Ah, you seem to think I am against wind power, I am not. I am just for home produced power as much as possible. I think wind farms are great, I just don' t want to be all of it. I own a small wind genny myself. It just doesn't work well here, solar PV does. I think something like the Pickens plan has a lot of merit to it, as well as home solar PV, better insulation, etc. I like "all of the above" with practical solar fusion being the best of the long term solutions.
I'd go so far as to encourage a ten year national plan, you get whatever you want, whatever works for you, 100% credit as long as it is an active system that works and the cost stays stable to what it was three months before the law got signed, so there's no price bumping or gouging. The last time we had good tax credits we were solving the energy crisis, unfortunately they went poofarama in 85. that was also around when we had the best mileage cars being common. We've gone downhill bad since then.
We haven't had good credits or incentives since then, just tiny credits and deductions.
Anyway, I don't care, I am doing what I can here on the cheap. I make US poverty level, close enough anyway, if I can afford it, so can a lot more folks. If they don't care about themselves, why should I? As to the foreigners starving and so on, their call, learn to grow food better or not, control population or not, get rid of medieval tribalism or not. Evolution works. I do farming, it is hard work, I do the sort of work 99% of born here Americans won't do, for real cheap money, the BS they claim we "need" illegal aliens for, so I can relate better to them foreign folks who work hard for cheap than I can to most people in the US. If those foreign folks got some dipsqut junta that is making them live in poverty, they need to be proactive about changing that, parse that as you might.
As to the US exporting, I could care less, wall street has borked it and it's going down for some years now, inevitable, and until we are energy independent and get back to being food independent, that should be our number one concern, not bailing out billionaires in investment banks. I'd just as soon wall street floated away into the ocean, waste of resources, parasites. (the US now imports more than we export FYI with regards food). Change that first, we can worry about the other folks later. Ya, it might suck, but also not my business. I neither want to exploit them unfairly, none, zero, just leave them alone to sort their own matters out, nor subsidize them. give a man a fish or teach him to fish, that choice.
I am a rather strict non interventionist when it comes to those matters, I don't want to fool with other folks business. Now I have no control over our foreign policy or monetary policy, so the best I can do is live how I preach, to put my money and my energy and time where my mouth is. If people want to live in high rise termite cities with no way to get food or water if something happens, not my call, they go way out of their way to choose that lifestyle and pay for it, usually a lot more than suburban or rural living. Their choice, evolution works. They trust the system, I don't, man, I don't, I think it is fragile as heck, I can see it crumbling fast right now. I guess they don't, or don't know what to do about it other than hope those wall street pirates who have ripped them off royally can fix things.
I am not betting on that happening, the opposite, just more ripoffs are coming, I think they screwed up way too bad the past few years, it's gone, or going soon, put it that way. So...I want to be where the food and water come from, not "maybe" gets delivered-to. The great heist of 2008 isn't over yet, and will continue to get real bad in 2009. Prices right now for most things are a deal, because most things, most stuff, in the US get imported. All bets are off for next year. I can't prove that, it is only my opinion, and we'll see how close or far off I am next year.
Ha! On the contrary, the normal solar PV installation electricity is usually a lot cleaner than the grid supplied. the term "brownout" exists because the grid will ship you that stuff. More exact voltage regulation, less spikes or surges, better sine wave, etc, is a consideration. It's akin to you want your home computer to be fed through a good UPS system rather than just slap it into the wall socket, your home UPS box does a similar job as a whole house or whole circuit solar PV rig. I just like the idea of taking it as far as possible until all your power is filtered through that sort of reality.
As to those prices, I will repeat, most homeowners who can do some normal carpentry and wiring can save a ton by doing most of the install labor themselves, and *especially* on this board I would expect any slashdotter to be able to do the bulk of that sort of work. And I don't care what wage people make, you are a geek and tool user or not. doing something that important I would think most geeks would want at least some of the hands on part. It ain't rocket surgery, might as well pay yourself.
And sure, you can opt out of getting grid supplied..and how many people do that as compared to just sucking it up and paying the bill? That's around a classic strawman right there, the way houses are now and family reality, you'd go one day and the spouse and kids would be whining "pay the dang bill, we want electricity!". Unless you got some alternative, your expensive house ain't worth much to live in with out electricity.
And that *is* the point right now, for tons of folks the moment *has* arrived, it is becoming more and more economical and practical as a form of future proofing and tangible insurance to do it yourself, at least as a decent adjunct for those critical circuits you want all the time, say your furnace blower, your freezer, etc. I don't know how it is where you are, but where I live we lose mains power a lot, having a backup is no longer just a nice thing to have, it is a necessity if you want to save your stuff from melting, or at least be able to run a fan during a heatwave, etc.
Modern homes without electricity become very uncomfortable and expensive tents pretty quickly without electricity. There's a peace of mind/tangible insurance aspect there that is hard to exactly quantify in terms of dollars, but it certainly does exist. It can become a life or death health issue with the very young and elderly if the power goes out for any length of time during extreme weather conditions, and it certainly can get into the very annoying level for regular healthy folks to have nothing when it is in the 90s out or below zero or like during an ice storm. They evac old folks as fast as possible out of their houses in the summer heat when the grid goes down, because they can croak fast. They have no excessive heat tolerance. How much is that worth to have some backup? Backup/self generated power is a really spiffy thing to have, beats the pants out of that marvelous foyer and electric chandelier *when you need it*. When you don't need it and everything is working fine it seems expensive, when that stuff poofs or something happens to your job or income or any other out of the ordinary situation, then that backup power looks likes a smart investment.
Different strokes, be happy with your purchases and decisions!
Personally, I want backups for my necessities, and I consider a reliable and redundant electric supply to be a modern necessity. I lived quite literally without running water or electricity for years, I am fully aware of what that takes and what that entails, much more so than most people here especially the developed world folks who have never experienced that outside of a week camping someplace. That is why I appreciate it so much now and why I find it eminently affordable to have redundancy for both my water supply and electricity, as well as for my food and heating and fuel. I *don't* take it for granted it will always be there, or tha
Your going to need a *lot* of citations for all of that, it just doesn't jibe with what I have seen, especially near a half a million folks starving because of US corn growing. Latest stats from two weeks ago they are going to have an additional billion bushels this year over what was already a near record spring estimate forecast, and no way did or will all that extra go into ethanol. Besides that, the US is under zero obligation to feed the world, that is up to individual nations, any exports are gravy, and that's it. If we have extra, fine, sell it, if we don't, their call why they don't have food. I look around and see a lot of stupid asshole nations who have their own weird policies that contribute to their own peoples miserty. Look at zimbabwe, used to be the alrgest food exporter in africa, nowe a basket case with the people there eating leaves and mice and bugs. That isn't my fault nor anyones but their own fault at this stage of the game. Same with any of the huge population nations, jeebus crap, zip the pants up now and then, they should buy a clue theyu need to maybe watch that population level. Not trying to be a hardass about it, but I am not an immediate blame the US first always on every issue. national food production is a national level security issue, ALL nations should make sure whatever they do they can be able to feed themselves before they buy dictator palace one or tank or stupid jet fighter. How many tractors could you make with the resources in one tank? See?
Anyway, back to the immediate, I know a lot of folks who have solar, none of them have any sort of 30 plus year payback, it is much less than that unless you are paying some really ridiculous amount for labor to do the install, if you do the bulk of it yourself, which you can if you are any kind of normal tool user, you can save a lot.
And for that matter, no law says you have to grid tie, you can run a sub panel and just run a few circuits, and use a battery bank for storage. Nice when the grid goes down after a hurricane or storm to keep the freezer working and maybe a fan, yes? Power the home office so the whole room is one big UPS protected system? It never has to be either/or, that's the biggest fallacy about solar PV out there, and nothing scales for the homeowner like solar PV, one panel to whatever. heck, I went two years near with just one panel as my sole electricity source, so I really don't want to hear about people's overblown expectations of what they need or deserve or can't live without. I am far from being rich or wealthy, and if I can afford it, I reject claims from people making a lot more that it is "unaffordable". they jsut want to spend money on other things, that's all. I don't own any sort of large TV, an old used 19 inch CRT is it. If people want to drop a grand on a stupid television, or buy jetskis or whatever, well, that's the choice they make. What is the ROI on a 42 inch LCD TV? A home theater system? having an extra bathroom? Buying a new car as opposed to a well used one? A "gaming" computer? Apply that to any number of things people buy. The money is there, people just have different priorities and don't take into consideration how much they drop on stuff that has zero ROI.
As to batteries, just a random tip, buck for amphour, the cheapest way to get lead in the garage is a forklift traction battery pack, it isn't that expensive relatively speaking to the alternatives and especially to any batteries that have "solar" stamped on them, and doing shallow cycling and good water maintenance it should last a long time. And perhaps when it is time to upgrade then we'll have better batteries. The global demand for better batteries is HUGE and tons of places are working on them now, I see nothing but good coming from that quarter. It's already a lot better now than it was 10 years ago. Look at what cordless drills cost ten years ago and replacement batteries for them. I can waltz into the local B&D store here right now and walk out with a drill and *two* batts
Where did I say dump the grid? I said add in a lot more solar so we won't have to massively upgrade the grid so much, because we can add to local production, directly for homes and businesses onsite, no grid required. And solar is more than just electricity, we have solar thermal as well, which could be used for a lot more hot water heating and space heating. The article is about the wind farms and not being able to use the power, my counter is a slightly larger emphasis on local production means we won't have to bump up the grid so much. Personally I would prefer an "all of the above" approach with energy, that and a much greater emphasis on dropping demand via better insulation in buildings and better and more efficient appliances and so on. All of the above, we are going to need all of it.
Solar as a stand alone source is very practical and thousands of people just in the US already use it, with battery banks. This isn't exotic or very rare anymore, man, this is 2008, the tech is solid and is out there working. When solar PV was first invented and used it cost thousands of dollars a watt, it is now down to full retail at some outlets under 4 bucks a watt, and getting better all the time.
Properly sized home battery banks can last for years, mine are ten years old this year and still work fine, despite any number of internet experts assuring me they might only last 2-3 years and need to be replaced. I heard the same thing when Priuses first came out, all sorts of internet experts claimed the batteries wouldn't last, but so far, very few people who own those cars have replaced them, many are well over one hundred thousand miles and still working.
As for leeching off the neighbors, well personally my panels weren't subsidized, regular plain full price retail. Hell, for the longest time home owners just in general terms were "leeching" off their usually poorer renting neighbors because they got a mortgage deduction and the renters didn't.
Governments offering incentives for this or that are common, it's beyond common, it is normal, it is exactly how this system works right now, the tax code is slap full of deductions or other ways to lower your taxes for this or that, so really, where's the beef? Local property taxes going to public schools, even single people and elderly with kids long gone out of the schools still pay that, because we the people folks decided it was a good idea for the commons. Corporate deductions for big business dudes to sit in a fancy and expensive restaurants and eat, and to travel around and show each other power points??? To own and operate private jets?? What the hell... Solar PV credits right now are such small potatoes compared to other forms of what could be called "tax payer leeching" it ain't funny.
And most other forms of energy delivery have been subsidized. The grid, just in general terms,centralized delivery, that whole idea, all those transmission lines are just put there, they cross private property all over, no one gets a rental check for that, the government mandates access. That's a huge subsidy that's an artificial subsidy worth who knows how many billions going to benefit private companies, but they deemed it a good enough way to benefit the "commons". Same with natural gas delivery and so on, or how about municipal water supply? The public roads? How far do you want to go with this?
Development of most forms of energy people get delivered have all benefited from tax monies or special grants like granted access, look at nuclear, untold huge big number billions in tax money went into developing it, and even today not a single plant out there has their own full private insurance, they all make use of the government-tax money-as the ultimate last insurer. If they had to pay full private rates, that would sure bump up that price to the end user.
We have a DOE, they do continual research work on all forms of energy, you name it, coal to hydro to e
You are already paying for it. It just shifts who gets the cash and who gets to own the means of production. If you are more than happy to have a perpetual open ended contract where you have no idea what you will be charged in the future for the product delivered...well...doesn't that just sound dumb? In essence, signing up for grid supplied power as your only source is just that. You're going to be paying that bill the rest of your life anyway (assuming like most people you will probably want electricity forever), so the question then changes to something more directly to the point now that this money issue is resolved, do you want to buy something you can eventually pay off and own and enjoy (solar PV does this in most cases, it can be as little as 7 years on up to 20 years at today's prices, but it does get paid off at some time), or just perpetually rent forever with no fixed price to look at? Do you want to build your own equity, or just keep building your electric landlord's equity? That money is leaving your wallet no matter what.
As to the issue of windpower and the grid, again, a much larger shift to smaller and more decentralized means of production means we won't have to rebuild the entire grid infrastructure so much. A *lot* of folks who have already gone full alternative energy run both types of systems now, because in the winter months the winds usually pickup as solar gain drops, vice versa in summer. Not everywhere, but it is exceedingly common now in those circles.
I look at this energy issue the same way as I do my big garden and this "eating" thing that seems to be as popular as using electricity. Ya, I could work more, make more money, then drive to the store and buy expensive organic stuff...or..just produce it onsite, eliminate several expensive middleman steps and use a lot less energy into the bargain, and not contribute so much to excess carbon emissions and so on.
When I look how much I get out of that garden (and my other stuff, dinner tonight home produced burgers with my own tomatoes and other stuff in a salad, topped off with my own watermelon for dessert) compared to hours worked and production costs involved, it is a rather well paying "job" to just do it myself. Tradeoffs, everyone gets to pick what they want to pay for and everyone gets a choice to pick if you want to own "it", "it" meaning any number of life's necessities or things you *really* want like back to the electricity, or help someone else own it and they might turn some over to you for a price to be constantly adjusted probably not much in your favor forever.
And that's it, along with economies of scale. Computers never got cheap until it went from thousands of home PCs to millions, then the market exploded and now look at it. Same deal will happen with alternative energy, and even though the earlier adopters pay more, they still get the benefits immediately, and it just keeps getting better from that point on.
Well of course that is really high, then again a lot of gasoline engined vehicles can cost that much or more. As to electricity rising in price, I have solar panels long paid off I would use to keep any electric vehicle I might get (or more likely build) charged, and would most likely buy some more than. My transpo needs are simple, I put more miles on the tractors here than I do in a car on the street.
They have an interesting electric vehicle at a home depot near me that is *this close* to being a practical electric short distance commuter type or neighborhood type car-thing at only 5 thousand bucks. It is a small little pickup with a dump bed, and it has a cab. I am thinking at around double that price it would be practical enough for my purposes, with more batteries and so on, a slightly bigger electric motor, and then an option to throw a generator in the back of the bed for a range extender. It is being sold as an electric ATV but looks not a lot different from some NEVs I have seen pics of.
I believe we'll be seeing affordable electric street vehicles that will be "good enough" from both US plants (ZAP has announced a one million sq ft manufacturing plant in Kentucky just the other day), and especially from India and China real dang soon now just based at looking at that 5 thou example. The california and western world builders can build expensive high end units, but the asian factories will be building the elctric vehicles "for the masses". Look what Tata did in one year, came out with an ICE car at 2500 bucks. They actually did it. You can't get a factory *paint job* for that in a US plant. And they say they *will* do electric ones and I believe them and who would bet against China not only having electric cars but twenty different makes soon? About around 9 years ago I remember riding on a small electric scooter (my boss at the time bought one for himself and his wife) that cost close to a grand, now you can get better ones than that for around 200 bucks. Stuff is changing fast in other words.
As to electric power, you can now get decent solar panels at around three and a half bucks a watt (saw a link here yesterday in fact for that in the thread). 8-9 years ago I was paying a little over 5. Not too bad, following normal electric device prices some, and a lot of new fabs go online next year and a few different thin film "printable solar" companies are either delivering like nano solar or close to delivering at well under that price.
To me, having an electric vehicle at least as a backup (I bought a small diesel pickup that gets close to 40MPG last year as my "normal" reaction to the inevitability of higher fuel prices) is just good transportation insurance, just like we have the solar PV and our generators for grid power insurance, both from an availability standpoint and also an economic long range standpoint. And I haven't mailed it in yet, but last week I downloaded and printed out my application for home ethanol fuel production (you are supposed to register with the Feds for that), so I can make fuel here using some scraps I can get (this is a farm after all), and biodiesel will be after that, so I can get both sorts of fuels covered, plus my electricity. I think short, medium and long range all the time on things.
I remember the oil embargo and paying ten bucks a gallon with a two gallon cap before (which would be more like paying 50 bucks now or something, a lot), and there's no reason to think it won't happen again given the nature of world events and the collective machismo and insanity of various world leaders. I'm into survivalism or practical preparedness, I just like having backups, and sometimes even backups for backups. I work and make money and go to the grocery store, but we also have a huge garden and grow our own beef and have a flock for eggs. Backups. We have a propane heater and a full tank of propane, but last year we didn't burn a single therm of that, we used all wood heat, wood harvested righ
I don't think the electric connection would be hard with a simple bolt together plug system, then a snap together clamshell weather cover. I can't see on their site though how that works but I am sure they took that into consideration. I think it is *by far* the slickest way to do a functional hybrid, then no worries (or major more expense) about trying to have 30 grand worth of batteries just to get some range, 50 miles on pure electric is more than enough for most commuting, or for me to get to town and back with juice to spare. That trailer itself is interesting, it doesn't pivot, it attaches at two points and stays rigid with the vehicle. On their test sportscar the whole thing in modular hybrid mode still fits inside a normal parking slot. They wanted it that way to make it easier to drive around cities for people who aren't comfortable with a regular trailer (like backing up).
As to the planes, it is frustrating to me, this farm also has a pretty fair airport, but I can't afford lessons or a plane. I maintain the runway and so on as part of my maintenance duties, and I hay the sides for the cattle. My boss owns most of the planes here, maybe one day he'll take pity on me and sell me a rebuildable junker cheap. He has a 172 that's been tricked out with a high performance package, a bigger engine, and another one, a 150, that has more "stunt" quality wings on it, able to cruise slow and not stall, do some fancy turns, etc. I think he has around 20 planes here total, some functional, some not, two of them are dual engined. The strip is between 2/3rds and 3/4ths mile long, grass, so we can handle most prop planes out there but no jets. Well, I know it can take a dc-9, they busted some drug smugglers at night once some years ago who just swooped in and landed, they got caught on the ground offloading. That's another one of my jobs, go check out "odd" planes that come in and land with no permission. Always makes me a little apprehensive, I usually use the binocs on them first to check. Although firearms are totally legal here and I have some (just necessary on the farm, wild dogs, random methheads stealing stuff, etc), I got no great desire to get between some smugglers and a million bucks of their product, if ya know what I mean...
Well, ten bucks a gallon would mean to me only going to town once a month instead of once a week like we do now. I don't commute either, live on a farm, but still need to go in for stuff. But...that is only a tiny fraction of the big picture, our modern world moves goods with liquid fuel, primarily diesel, and that impacts a lot of other expenses. $10 a gallon in the US in a fast time frame would cause an economic crash, a large one, unimaginable economic problems. Right now as it stands it has already put a lot of people hurting.
As to traveling several thousand miles a month and not be commuting, I won't ask your personal reasons, not appropriate and not my business, but the only person I know who had to do that lately was trying to help a very elderly parent a few states away by going over on the weekends, and wound up buying a used cessna instead for the trip, just to speed things up. I asked, he said he gets around 14 MPG but it is in a much more straight line than driving a car, and at double highway speeds.
As to electric versus gasoline or diesel cars, the range problem has been solved for years now, as far as I can see it is a non problem anymore, it's called one more axle. AC Propulsion built the first models of the range extending generator trailer. It's not a true hybrid like Prius, the vehicle itself is just electric, but a modular hybrid system then, which I think makes more sense than regular hybrids that carry double the stuff all the time, the engine, the electric motor, the batteries, the fuel tank. That's twice as much junk as you really need, and why I don't care for any of the hybrids that much. With the modular system, around town, pure electric, for trips, attach the small generator trailer and fill it up and go, just like any other gasoline car. Plus the generator trailer would be cool for a whole house generator when the grid goes down. I know I am looking forward to affordable all electrics, as I could keep a small one charged from my solar panels if I only needed to drive it once a week.
...would the gallon of gas have to reach before you'd reconsider something other than that? $10 a gallon, $15? And how about rationing (which I remember occurring before), if it ever got that that, say you could only get a few gallons a week due to some expanded mideast war disrupting huge amounts of the global supply? The reason I ask is I see this sort of sentiment a lot, the 500 mile range drawback, but I am wondering how often people actually drive that sort of distance on a regular basis, say at least once a week or so. My point is, for regular around town and commuting, I don't think you (a very general "anyone you") need that sort of range, and for the odd trip, there are always rentals.
Hey, cable or telco guys! Please install all the dang boxes you want out here so we can get *some* kind of broadband. Those snooty yuppie rich places don't want it, they sayso -> "too ugly" "destroys the oh so darling neighborhood ambiance when we are having our wine and cheese soirées". See? Losers, come out where you'll be appreciated.
Thanks on behalf of the millions of people in the US who live outside the major cities and burbs.
As a matter of fact yes, we have a steam engine about 400 yards from where I am sitting right now. Here on ye olde farm, that's the next big project after the shavings mill is finished (the building is almost done, then install the equipment), putting up the steam engine-driven sawmill. Sorta neat that the scraps from the device-the slabs- will provide the fuel to run it. Pure sustainable and carbon neutral, not too shabby in todays world. Not that this is all that common today, but it isn't that uncommon either, steam is still in widespread use around the world here and there, and a lot of modern powerplants are steam, for that matter. I would imagine a ton of people reading here today and posting are doing that from coal burning steam powerplants. Of course those are turbines and not pistons, but it is still steam powered. The one here is a piston, looks sort of like an old locomotive.
Just thought I'd throw that in because maybe mainframes still have some practical uses.
These various young athletes make money eventually endorsing products, and having a gold over a silver or bronze is a direct monetary benefit. I would imagine there could possibly be some lawsuits over this eventually, even if the IOC is "satisfied". They are going to have a hard time explaining the documents and the blatant trying to hide the original sources. A big mess and fits in with the other fake stuff connected to these olympics, the fake fireworks newscasts, the fake lip syncing singing, etc.
Well, thanks for the information! I thought no music=exempt. That is just quite strange and obviously seriously wrong. If I ever do my own talk station (which I plan on doing as soon as broadband is available at my location), I'd tell them to take a walk and fight it as far as I can.
I don't listen to net music radio at all, just talk radio which isn't threatened by this music deal, but are you saying these internet music broadcasters don't have an easy way to mash a button mid song while you are listening to it and have you automagically purchase it cheap? Or at least get it lined up in some purchasing queue, so the bands and promoters could see this was an effective medium. How the heck are they to know you heard it on pandora then went over to itunes to purchase it? I would have thought that would be common and easy by now.
ya ya this time it was "just a game", or "just a camera and taking pictures illegally", its "the legal free speech zone is over here behind this fence barricade", "well, we were told by our superior entities that there were links to osama bin forgotten and 9-11 and he had WMD and..orders..uhh.", "well, segregation is the law, so them darkies got to stay in the back of the bus and they can't go to the white folk's schools or drink out of the water fountains, so we got to have law-n-order!", "we need to pacify them injuns", and.....just tons of excuses over the years/decades/generations/centuries for being dickwads. It all adds up. You got a society that starts to treat everyone like a criminal, where they can get away with anything they want as long as they say the magic phrase of that generation, which in this generation is "security threat-tarrrr-ism!!", guess what, you have created a "papers please" police state on purpose. And once on that path it usually ends up with the cattle cars and the camps and political prisoners and so on, all because of some excuse and following orders and allowing it to go on every little step of the way until a lot of stuff has changed for the worse.
No one single incident is the tipping point, there probably isn't a real tipping point, it is the accumulation of all the little precedents headed towards the full bore tyrannical regime that gives it away. If you aren't seeing the word "no, that is just wrong" being applied occassionally, that's your biggest clue that it is rapidly headed towards a *really* bad news situation, which unfortunately humans have gone through too many times in the past.
In the 20th century, the biggest criminal gangs and mass murderers were the state, and the state's employees, untold millions of people robbed, raped, tortured, incarcerated, and killed by their own governments and government employees, all over the planet.
And that is why with the original founding of the US they tried to break that cycle, (yes, it was still flawed in many ways but it was the first serious organized humans attempt). They recognized the individual was sovereign and free, and was born that way, nothing else was need other than existence, he did not have rights which were doled out or taken away on a whim by some king or dictator or prince or emperor or clerk in chief.
That's why they made a point to try to clearly limit governmental power, that's why they were so insistent on a second amendment and full technological parity of self defense tools and why they *absolutely* did NOT want a large permanent standing army, because they knew it would eventually lead to yet another stoopid dictatorship. And it is because human nature doesn't change that much, the criminally insane and shrewd megalomaniacs and psychopaths always rise to positions of power, that's what they crave over everything else so that is what they work for and get. It's not like there are tons of those crazy people, there aren't, there never have been, it is an oddly occuring human defect condition, but it is why bad stuff happens all the time, dealing with ultimate predators is hard, going along with them is a lot easier, and eventually in very large ways, those crazy leaders get followers who do not question edicts and commands, no matter how far it goes because of the phenomenon of incremental changes, they just follow through, even when they know it could very well be wrong, and there's always some excuse they use for it.
If you are interested in the electric car scene, check out this website with all the individual conversions, there's a lot of them, from lawn tractors to commuter cars to sportscars to full size trucks, scooters, e-bikes, you name it, it's been converted. EV Album
Nope, they are not 12 volt, some electric cars go up to hundreds of volts because of series connections and in order to get some speed out of them. Even just slow speed golf carts are typically 48 volt with 6-8 volt batteries onboard. If you mean individual batteries, there are a variety of them, no one size fits all has come out to be the clear winner unless you can afford a tesla level battery pack which uses a form of lithium cells, thousands of them.
You can save considerable doing your solar install if you do the bulk of the work yourself. I mean a lot, I wouldn't be surprised at all if anything you got quoted was like 40% labor. There's only a few parts that require a licensed electrician. (I have helped put in two big systems and did all of my own small system) As to your current electric bill, unless you have a signed contract from your supplier guaranteeing the price you pay now for the next 30 years, you can't compare it to a solar install which does give you such a contract. You can hope your bill won't go up drastically, but that's about it.
As to your car, good luck. Get a diesel that gets good mileage, or one of the better gasoline cars from the 80s that get better mileage than even hybrids now. I got a smallish diesel (pickup) last year used for really cheap, although it is a rat, it was the best I could find in my area for sale. My next project though will be pure electric (another small pickup, I'll do a conversion) for local driving into town, (I don't have to commute so once a week is fine, 40 mile range is fine, and I will keep it charged from my existing solar panels) then I will put a fuel generator in a trailer or in the bed (maybe, batteries suck down the weight)for longer trips. That solves the range problem quite easily, plus, having a decent generator is good back up emergency power for your home anyway, just a good thing to have.
As to rebates or tax credits, too many variables state to state to say yes or no, but the feds still have a 2 grand tax credit. Not a lot, but at least it beats nothing. Do a google search and check your individual state, they really vary a lot, some are quite generous. but heck ya I think we should have them, much better tax credits would get solar adopted faster and help with the overall long range energy issues, plus home installations are decentralized, meaning we don't need to expand the existing expensive powergrid network.
The cheapest way to start to go alternative energy is to drop demand. Sounds weird, but just getting really good energy efficient appliances and making sure your home is more than adequately insulated, etc, helps a lot.
Personally though I draw the line at compact fluorescents, I detest them things. I am holding out for cheaper LED lighting. We save in other ways like we get by without expensive AC here in georgia because we picked out our little cabin because it sits under really decent shade meaning we can get by with a few window fans and it has it's own water supply from a well, we have a woodstove hookup and that is our primary heat, and the huge garden spot cuts the food bills drastically, that and we raise our own beef. Nothing like "locally sourced" for a lot of your day to day necessities to cut the bills!
If you want to look at examples of self powered homes that also power the family car, just for some ideas and they are cool anyway, you can check out this for some working examples.
there's nothing to stop people buying the apple bundle just because of clone makers. Apple could maintain their same standards if there were one clone maker or a thousand and consumers could still choose them. They are the only ones can stamp Apple on their computer products though. There's nothing stopping Mac owners now buying apple branded RAM either, even though other generic RAM will fit and work, and they could choose that (and a lot do because Apple charges a lot more for their RAM) if they wanted to and it might void the warranty (I don't know on that, maybe not though), but they *can* do it legally. This is just taking that same idea and legal rights and extending it to the whole hardware package, and as to software, as long as you aren't selling illegal cloned copies, you can cram it in anyplace you feel like. There's a distinct difference between a copyright and some EULA.
We went through this with cars. The manufacturers, who had just as deep of pockets and just as many or more of lawyers as apple could possibly throw at this situation wanted to make it so you could only get and install bloated price OEM parts to go on their cars. They lost in court and now you can go to the parts store and get a variety of parts that don't come from the major manufactuers and have their stamp on them, but they will fit into place and work. You can get out your welder and mix and match for that matter, if you want a belchfire motor and an Acme transmission in a roadhog chassis, it is legal to do so. IOW you can get 50 buck starters that work just as good as the original 150 buck starters. Or engines or what have you. And they can't insist you only burn "their" brand of gasoline either, nor can the gasoline company insist you can only put it into approved brand cars. So there's your car analogy, hardware is the cars, software is the gasoline.
Now the car parts clone makers can't claim they are the original manufacturer, but they can still do it and the consumer is obviously better off by a wide margin. Apple is out to lunch, hope it makes it to the supreme court.
With that said, I don't want either a mac clone nor OSX, Linux works just fine on generic commodity hardware if you do just a bit of homework before you buy components or systems. But the *principle* is important. And if Apple throws a hissy fit about patents, that needs to go to the supreme court as well as to why if they can get a patent there is no warranty as to being suitable for purpose for software. That is such a blatantly glaring ripoff to the end user consumer it ain't funny. One or the other for software, copyright or a patent, but not both.
..to be able to know when the odd deer is going to be there jumping out in the road, or someone's dog, or cow that busted out of the fence, or some lumber or a ladder across the road that someone dropped off their truck and didn't see fall out, or fallen tree limbs or big rocks off the adjacent hill and a lot of etc. Or my fav I hit while on a motorcycle, a lot of cow crap on top of acorns. Like ball bearings on slick ice.
Just because your machine can do it, and you can do it on a closed track, does not mean it is safe to do double the speed limit on random roads, especially rural roads. A lot of times it isn't safe to *do* the speed limit if the road is the least bit twisty and has blind turns in it without a lot of visual notice. The hospitals and cemeteries are filled up with evel kniebel wannabes treating public roads like race tracks. Ya, it's fun, and possible..sometimes. Sometimes it just ain't. And unless you are psychic enough to win Randi's prize, you never know when it is or isn't.
"If America is supposed to be moving away from a manufacturing economy and toward a service economy"..that's the theory the wall street pirates have pushed while they sold off everything they could. If that theory actually worked, the USA would be the ones holding all the balance of trade surpluses. What we are holding is the largest debt ever even conceived of on the planet, all the banks in big trouble, a dollar dropping in worth by the year, government that has to keep rearranging their economic stats to make it look better than it is, and so on.
It sounds great to those making 7 or 8 figures a year, Because they are in a position to arbitrage digital bits fast for alleged "work", so they keep pushing the fairy tale that "you too, joe sixpack" will be getting that. It's only taken them one generation of pushing that notion to destroy the economy, it is cruising on inertia now as all the foreigners sitting on buckets of dollars are trying to figure out how to convert them to "anything but more pieces of government or big bank IOU paper" as fast as possible without it turning to a full scale rout.
The latest is big sovereign wealth funds snapping up residential and commercial properties for dimes on the dollar from two years ago.
Sure, it looks just wonderful when you sell off all your real wealth and go into bondage for it. The only reason the middle class has the illusion of wealth and prosperity now is because by and large they have hocked everything they have including their grandchildren's labor to living large now. they just siucked that in and ran with it, thinking it could last forever, short term wealth for longer term destitution and transfer who gets to pay the tab to the next two generations.
I've used an analogy before for our economy over the last 25 years. A carpenter or mechanic can pawn all his tools and truck friday night and have a helluva "rich" weekend, man, the economy is great! Look at all the money!
Uh huh.
Eventually monday comes around and you need to work but can't, and the bills keep coming in. We are right about at monday morning now after a rich one generation long weekend.
Servicing wealth does not create wealth. Managing wealth does not create wealth. Writing about wealth or having a TV show about wealth does not create wealth. Repackaging IOUs into different bundles and giving them new names does not create any new wealth. Governing wealth does not create wealth (in spades, it is the anti-wealth). Playing sports and games and having entertainments around wealth does not create wealth.
You create wealth, or you rearrange who has it and dilute wealth, that's about it.
Manufacturing creates wealth by taking cheaper raw materials, leveraging human smarts and labor, and turning them into something useful. Servicing that is just a negative cost of wealth, every penny in service detracts from the value, and it in no way constitutes creating it.
And for that matter, all these places that now create wealth are finding out they can do their own servicing, whatever is necessary. They built up their manufacturing bases with the help of the wall street looters and their scientific and engineering bases with the connivance of the US government looking the other way as it all got hijacked, to the point now, ya, they'll keep sucking as much free and cheap R&D from the US that they can, but it is no longer strictly necessary either. That hit an "enough" stage a little while ago. From here on out everything they can get is gravy, but they don't really need it either.
The US is becoming redundant, an expensive redundancy to the planet, and as soon as all those foreign piles of dollars are transferred into something tangible and useful then that's it, the weekend binge and party is over, full daylight on Monday morning. Here is an example of what is happening, China is just *buying* Africa, all the good bits, all the critical minerals, all the good farmland, etc, by helping those folks bu
Cooking could make a lot of foods more digestible (and softer, useful when there is no dental care...), but it has an additional benefit that would have helped ancient man evolve tech faster, and that is, it kills parasites and bacteria, etc. Those folks who cooked their foods would have lived longer because of this, and had time to take their acquired memories and knowledge and keep trying out new things/new tasks, finding more efficient ways to do things. That just takes time, and having "elders" who lived decades longer would have certainly helped out. And then having elders who were smart and had a lot of wisdom to pass down but were starting to get frail would have meant that those societies who took care of their elders would have developed social cohesion earlier, which would have meant a more rapid "brain multiplier" effect because of having a lot of accumulated knowledge in a small geographic area which was available to more people.
..you are never "unpaid". Never. The immediate and primary currency -your pay- you receive at all times and in as large of amounts as you wish is other peoples code they freely share. You can take this huge amount that is out there and use it for any purpose you want, including engaging in this thing called "business" where you can get paid in another form of currency if you desire. If you want to know where computers and code are used so you can "get paid" in central bankers currency while working "a job", here is a handy reference to start your search from. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of listings in this reference manual all use computers and code in some fashion now-a-days, and most of them all will pay you in central bankers currency if you work a job with them. So you not only get paid, you get paid twice if you use open source. Kinda nifty.
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Ah, you seem to think I am against wind power, I am not. I am just for home produced power as much as possible. I think wind farms are great, I just don'
t want to be all of it. I own a small wind genny myself. It just doesn't work well here, solar PV does. I think something like the Pickens plan has a lot of merit to it, as well as home solar PV, better insulation, etc. I like "all of the above" with practical solar fusion being the best of the long term solutions.
I'd go so far as to encourage a ten year national plan, you get whatever you want, whatever works for you, 100% credit as long as it is an active system that works and the cost stays stable to what it was three months before the law got signed, so there's no price bumping or gouging. The last time we had good tax credits we were solving the energy crisis, unfortunately they went poofarama in 85. that was also around when we had the best mileage cars being common. We've gone downhill bad since then.
We haven't had good credits or incentives since then, just tiny credits and deductions.
Anyway, I don't care, I am doing what I can here on the cheap. I make US poverty level, close enough anyway, if I can afford it, so can a lot more folks. If they don't care about themselves, why should I? As to the foreigners starving and so on, their call, learn to grow food better or not, control population or not, get rid of medieval tribalism or not. Evolution works. I do farming, it is hard work, I do the sort of work 99% of born here Americans won't do, for real cheap money, the BS they claim we "need" illegal aliens for, so I can relate better to them foreign folks who work hard for cheap than I can to most people in the US. If those foreign folks got some dipsqut junta that is making them live in poverty, they need to be proactive about changing that, parse that as you might.
As to the US exporting, I could care less, wall street has borked it and it's going down for some years now, inevitable, and until we are energy independent and get back to being food independent, that should be our number one concern, not bailing out billionaires in investment banks. I'd just as soon wall street floated away into the ocean, waste of resources, parasites. (the US now imports more than we export FYI with regards food). Change that first, we can worry about the other folks later. Ya, it might suck, but also not my business. I neither want to exploit them unfairly, none, zero, just leave them alone to sort their own matters out, nor subsidize them. give a man a fish or teach him to fish, that choice.
I am a rather strict non interventionist when it comes to those matters, I don't want to fool with other folks business. Now I have no control over our foreign policy or monetary policy, so the best I can do is live how I preach, to put my money and my energy and time where my mouth is. If people want to live in high rise termite cities with no way to get food or water if something happens, not my call, they go way out of their way to choose that lifestyle and pay for it, usually a lot more than suburban or rural living. Their choice, evolution works. They trust the system, I don't, man, I don't, I think it is fragile as heck, I can see it crumbling fast right now. I guess they don't, or don't know what to do about it other than hope those wall street pirates who have ripped them off royally can fix things.
I am not betting on that happening, the opposite, just more ripoffs are coming, I think they screwed up way too bad the past few years, it's gone, or going soon, put it that way. So...I want to be where the food and water come from, not "maybe" gets delivered-to. The great heist of 2008 isn't over yet, and will continue to get real bad in 2009. Prices right now for most things are a deal, because most things, most stuff, in the US get imported. All bets are off for next year. I can't prove that, it is only my opinion, and we'll see how close or far off I am next year.
Ha! On the contrary, the normal solar PV installation electricity is usually a lot cleaner than the grid supplied. the term "brownout" exists because the grid will ship you that stuff. More exact voltage regulation, less spikes or surges, better sine wave, etc, is a consideration. It's akin to you want your home computer to be fed through a good UPS system rather than just slap it into the wall socket, your home UPS box does a similar job as a whole house or whole circuit solar PV rig. I just like the idea of taking it as far as possible until all your power is filtered through that sort of reality.
As to those prices, I will repeat, most homeowners who can do some normal carpentry and wiring can save a ton by doing most of the install labor themselves, and *especially* on this board I would expect any slashdotter to be able to do the bulk of that sort of work. And I don't care what wage people make, you are a geek and tool user or not. doing something that important I would think most geeks would want at least some of the hands on part. It ain't rocket surgery, might as well pay yourself.
And sure, you can opt out of getting grid supplied..and how many people do that as compared to just sucking it up and paying the bill? That's around a classic strawman right there, the way houses are now and family reality, you'd go one day and the spouse and kids would be whining "pay the dang bill, we want electricity!". Unless you got some alternative, your expensive house ain't worth much to live in with out electricity.
And that *is* the point right now, for tons of folks the moment *has* arrived, it is becoming more and more economical and practical as a form of future proofing and tangible insurance to do it yourself, at least as a decent adjunct for those critical circuits you want all the time, say your furnace blower, your freezer, etc. I don't know how it is where you are, but where I live we lose mains power a lot, having a backup is no longer just a nice thing to have, it is a necessity if you want to save your stuff from melting, or at least be able to run a fan during a heatwave, etc.
Modern homes without electricity become very uncomfortable and expensive tents pretty quickly without electricity. There's a peace of mind/tangible insurance aspect there that is hard to exactly quantify in terms of dollars, but it certainly does exist. It can become a life or death health issue with the very young and elderly if the power goes out for any length of time during extreme weather conditions, and it certainly can get into the very annoying level for regular healthy folks to have nothing when it is in the 90s out or below zero or like during an ice storm. They evac old folks as fast as possible out of their houses in the summer heat when the grid goes down, because they can croak fast. They have no excessive heat tolerance. How much is that worth to have some backup? Backup/self generated power is a really spiffy thing to have, beats the pants out of that marvelous foyer and electric chandelier *when you need it*. When you don't need it and everything is working fine it seems expensive, when that stuff poofs or something happens to your job or income or any other out of the ordinary situation, then that backup power looks likes a smart investment.
Different strokes, be happy with your purchases and decisions!
Personally, I want backups for my necessities, and I consider a reliable and redundant electric supply to be a modern necessity. I lived quite literally without running water or electricity for years, I am fully aware of what that takes and what that entails, much more so than most people here especially the developed world folks who have never experienced that outside of a week camping someplace. That is why I appreciate it so much now and why I find it eminently affordable to have redundancy for both my water supply and electricity, as well as for my food and heating and fuel. I *don't* take it for granted it will always be there, or tha
Your going to need a *lot* of citations for all of that, it just doesn't jibe with what I have seen, especially near a half a million folks starving because of US corn growing. Latest stats from two weeks ago they are going to have an additional billion bushels this year over what was already a near record spring estimate forecast, and no way did or will all that extra go into ethanol. Besides that, the US is under zero obligation to feed the world, that is up to individual nations, any exports are gravy, and that's it. If we have extra, fine, sell it, if we don't, their call why they don't have food. I look around and see a lot of stupid asshole nations who have their own weird policies that contribute to their own peoples miserty. Look at zimbabwe, used to be the alrgest food exporter in africa, nowe a basket case with the people there eating leaves and mice and bugs. That isn't my fault nor anyones but their own fault at this stage of the game. Same with any of the huge population nations, jeebus crap, zip the pants up now and then, they should buy a clue theyu need to maybe watch that population level. Not trying to be a hardass about it, but I am not an immediate blame the US first always on every issue. national food production is a national level security issue, ALL nations should make sure whatever they do they can be able to feed themselves before they buy dictator palace one or tank or stupid jet fighter. How many tractors could you make with the resources in one tank? See?
Anyway, back to the immediate, I know a lot of folks who have solar, none of them have any sort of 30 plus year payback, it is much less than that unless you are paying some really ridiculous amount for labor to do the install, if you do the bulk of it yourself, which you can if you are any kind of normal tool user, you can save a lot.
And for that matter, no law says you have to grid tie, you can run a sub panel and just run a few circuits, and use a battery bank for storage. Nice when the grid goes down after a hurricane or storm to keep the freezer working and maybe a fan, yes? Power the home office so the whole room is one big UPS protected system? It never has to be either/or, that's the biggest fallacy about solar PV out there, and nothing scales for the homeowner like solar PV, one panel to whatever. heck, I went two years near with just one panel as my sole electricity source, so I really don't want to hear about people's overblown expectations of what they need or deserve or can't live without. I am far from being rich or wealthy, and if I can afford it, I reject claims from people making a lot more that it is "unaffordable". they jsut want to spend money on other things, that's all. I don't own any sort of large TV, an old used 19 inch CRT is it. If people want to drop a grand on a stupid television, or buy jetskis or whatever, well, that's the choice they make. What is the ROI on a 42 inch LCD TV? A home theater system? having an extra bathroom? Buying a new car as opposed to a well used one? A "gaming" computer? Apply that to any number of things people buy. The money is there, people just have different priorities and don't take into consideration how much they drop on stuff that has zero ROI.
As to batteries, just a random tip, buck for amphour, the cheapest way to get lead in the garage is a forklift traction battery pack, it isn't that expensive relatively speaking to the alternatives and especially to any batteries that have "solar" stamped on them, and doing shallow cycling and good water maintenance it should last a long time. And perhaps when it is time to upgrade then we'll have better batteries. The global demand for better batteries is HUGE and tons of places are working on them now, I see nothing but good coming from that quarter. It's already a lot better now than it was 10 years ago. Look at what cordless drills cost ten years ago and replacement batteries for them. I can waltz into the local B&D store here right now and walk out with a drill and *two* batts
Where did I say dump the grid? I said add in a lot more solar so we won't have to massively upgrade the grid so much, because we can add to local production, directly for homes and businesses onsite, no grid required. And solar is more than just electricity, we have solar thermal as well, which could be used for a lot more hot water heating and space heating. The article is about the wind farms and not being able to use the power, my counter is a slightly larger emphasis on local production means we won't have to bump up the grid so much. Personally I would prefer an "all of the above" approach with energy, that and a much greater emphasis on dropping demand via better insulation in buildings and better and more efficient appliances and so on. All of the above, we are going to need all of it.
Solar as a stand alone source is very practical and thousands of people just in the US already use it, with battery banks. This isn't exotic or very rare anymore, man, this is 2008, the tech is solid and is out there working. When solar PV was first invented and used it cost thousands of dollars a watt, it is now down to full retail at some outlets under 4 bucks a watt, and getting better all the time.
Properly sized home battery banks can last for years, mine are ten years old this year and still work fine, despite any number of internet experts assuring me they might only last 2-3 years and need to be replaced. I heard the same thing when Priuses first came out, all sorts of internet experts claimed the batteries wouldn't last, but so far, very few people who own those cars have replaced them, many are well over one hundred thousand miles and still working.
As for leeching off the neighbors, well personally my panels weren't subsidized, regular plain full price retail. Hell, for the longest time home owners just in general terms were "leeching" off their usually poorer renting neighbors because they got a mortgage deduction and the renters didn't.
Governments offering incentives for this or that are common, it's beyond common, it is normal, it is exactly how this system works right now, the tax code is slap full of deductions or other ways to lower your taxes for this or that, so really, where's the beef? Local property taxes going to public schools, even single people and elderly with kids long gone out of the schools still pay that, because we the people folks decided it was a good idea for the commons. Corporate deductions for big business dudes to sit in a fancy and expensive restaurants and eat, and to travel around and show each other power points??? To own and operate private jets?? What the hell... Solar PV credits right now are such small potatoes compared to other forms of what could be called "tax payer leeching" it ain't funny.
And most other forms of energy delivery have been subsidized. The grid, just in general terms,centralized delivery, that whole idea, all those transmission lines are just put there, they cross private property all over, no one gets a rental check for that, the government mandates access. That's a huge subsidy that's an artificial subsidy worth who knows how many billions going to benefit private companies, but they deemed it a good enough way to benefit the "commons". Same with natural gas delivery and so on, or how about municipal water supply? The public roads? How far do you want to go with this?
Development of most forms of energy people get delivered have all benefited from tax monies or special grants like granted access, look at nuclear, untold huge big number billions in tax money went into developing it, and even today not a single plant out there has their own full private insurance, they all make use of the government-tax money-as the ultimate last insurer. If they had to pay full private rates, that would sure bump up that price to the end user.
We have a DOE, they do continual research work on all forms of energy, you name it, coal to hydro to e
You are already paying for it. It just shifts who gets the cash and who gets to own the means of production. If you are more than happy to have a perpetual open ended contract where you have no idea what you will be charged in the future for the product delivered...well...doesn't that just sound dumb? In essence, signing up for grid supplied power as your only source is just that. You're going to be paying that bill the rest of your life anyway (assuming like most people you will probably want electricity forever), so the question then changes to something more directly to the point now that this money issue is resolved, do you want to buy something you can eventually pay off and own and enjoy (solar PV does this in most cases, it can be as little as 7 years on up to 20 years at today's prices, but it does get paid off at some time), or just perpetually rent forever with no fixed price to look at? Do you want to build your own equity, or just keep building your electric landlord's equity? That money is leaving your wallet no matter what.
As to the issue of windpower and the grid, again, a much larger shift to smaller and more decentralized means of production means we won't have to rebuild the entire grid infrastructure so much. A *lot* of folks who have already gone full alternative energy run both types of systems now, because in the winter months the winds usually pickup as solar gain drops, vice versa in summer. Not everywhere, but it is exceedingly common now in those circles.
I look at this energy issue the same way as I do my big garden and this "eating" thing that seems to be as popular as using electricity. Ya, I could work more, make more money, then drive to the store and buy expensive organic stuff...or..just produce it onsite, eliminate several expensive middleman steps and use a lot less energy into the bargain, and not contribute so much to excess carbon emissions and so on.
When I look how much I get out of that garden (and my other stuff, dinner tonight home produced burgers with my own tomatoes and other stuff in a salad, topped off with my own watermelon for dessert) compared to hours worked and production costs involved, it is a rather well paying "job" to just do it myself. Tradeoffs, everyone gets to pick what they want to pay for and everyone gets a choice to pick if you want to own "it", "it" meaning any number of life's necessities or things you *really* want like back to the electricity, or help someone else own it and they might turn some over to you for a price to be constantly adjusted probably not much in your favor forever.
And that's it, along with economies of scale. Computers never got cheap until it went from thousands of home PCs to millions, then the market exploded and now look at it. Same deal will happen with alternative energy, and even though the earlier adopters pay more, they still get the benefits immediately, and it just keeps getting better from that point on.
choices-it's nice to have them
no choice and vendor lockin-not so nice
Well of course that is really high, then again a lot of gasoline engined vehicles can cost that much or more. As to electricity rising in price, I have solar panels long paid off I would use to keep any electric vehicle I might get (or more likely build) charged, and would most likely buy some more than. My transpo needs are simple, I put more miles on the tractors here than I do in a car on the street.
They have an interesting electric vehicle at a home depot near me that is *this close* to being a practical electric short distance commuter type or neighborhood type car-thing at only 5 thousand bucks. It is a small little pickup with a dump bed, and it has a cab. I am thinking at around double that price it would be practical enough for my purposes, with more batteries and so on, a slightly bigger electric motor, and then an option to throw a generator in the back of the bed for a range extender. It is being sold as an electric ATV but looks not a lot different from some NEVs I have seen pics of.
I believe we'll be seeing affordable electric street vehicles that will be "good enough" from both US plants (ZAP has announced a one million sq ft manufacturing plant in Kentucky just the other day), and especially from India and China real dang soon now just based at looking at that 5 thou example. The california and western world builders can build expensive high end units, but the asian factories will be building the elctric vehicles "for the masses". Look what Tata did in one year, came out with an ICE car at 2500 bucks. They actually did it. You can't get a factory *paint job* for that in a US plant. And they say they *will* do electric ones and I believe them and who would bet against China not only having electric cars but twenty different makes soon? About around 9 years ago I remember riding on a small electric scooter (my boss at the time bought one for himself and his wife) that cost close to a grand, now you can get better ones than that for around 200 bucks. Stuff is changing fast in other words.
As to electric power, you can now get decent solar panels at around three and a half bucks a watt (saw a link here yesterday in fact for that in the thread). 8-9 years ago I was paying a little over 5. Not too bad, following normal electric device prices some, and a lot of new fabs go online next year and a few different thin film "printable solar" companies are either delivering like nano solar or close to delivering at well under that price.
To me, having an electric vehicle at least as a backup (I bought a small diesel pickup that gets close to 40MPG last year as my "normal" reaction to the inevitability of higher fuel prices) is just good transportation insurance, just like we have the solar PV and our generators for grid power insurance, both from an availability standpoint and also an economic long range standpoint. And I haven't mailed it in yet, but last week I downloaded and printed out my application for home ethanol fuel production (you are supposed to register with the Feds for that), so I can make fuel here using some scraps I can get (this is a farm after all), and biodiesel will be after that, so I can get both sorts of fuels covered, plus my electricity. I think short, medium and long range all the time on things.
I remember the oil embargo and paying ten bucks a gallon with a two gallon cap before (which would be more like paying 50 bucks now or something, a lot), and there's no reason to think it won't happen again given the nature of world events and the collective machismo and insanity of various world leaders. I'm into survivalism or practical preparedness, I just like having backups, and sometimes even backups for backups. I work and make money and go to the grocery store, but we also have a huge garden and grow our own beef and have a flock for eggs. Backups. We have a propane heater and a full tank of propane, but last year we didn't burn a single therm of that, we used all wood heat, wood harvested righ
I don't think the electric connection would be hard with a simple bolt together plug system, then a snap together clamshell weather cover. I can't see on their site though how that works but I am sure they took that into consideration. I think it is *by far* the slickest way to do a functional hybrid, then no worries (or major more expense) about trying to have 30 grand worth of batteries just to get some range, 50 miles on pure electric is more than enough for most commuting, or for me to get to town and back with juice to spare. That trailer itself is interesting, it doesn't pivot, it attaches at two points and stays rigid with the vehicle. On their test sportscar the whole thing in modular hybrid mode still fits inside a normal parking slot. They wanted it that way to make it easier to drive around cities for people who aren't comfortable with a regular trailer (like backing up).
As to the planes, it is frustrating to me, this farm also has a pretty fair airport, but I can't afford lessons or a plane. I maintain the runway and so on as part of my maintenance duties, and I hay the sides for the cattle. My boss owns most of the planes here, maybe one day he'll take pity on me and sell me a rebuildable junker cheap. He has a 172 that's been tricked out with a high performance package, a bigger engine, and another one, a 150, that has more "stunt" quality wings on it, able to cruise slow and not stall, do some fancy turns, etc. I think he has around 20 planes here total, some functional, some not, two of them are dual engined. The strip is between 2/3rds and 3/4ths mile long, grass, so we can handle most prop planes out there but no jets. Well, I know it can take a dc-9, they busted some drug smugglers at night once some years ago who just swooped in and landed, they got caught on the ground offloading. That's another one of my jobs, go check out "odd" planes that come in and land with no permission. Always makes me a little apprehensive, I usually use the binocs on them first to check. Although firearms are totally legal here and I have some (just necessary on the farm, wild dogs, random methheads stealing stuff, etc), I got no great desire to get between some smugglers and a million bucks of their product, if ya know what I mean...
Well, ten bucks a gallon would mean to me only going to town once a month instead of once a week like we do now. I don't commute either, live on a farm, but still need to go in for stuff. But...that is only a tiny fraction of the big picture, our modern world moves goods with liquid fuel, primarily diesel, and that impacts a lot of other expenses. $10 a gallon in the US in a fast time frame would cause an economic crash, a large one, unimaginable economic problems. Right now as it stands it has already put a lot of people hurting.
As to traveling several thousand miles a month and not be commuting, I won't ask your personal reasons, not appropriate and not my business, but the only person I know who had to do that lately was trying to help a very elderly parent a few states away by going over on the weekends, and wound up buying a used cessna instead for the trip, just to speed things up. I asked, he said he gets around 14 MPG but it is in a much more straight line than driving a car, and at double highway speeds.
As to electric versus gasoline or diesel cars, the range problem has been solved for years now, as far as I can see it is a non problem anymore, it's called one more axle. AC Propulsion built the first models of the range extending generator trailer. It's not a true hybrid like Prius, the vehicle itself is just electric, but a modular hybrid system then, which I think makes more sense than regular hybrids that carry double the stuff all the time, the engine, the electric motor, the batteries, the fuel tank. That's twice as much junk as you really need, and why I don't care for any of the hybrids that much. With the modular system, around town, pure electric, for trips, attach the small generator trailer and fill it up and go, just like any other gasoline car. Plus the generator trailer would be cool for a whole house generator when the grid goes down. I know I am looking forward to affordable all electrics, as I could keep a small one charged from my solar panels if I only needed to drive it once a week.
...would the gallon of gas have to reach before you'd reconsider something other than that? $10 a gallon, $15? And how about rationing (which I remember occurring before), if it ever got that that, say you could only get a few gallons a week due to some expanded mideast war disrupting huge amounts of the global supply? The reason I ask is I see this sort of sentiment a lot, the 500 mile range drawback, but I am wondering how often people actually drive that sort of distance on a regular basis, say at least once a week or so. My point is, for regular around town and commuting, I don't think you (a very general "anyone you") need that sort of range, and for the odd trip, there are always rentals.
Hey, cable or telco guys! Please install all the dang boxes you want out here so we can get *some* kind of broadband. Those snooty yuppie rich places don't want it, they sayso -> "too ugly" "destroys the oh so darling neighborhood ambiance when we are having our wine and cheese soirées". See? Losers, come out where you'll be appreciated.
Thanks on behalf of the millions of people in the US who live outside the major cities and burbs.
As a matter of fact yes, we have a steam engine about 400 yards from where I am sitting right now. Here on ye olde farm, that's the next big project after the shavings mill is finished (the building is almost done, then install the equipment), putting up the steam engine-driven sawmill. Sorta neat that the scraps from the device-the slabs- will provide the fuel to run it. Pure sustainable and carbon neutral, not too shabby in todays world. Not that this is all that common today, but it isn't that uncommon either, steam is still in widespread use around the world here and there, and a lot of modern powerplants are steam, for that matter. I would imagine a ton of people reading here today and posting are doing that from coal burning steam powerplants. Of course those are turbines and not pistons, but it is still steam powered. The one here is a piston, looks sort of like an old locomotive.
Just thought I'd throw that in because maybe mainframes still have some practical uses.
These various young athletes make money eventually endorsing products, and having a gold over a silver or bronze is a direct monetary benefit. I would imagine there could possibly be some lawsuits over this eventually, even if the IOC is "satisfied". They are going to have a hard time explaining the documents and the blatant trying to hide the original sources. A big mess and fits in with the other fake stuff connected to these olympics, the fake fireworks newscasts, the fake lip syncing singing, etc.
...where the collar was a different color from the rest of the shirt?
That's Flash.
Just say no.
Well, thanks for the information! I thought no music=exempt. That is just quite strange and obviously seriously wrong. If I ever do my own talk station (which I plan on doing as soon as broadband is available at my location), I'd tell them to take a walk and fight it as far as I can.
I don't listen to net music radio at all, just talk radio which isn't threatened by this music deal, but are you saying these internet music broadcasters don't have an easy way to mash a button mid song while you are listening to it and have you automagically purchase it cheap? Or at least get it lined up in some purchasing queue, so the bands and promoters could see this was an effective medium. How the heck are they to know you heard it on pandora then went over to itunes to purchase it? I would have thought that would be common and easy by now.
not their checks, not their orders, not their careers, not their pensions, nothing, they have a human duty to not do stupid and illegal and immoral things, from minor to major. Legal reference and precedent why following orders is not an automatic excuse to do anything you want or are ordered to do.
ya ya this time it was "just a game", or "just a camera and taking pictures illegally", its "the legal free speech zone is over here behind this fence barricade", "well, we were told by our superior entities that there were links to osama bin forgotten and 9-11 and he had WMD and..orders..uhh.", "well, segregation is the law, so them darkies got to stay in the back of the bus and they can't go to the white folk's schools or drink out of the water fountains, so we got to have law-n-order!", "we need to pacify them injuns", and.....just tons of excuses over the years/decades/generations/centuries for being dickwads. It all adds up. You got a society that starts to treat everyone like a criminal, where they can get away with anything they want as long as they say the magic phrase of that generation, which in this generation is "security threat-tarrrr-ism!!", guess what, you have created a "papers please" police state on purpose. And once on that path it usually ends up with the cattle cars and the camps and political prisoners and so on, all because of some excuse and following orders and allowing it to go on every little step of the way until a lot of stuff has changed for the worse.
No one single incident is the tipping point, there probably isn't a real tipping point, it is the accumulation of all the little precedents headed towards the full bore tyrannical regime that gives it away. If you aren't seeing the word "no, that is just wrong" being applied occassionally, that's your biggest clue that it is rapidly headed towards a *really* bad news situation, which unfortunately humans have gone through too many times in the past.
In the 20th century, the biggest criminal gangs and mass murderers were the state, and the state's employees, untold millions of people robbed, raped, tortured, incarcerated, and killed by their own governments and government employees, all over the planet.
And that is why with the original founding of the US they tried to break that cycle, (yes, it was still flawed in many ways but it was the first serious organized humans attempt). They recognized the individual was sovereign and free, and was born that way, nothing else was need other than existence, he did not have rights which were doled out or taken away on a whim by some king or dictator or prince or emperor or clerk in chief.
That's why they made a point to try to clearly limit governmental power, that's why they were so insistent on a second amendment and full technological parity of self defense tools and why they *absolutely* did NOT want a large permanent standing army, because they knew it would eventually lead to yet another stoopid dictatorship. And it is because human nature doesn't change that much, the criminally insane and shrewd megalomaniacs and psychopaths always rise to positions of power, that's what they crave over everything else so that is what they work for and get. It's not like there are tons of those crazy people, there aren't, there never have been, it is an oddly occuring human defect condition, but it is why bad stuff happens all the time, dealing with ultimate predators is hard, going along with them is a lot easier, and eventually in very large ways, those crazy leaders get followers who do not question edicts and commands, no matter how far it goes because of the phenomenon of incremental changes, they just follow through, even when they know it could very well be wrong, and there's always some excuse they use for it.
If you are interested in the electric car scene, check out this website with all the individual conversions, there's a lot of them, from lawn tractors to commuter cars to sportscars to full size trucks, scooters, e-bikes, you name it, it's been converted. EV Album
Nope, they are not 12 volt, some electric cars go up to hundreds of volts because of series connections and in order to get some speed out of them. Even just slow speed golf carts are typically 48 volt with 6-8 volt batteries onboard. If you mean individual batteries, there are a variety of them, no one size fits all has come out to be the clear winner unless you can afford a tesla level battery pack which uses a form of lithium cells, thousands of them.
You can save considerable doing your solar install if you do the bulk of the work yourself. I mean a lot, I wouldn't be surprised at all if anything you got quoted was like 40% labor. There's only a few parts that require a licensed electrician. (I have helped put in two big systems and did all of my own small system) As to your current electric bill, unless you have a signed contract from your supplier guaranteeing the price you pay now for the next 30 years, you can't compare it to a solar install which does give you such a contract. You can hope your bill won't go up drastically, but that's about it.
As to your car, good luck. Get a diesel that gets good mileage, or one of the better gasoline cars from the 80s that get better mileage than even hybrids now. I got a smallish diesel (pickup) last year used for really cheap, although it is a rat, it was the best I could find in my area for sale. My next project though will be pure electric (another small pickup, I'll do a conversion) for local driving into town, (I don't have to commute so once a week is fine, 40 mile range is fine, and I will keep it charged from my existing solar panels) then I will put a fuel generator in a trailer or in the bed (maybe, batteries suck down the weight)for longer trips. That solves the range problem quite easily, plus, having a decent generator is good back up emergency power for your home anyway, just a good thing to have.
As to rebates or tax credits, too many variables state to state to say yes or no, but the feds still have a 2 grand tax credit. Not a lot, but at least it beats nothing. Do a google search and check your individual state, they really vary a lot, some are quite generous. but heck ya I think we should have them, much better tax credits would get solar adopted faster and help with the overall long range energy issues, plus home installations are decentralized, meaning we don't need to expand the existing expensive powergrid network.
The cheapest way to start to go alternative energy is to drop demand. Sounds weird, but just getting really good energy efficient appliances and making sure your home is more than adequately insulated, etc, helps a lot.
Personally though I draw the line at compact fluorescents, I detest them things. I am holding out for cheaper LED lighting. We save in other ways like we get by without expensive AC here in georgia because we picked out our little cabin because it sits under really decent shade meaning we can get by with a few window fans and it has it's own water supply from a well, we have a woodstove hookup and that is our primary heat, and the huge garden spot cuts the food bills drastically, that and we raise our own beef. Nothing like "locally sourced" for a lot of your day to day necessities to cut the bills!
If you want to look at examples of self powered homes that also power the family car, just for some ideas and they are cool anyway, you can check out this for some working examples.
there's nothing to stop people buying the apple bundle just because of clone makers. Apple could maintain their same standards if there were one clone maker or a thousand and consumers could still choose them. They are the only ones can stamp Apple on their computer products though. There's nothing stopping Mac owners now buying apple branded RAM either, even though other generic RAM will fit and work, and they could choose that (and a lot do because Apple charges a lot more for their RAM) if they wanted to and it might void the warranty (I don't know on that, maybe not though), but they *can* do it legally. This is just taking that same idea and legal rights and extending it to the whole hardware package, and as to software, as long as you aren't selling illegal cloned copies, you can cram it in anyplace you feel like. There's a distinct difference between a copyright and some EULA.
We went through this with cars. The manufacturers, who had just as deep of pockets and just as many or more of lawyers as apple could possibly throw at this situation wanted to make it so you could only get and install bloated price OEM parts to go on their cars. They lost in court and now you can go to the parts store and get a variety of parts that don't come from the major manufactuers and have their stamp on them, but they will fit into place and work. You can get out your welder and mix and match for that matter, if you want a belchfire motor and an Acme transmission in a roadhog chassis, it is legal to do so. IOW you can get 50 buck starters that work just as good as the original 150 buck starters. Or engines or what have you. And they can't insist you only burn "their" brand of gasoline either, nor can the gasoline company insist you can only put it into approved brand cars. So there's your car analogy, hardware is the cars, software is the gasoline.
Now the car parts clone makers can't claim they are the original manufacturer, but they can still do it and the consumer is obviously better off by a wide margin. Apple is out to lunch, hope it makes it to the supreme court.
With that said, I don't want either a mac clone nor OSX, Linux works just fine on generic commodity hardware if you do just a bit of homework before you buy components or systems. But the *principle* is important. And if Apple throws a hissy fit about patents, that needs to go to the supreme court as well as to why if they can get a patent there is no warranty as to being suitable for purpose for software. That is such a blatantly glaring ripoff to the end user consumer it ain't funny. One or the other for software, copyright or a patent, but not both.
..to be able to know when the odd deer is going to be there jumping out in the road, or someone's dog, or cow that busted out of the fence, or some lumber or a ladder across the road that someone dropped off their truck and didn't see fall out, or fallen tree limbs or big rocks off the adjacent hill and a lot of etc. Or my fav I hit while on a motorcycle, a lot of cow crap on top of acorns. Like ball bearings on slick ice.
Just because your machine can do it, and you can do it on a closed track, does not mean it is safe to do double the speed limit on random roads, especially rural roads. A lot of times it isn't safe to *do* the speed limit if the road is the least bit twisty and has blind turns in it without a lot of visual notice. The hospitals and cemeteries are filled up with evel kniebel wannabes treating public roads like race tracks. Ya, it's fun, and possible..sometimes. Sometimes it just ain't. And unless you are psychic enough to win Randi's prize, you never know when it is or isn't.
"If America is supposed to be moving away from a manufacturing economy and toward a service economy"..that's the theory the wall street pirates have pushed while they sold off everything they could. If that theory actually worked, the USA would be the ones holding all the balance of trade surpluses. What we are holding is the largest debt ever even conceived of on the planet, all the banks in big trouble, a dollar dropping in worth by the year, government that has to keep rearranging their economic stats to make it look better than it is, and so on.
It sounds great to those making 7 or 8 figures a year, Because they are in a position to arbitrage digital bits fast for alleged "work", so they keep pushing the fairy tale that "you too, joe sixpack" will be getting that. It's only taken them one generation of pushing that notion to destroy the economy, it is cruising on inertia now as all the foreigners sitting on buckets of dollars are trying to figure out how to convert them to "anything but more pieces of government or big bank IOU paper" as fast as possible without it turning to a full scale rout.
The latest is big sovereign wealth funds snapping up residential and commercial properties for dimes on the dollar from two years ago.
Sure, it looks just wonderful when you sell off all your real wealth and go into bondage for it. The only reason the middle class has the illusion of wealth and prosperity now is because by and large they have hocked everything they have including their grandchildren's labor to living large now. they just siucked that in and ran with it, thinking it could last forever, short term wealth for longer term destitution and transfer who gets to pay the tab to the next two generations.
I've used an analogy before for our economy over the last 25 years. A carpenter or mechanic can pawn all his tools and truck friday night and have a helluva "rich" weekend, man, the economy is great! Look at all the money!
Uh huh.
Eventually monday comes around and you need to work but can't, and the bills keep coming in. We are right about at monday morning now after a rich one generation long weekend.
Servicing wealth does not create wealth. Managing wealth does not create wealth. Writing about wealth or having a TV show about wealth does not create wealth. Repackaging IOUs into different bundles and giving them new names does not create any new wealth. Governing wealth does not create wealth (in spades, it is the anti-wealth). Playing sports and games and having entertainments around wealth does not create wealth.
You create wealth, or you rearrange who has it and dilute wealth, that's about it.
Manufacturing creates wealth by taking cheaper raw materials, leveraging human smarts and labor, and turning them into something useful. Servicing that is just a negative cost of wealth, every penny in service detracts from the value, and it in no way constitutes creating it.
And for that matter, all these places that now create wealth are finding out they can do their own servicing, whatever is necessary. They built up their manufacturing bases with the help of the wall street looters and their scientific and engineering bases with the connivance of the US government looking the other way as it all got hijacked, to the point now, ya, they'll keep sucking as much free and cheap R&D from the US that they can, but it is no longer strictly necessary either. That hit an "enough" stage a little while ago. From here on out everything they can get is gravy, but they don't really need it either.
The US is becoming redundant, an expensive redundancy to the planet, and as soon as all those foreign piles of dollars are transferred into something tangible and useful then that's it, the weekend binge and party is over, full daylight on Monday morning. Here is an example of what is happening, China is just *buying* Africa, all the good bits, all the critical minerals, all the good farmland, etc, by helping those folks bu
Cooking could make a lot of foods more digestible (and softer, useful when there is no dental care...), but it has an additional benefit that would have helped ancient man evolve tech faster, and that is, it kills parasites and bacteria, etc. Those folks who cooked their foods would have lived longer because of this, and had time to take their acquired memories and knowledge and keep trying out new things/new tasks, finding more efficient ways to do things. That just takes time, and having "elders" who lived decades longer would have certainly helped out. And then having elders who were smart and had a lot of wisdom to pass down but were starting to get frail would have meant that those societies who took care of their elders would have developed social cohesion earlier, which would have meant a more rapid "brain multiplier" effect because of having a lot of accumulated knowledge in a small geographic area which was available to more people.
..you are never "unpaid". Never. The immediate and primary currency -your pay- you receive at all times and in as large of amounts as you wish is other peoples code they freely share. You can take this huge amount that is out there and use it for any purpose you want, including engaging in this thing called "business" where you can get paid in another form of currency if you desire. If you want to know where computers and code are used so you can "get paid" in central bankers currency while working "a job", here is a handy reference to start your search from. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of listings in this reference manual all use computers and code in some fashion now-a-days, and most of them all will pay you in central bankers currency if you work a job with them. So you not only get paid, you get paid twice if you use open source. Kinda nifty.