My food comes from "the cloud". Some people grow their own food, and bully for them, but that's too much work for me, uses more sunny fertile land then I own, and requires expensive equipment in the winter. My food source might go away, and then I'm up shits creek. Such is the risk of living in an urban setting.
If I can risk starvation at the hands of others, I think I can put together a sensible strategy for using cloud services.
Yes, a car engine takes energy to manufacture, and it doesn't really matter whether a cab burns through it or an individual burns through it - either way the engine is toast. But the whole remainder of the car is re-used. By the time your average car burns through its engine, its value is so low that there is no point re-powering it.
I'd also wager that cabs carry more passengers on average than a privately-owned car. I know that our main use for cabs was when we had a handful of people that made it silly to take the bus at $2 each.
Yeah, that's a good point. They run the country almost like two separate countries. As a citizen, you aren't even allowed freedom of movement. Of course then their per capita carbon output becomes staggering.
I'd wager that a professionally maintained cab has nine lives. I bet it stays on the road much longer and with better emissions. You very rarely see cabs blowing smoke, at least not in NYC. They would shove a new engine in those things about once a year IIRC. The newer cabs are mostly hybrids. I think I read that 1/3 of the fleet is hybrid now... I don't know what kind of life they get out of those.
Mass transit is not all that much better than a car for operating emissions. They run these huge vehicles all night with hardly anyone on them. New York only makes out positive because of the sheer volume of people who use it - literally stuffed in at peak hours. The mass transit is not really there for environmental reasons; it is there because surface transportation simply could not move that many people. I'd wager a small motorcycle is better in terms of carbon output than a bus on average. The trains are potentially 100% carbon-free, but I think NYC still gets a lot of coal power.
There's an (in)famous taxi stand at 79th and York for Yellow Cabs that only take groups to Wall Street.
The private vans run the gamut from legit, licensed vehicles run by the local transit union (MTU), to illegal things (dollar vans) blaring reggae music - mostly in Queens and Brooklyn. On the Upper East Side, Marios is a big one. The protocol varies by neighborhood - York Avenue you can just show up and wait for a van. If you live around 2nd Ave, you need to reserve a spot. The new subway should alleviate that:)
He gets a lot of credit, though. It's attractive, but still very practical, unlike the Fisker. He picked very nice materials and seems to have made it possible to manufacture well - quality control is apparently top-notch. He kept the price within striking range of the Luxury big-boys, and seems to have picked a sweet-spot for range.
See my response above. ZipCars use nowhere near as much resources as everyone owning a car for themselves. Think about the incentives at work: if you had to swipe your credit card to use your own car, you'd use it a lot less. As it is right now, your own car just sits in your driveway if you don't use it. You already paid for it, so you might as well use it. With a ZipCar (or a cab, for that matter), you have to weigh the cost of the rental/ride (perhaps $20) against a ride on the MTA ($2 or no additional cost if you already pay for a pass) . The result is that a single ZipCar or cab serves hundreds of people.
Now obviously, if you commute in a cab every day, you are using just as much carbon as someone who drives. However, even then there is an environmental benefit, since many fewer cars need to be constructed - the cab is used by many people. I lived on the Upper East Side - which is (for now) poorly served by subway, and cabs were hard to come by at rush hour. Many people took these private express vans into town, fitting 12 people into a single van.
Don't blame the reporter, blame the Tesla chief designer:
After the battery-pack demonstration, Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, can barely contain himself as he talks about the design of the Model S. “It’s like the leap of faith Apple (AAPL) took with the iPhone,” he says, explaining why the car has a touchscreen instead of the usual physical buttons. “There’s a cleanliness to the interior. The screen is the hero. We are in the midst of that transition toward a new way of thinking. For me, it’s that iPhone moment.”
Tesla wanted to pump electricity into the atmosphere and harvest it with antennas on our homes. No way that could have led to any trouble, and of course it is an extremely efficient way to transmit electricity.
I think a lot of it was presentation and circumstances (as you mention). His presentation was "aw, shucks" and folksy. That plays as "moron" in much of the country, despite the man's credentials. I see a similar reaction to Obama's "academic" tone, which I think turns off the same people that Carter's folksy presentation appealed to. Personally, I like Obama's style better, even if I think he's got some pretty atrocious policies and a disaster of an executive style. Carter had a similarly horrid executive style, which may have frustrated his potential base. As a contrast, Reagan had a lot of success getting his way even though he had to deal with a split congress.
Nah, just drop some crap off a bridge. Even just a cardboard box or a newspaper or something. . Cars will slow down and this will cause a massive jam behind them. Even something unique on the side of the road for people to gawk at will cause a huge gaper delay. The cops do this regularly, and it always pisses me off. Sometimes you get to the front of a jam and it is an accident or something, but often it's just a cop that decided to pull someone over during heavy traffic.
If you want finesse, get a few friends with cars and drive side-by-side a little bit slowly. Not enough to be blatant, but enough to cause a few cars to back up behind you. Exit at the next opportunity and re-enter on the opposite side to drive past your handiwork.
The UK and France have very mild climates compared to most of the US. The UK is the most densely populated country in the EU. Comparing energy use of residents in Wyoming or even Atlanta to France or the UK is silly. The closest approximation would be the Delaware-to-New York part of the East Coast, but even that has much harsher temperature extremes than the UK or most of France. As an example, residents of NYC have half the carbon footprint of other people in the US - mostly because heating (the units are rarely single family) and transportation (something like 90% of residents use public transit).
Anyway, the US unquestionably emits more carbon per capita than the EU, but cherry-picking the UK and France and then comparing that to the entire US is not very instructive.
I agree that the US is behind Europe on fuel efficiency of our car fleet - though we have made recent strides. Also, the measure that the Europeans use for fuel economy is much looser than the US standard - in reality, many of the cars available are virtually the same yet have drastically different ratings in the US and Europe.
You can't compare the entire US to France - the US on the whole has a much rougher climate than most of France. There are few areas of the US with the kind of mild climate that part of Europe enjoys. Our east coast has extremes of temperature - if you live in a place that is warm in the winter, it is almost uninhabitable without AC in the summer. If you live in a place with nice summers, the winters are cold and require a lot of heating. There are places in the Northwest with similar temperatures, but they tend to have a 6-month drought season and a 6-month rainy season, so they aren't ideal for traditional agriculture and thus aren't as densely settled.
In addition to these recent demographic shifts, we found a new way to get at huge reservoirs of natural gas that Europe is skittish to do themselves, and now Europe is burning our excess coal. The result is that the US has decreased its own emissions by 20%, and much of that is now added to Europe's total (though the economic downturn is still keeping emissions low). It's true that France is crazy for nuclear, and I admire and covet their willingness to reprocess fuel. But they are very much an anomaly in Europe - everyone else is abandoning nuclear (or at least pretending to), because a tidal wave might suddenly hit Germany and cause a nuclear emergency.
No, definitely not. But two things: (1) Zip cars don't charge for gas, and so the vehicles tend to be very fuel efficient. I always seemed to get a Civic or Scion. (2) The average ZipCar member rents for only 4 hours per month, driving 6 miles per hour. That's only 24 miles per month. It would take your average ZipCar driver over 300 years to drive 100,000 miles. Your average car driver puts more than 13,000 miles per year on their car, so they take 7 years or so to get to 100,000 miles. That's a huge improvement.
I usually used an ice scraper to "defrost" windshields.
I have to use that in addition to the defroster. It gets the chunks off, but you still can't see anything. Believe me, before remote start I was not just sitting there in the car freezing my ass off for no reason. This is at 6:30 in the morning. Public transit is not an option because the transfer and destination stations are not safe add odd hours.
That's a good point, though it is changing in the US. You can live car-free in Philadelphia and Boston now, thanks to car sharing services. New York has always been mostly car-free (I lived there without cars for about 5 years). Buses take you from city to city (Chinatown bus) in the Northeast for less than $20. My wife recently took the bus from Philly to the Jersey shore, and it wasn't much worse than driving (time wise).
Comparing yourself to India or Chad is just ridiculous, try France of the UK or other western European countries.
I'd bet the US holds up quite well, especially since Europe started buying our surplus coal. I'd wager that a European city dweller is pretty much on par with a US city dweller, and the French in the countryside pretty much mirror the people in the US countryside. I'd also bet that any discrepancy is due to automobiles, since the US likes big engines and don't penalize as much for that taste. Even there, I'd bet the discrepancy has fallen quite a bit in recent years as our standards have tightened and European standards were already so good that further improvements are marginal.
I disagree! You can have remote start, so that the car is nice and cool when you first get in, not just while shopping!
(I actually have remote start, but for the winter when you can't see out the front window until the defroster starts working so you end up sitting in the driveway for 5 minutes anyway.)
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My food comes from "the cloud". Some people grow their own food, and bully for them, but that's too much work for me, uses more sunny fertile land then I own, and requires expensive equipment in the winter. My food source might go away, and then I'm up shits creek. Such is the risk of living in an urban setting.
If I can risk starvation at the hands of others, I think I can put together a sensible strategy for using cloud services.
They could be external if they could use residual alcohol in vomit, blood, and urine.
Yes, a car engine takes energy to manufacture, and it doesn't really matter whether a cab burns through it or an individual burns through it - either way the engine is toast. But the whole remainder of the car is re-used. By the time your average car burns through its engine, its value is so low that there is no point re-powering it.
I'd also wager that cabs carry more passengers on average than a privately-owned car. I know that our main use for cabs was when we had a handful of people that made it silly to take the bus at $2 each.
Alcohol has quite a bit of chemical energy.
Yeah, that's a good point. They run the country almost like two separate countries. As a citizen, you aren't even allowed freedom of movement. Of course then their per capita carbon output becomes staggering.
I'd wager that a professionally maintained cab has nine lives. I bet it stays on the road much longer and with better emissions. You very rarely see cabs blowing smoke, at least not in NYC. They would shove a new engine in those things about once a year IIRC. The newer cabs are mostly hybrids. I think I read that 1/3 of the fleet is hybrid now... I don't know what kind of life they get out of those.
Mass transit is not all that much better than a car for operating emissions. They run these huge vehicles all night with hardly anyone on them. New York only makes out positive because of the sheer volume of people who use it - literally stuffed in at peak hours. The mass transit is not really there for environmental reasons; it is there because surface transportation simply could not move that many people. I'd wager a small motorcycle is better in terms of carbon output than a bus on average. The trains are potentially 100% carbon-free, but I think NYC still gets a lot of coal power.
There's an (in)famous taxi stand at 79th and York for Yellow Cabs that only take groups to Wall Street.
The private vans run the gamut from legit, licensed vehicles run by the local transit union (MTU), to illegal things (dollar vans) blaring reggae music - mostly in Queens and Brooklyn. On the Upper East Side, Marios is a big one. The protocol varies by neighborhood - York Avenue you can just show up and wait for a van. If you live around 2nd Ave, you need to reserve a spot. The new subway should alleviate that :)
He gets a lot of credit, though. It's attractive, but still very practical, unlike the Fisker. He picked very nice materials and seems to have made it possible to manufacture well - quality control is apparently top-notch. He kept the price within striking range of the Luxury big-boys, and seems to have picked a sweet-spot for range.
The hilarious thing is that I can't tell if you typed out unicode characters or not, because this is a very high-tech website.
Since Slashdot sees fit to block those languages, I think I'll take their cue and add Arabic, Russian, and Chinese language urls to my spam filter :)
See my response above.
ZipCars use nowhere near as much resources as everyone owning a car for themselves. Think about the incentives at work: if you had to swipe your credit card to use your own car, you'd use it a lot less. As it is right now, your own car just sits in your driveway if you don't use it. You already paid for it, so you might as well use it. With a ZipCar (or a cab, for that matter), you have to weigh the cost of the rental/ride (perhaps $20) against a ride on the MTA ($2 or no additional cost if you already pay for a pass) . The result is that a single ZipCar or cab serves hundreds of people.
Now obviously, if you commute in a cab every day, you are using just as much carbon as someone who drives. However, even then there is an environmental benefit, since many fewer cars need to be constructed - the cab is used by many people. I lived on the Upper East Side - which is (for now) poorly served by subway, and cabs were hard to come by at rush hour. Many people took these private express vans into town, fitting 12 people into a single van.
Don't blame the reporter, blame the Tesla chief designer:
Tesla wanted to pump electricity into the atmosphere and harvest it with antennas on our homes. No way that could have led to any trouble, and of course it is an extremely efficient way to transmit electricity.
I didn't mention cabs?
It's not that far off.... it's all about perspective. If you compare the economic output of the US (2,291 GDP/tons of carbon) and EU (3,712 GDP/tons of carbon) vs their carbon output, they are quite similar when compared to, say, China (435 GDP/tons of carbon).
I think a lot of it was presentation and circumstances (as you mention). His presentation was "aw, shucks" and folksy. That plays as "moron" in much of the country, despite the man's credentials. I see a similar reaction to Obama's "academic" tone, which I think turns off the same people that Carter's folksy presentation appealed to. Personally, I like Obama's style better, even if I think he's got some pretty atrocious policies and a disaster of an executive style. Carter had a similarly horrid executive style, which may have frustrated his potential base. As a contrast, Reagan had a lot of success getting his way even though he had to deal with a split congress.
Nah, just drop some crap off a bridge. Even just a cardboard box or a newspaper or something. . Cars will slow down and this will cause a massive jam behind them. Even something unique on the side of the road for people to gawk at will cause a huge gaper delay. The cops do this regularly, and it always pisses me off. Sometimes you get to the front of a jam and it is an accident or something, but often it's just a cop that decided to pull someone over during heavy traffic.
If you want finesse, get a few friends with cars and drive side-by-side a little bit slowly. Not enough to be blatant, but enough to cause a few cars to back up behind you. Exit at the next opportunity and re-enter on the opposite side to drive past your handiwork.
The UK and France have very mild climates compared to most of the US. The UK is the most densely populated country in the EU. Comparing energy use of residents in Wyoming or even Atlanta to France or the UK is silly. The closest approximation would be the Delaware-to-New York part of the East Coast, but even that has much harsher temperature extremes than the UK or most of France. As an example, residents of NYC have half the carbon footprint of other people in the US - mostly because heating (the units are rarely single family) and transportation (something like 90% of residents use public transit).
Anyway, the US unquestionably emits more carbon per capita than the EU, but cherry-picking the UK and France and then comparing that to the entire US is not very instructive.
I agree that the US is behind Europe on fuel efficiency of our car fleet - though we have made recent strides. Also, the measure that the Europeans use for fuel economy is much looser than the US standard - in reality, many of the cars available are virtually the same yet have drastically different ratings in the US and Europe.
You can't compare the entire US to France - the US on the whole has a much rougher climate than most of France. There are few areas of the US with the kind of mild climate that part of Europe enjoys. Our east coast has extremes of temperature - if you live in a place that is warm in the winter, it is almost uninhabitable without AC in the summer. If you live in a place with nice summers, the winters are cold and require a lot of heating. There are places in the Northwest with similar temperatures, but they tend to have a 6-month drought season and a 6-month rainy season, so they aren't ideal for traditional agriculture and thus aren't as densely settled.
We have some recent trends in the US that you might not be aware of. One, kids are less interested in cars. Young people are going completely carless in cities - though the cities tend to be those with decent public transportation. That's not even a requirement, though, as car sharing has become the vogue. Young people are flooding into once-crumbling downtowns.
In addition to these recent demographic shifts, we found a new way to get at huge reservoirs of natural gas that Europe is skittish to do themselves, and now Europe is burning our excess coal. The result is that the US has decreased its own emissions by 20%, and much of that is now added to Europe's total (though the economic downturn is still keeping emissions low). It's true that France is crazy for nuclear, and I admire and covet their willingness to reprocess fuel. But they are very much an anomaly in Europe - everyone else is abandoning nuclear (or at least pretending to), because a tidal wave might suddenly hit Germany and cause a nuclear emergency.
No, definitely not. But two things: (1) Zip cars don't charge for gas, and so the vehicles tend to be very fuel efficient. I always seemed to get a Civic or Scion. (2) The average ZipCar member rents for only 4 hours per month, driving 6 miles per hour. That's only 24 miles per month. It would take your average ZipCar driver over 300 years to drive 100,000 miles. Your average car driver puts more than 13,000 miles per year on their car, so they take 7 years or so to get to 100,000 miles. That's a huge improvement.
If the inside of his car fogs up, why do you think you know better?
I usually used an ice scraper to "defrost" windshields.
I have to use that in addition to the defroster. It gets the chunks off, but you still can't see anything. Believe me, before remote start I was not just sitting there in the car freezing my ass off for no reason. This is at 6:30 in the morning. Public transit is not an option because the transfer and destination stations are not safe add odd hours.
That's a good point, though it is changing in the US. You can live car-free in Philadelphia and Boston now, thanks to car sharing services. New York has always been mostly car-free (I lived there without cars for about 5 years). Buses take you from city to city (Chinatown bus) in the Northeast for less than $20. My wife recently took the bus from Philly to the Jersey shore, and it wasn't much worse than driving (time wise).
Comparing yourself to India or Chad is just ridiculous, try France of the UK or other western European countries.
I'd bet the US holds up quite well, especially since Europe started buying our surplus coal. I'd wager that a European city dweller is pretty much on par with a US city dweller, and the French in the countryside pretty much mirror the people in the US countryside. I'd also bet that any discrepancy is due to automobiles, since the US likes big engines and don't penalize as much for that taste. Even there, I'd bet the discrepancy has fallen quite a bit in recent years as our standards have tightened and European standards were already so good that further improvements are marginal.
I disagree! You can have remote start, so that the car is nice and cool when you first get in, not just while shopping!
(I actually have remote start, but for the winter when you can't see out the front window until the defroster starts working so you end up sitting in the driveway for 5 minutes anyway.)