In Texas most modern houses (say less than 50 years old) are on slab construction with embedded copper pipes. Older houses are frequently pier and beam. There are no regulations for copper coating the pipes going through concrete, and plumbing failures of copper pipes in foundations are decently rare. Rusting and failure of iron pipes under foundations before copper became common, isn't infrequent though.
I consider AT&T the second rate carrier, that likes to give their customers the shaft at regular intervals. They are also really expensive. But if you live/travel in T*Mobile's not great coverage area, or your company pays your cell bill without question, I understand going with AT&T.
Yes, MP3 is a truly, stinkingly, horribly, worthlessly wrong codec to use for human speech over a packet switched network for a dizzying number of reasons. It just wasn't optimized to transmit specifically human speech frequencies at very low bandwidth requirements. Additionally MP3 was never designed to be a streaming protocol and latency would be stupidly awful.
There are biologists, speech scientists, audiologists, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists that have spent tens of thousands of hours optimizing the several good codecs for transmitting voice over low bandwidth connections.
And using WAV would be an insanely terrible idea too. If you use one of the good speech codecs, and raise the bitrate a bit above the bottom of the barrel rate most telcos are using, you'd have what sounds like CD quality voice conversations at maybe one fiftieth the bandwidth requirements of MP3 or WAV.
T*Mobile allows you to set your 911 address for your account, since they offer Voip. You can get a Bluetooth adapter allowing your home phones to route their service over your cellphone to allow you to pick up any corded extension and join the conversation. T*mobile also has a very good deal for completely unlimited minutes, $90/month on family plan, don't remember the individual plan cost.
Check google voice's rates. If they are good, you can place the call through them on your cellphone. Shoot, you could do the same on your landline if you still want to keep it, but GV has better rates.
Since they also provide voip, you can specify your account wide 911 location with them. If your phone doesn't have GPS, 911 will instantly get your home address.
1. Uh, wow. They use the internet and can tolerate dialup? Many people can get naked DSL for less than a basic phone line and internet provider.
2. They need Google Voice. Give granny the GV number, and program GV to send her straight to voicemail. Poor granny!!!
I bet you live in a surburban or rural area, and the landline provider put a line doubler on their backhaul to the switching office, so they wouldn't have to lay more pipe.
There are streaming digital formats specifically designed to carry the human voice clearly, with low latency, at obscenely low bitrates. As another poster said, MP3 is a terrible format for this. The problem is telecoms have lowered the bitrates beyond the prudent level for decent quality, so they can squeeze ever more calls onto the same pipe.
>run your engine for several hours to do so.
No you don't. Just leave your ignition in the accessory position (not run) with the phone connected to the car charger. A car battery could power an iPhone for weeks before you'd need to start the car to charge the battery.
Many people can buy a naked DSL now as an unadvertised option, though it isn't always as good a deal
Most security alarms can be set up for internet communication to HDQ
Sound quality I think depends a lot on your carrier/handset/reception. At its best, I think cell calls are better than landline, but at its worst they aren't too good. Landlines in the US are generally consistiently good quality.
Did your cell quit working over the 5 day power outage? If your battery just ran down, why don't you get a small solar or crank charger, or plug it into your car
For comfort, you should get one of those Bluetooth adapters that connects your cellphone to your landline phones. That way you can use the landline phone you are comfortable with, and it will be routed over your cellphone service.
In my brother's area and my parents area, landlines stayed up for a day or 2 longer than the cellphones. But cellphones came back several days faster than the landlines. And some areas had cell service longer where the telecoms had put in sufficiently large batteries and generators (which isn't required for cell sites).
Personally I would like the local government be required to obtain and maintain right of way poles and underground ducts, and they have authority to approve right of way use, and police abuse of the right of way between landowners and utilities. Approving use can be required to be done in a fair and non exclusionary way.
I sure don't want non essential utilities able to have any en-masse control of right of way acquisition. There's virtually no way to prevent abuse.
And you don't think that cable network would still be expanded even without the benefit of the monopoly?
No, they would. After a sufficient period of having a hissy fit, stopping all investment, threating that their service would degrade because they couldn't possibly eek out a profit with competition, once they decided the local politicians weren't going to give in, and they would have to compete for customers, they would start expanding again. Perhaps even faster once real competition shows up on the scene.
You will need some regulation to prevent companies from coming in and abusing the public right of way. Perhaps both legacy and newcomers will need to pay right of way fees to keep it under control.
So I would again ask why it's necessary for local Governments to guarantee a monopoly to the likes of Comcast and Time Warner? If the barrier to entry is as high as you say it is then why do the cable companies willingly operate under such a system? Do they enjoy paying franchise fees or do they get something out of the arrangement?
I don't agree with the local monopoly of cable companies, but I understand how it came about. It was considered the same as a utility. At the time building distribution infrastructure was one of the most capital intensive industries out there. Now maybe wireless licensing is more expensive than stringing cable overhead. But I think you answer your own question. They know the approximate rate of cable adoption, and they can manage the costs of buildout and franchise fees, in exchange for the monopoly market. Companies don't like it when you move their cheese, unless they feel like you are replacing it with something cheesier.
why is government complacent with the cable monopoly? They don't (at least in my area) franchise the power company or the telephone company. Only the cable company is singled out for this treatment. Why?
Well until recently electrical companies had monopolies in TX, and until not terribly long ago local landlines did too, in a state with a raging pro-market Republican/Libertarian bent. I'd say it is probably just a matter of more effective lobbying by the cable company to your local government.
At 2AM when most people are asleep, you can slurp down all the torrented goodness that you can pull across your router. At 2PM, you can still get good speeds but with increased latency in exchange for better web browsing and quicker instant messaging.
I think that was the point, Comcast was shaping 24/7 when there was no need to. Also, I have no problem with traffic shaping at the protocol level (Voip over http), but I don't find it acceptable to do it on a service level (Comcast phone at home over Vonage).
Traffic shaping is usually generically stated as a possibility in your contract (e.g. we may provide increased bandwidth to certain applications for best user experience). Instead they should spell it out (e.g. We will not oversubscribe our network beyond 10%. During times of network congestion greater than 70% of available bandwidth, we will prioritize in the following manner - Voip, http, unknown, email, ftp). Finally I think the providers should have a network status page so you can see the condition of their network and your link, and it shows you vaguely where the congestion is (your segment, their hub).
no less than four different networks across large portions of the United States.
They duplicated infrastructure in densely populated areas because it was financially worth it and capacity was needed. For telecom considerations, wireless has a pretty low infrastructure requirement. In less populated areas, there is a lot of transparent roaming going on. So there isn't really 4 networks across large portions of the US.
What makes you think it's all about price?
That wasn't his larger point. A rational incumbent economic actor in a high cap industry will dramatically reduce prices if an interloper tries to deploy a similar product. People will be less inclined to switch and the expected profitability and customer penetration can't be met for the interloper, forcing their withdraw. And for the record, I'd love to pay more for FIOS, or Uverse, or any other high speed option to cable. No company seems particularly interested in serving my neighborhood.
Hmm, in NYS they don't require the Inspectors to be from the same election district. In fact they rarely are.
Inspectors in TX rarely live in that precinct, but the poll workers do (EJ, AJ, and poll clerks). I believe we would occasionally have out of precinct workers at the discretion of the party chairmen, when we didn't have enough in precinct volunteers. It has been a long time since I had that job.
I've never advocated for electronic voting systems.
It was my impression that your parent post was saying inherent weaknesses in DREs weren't a primary concern, due to physical and process controls by the Elections Office. I was making the argument that the controls aren't sufficient to protect a poorly designed DRE, and we must insist DREs be as safe as we know how to make them. I agree with the rest of your statement. Sorry if I misunderstood the grandparent post.
In my state there are four of us, representing at least two different political parties. It seems unlikely to me that you could get four randomly assigned people from different political parties to all agree to rig an election.
In Texas we have an EJ, an alternate EJ, and 2 poll clerks. The EJ should be the majority party in the precinct, the AJ is the minority party, and the clerks are hired by the EJ and I believe can be any party. The EJ and AJ weren't randomly assigned, but chosen from precinct residents that volunteered. They had to be accepted by the county party chairman of their party.
Occasionally there were not volunteers from both parties in the precinct, so we had to allow the AJ to be the same party. In some of our rural and one-sided precincts especially, this is ripe for gaming and abuse. If you knew there were unlikely to be volunteers from the opposing party, you could change your party affiliation and pretty much be guaranteed to be the AJ.
Sounds like the system worked if he got caught. My only question would be why did it take so long?
It worked, but it was too close for comfort. As I recall he was choosing people off the precinct roster that didn't vote in the last election. In the flurry of activity of setting up the polling location, I think he was signing the poll book real quick, then voting shortly thereafter. The AJ just happened to see him messing with the poll book as she was setting something else up. This was in the days of scantron ballots, so there isn't a ballot counter on any machine. It is all manual.
the machines are randomly audited and you have no way of knowing if yours is going to be one of them or not. I don't know what else you can do to protect the system at this point.
There have been some attacks that are likely to be invisible to an audit of a machine, unless you disassemble the compiled code and study it in detail. I also don't like relying on a random audit where even one instance of fraud isn't acceptable. Elections Boards rarely have the knowledge or time to effectively identify mathematically or technically sophisticated attacks. This is why I think all EVS must have completely published source code, or they should be open sourced, so any interested party can come in, request records, and have a fighting chance identifying fraud.
You've got an awful lot of "coulds" there. People could do any number of things. All you can do is make the system as secure as possible.
I saw the inside of the system. I don't think I am particularly clever, and I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about novel attacks. But what I saw was disturbing. And not because I think the Elections Office I worked at was poorly run, or unconcerned with fraud, but because there is a dearth of technically savvy security knowledgeable people willing to work for the low wages in an Elections Office. And there are a decent number of scary smart morally depraved people in the world. We should guard against them as best as possible.
Right now EVSes are not demonstrably safe from known attacks. We must make them so to the point we can, and not count on physical and process security to keep them safe. You need as many layers of safety as you can.
Pre 2008 elections, when there were so many Slashdot stories on EVSes and their deficiencies, it seemed every story had at least one post where someone pointed out an Elections expert recommending changes (such as requiring proprietary EVSes to publish their source, or starting an open source EVS based on commodity hardware), or mathematicians looking at theoretical solutions to the problem.
I think the real problem is we don't have the political will to toss the apple cart.
I worked as an Elections Clerk. I was the person who hired the Elections Judges (poll workers) and was phone triage on elections day when they didn't know what to do with a voter.
First, 99.99% of the EJs are good people, but there are also bad seeds. You must guard against the EJ's as much as the voter. We had an EJ voting every day of early voting, until the Alternate Judge discovered what he was doing and reported him to us. We reported him to the County Commissioners and County Prosecutor who declined to prosecute the person for whatever (probably politically motivated) reason.
With paper ballots, the fraud would be easier to spot statistically. But any EJ that could figure out how to upload a virus to their voting machine, and get it onto the tabulating machine, could possibly edit results in a way that would make it very hard to discover.
Second, an attacker could possibly find a way to defeat a tamper seal, or could break into the storage facility of the voting machines before election day, or I am sure there are a multitude of other attacks where someone could have a short time of unsupervised access to the voting machine that wouldn't be detected by tamper proof seals.
I work for the Materials department of a major transportation company. We looked at RFID hoping to do what you dream of. We decided it wasn't likely to work for us for various reasons. The tags are still pricey (especially in relation to low value items). They are a little fragile. And the read range isn't great, or is non-existant if they are hidden down in a pile of metallic items.
First, you failed to deal with the actual running time of the AC. During the summer, my AC would run non-stop from around 1pm to 6pm. But it runs only intermittently the rest of the day. If you calculate out the actual running time, the reduction with the setback thermostat would probably be 40%. But then again I said it sets back to 99dF. You may think that means it doesn't run, but that would be incorrect. It occasionally runs during setback because my house would get to 110dF without it.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics only deals with energy flows, not with how they relate to AC run time and energy usage in a complex system. My point was ACs reject heat at a fairly constant rate. If it had to run longer in toto just because you let the house heat up rather than keep it cool at the same outdoor temp, then heat energy appeared out of nowhere. And that is impossible.
Electric water heaters aren't just much more expensive than gas water heaters, they are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more expensive. Look at the energy guides on a new standby gas vs. electric water heater of the same size. You will see they estimate electricity will cost you 2-3 times as much for the same amount of hot water. This doesn't change with tankless water heaters, so there is a lot of your difference right there.
People who had undersized electric standby water heaters that frequently ran out of hot water find the electric tankless water heaters cost them more as they luxuriate in long hot showers and baths. If you have a big family that uses hot washing machine water and frequent dishwasher runs, or your family and friends have smaller families with a more navy shower, cold washing machine, dishwasher only when full mentality, that could be the entire difference right there.
If you still are concerned about your power use, you should have an electrician come out. My brother noticed his electric bill was up significantly for 2 months, then his AC tripped the circuit breaker twice. The electrician came out and discovered the wire from his house to the outside AC unit had chaffed and was arcing enough to not start a fire, but was DOUBLING the energy draw of the AC unit. The electrician changed the pigtail and his electricity bill is significantly down.
But I do know for a fact if you had a properly sized electric standby water heater and didn't change your behavior, your electric bill would probably be 10% higher. And if your friends had either an electric standby or tankless water heater, their electric bill would be in the same range as yours.
Slashdot Mirror
In Texas most modern houses (say less than 50 years old) are on slab construction with embedded copper pipes. Older houses are frequently pier and beam. There are no regulations for copper coating the pipes going through concrete, and plumbing failures of copper pipes in foundations are decently rare. Rusting and failure of iron pipes under foundations before copper became common, isn't infrequent though.
I consider AT&T the second rate carrier, that likes to give their customers the shaft at regular intervals. They are also really expensive. But if you live/travel in T*Mobile's not great coverage area, or your company pays your cell bill without question, I understand going with AT&T.
Yes, MP3 is a truly, stinkingly, horribly, worthlessly wrong codec to use for human speech over a packet switched network for a dizzying number of reasons. It just wasn't optimized to transmit specifically human speech frequencies at very low bandwidth requirements. Additionally MP3 was never designed to be a streaming protocol and latency would be stupidly awful.
There are biologists, speech scientists, audiologists, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists that have spent tens of thousands of hours optimizing the several good codecs for transmitting voice over low bandwidth connections.
And using WAV would be an insanely terrible idea too. If you use one of the good speech codecs, and raise the bitrate a bit above the bottom of the barrel rate most telcos are using, you'd have what sounds like CD quality voice conversations at maybe one fiftieth the bandwidth requirements of MP3 or WAV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Speech_codecs
I'm not trying to harp on you, I'm just suggesting you should do some indepth research if you are really interested in this.
T*Mobile allows you to set your 911 address for your account, since they offer Voip. You can get a Bluetooth adapter allowing your home phones to route their service over your cellphone to allow you to pick up any corded extension and join the conversation. T*mobile also has a very good deal for completely unlimited minutes, $90/month on family plan, don't remember the individual plan cost.
Check google voice's rates. If they are good, you can place the call through them on your cellphone. Shoot, you could do the same on your landline if you still want to keep it, but GV has better rates.
Since they also provide voip, you can specify your account wide 911 location with them. If your phone doesn't have GPS, 911 will instantly get your home address.
1. Uh, wow. They use the internet and can tolerate dialup? Many people can get naked DSL for less than a basic phone line and internet provider.
2. They need Google Voice. Give granny the GV number, and program GV to send her straight to voicemail. Poor granny!!!
I bet you live in a surburban or rural area, and the landline provider put a line doubler on their backhaul to the switching office, so they wouldn't have to lay more pipe.
There are streaming digital formats specifically designed to carry the human voice clearly, with low latency, at obscenely low bitrates. As another poster said, MP3 is a terrible format for this. The problem is telecoms have lowered the bitrates beyond the prudent level for decent quality, so they can squeeze ever more calls onto the same pipe.
>run your engine for several hours to do so.
No you don't. Just leave your ignition in the accessory position (not run) with the phone connected to the car charger. A car battery could power an iPhone for weeks before you'd need to start the car to charge the battery.
Which pico cell are you using? A lot of them are so overpriced.
Many people can buy a naked DSL now as an unadvertised option, though it isn't always as good a deal
Most security alarms can be set up for internet communication to HDQ
Sound quality I think depends a lot on your carrier/handset/reception. At its best, I think cell calls are better than landline, but at its worst they aren't too good. Landlines in the US are generally consistiently good quality.
Did your cell quit working over the 5 day power outage? If your battery just ran down, why don't you get a small solar or crank charger, or plug it into your car
For comfort, you should get one of those Bluetooth adapters that connects your cellphone to your landline phones. That way you can use the landline phone you are comfortable with, and it will be routed over your cellphone service.
In my brother's area and my parents area, landlines stayed up for a day or 2 longer than the cellphones. But cellphones came back several days faster than the landlines. And some areas had cell service longer where the telecoms had put in sufficiently large batteries and generators (which isn't required for cell sites).
Personally I would like the local government be required to obtain and maintain right of way poles and underground ducts, and they have authority to approve right of way use, and police abuse of the right of way between landowners and utilities. Approving use can be required to be done in a fair and non exclusionary way.
I sure don't want non essential utilities able to have any en-masse control of right of way acquisition. There's virtually no way to prevent abuse.
And you don't think that cable network would still be expanded even without the benefit of the monopoly?
No, they would. After a sufficient period of having a hissy fit, stopping all investment, threating that their service would degrade because they couldn't possibly eek out a profit with competition, once they decided the local politicians weren't going to give in, and they would have to compete for customers, they would start expanding again. Perhaps even faster once real competition shows up on the scene.
You will need some regulation to prevent companies from coming in and abusing the public right of way. Perhaps both legacy and newcomers will need to pay right of way fees to keep it under control.
So I would again ask why it's necessary for local Governments to guarantee a monopoly to the likes of Comcast and Time Warner? If the barrier to entry is as high as you say it is then why do the cable companies willingly operate under such a system? Do they enjoy paying franchise fees or do they get something out of the arrangement?
I don't agree with the local monopoly of cable companies, but I understand how it came about. It was considered the same as a utility. At the time building distribution infrastructure was one of the most capital intensive industries out there. Now maybe wireless licensing is more expensive than stringing cable overhead. But I think you answer your own question. They know the approximate rate of cable adoption, and they can manage the costs of buildout and franchise fees, in exchange for the monopoly market. Companies don't like it when you move their cheese, unless they feel like you are replacing it with something cheesier.
why is government complacent with the cable monopoly? They don't (at least in my area) franchise the power company or the telephone company. Only the cable company is singled out for this treatment. Why?
Well until recently electrical companies had monopolies in TX, and until not terribly long ago local landlines did too, in a state with a raging pro-market Republican/Libertarian bent. I'd say it is probably just a matter of more effective lobbying by the cable company to your local government.
At 2AM when most people are asleep, you can slurp down all the torrented goodness that you can pull across your router. At 2PM, you can still get good speeds but with increased latency in exchange for better web browsing and quicker instant messaging.
I think that was the point, Comcast was shaping 24/7 when there was no need to. Also, I have no problem with traffic shaping at the protocol level (Voip over http), but I don't find it acceptable to do it on a service level (Comcast phone at home over Vonage).
Traffic shaping is usually generically stated as a possibility in your contract (e.g. we may provide increased bandwidth to certain applications for best user experience). Instead they should spell it out (e.g. We will not oversubscribe our network beyond 10%. During times of network congestion greater than 70% of available bandwidth, we will prioritize in the following manner - Voip, http, unknown, email, ftp). Finally I think the providers should have a network status page so you can see the condition of their network and your link, and it shows you vaguely where the congestion is (your segment, their hub).
no less than four different networks across large portions of the United States.
They duplicated infrastructure in densely populated areas because it was financially worth it and capacity was needed. For telecom considerations, wireless has a pretty low infrastructure requirement. In less populated areas, there is a lot of transparent roaming going on. So there isn't really 4 networks across large portions of the US.
What makes you think it's all about price?
That wasn't his larger point. A rational incumbent economic actor in a high cap industry will dramatically reduce prices if an interloper tries to deploy a similar product. People will be less inclined to switch and the expected profitability and customer penetration can't be met for the interloper, forcing their withdraw. And for the record, I'd love to pay more for FIOS, or Uverse, or any other high speed option to cable. No company seems particularly interested in serving my neighborhood.
Hmm, in NYS they don't require the Inspectors to be from the same election district. In fact they rarely are.
Inspectors in TX rarely live in that precinct, but the poll workers do (EJ, AJ, and poll clerks). I believe we would occasionally have out of precinct workers at the discretion of the party chairmen, when we didn't have enough in precinct volunteers. It has been a long time since I had that job.
I've never advocated for electronic voting systems.
It was my impression that your parent post was saying inherent weaknesses in DREs weren't a primary concern, due to physical and process controls by the Elections Office. I was making the argument that the controls aren't sufficient to protect a poorly designed DRE, and we must insist DREs be as safe as we know how to make them. I agree with the rest of your statement. Sorry if I misunderstood the grandparent post.
In my state there are four of us, representing at least two different political parties. It seems unlikely to me that you could get four randomly assigned people from different political parties to all agree to rig an election.
In Texas we have an EJ, an alternate EJ, and 2 poll clerks. The EJ should be the majority party in the precinct, the AJ is the minority party, and the clerks are hired by the EJ and I believe can be any party. The EJ and AJ weren't randomly assigned, but chosen from precinct residents that volunteered. They had to be accepted by the county party chairman of their party.
Occasionally there were not volunteers from both parties in the precinct, so we had to allow the AJ to be the same party. In some of our rural and one-sided precincts especially, this is ripe for gaming and abuse. If you knew there were unlikely to be volunteers from the opposing party, you could change your party affiliation and pretty much be guaranteed to be the AJ.
Sounds like the system worked if he got caught. My only question would be why did it take so long?
It worked, but it was too close for comfort. As I recall he was choosing people off the precinct roster that didn't vote in the last election. In the flurry of activity of setting up the polling location, I think he was signing the poll book real quick, then voting shortly thereafter. The AJ just happened to see him messing with the poll book as she was setting something else up. This was in the days of scantron ballots, so there isn't a ballot counter on any machine. It is all manual.
the machines are randomly audited and you have no way of knowing if yours is going to be one of them or not. I don't know what else you can do to protect the system at this point.
There have been some attacks that are likely to be invisible to an audit of a machine, unless you disassemble the compiled code and study it in detail. I also don't like relying on a random audit where even one instance of fraud isn't acceptable. Elections Boards rarely have the knowledge or time to effectively identify mathematically or technically sophisticated attacks. This is why I think all EVS must have completely published source code, or they should be open sourced, so any interested party can come in, request records, and have a fighting chance identifying fraud.
You've got an awful lot of "coulds" there. People could do any number of things. All you can do is make the system as secure as possible.
I saw the inside of the system. I don't think I am particularly clever, and I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about novel attacks. But what I saw was disturbing. And not because I think the Elections Office I worked at was poorly run, or unconcerned with fraud, but because there is a dearth of technically savvy security knowledgeable people willing to work for the low wages in an Elections Office. And there are a decent number of scary smart morally depraved people in the world. We should guard against them as best as possible.
Right now EVSes are not demonstrably safe from known attacks. We must make them so to the point we can, and not count on physical and process security to keep them safe. You need as many layers of safety as you can.
Pre 2008 elections, when there were so many Slashdot stories on EVSes and their deficiencies, it seemed every story had at least one post where someone pointed out an Elections expert recommending changes (such as requiring proprietary EVSes to publish their source, or starting an open source EVS based on commodity hardware), or mathematicians looking at theoretical solutions to the problem.
I think the real problem is we don't have the political will to toss the apple cart.
I worked as an Elections Clerk. I was the person who hired the Elections Judges (poll workers) and was phone triage on elections day when they didn't know what to do with a voter.
First, 99.99% of the EJs are good people, but there are also bad seeds. You must guard against the EJ's as much as the voter. We had an EJ voting every day of early voting, until the Alternate Judge discovered what he was doing and reported him to us. We reported him to the County Commissioners and County Prosecutor who declined to prosecute the person for whatever (probably politically motivated) reason.
With paper ballots, the fraud would be easier to spot statistically. But any EJ that could figure out how to upload a virus to their voting machine, and get it onto the tabulating machine, could possibly edit results in a way that would make it very hard to discover.
Second, an attacker could possibly find a way to defeat a tamper seal, or could break into the storage facility of the voting machines before election day, or I am sure there are a multitude of other attacks where someone could have a short time of unsupervised access to the voting machine that wouldn't be detected by tamper proof seals.
I work for the Materials department of a major transportation company. We looked at RFID hoping to do what you dream of. We decided it wasn't likely to work for us for various reasons. The tags are still pricey (especially in relation to low value items). They are a little fragile. And the read range isn't great, or is non-existant if they are hidden down in a pile of metallic items.
First, you failed to deal with the actual running time of the AC. During the summer, my AC would run non-stop from around 1pm to 6pm. But it runs only intermittently the rest of the day. If you calculate out the actual running time, the reduction with the setback thermostat would probably be 40%. But then again I said it sets back to 99dF. You may think that means it doesn't run, but that would be incorrect. It occasionally runs during setback because my house would get to 110dF without it.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics only deals with energy flows, not with how they relate to AC run time and energy usage in a complex system. My point was ACs reject heat at a fairly constant rate. If it had to run longer in toto just because you let the house heat up rather than keep it cool at the same outdoor temp, then heat energy appeared out of nowhere. And that is impossible.
Electric water heaters aren't just much more expensive than gas water heaters, they are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more expensive. Look at the energy guides on a new standby gas vs. electric water heater of the same size. You will see they estimate electricity will cost you 2-3 times as much for the same amount of hot water. This doesn't change with tankless water heaters, so there is a lot of your difference right there.
People who had undersized electric standby water heaters that frequently ran out of hot water find the electric tankless water heaters cost them more as they luxuriate in long hot showers and baths. If you have a big family that uses hot washing machine water and frequent dishwasher runs, or your family and friends have smaller families with a more navy shower, cold washing machine, dishwasher only when full mentality, that could be the entire difference right there.
If you still are concerned about your power use, you should have an electrician come out. My brother noticed his electric bill was up significantly for 2 months, then his AC tripped the circuit breaker twice. The electrician came out and discovered the wire from his house to the outside AC unit had chaffed and was arcing enough to not start a fire, but was DOUBLING the energy draw of the AC unit. The electrician changed the pigtail and his electricity bill is significantly down.
But I do know for a fact if you had a properly sized electric standby water heater and didn't change your behavior, your electric bill would probably be 10% higher. And if your friends had either an electric standby or tankless water heater, their electric bill would be in the same range as yours.