less pollution (even if you get your juice from coal), and that can be attractive unto itself. Gee, what do you know, "going green" can mean at least initially that you're paying more. For those who can afford it, that will still be worth it.
The juice has to come from somewhere, and scrubbed coal plants may be cleaner than the exhaust of millions of vehicles, but it is by no means a Free Lunch.
So advocates need to temper their glee with a little reality check until they can hang enough solar panels on their roofs to charge their cars.
After we've already agreed that even the worst case (coal power) is better than ICEs and made the obvious statement that there's no such thing as a free lunch, I see absolutely no reason to temper my glee. I am very gleeful at getting something much better than what we have.
I don't get where this comes from: 1) Assume EV fan thinks they are completely perfect and do not harm the environment in any way ever. 2) Point out the obvious that this strawman is untrue. 3) Tell EV fan to stop being happy or advocating their solution.
I mean there may be some wackos out there who really believe (1), but none of them are around here, so who are you talking to?
Yes, but like Newtonian mechanics, modern relativity would still be a useful first order approximation. Plus, to the best of my knowledge relativity has only rarely been tested to more than first order effects.
Well what I mean is that the Theory of Relativity only looks anything like it does due to the absence of a preferred reference frame. Newton's Laws are only a good approximation because its basic assumption that time is constant is approximately true for normal speeds/masses. It's difficult to see how "There is no preferred reference frame" could be approximately true, but all the conclusions of Relativity stem from that being exactly true. Without that assumption it wouldn't be even approximately like it is now. And it seems too inherent, too good an assumption, to be turned over but still have the theory hold any water at all. Much like the classical Conservation of Energy has survived the transition to GR and QM, I suspect "all reference frames are equal" will continue to hold true.
On the other hand, I'll admit I have a hard time imagining what a universe without causality would be like. Much like I'm sure people looking at Einstein's theory had a hard time imagining a universe where time passed at different rates for different people.
We have tested Relativity to the extent of our ability to measure. It's extremely well tested. I'm not sure what second order effects your referring to, but if its possible for us to measure them, we have.
I agree; at the moment there's no watertight reason to prefer one interpretation over another. But the alternatives are hidden variables (local variables are ruled out by Bell inequality experiments and nonlocal variables would violate relativity), or the literal Copenhagen interpretation. (There are others, but these are the most popular.)
We're already violating Relativity by allowing FTL even in theory, so I have no problem with that aspect.:P
The Copenhagen interpretation is almost certainly wrong. (My only correction to his list is that #6 also applies to the No Hair theorem.)
I've always hated the Copenhagen Interpretation because it always seemed like a scientific argument based on puns.
40 miles per day electric of your 50 mile commute leaving 10 miles to gasoline. So yeah it gets great mileage, otherwise it is like 50 to 60 max, probably lower. Too much energy loss to convert between forms of power.
Actually the conversion is very efficient. The biggest inefficiency is in the nature of the ICE itself, but because it's used solely as a generator it can be small, light, and optimized for a single RPM.
But yeah, it would get great mileage -- even "equivalent energy usage" mileage -- for your 50 mile commute.
the real story is, highway mileage without recharge except by the engine.
Which they gave as 50mpg...
If you leave out the battery pack it still means five plus years to make up the difference IF your car only gets 30 in the city. Buy a TDI from VW and you get forty plus for around 22k.
I think the lesson here is don't be an early adopter of technology if your primary goal is to save money.:P
So, while doing its (realistic, not theoretical) 30 mile run on batteries, it has to lug around a heavy internal combustion engine
Yeah, which is why it can go farther than that.
and when it switches to its engine, it gets worse mileage than a VW Polo Bluemotion, while lugging around an expensive pile of useless toxic metal.
How far can the Bluemotion go without burning any gas at all? If I'm only using it to commute to work, can I never go to a
BTW, the pile of not-actually-very-toxic metal is also anything but useless. The Volt is a series hybrid. That means that the motor is purely electric, and the ICE is only there as a method of recharging the battery for longer trips. This is good, because it means the ICE can be optimized for that task. So because of this yes you pay for the weight of the batteries, yet it still gets very good mileage while burning gas. How is "one of the best" suddenly equivalent to "the worst"?
Long range electric or efficient internal combustion. Please, please, pick one.
Sorry, but right now, I think the combination of zero gas usage for short commutes, and the convenience of being able to use any normal gas station for rapid refueling anywhere in the country for longer trips is the right tradeoff. I'm sure you must be a huge fan of Tesla Motors, and while I certainly am too it's not to the extent of thinking that's the only or even best method of doing an EV today. Battery ranges are too short, and charge times are too long. When they fix both, so that I can drive all the way across Nebraska without stopping, and then pop into any charging station and be full again in the time it takes to buy some munchies and hit the head, then "long range electric" will be the best choice.
Slashdot Mirror
He's smoking New Math Lights. With that fresh menthol flavor and less tar than competing brands, New Math Lights lets you fail at math with style!
On the one hand, are you under some delusion that your health insurance company is somehow doing a better job? With greater reliability, efficiency, and accountability? Fewer errors, fewer denied valid claims?? Do you just take it on faith, or do you have any evidence at all that your insurance company is doing a better job?
Well they're making tons of money, so they must be doing something right! =D
By people, you mean the SSA? Aren't they the ones who should be using the SSN/birthdate?
SSA would use SSNs, Law Enforcement, i.e. the people providing the SSA with information about criminals, may not have been.
It was a very simple point. Two replies totally missed it.
Bullshit. By your definition, anything you can do to someone should be legal if the victim is too terrified to resist.
Bullshit, because at no point did he argue that non-violent crimes should not be crimes.
I disagree with his opinion, because I think it is extremely obvious that rape of the victim-is-not-consenting kind normally associated with the word is inherently violent.
But he was not in any way arguing that "non-violent" rape should be legal. That's a ludicrous strawman you built so that you could burn it.
No, sorry. Your example about statutory rape where the 'victim' is in fact consenting is an example of a non-violent crime.
Rape against a non-consenting victim is sexual violence. There is violence inherent in the act of violating someone's body. Think for two seconds about what is actually entailed and this should be obvious.
With with only one tower in range you can (of course) be located as being in its service area and which "pie wedge" you're in. If it exports the distance from the timing handshake (and you're not in a signal shadow and communicating using a reflection) that can be narrowed to an arc around it.
Interesting. How does it figure direction from only one tower... *remembers what cell towers look like* *lightbulb goes on* duh from which of the antennae receives the signal.
So yeah they can narrow down your location to an extent with just one tower. Also means they can do a much better job of determining your location with just two towers.
Running the GPS on a phone eats up the battery, I wouldn't assume any phone company would be purposefully sabotaging the battery life of its own products to piss off its customers.
You may already realize this, but for clarity's sake: GPS isn't needed to track phones. They can be tracked simply from their signal as long as there are multiple towers within range to receive it. So probably in any city you can be tracked.
And tracking of cell phones has come up in the past, and is generally quite controversial: http://www.insidetech.com/news/articles/2299-controversial-study-tracks-movement-via-cellphones
It may be controversial when some scientists announce that they're going to be using tracking data. That doesn't mean you aren't quietly being tracked anyway. Hell, carriers are required to give your position to law enforcement or emergency services. Since this kind of tracking is more or less passive -- it's based on your normal cell signal, no extra data is being sent by your phone -- then unlike with the Palm Pre's GPS you have no direct way of knowing if you're being tracked or not. You just know it's possible.
But yellow may attract a flock of song chavs or a legless tree asbo.
True! But on the other hand, it'll be safe from the Green Lantern.
Well that's why you feed them, so they don't get too exhausted to move. :P
What are you planning to do, otherwise? Physically pick up the immobile bees and place them close enough to the nectar to eat but not so close they drown?
That, and you'll end up with an army of ants swarming the sugary concoction. Pretty much all insects will find it tasty.
A simple trick from hummingbird feeders is to have a cup of water the ants would have to swim through to get to the nectar, likea so. Ants can't swim, so they can't get to it. Okay, some species can form ant-bridges to cross water. Hopefully those kind aren't around where you're keeping your bees. :)
This is obviously a plot by the Society of Birds to make more food for their feathered friends.
Maybe! Certainly hummingbirds will like the sugar water as much as bees do.
Here's another trick that would probably work if you are only interested in attracting bees to your feeder: Paint it yellow. Hummingbirds are attracted to the color red, not so much to yellow. That's why hummingbird feeders are red. Some though have yellow "flowers", and I've learned that you should avoid those if you don't want bees and wasps on your feeder because they like yellow. Flip that around, and you have a feeder that should attract bees (and wasps) but not hummingbirds.
Your post made a lot of sense to me, until I suddenly remembered that the second word was Chevrolet's. :)
If you could build a shuttle for free and only have to pay for the fuel then space travel would still be insanely expensive.
That's simply not true. Fuel costs are a very tiny portion of the overall costs to develop, build, maintain and operate rockets. That's why liquid fuel rockets aren't actually any cheaper to launch than solid fuel even though the fuel itself is much cheaper.
If fuel costs were the only cost space travel would be orders of magnitude cheaper. But when you're making a tiny fleet of ships under government contract, then the rest of the costs balloon and can't be amortized over a large number of ships/launches. That is definitely something these investments can help with.
Space is, by definition, a vacuum. A large empty hole filled with a whole lot of nothing.
Hehe. Yeah, that's a definition, but another definition includes all the not-nothing stuff that's off the earth. I mean you mention a bunch of stuff that's "in space", or at least you have to go through space to get to it.
But yeah. What could we get with cheap access to space?
Solar radiation unfiltered by atmosphere? Okay. And after transferring to microwaves and building ground stations... why not just build solar cells on Earth?
Because unlike the light frequencies photovoltaics operate at, the microwave beam isn't attenuated by the atmosphere, giving as much as an order of magnitude improvement in energy. Because unlike ground-based solar, it will work anywhere on the globe year round for most of the day. Come on, this one is a no-brainer.
Rocks and ores? Yes, but getting rocks down the well would either require expensive heavy-lift capacity or would be indistinguishable from orbital bombing, so creates a whole new category of weapon of mass destruction. And the ores we're likely to run out of soon on Earth are finnicky things like copper and cadmium and uranium. Are huge asteroids of boring nickel-iron actually *useful* except as a way of wiping continents off the map?
You don't have to be in danger of running out of a material on earth. You just have to be able to multiply the output by an order of magnitude or two by harvesting a couple asteroids. There are tons of rare elements in near earth asteroids. A lot of them, despite not "running out" on earth, are very expensive to acquire. So, make getting out and into our gravity well cheaper, getting to NEOs is already easy, figure out how to process small asteroids, and you have a profitable scheme. This one isn't a "no-brainer" as in it isn't clearly something we should be doing right now, but it is very likely to be profitable if we tried.
Helium-3! We'll mine the Moon for it and later scoop Jupiter! Okay... but you need functioning fusion before Helium-3 is useful. We might get warp drive first. And even then, it might not pay for itself.
Lol. Sure. Maybe we'll come up with whatever crazy new revelation of physics allows warp drive before we figure out the engineering problems of fusion. Anyway, yeah, if fusion works, He-3 will be incredibly profitable. Hopefully we aren't still waiting on cheap access to space when it comes online!
BTW you forgot to mention same-day travel/delivery to anywhere on earth. This we're closer to achieving than anything else.
No, the people who blythely say things, like, "Finally, zero-emissions transportation I can afford!" are disengenuous in the extreme. Because most of them do (sort of) know that they're burning a trainload of coal
So... they know it, you know it, I know it... Apparently everyone knows it, but it's still disengenuous to say something completely true -- the car is zero emission -- because apparently someone might not know that this doesn't mean there's no pollution involved ever even though everyone actually knows exactly what is meant.
Got it.
And of course they get to have a chuckle at the poor fools who can't personally afford to buy a new vehicle chock full of toxic batteries, but who none the less are subsidizing Mr. Cool Green's purchase by having several thousand dollars of his tax dollars pushed over onto them. So progressive to make lower middle class people who can't play the same game help buy your car for you.
And how the hell do you expect the "poor" (and lol, I know actual poor people, "lower middle class" isn't poor sorry) to ever be able to afford any of this stuff in nobody buys it, both to reduce production cost and to introduce these cars into the used market? Subsidies are there to actually make these cars (well not the Volt but e.g. Civic Hybrid) affordable to even to the lower middle class. Maybe if you hadn't bought that shiny new Explorer as soon as gas dropped below $4, you'd be able to take advantage of the incentives yourself.
People on a forum like this should be exactly the ones to universally downplay developments like this, because when they wax poetic about their coal-powered car, they're contributing to a larger conversation in the wider culture that generally picks up on the "zero emissions" part and doesn't have a clue about the reality of burning those fossile fuels on the other end of the grid.
No. Absolutely not. Because this development IS a huge improvement. That is not debatable. You can babble about toxic batteries (cluephone: The whole LiIon battery pack is vastly, vastly less toxic than the Lead-acid battery in your smog emitter) and coal power (which still ends up being vastly superior in terms of emissions) all you want, fact is this is a great development. Only the retarded -- or the retarded by choice -- would want to downplay a positive development.
But I'm glad to see that you're concerned about hypothetical retards who don't read slashdot. Even though I've seen semi-literates on non-slashdot spout the same stuff about how EVs don't do anything because it just moves the pollution to the power plant. Who are these people who don't know coal plants burn coal exactly? Because even the dumbest people I can think of know that. In fact, the only case I can think of where what you claim happens actually happened was when you pretended someone else didn't know that when they said "zero emissions" even though you knew that wasn't the case and they actually knew it. Made-up people are not a good argument.
In any case, at best that means be realistic about what you're claiming an EV accomplishes. It does not mean that this development should be downplayed. Because it's a good development. Say otherwise, and demonstrate ignorance or disingenuity.
When it comes to actually reducing emissions, cars like this are lost in the noise, compared to just using more insulation in the attics of older houses, or replacing the windows on older commercial structures. But that's SO not cool, compared to talking about a vehicle that has built-in MiFi, and so it goes un-talked-about.
It's not noise, vehicle emissions are a huge problem, but yes those are great ideas. Great ideas I've heard a thousand times, anyone who is buying a new house, getting work done on their house, building a new office building, or otherwise will hear about a lot. I've heard it on Fox News segments about saving energy -- "upgrade your insulation, buy new windows!" So yeah, surpr
As I pointed out elsewhere, if you were concerned with "greenness" rather than finance or fashion, buying a new car would be the last thing you would consider. Manufacturing new cars is a very dirty process.
As I said in another post what you say is true for the individual. But if everyone who bought a Prius, Golf, or other efficient new car in the last ten years had instead bought a used car, then the only cars in the used market would be gas guzzlers. As evidenced by a friend of mine who could only afford used and who wanted an efficient car but ended up with a light truck because there weren't any suitable econo-cars around -- they're very popular, you see, and there are essentially not enough cars entering the used market to satisfy the demand.
Cars only last so long. Used cars become less efficient and more emmissive over time (and if you don't live in Cali or similar places you aren't obligated to fix it). You can't not build new cars. That's unsustainable. So if you're going to buy a new car then buying a green one does, in fact, help improve the overall greenness of our vehicle fleet over time.
That's not an excuse for conspicuous consumption in the name of "greeness". Anyone who bought a Prius or other efficient car recently should still be driving it, not rushing out to buy a Volt the second it comes out. :P But eventually they have to replace it, and thus someone else can buy an efficient used car instead of a gas-guzzler.
Unfortunately you get $3500 for a 2 mpg gain.
Ugh, I didn't know that. That's asstastic.
Maybe he's talking to the people who use phrases like "zero emissions" in discussions, right here on this very web site. Or the people who are politically aligned (for other reasons) with people who do, and who thus don't correct them for social discomfort reasons. You know who you are.
And... you're too stupid to know that "zero emissions" is referring to the car itself? Or you're assuming that the person saying it is too stupid? Or you're pretending to be stupid enough to not know that, then point out that emissions are happening elsewhere, and thereby prove that the person who never intended what you fallaciously pretended to think they meant is too stupid to know what you were pretending to not know?
I'm just trying to figure out how, when everyone involved in the discussion knows exactly what is being said and what it means, there ends up being some confusion that needs to be corrected.
And at what point does that justify not being excited and happy about the actual advancement being made toward reducing emissions? "My strawman version of what you claim is happening isn't true. Therefore nothing good is actually happening..." is that the logic? I don't think so, so what exactly are you trying to say?
Screw the motorcycle. Drive a $1000 shittermobile. It's pretty easy to buy one that gets 30 mpg. Drive it for a year or two and either junk it, or sell it for a couple hundred dollars. You'll never approach the efficiency of that compared to buying any new car, hybrid or not as there will be no new manufacturing required.
That's true at the individual level.
But there's a finite number of cheap used cars with good gas mileage, and they don't necessarily last very long. Case in point a friend of mine with a very limited budget ended up having to buy a light truck because used econo-cars are so popular they couldn't find one in their area. So instead they end up getting something less efficient.
So to make the used market sustainable, people do need to buy new cars too. If the used market is going to have fuel efficient cars in it, people need to buy new efficient cars. If everyone who has bought a new Prius or new Golf or other new, efficient car had instead bought an old, efficient clunker, then the only used cars on sale today would be SUVs, destroying the whole argument.
That's still not an economic justification for buying new cars; nobody who is in used-car price ranges should buy a new *whatever* and think they're saving money. But it is true that to make our fleet as a whole more efficient, we do need to replace existing cars with more efficient ones and that means buying new ones.
If you have the cheddar to drop $40k on a commuter car, you probably don't think twice about the price at the pump. Let's hope there are enough people buying this for the novelty value that it will stay afloat long enough that production efficiency can improve to the $25k/unit level.
Novelty? Try never having to factor a stop at the gas station into my morning commute.
The math works out pretty close to making up for the extra cost of the vehicle. Depending on your assumptions on where gas prices are going (if you pick down, though, you lose), it could work out to a real savings in 5 years or still a couple grand in the hole after 10.
If you can afford the car, then the convenience factor starts to look worth it.
Also if you can afford the car, then regardless of the economics, you'll be using a lot less gas and causing a lot less pollution (even if you get your juice from coal), and that can be attractive unto itself. Gee, what do you know, "going green" can mean at least initially that you're paying more. For those who can afford it, that will still be worth it.
"Beta" means "it's not done yet"
But it does not mean "vapor".
So, yeah.
The juice has to come from somewhere, and scrubbed coal plants may be cleaner than the exhaust of millions of vehicles, but it is by no means a Free Lunch.
So advocates need to temper their glee with a little reality check until they can hang enough solar panels on their roofs to charge their cars.
After we've already agreed that even the worst case (coal power) is better than ICEs and made the obvious statement that there's no such thing as a free lunch, I see absolutely no reason to temper my glee. I am very gleeful at getting something much better than what we have.
I don't get where this comes from:
1) Assume EV fan thinks they are completely perfect and do not harm the environment in any way ever.
2) Point out the obvious that this strawman is untrue.
3) Tell EV fan to stop being happy or advocating their solution.
I mean there may be some wackos out there who really believe (1), but none of them are around here, so who are you talking to?
Yes, but like Newtonian mechanics, modern relativity would still be a useful first order approximation. Plus, to the best of my knowledge relativity has only rarely been tested to more than first order effects.
Well what I mean is that the Theory of Relativity only looks anything like it does due to the absence of a preferred reference frame. Newton's Laws are only a good approximation because its basic assumption that time is constant is approximately true for normal speeds/masses. It's difficult to see how "There is no preferred reference frame" could be approximately true, but all the conclusions of Relativity stem from that being exactly true. Without that assumption it wouldn't be even approximately like it is now. And it seems too inherent, too good an assumption, to be turned over but still have the theory hold any water at all. Much like the classical Conservation of Energy has survived the transition to GR and QM, I suspect "all reference frames are equal" will continue to hold true.
On the other hand, I'll admit I have a hard time imagining what a universe without causality would be like. Much like I'm sure people looking at Einstein's theory had a hard time imagining a universe where time passed at different rates for different people.
We have tested Relativity to the extent of our ability to measure. It's extremely well tested. I'm not sure what second order effects your referring to, but if its possible for us to measure them, we have.
I agree; at the moment there's no watertight reason to prefer one interpretation over another. But the alternatives are hidden variables (local variables are ruled out by Bell inequality experiments and nonlocal variables would violate relativity), or the literal Copenhagen interpretation. (There are others, but these are the most popular.)
We're already violating Relativity by allowing FTL even in theory, so I have no problem with that aspect. :P
The Copenhagen interpretation is almost certainly wrong. (My only correction to his list is that #6 also applies to the No Hair theorem.)
I've always hated the Copenhagen Interpretation because it always seemed like a scientific argument based on puns.
But... I don't want CO2 to be the metric.
40 miles per day electric of your 50 mile commute leaving 10 miles to gasoline. So yeah it gets great mileage, otherwise it is like 50 to 60 max, probably lower. Too much energy loss to convert between forms of power.
Actually the conversion is very efficient. The biggest inefficiency is in the nature of the ICE itself, but because it's used solely as a generator it can be small, light, and optimized for a single RPM.
But yeah, it would get great mileage -- even "equivalent energy usage" mileage -- for your 50 mile commute.
the real story is, highway mileage without recharge except by the engine.
Which they gave as 50mpg...
If you leave out the battery pack it still means five plus years to make up the difference IF your car only gets 30 in the city. Buy a TDI from VW and you get forty plus for around 22k.
I think the lesson here is don't be an early adopter of technology if your primary goal is to save money. :P
So, while doing its (realistic, not theoretical) 30 mile run on batteries, it has to lug around a heavy internal combustion engine
Yeah, which is why it can go farther than that.
and when it switches to its engine, it gets worse mileage than a VW Polo Bluemotion, while lugging around an expensive pile of useless toxic metal.
How far can the Bluemotion go without burning any gas at all? If I'm only using it to commute to work, can I never go to a
BTW, the pile of not-actually-very-toxic metal is also anything but useless. The Volt is a series hybrid. That means that the motor is purely electric, and the ICE is only there as a method of recharging the battery for longer trips. This is good, because it means the ICE can be optimized for that task. So because of this yes you pay for the weight of the batteries, yet it still gets very good mileage while burning gas. How is "one of the best" suddenly equivalent to "the worst"?
Long range electric or efficient internal combustion. Please, please, pick one.
Sorry, but right now, I think the combination of zero gas usage for short commutes, and the convenience of being able to use any normal gas station for rapid refueling anywhere in the country for longer trips is the right tradeoff. I'm sure you must be a huge fan of Tesla Motors, and while I certainly am too it's not to the extent of thinking that's the only or even best method of doing an EV today. Battery ranges are too short, and charge times are too long. When they fix both, so that I can drive all the way across Nebraska without stopping, and then pop into any charging station and be full again in the time it takes to buy some munchies and hit the head, then "long range electric" will be the best choice.