I can tell you with pretty good certainty exactly how much further my car can go based on the gas guage. Clearly there isn't that same capability with this car and the battery.
And likewise I can tell you with pretty good certainty exactly how far my car can go based on the battery meter. This is just a matter of experience, and the journalist in question clearly had no experience with electric cars so he was in a state of constant confusion.
You don't need to drive an electric for very long before you get a feel for its remaining range. Most of the time this doesn't matter so much though because you essentially need to go on road trips to start challenging the battery on a Tesla and most people don't do that very often. On a normal day of driving to work, to the shops, and back home, it is a non-issue because you start the day with a full battery and it's got plenty of juice in it.
What it's looking like is that this guy deliberately only charged the car to e.g. 200 miles, and went out and took it on a much more demanding trip on purpose. What a normal person would tend to do is top the car up (which gives significantly more than 200mi of range) and only then go out on a trip of unknown length. Usually this topping up happens over night, but again it seems like this guy deliberately chose not to charge it over night.
Likewise, you could fill up a petrol car with only enough petrol to take it for 200mi and then go out and drive 250mi just to demonstrate that yes, it is physically possible to run out of gas and in fact it is quite easy to do so if you go out of your way to make it happen.
But we already knew this. Did the New York Times think that electric vehicles are magic new wonders that have cracked the perpetual motion problem and that they never run out of juice? If so, then I can understand why they would think this was a news story worthy of print.
It sounds like the electric car works as designed when used by a knowledgeable person. The problem is that people don't need to be knowledgeable about conventional cars. If you buy a new car it just works.
Oh but they do. They need to know about optimal RPM ranges, they need to know about gear shifting (even if it's automatic), they need to know about refueling, different fuel types and which ones to definitely not put in this particular car.
Having driven a Tesla now since May of last year it is entirely clear to me that this is by far one of the most worry free cars in the world. I do not have to worry about RPMs because it has one smooth curve from 0 to 14000, I do not need to worry about gearing whether auto or manual because there is none, I do not need to worry about jerky performance on the traction control because the electric motor can control this perfectly smoothly without having to slam on the brakes to cover for ICE quirks, I do not need to worry about waiting for ages for the cabin heat to come on because it has a resistive heater fed straight from the battery, I do not need to worry about gas ever because every time I come out to my car it is always full.
Half way now through the Norwegian winter, having gone through two cold dips with regular temperatures in the minus 15 to minus 20 Celsius region, and not a single issue with the cold. I once started it up with only a nearly full battery having left it not plugged in while at work at -10 Celsius and colder, and easily drove it the 200km for a weekend with my parents, with almost 100km to spare on the battery when I arrived. And that was with the resistive heater going on full throttle for the major part of the trip. This on the Roadster which starts at ~360km range on a full battery. In my experience, cold weather is as close to a non-issue as you could expect on any car.
The difference is, with a gas car, once a week. With an all electric, every day.
It really is impossible to explain to a gas car owner what a fantastic, beautiful world it is to live in where your car always has a full "tank" every morning when you come into your garage. Yes I need to take five seconds to plug it in once a day when I come home to make this world possible. I do not have to visit a gas station at all, ever, for any reason.
It is a different world. I am not a poet and I do not have the words to fully make it justice. It has to be lived.
I really don't understand why everyone here makes such a big deal out of this. Is theft some special, awful crime in the US? Is being a thief worse than being a rapist, paedophile, mugger of old ladies or card cheat man?
It doesn't need to be particularly awful, it just needs to be negative.
The thing is that sharing is seen, and has been seen for a large part of human history, as a positive and fantastic thing. Sharing with eachother is why we have democracy, technology, modern health care, an unprecedented peaceful planet, etc. and so forth. It is because past generation chose to share with eachother their thoughts, ideas, plans, suggestions, discovieries, etc. that we have been able to work our way out of dark smoke-filled caves to the cozy brightly lit houses/flats/whatever of today. Sharing is a beautiful and wonderful thing in human history.
So if the media cartels can manage to move the collective idea of sharing from this elevated state down into the slightly negative category of even just petty theft, then this is a monumental victory for them. That is the essence of this war that is being fought over a "mere" word.
Not to mention that Musk presumably considers the charging and temperature monitoring systems as an integral part of any sensible Lion battery design. Those are exactly the two things Tesla has done perfectly right, after all. (The chemical cells themselves, Tesla just buys in from an external supplier.)
didn't work for the japanese, because no possibility of resupply, reinforcement, or retreat. Defeat thus assured. About 21,844 killed, 216 survivors taken prisoner. A horrible bloodbath and yes 6800 american soldiers killed, but it didn't "work"
By the time of Iwo Jima, Japanese high command would have realized they were losing the war. When this realization sinks in, overall strategy will tend to shift from winning the war over to playing for conditional surrender.
The way you get the enemy to offer you conditional surrender in this situation is by convincing them that totally defeating you is going to be so fantastically expensive, a conditional surrender is preferable. So if you can put up a spirited defence of e.g. Iwo Jima and kill thousands of their troops, and they start asking themselves how many tens or hundreds of thousands they will lose by invading your mainland, then your Iwo Jima defence will have "worked" even if that island itself should fall. It's the pawn you sacrifice to save your nation.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those meddling scientists at the Manhattan project.
If I wrote a novel and Antigua started selling it, undercutting me and not compensating me in any way.. yes it would be just about time to grab your guns. This isn't about them being wronged, it's about them not respecting the sovereignty of another nation. They cannot dictate our laws, regardless of if those laws are dumb.
It is symptomatic of your post that in one and the same paragraph you 1) imply it would be right and just to invade another nation and 2) complain about people not respecting national sovereignty.
The US is already getting enough heat, both foreign and domestic, about their long-standing Cuban oblivion policy. It is not at all clear the administration wants to put political capital into the same sort of programme directed against Antigua. It might just be easier, in the end, to allow Antigua to run their gambling site. Or give them foreign aid to cover their losses from not doing so.
If this is the sort of calculation Antigua has made, and they figure the odds are in their favour, then this is a fair bet to make. It will be interesting to see.
(What is presumably not going to actually happen is the mp3 site, that's just a negotiating card to force the hand of the US.)
So how do you explain the current government tyranny? According to you there should be none.
The US govt is probably not any more tyrannical now than it always has been. This is the "free" country that put its own law-abiding citizens into concentration camps during WW2 just because they had slanted eyes. Gitmo is insignificant in comparison.
When the US Constitution lists a bunch of rights, those weren't listed there because its writers thought you'd actually get them. They are listed exactly because they knew no realistic govt would ever let you have them, to give you a cudgel to keep whacking the govt with to at least prevent the whole thing from becoming a fundamentalist hell-hole.
What the US has today isn't true tyranny. You'll know true tyranny when you get it.
The stated purpose of the freedom is to allow for the security of the state, not to arm the populous in defense against the political leaders of the state.
The security of a free state. The state is not the government, the state is the territory and its people. A tyrannical government is a threat to the security of this free state and so clearly a tyrannical government can be attacked to protect the security of the state.
In fact, the Constitution outright criminalizes the waging of war against the government.
Well, it presumably has to in order to avoid ongoing anarchy.
In the end, the Supreme Court gets to decide what it really means, and how its intent should impact law.
Well, in the end, if you were right, then your victorious military junta gets to decide.:-)
(And yes, that is a tautology of sorts: the winner generally gets to decide who was right.)
Do you wonder, like I do, that the whole fiscal cliff thing is really just some bit of choreographed acting job? It had all the drama, tension and suspense of an action movie.
Maybe it feels like an action movie from inside the US. Watching it from here across the pond, it's been a comedic farce which is now transitioning into slapstick.
The US congress up in arms about the US congress refusing to fund the programmes that the US congress enacted? Really? Hang on while I nuke up another batch of popcorn!:D
And a last minute, down to the wire, happy ending.
Oh but it's not over is it, it's just been postponed. Again. It is the X-Files of political dramas: plenty of overacting by all involved but we're not going to see any actual plot development this side of the century.
The US would have to buy around 45% of the gold ever mined to cover its issued currency at current prices. Forgive me for finding that laughable.
If currencies were tied to the value of gold, then this would have a drastic impact on the price of gold. Long story short, gold would have a much different price today than the one you base your assumption on and so your conclusion doesn't hold.
I still don't understand. Why gold?
Gold has a number of qualities that makes it a perfect material for coinage. It is rare but not too rare. It is not particularly useful for anything other than as a currency, so you won't get surprising losses of gold because people decide to eat it or something. It also doesn't corrode. These two aspects make for a stable currency which is good. It is easily malleable, divisible and recombinable which makes for a very practical currency. Also it's pretty to look at so people will generally be happy to own it.
Why not platinum?
If we didn't have gold, maybe we would use platinum in some capacity. It is however much more difficult to work and so much less practical in use. Also it may be a tad too rare, not really sure.
Why not pieces of slate? I like slate, I'd rather have a slate bed to my snooker table than a gold one.
Slate is too common, it is too heavy, it is too brittle, and it can not easily be reconstituted into large blocks once broken up.
What value do your "precious metals" have other than what the mindshare attaches to them?
Gold is valuable because of its fantastic suitability for currency. All the alternative materials you could use for currency (leaves, sea shells, acorns, corn, rice, silver, fur, etc.) are inferior to gold in one or more aspects. This makes gold a very attractive material, and a valuable one.
Can anyone convince me that this car can do well in the Canadian winter?
The car has a very efficient heat pump based cabin heating system. It will start delivering heat to the inside of the car much faster than a gas powered car will since it doesn't need to wait for the engine to get warm.
The battery pack is also heated (or cooled, as required) to keep it within optimal working temperatures. Outside temperatures therefore do not affect the performance of the car, other than possibly immediately after starting it up on a cold day while the heater is still warming it up. If it is anything like my Roadster than the manual will tell you to plug in the car if you're leaving it at colder than -20C for extended periods of time, in which case the battery will be heated using grid power.
The battery in the car is so big you're not actually going to notice much effect on range from it running its cabin and battery temperature control systems. Even if it had a 5kW cabin heater (which it definitely does not, that would be way over the top) the battery could run such a monster for 17 hours before running out. A more believable 1kW heat pump could be run for 85 hours. Temperature effects on vehicle range are therefore little more than sampling noise for this car.
(I had to snicker when I saw a video review of the Model S with the couple taking it from LA to Vegas, without the AC on because they thought it would save a relevant amount of battery capacity to keep it off. People's prejudices about electric cars are now due for a third millennium reality check.)
One thing I don't understand, and perhaps someone on here can enlighten me, is why people always assume you will fill up only when the tank is empty?
People who are used to cars with fuel tanks have learned to think this way and have great difficulty adjusting to the realities of the electric car. It's just not easy to imagine what life would be like if you could plug your car into a power outlet when you put it in the garage in the evening, and then have it magically full of juice again next morning. I have no words to fully describe the pleasure of never having to waste 5-15 minutes at a gas station just to refill my car, instead I simply plug it in when I park it.
There may also be an issue with previous generations of electric cars using battery technologies that didn't like being repeatedly charged up and down by small amounts - you'd get owners going out on drives just to run down the battery so that they could charge it all up without damaging it etc. Current generation batteries (lithium ion) aren't like this and you can charge however much you want whenever you want.
I've had a Tesla for five months now and I have loved every single second of it. No expensive and time consuming gas station visits, instant acceleration, zero worries about gearing and ideal rpms, no annoying engine sounds or vibration, just pure fun driving pleasure. Also helps of course that in Norway I get no road tolls, no parking fees, can drive in the bus lane, etc. and so forth.
Once we get more electric cars that are proper cars rather than street legal golf carts I think we will start seeing a serious shift from ICE cars to electric ones, simply because they cover people's needs and they are so much more convenient to use. People who regularly travel 500km+ on a daily basis may still want to stick to the good old fuel tank of course, simply for the speed of refilling. But I think this sort of range requirement will become a niche market going forward, and perhaps Tesla will even manage to crack the quick charge problem once and for all. (One can hope...)
If the universe is infinite, then this observation says nothing about the non-observable universe. Any statements about the non-observable portions are purely assumptions.
Of course, the thing about the non-observable universe is that as far as we care it might as well not exist.
Gold has surprisingly high intrinsic value simply by being so eminently suitable for use as a currency. Gold is just common enough to be available in sufficient quantities, yet sufficiently rare that no one is going to be able to just dump a million tons of it on the market and crash the economy. Gold doesn't tarnish or otherwise degrade over time. It is easily malleable for bit payments, and also easily workable for use as coinage. Moreover it is quite pretty so people are rather happy to be able to own it.
Even its otherwise practical uselessness (apart from some limited use in electronics) works in gold's favour, because since no one is going to physically eat their gold you know you have a fairly stable economic base to operate within: the supply of gold will slowly increase from mining but only very rarely decrease (some will be lost to the bottom of the ocean and such).
Unless you are the only person on the planet you are going to want to engage in trade, and barter is sufficiently inefficient you will be hunting high and low for a common medium of exchange. Gold fills that niche perfectly, has done so for thousands of years and will continue to do so right up until we can bring back million-ton gold asteroids and park them up in orbit.
Holding on to gold for the post-apocalypse is quite sensible, to the extent that the idea of a post-apocalyptic world itself makes much sense. With the death of modern economic systems gold will fast become king again.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you with pretty good certainty exactly how much further my car can go based on the gas guage. Clearly there isn't that same capability with this car and the battery.
And likewise I can tell you with pretty good certainty exactly how far my car can go based on the battery meter. This is just a matter of experience, and the journalist in question clearly had no experience with electric cars so he was in a state of constant confusion.
You don't need to drive an electric for very long before you get a feel for its remaining range. Most of the time this doesn't matter so much though because you essentially need to go on road trips to start challenging the battery on a Tesla and most people don't do that very often. On a normal day of driving to work, to the shops, and back home, it is a non-issue because you start the day with a full battery and it's got plenty of juice in it.
What it's looking like is that this guy deliberately only charged the car to e.g. 200 miles, and went out and took it on a much more demanding trip on purpose. What a normal person would tend to do is top the car up (which gives significantly more than 200mi of range) and only then go out on a trip of unknown length. Usually this topping up happens over night, but again it seems like this guy deliberately chose not to charge it over night.
Likewise, you could fill up a petrol car with only enough petrol to take it for 200mi and then go out and drive 250mi just to demonstrate that yes, it is physically possible to run out of gas and in fact it is quite easy to do so if you go out of your way to make it happen.
But we already knew this. Did the New York Times think that electric vehicles are magic new wonders that have cracked the perpetual motion problem and that they never run out of juice? If so, then I can understand why they would think this was a news story worthy of print.
It sounds like the electric car works as designed when used by a knowledgeable person. The problem is that people don't need to be knowledgeable about conventional cars. If you buy a new car it just works.
Oh but they do. They need to know about optimal RPM ranges, they need to know about gear shifting (even if it's automatic), they need to know about refueling, different fuel types and which ones to definitely not put in this particular car.
Having driven a Tesla now since May of last year it is entirely clear to me that this is by far one of the most worry free cars in the world. I do not have to worry about RPMs because it has one smooth curve from 0 to 14000, I do not need to worry about gearing whether auto or manual because there is none, I do not need to worry about jerky performance on the traction control because the electric motor can control this perfectly smoothly without having to slam on the brakes to cover for ICE quirks, I do not need to worry about waiting for ages for the cabin heat to come on because it has a resistive heater fed straight from the battery, I do not need to worry about gas ever because every time I come out to my car it is always full.
Half way now through the Norwegian winter, having gone through two cold dips with regular temperatures in the minus 15 to minus 20 Celsius region, and not a single issue with the cold. I once started it up with only a nearly full battery having left it not plugged in while at work at -10 Celsius and colder, and easily drove it the 200km for a weekend with my parents, with almost 100km to spare on the battery when I arrived. And that was with the resistive heater going on full throttle for the major part of the trip. This on the Roadster which starts at ~360km range on a full battery. In my experience, cold weather is as close to a non-issue as you could expect on any car.
The difference is, with a gas car, once a week. With an all electric, every day.
It really is impossible to explain to a gas car owner what a fantastic, beautiful world it is to live in where your car always has a full "tank" every morning when you come into your garage. Yes I need to take five seconds to plug it in once a day when I come home to make this world possible. I do not have to visit a gas station at all, ever, for any reason.
It is a different world. I am not a poet and I do not have the words to fully make it justice. It has to be lived.
I really don't understand why everyone here makes such a big deal out of this. Is theft some special, awful crime in the US? Is being a thief worse than being a rapist, paedophile, mugger of old ladies or card cheat man?
It doesn't need to be particularly awful, it just needs to be negative.
The thing is that sharing is seen, and has been seen for a large part of human history, as a positive and fantastic thing. Sharing with eachother is why we have democracy, technology, modern health care, an unprecedented peaceful planet, etc. and so forth. It is because past generation chose to share with eachother their thoughts, ideas, plans, suggestions, discovieries, etc. that we have been able to work our way out of dark smoke-filled caves to the cozy brightly lit houses/flats/whatever of today. Sharing is a beautiful and wonderful thing in human history.
So if the media cartels can manage to move the collective idea of sharing from this elevated state down into the slightly negative category of even just petty theft, then this is a monumental victory for them. That is the essence of this war that is being fought over a "mere" word.
Maybe because Tesla does not make the batteries that they use? Why not buy from, you know, the actual vendor?
Tesla makes the batteries, but not the individual cells. Their main strength is in the charge and temperature management systems.
Not to mention that Musk presumably considers the charging and temperature monitoring systems as an integral part of any sensible Lion battery design. Those are exactly the two things Tesla has done perfectly right, after all. (The chemical cells themselves, Tesla just buys in from an external supplier.)
How long does it take to charge a Tesla?
Depends on the Tesla, and on the charger. From empty to full I would say anywhere from one hour, to thirty hours.
In a lithium-ion battery the control circuitry is pretty much inseparable from the battery itself. If you do separate them, expect a fire.
Engineering top notch control circuitry is exactly one of the big technological selling points of Musk's companies.
didn't work for the japanese, because no possibility of resupply, reinforcement, or retreat. Defeat thus assured. About 21,844 killed, 216 survivors taken prisoner. A horrible bloodbath and yes 6800 american soldiers killed, but it didn't "work"
By the time of Iwo Jima, Japanese high command would have realized they were losing the war. When this realization sinks in, overall strategy will tend to shift from winning the war over to playing for conditional surrender.
The way you get the enemy to offer you conditional surrender in this situation is by convincing them that totally defeating you is going to be so fantastically expensive, a conditional surrender is preferable. So if you can put up a spirited defence of e.g. Iwo Jima and kill thousands of their troops, and they start asking themselves how many tens or hundreds of thousands they will lose by invading your mainland, then your Iwo Jima defence will have "worked" even if that island itself should fall. It's the pawn you sacrifice to save your nation.
And they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those meddling scientists at the Manhattan project.
If I wrote a novel and Antigua started selling it, undercutting me and not compensating me in any way.. yes it would be just about time to grab your guns. This isn't about them being wronged, it's about them not respecting the sovereignty of another nation. They cannot dictate our laws, regardless of if those laws are dumb.
It is symptomatic of your post that in one and the same paragraph you 1) imply it would be right and just to invade another nation and 2) complain about people not respecting national sovereignty.
Cognitive dissonance much? :D
The US is already getting enough heat, both foreign and domestic, about their long-standing Cuban oblivion policy. It is not at all clear the administration wants to put political capital into the same sort of programme directed against Antigua. It might just be easier, in the end, to allow Antigua to run their gambling site. Or give them foreign aid to cover their losses from not doing so.
If this is the sort of calculation Antigua has made, and they figure the odds are in their favour, then this is a fair bet to make. It will be interesting to see.
(What is presumably not going to actually happen is the mp3 site, that's just a negotiating card to force the hand of the US.)
So how do you explain the current government tyranny? According to you there should be none.
The US govt is probably not any more tyrannical now than it always has been. This is the "free" country that put its own law-abiding citizens into concentration camps during WW2 just because they had slanted eyes. Gitmo is insignificant in comparison.
When the US Constitution lists a bunch of rights, those weren't listed there because its writers thought you'd actually get them. They are listed exactly because they knew no realistic govt would ever let you have them, to give you a cudgel to keep whacking the govt with to at least prevent the whole thing from becoming a fundamentalist hell-hole.
What the US has today isn't true tyranny. You'll know true tyranny when you get it.
The stated purpose of the freedom is to allow for the security of the state, not to arm the populous in defense against the political leaders of the state.
The security of a free state. The state is not the government, the state is the territory and its people. A tyrannical government is a threat to the security of this free state and so clearly a tyrannical government can be attacked to protect the security of the state.
In fact, the Constitution outright criminalizes the waging of war against the government.
Well, it presumably has to in order to avoid ongoing anarchy.
In the end, the Supreme Court gets to decide what it really means, and how its intent should impact law.
Well, in the end, if you were right, then your victorious military junta gets to decide. :-)
(And yes, that is a tautology of sorts: the winner generally gets to decide who was right.)
Do you wonder, like I do, that the whole fiscal cliff thing is really just some bit of choreographed acting job? It had all the drama, tension and suspense of an action movie.
Maybe it feels like an action movie from inside the US. Watching it from here across the pond, it's been a comedic farce which is now transitioning into slapstick.
The US congress up in arms about the US congress refusing to fund the programmes that the US congress enacted? Really? Hang on while I nuke up another batch of popcorn! :D
And a last minute, down to the wire, happy ending.
Oh but it's not over is it, it's just been postponed. Again. It is the X-Files of political dramas: plenty of overacting by all involved but we're not going to see any actual plot development this side of the century.
The US would have to buy around 45% of the gold ever mined to cover its issued currency at current prices. Forgive me for finding that laughable.
If currencies were tied to the value of gold, then this would have a drastic impact on the price of gold. Long story short, gold would have a much different price today than the one you base your assumption on and so your conclusion doesn't hold.
I still don't understand. Why gold?
Gold has a number of qualities that makes it a perfect material for coinage. It is rare but not too rare. It is not particularly useful for anything other than as a currency, so you won't get surprising losses of gold because people decide to eat it or something. It also doesn't corrode. These two aspects make for a stable currency which is good. It is easily malleable, divisible and recombinable which makes for a very practical currency. Also it's pretty to look at so people will generally be happy to own it.
Why not platinum?
If we didn't have gold, maybe we would use platinum in some capacity. It is however much more difficult to work and so much less practical in use. Also it may be a tad too rare, not really sure.
Why not pieces of slate? I like slate, I'd rather have a slate bed to my snooker table than a gold one.
Slate is too common, it is too heavy, it is too brittle, and it can not easily be reconstituted into large blocks once broken up.
What value do your "precious metals" have other than what the mindshare attaches to them?
Gold is valuable because of its fantastic suitability for currency. All the alternative materials you could use for currency (leaves, sea shells, acorns, corn, rice, silver, fur, etc.) are inferior to gold in one or more aspects. This makes gold a very attractive material, and a valuable one.
And yes, trade is that important.
Can anyone convince me that this car can do well in the Canadian winter?
The car has a very efficient heat pump based cabin heating system. It will start delivering heat to the inside of the car much faster than a gas powered car will since it doesn't need to wait for the engine to get warm.
The battery pack is also heated (or cooled, as required) to keep it within optimal working temperatures. Outside temperatures therefore do not affect the performance of the car, other than possibly immediately after starting it up on a cold day while the heater is still warming it up. If it is anything like my Roadster than the manual will tell you to plug in the car if you're leaving it at colder than -20C for extended periods of time, in which case the battery will be heated using grid power.
The battery in the car is so big you're not actually going to notice much effect on range from it running its cabin and battery temperature control systems. Even if it had a 5kW cabin heater (which it definitely does not, that would be way over the top) the battery could run such a monster for 17 hours before running out. A more believable 1kW heat pump could be run for 85 hours. Temperature effects on vehicle range are therefore little more than sampling noise for this car.
(I had to snicker when I saw a video review of the Model S with the couple taking it from LA to Vegas, without the AC on because they thought it would save a relevant amount of battery capacity to keep it off. People's prejudices about electric cars are now due for a third millennium reality check.)
One thing I don't understand, and perhaps someone on here can enlighten me, is why people always assume you will fill up only when the tank is empty?
People who are used to cars with fuel tanks have learned to think this way and have great difficulty adjusting to the realities of the electric car. It's just not easy to imagine what life would be like if you could plug your car into a power outlet when you put it in the garage in the evening, and then have it magically full of juice again next morning. I have no words to fully describe the pleasure of never having to waste 5-15 minutes at a gas station just to refill my car, instead I simply plug it in when I park it.
There may also be an issue with previous generations of electric cars using battery technologies that didn't like being repeatedly charged up and down by small amounts - you'd get owners going out on drives just to run down the battery so that they could charge it all up without damaging it etc. Current generation batteries (lithium ion) aren't like this and you can charge however much you want whenever you want.
I've had a Tesla for five months now and I have loved every single second of it. No expensive and time consuming gas station visits, instant acceleration, zero worries about gearing and ideal rpms, no annoying engine sounds or vibration, just pure fun driving pleasure. Also helps of course that in Norway I get no road tolls, no parking fees, can drive in the bus lane, etc. and so forth.
Once we get more electric cars that are proper cars rather than street legal golf carts I think we will start seeing a serious shift from ICE cars to electric ones, simply because they cover people's needs and they are so much more convenient to use. People who regularly travel 500km+ on a daily basis may still want to stick to the good old fuel tank of course, simply for the speed of refilling. But I think this sort of range requirement will become a niche market going forward, and perhaps Tesla will even manage to crack the quick charge problem once and for all. (One can hope ...)
If the universe is infinite, then this observation says nothing about the non-observable universe. Any statements about the non-observable portions are purely assumptions.
Of course, the thing about the non-observable universe is that as far as we care it might as well not exist.
Maybe we can found a new country, Extremistan, and put them all there to kill each other while the rest of the world enjoys peace and pluralism.
Actually we did. We called it "America".
Not convinced it worked out so well in the end. :P
What U.S. laws did Assange break?
They could tell you, but they would have to kill you first.
Gold has surprisingly high intrinsic value simply by being so eminently suitable for use as a currency. Gold is just common enough to be available in sufficient quantities, yet sufficiently rare that no one is going to be able to just dump a million tons of it on the market and crash the economy. Gold doesn't tarnish or otherwise degrade over time. It is easily malleable for bit payments, and also easily workable for use as coinage. Moreover it is quite pretty so people are rather happy to be able to own it.
Even its otherwise practical uselessness (apart from some limited use in electronics) works in gold's favour, because since no one is going to physically eat their gold you know you have a fairly stable economic base to operate within: the supply of gold will slowly increase from mining but only very rarely decrease (some will be lost to the bottom of the ocean and such).
Unless you are the only person on the planet you are going to want to engage in trade, and barter is sufficiently inefficient you will be hunting high and low for a common medium of exchange. Gold fills that niche perfectly, has done so for thousands of years and will continue to do so right up until we can bring back million-ton gold asteroids and park them up in orbit.
Holding on to gold for the post-apocalypse is quite sensible, to the extent that the idea of a post-apocalyptic world itself makes much sense. With the death of modern economic systems gold will fast become king again.
Where do you think the electricity comes from? Most likely: diesel generators.
I know where my electricity comes from: Norwegian waterfalls. :-)
How often do you ever accelerate flat out from 0 to 60?
If you have a Tesla, you do it whenever the opportunity presents itself! :D