Sure I could save $4 by making my own breakfast and coffee before I leave the house, but those extra 20 minutes of sleep are worth a lot more to me.
If you're making $10/hr, it took you 24 minutes of work to earn that $4. So you're actually losing 4 minutes out of this deal. i.e. If you paid $4 for breakfast every morning so you could save time and sleep in 20 minutes, in order to have the same amount of money in your bank account at the end of the year (all other things being equal) you'd have to work 24 minutes more each day. Resulting in a net loss of 4 minutes free time each day.
That's really the point here - your time isn't valued by how much that sleep is worth to you. It's valued by how much time you have to spend working to earn your rmoney. If you're a millionaire investor then $2.50 for a cup of coffee is trivial and won't affect your finances in any appreciable way. It's just that people who got rich by being miserly tend to remain miserly even after they've become rich. But if you're making minimum wage or close to it (with hopes of becoming a millionaire investor in the future), no way in hell does that $2.50 cup of coffee make sense.
Disassociate the purchase transaction from real money by using a fake currency, and people will spend it more freely. Even if there's a 1:1 association between the fake currency and real money.
Casinos do it by using chips.
Amusement parks do it by using Disney Dollars or something similar.
Online games do it by using virtual in-game currency like gold or PLEX.
Tourist areas take advantage of it by charging prices in their native currency, and tourists unfamiliar with the exchange rate can easily overpay for stuff.
Credit card companies do it by removing physical cash from the transaction. You just swipe a card to buy something, never feeling the pain of the cash leaving your wallet.
The decision to actually sell them as a product was quite separate - and, as history has shown, a stroke of genius.
When digital phone networks were first introduced in Asia, texting was included for free. The messages are sent over the same bandwidth that's used to ring your phone when you get a call. Since there's rarely an incoming call at any given time, that leaves a lot of free bandwidth. So the carriers figured might as well use it for something. And since it didn't cost them anything to provide, they just threw it in as a freebie. So text messaging ended up being free in Asia and Europe.
The U.S. had an extensive and functional analog cellular network, and that inertia made it slower to switch over to a digital cellular network. That gave the carriers time to see what features were popular in the rest of the world. That's how we ended up with 99 cent ringtones and 15 cent text messages - things that cost the carriers almost nothing to supply. There was no genius involved, only greed. If there had been more competition, prices would've dropped quicker. But alas putting together a cellular network is not a trivial task. There were only a half dozen or so carriers (true carriers, not MVNOs), and all of them decided to overcharge for texts. Still, two decades of what little competition there is has driven text prices down close to what they cost to provide - almost zero.
The scarcity is artificial because Mattel has a trademark on Barbie, Nintendo has a copyright on the Nintendo game system. Nobody else is allowed to make these things even though it would be trivial to make copies. And Mattel/Nintendo obviously aren't making enough of them. Welcome to the dark side of intellectual property - where the IP owner has created demand (via advertising and word of mouth) but decides it's not worth creating enough supply to fulfill that demand, while simultaneously preventing anyone else from fulfilling that demand via threat of IP lawsuits.
Compounding that, it only takes a few kooks willing to pay those crazy prices to make the venture pay for the scalpers. A lot of product gets left on the shelf even in the midst of huge demand. That is, an inefficient market.
Market price is dynamic and ephemeral. Every sale alters the market price slightly (removes one unit of supply and one unit of demand). Or at least it should. Unless the owner of the IP has done something stupid like put a MAP (minimum advertised price) condition on its retailers. That throws a monkey wrench into the market process, resulting in items left on the shelf because the retailer can't drop the price down to its true market price.
Product being left on the shelf because the price has been driven too high by scalpers actually isn't a problem. That means the scalpers have overestimated demand, meaning they (or at least some of them) are going to be stuck with product they were hoping to flip. Either they don't know about sunk costs and will hold onto it (maintaining the high price) and eventually eat the loss (or make less profit if the first few sales were ginormous). Or they'll eat the loss, causing the market price to drop.
The first Prius we bought was $40,000. At the time, we could have easily gotten a similar size/class car for maybe $20,000 to $25,000, one that got around 30 mpg. There is no way we paid off the difference in financing costs over the lifetime of the car with the marginal savings on gasoline at around 50 mpg
That's actually a problem with how the U.S. measures fuel efficiency. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel efficiency. So the bigger the MPG number, the less fuel you're saving. The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. e.g. Suppose you needed to drive 100 miles. How much fuel would you need to use?
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the fuel saved over the previous step is halved? Economy cars like the Prius are the worst place to put a hybrid engine. It's already a very fuel-efficient vehicle without a hybrid motor. Adding a hybrid motor and batteries doesn't save you very much fuel. Say a non-hybrid Prius got 33 MPG (3 gallons per 100 miles). Converting it to a hybrid only reduces its fuel consumption to 2 gallons per 100 miles. That +17 MPG may look big, but it's only saving you 1 gallon per 100 miles.
The best place to put a hybrid motor is in the gas guzzlers - tractor trailers and SUVs. Precisely the vehicles the environmentalists scoffed at hybridizing. If you can improve a 12.5 MPG SUV's mileage to 14.3 MPG (+1.8 MPG), that will save 1 gallon per 100 miles. Exactly as much as putting a hybrid in a Prius-type vehicle. The +1.8 MPG and +17 MPG represent the same fuel savings. (Yes you can save more by switching from the SUV to the econobox, but that has nothing to do with hybrids nor is it a viable option for people who might need the SUV.)
Likewise if you can improve a tractor trailer's 6.25 MPG to 6.67 MPG (+0.42 MPG), that also saves 1 gallon per 100 miles. This is why Elon Musk was so insistent on developing an electric tractor trailer. He understands that MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency, and that the best way for the country to reduce it's fuel consumption is to improve the efficiency of low MPG vehicles.
The cost of the eGolf lease is dependent on the $7500 Federal EV tax credit, and probably the $2500 California credit as well. Add that $10k to the eGolf's lease price and you get a very different picture. Which was GP's point.
Also, I'm curious where you were able to find it for a $50/mo lease payment. When I almost leased one a couple years back, the lowest price I could find was $79/mo.
Most electricity is generated from fossil fuels, so it would be hit by the same tax.
Do note that EVs are not more efficient than ICE vehicles. Take the ~40% efficiency of an electricity-generating coal plant, multiply it by 90% transmission losses, by the 75% battery charging efficiency, and approx 85% electric motor efficiency, and you get (0.4)*(0.9)*(0.75)*(0.85) = 0.2295. Or 23% energy efficiency for EVs.
It may surprise you to learn that diesel ICE cars and trucks are 30%-40% efficient. Diesel engines are much more efficient at extracting energy from the fuel source - about as efficient as an industrial-scale coal plant. That's what's being glossed over in the environmental movement's crusade to eliminate diesel vehicles based solely on emissions. Diesel engines have significantly higher energy efficiency (convert less of the source fuel into waste heat) than other types of engines and turbines.
It's this high efficiency which creates more pollutants - the higher temps and lean mixture causes some atmospheric oxygen to combine with atmospheric nitrogen (instead of with carbon or hydrogen in the fuel to create CO2 and H2O), creating nitrous oxides. So penalizing technologies solely based on pollution emissions is equivalent to penalizing higher energy efficiency. Higher efficiency and higher pollution come as a package deal with combustion processes.
EVs are cheaper to operate than gasoline vehicles not because an EV is more energy-efficient, but because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline.
Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ.
Gasoline costs about $2/gallon (without taxes), and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 1.67 cents/MJ. (You gotta exclude the taxes because if we do switch to mostly EVs, then they're going to have to be charged the same taxes in order to maintain our roads.)
For the same amount of energy, coal is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for higher energy efficiency. Your EV wastes more energy than my diesel.
By themselves these pieces of information are quite harmless (though you had the option of paying the phone company for an unlisted number). Even a few of them together (name, address, phone number) is fairly innocuous.
What's changed is the ability to cross-reference massive amounts of data to build up a profile of each person. Name, address, phone number, age, gender, marital status, job, income, education, SSN, what kind of car you drive, what type of phone you have (and have had since 2005), how many credit cards you have, size of mortgage on your house, what games you like to play, what movies you like, shoe size, pics from your vacation this past summer, that you're expecting a 2nd child in 3 months, computer you use, the last 1000 websites you've visited, that you still wear superhero underwear, your furry fetish, etc. Suddenly this is no longer about an anonymous name in a phone book; your entire personal life and details are laid bare.
If the only data companies could collect were name, address, and phone number, I don't think people would be making a big deal about this (or said information being lost in a hack). But add in all that other stuff (some of which nobody should be allowed to collect in the first place) and you have a big problem. People are willing to give up some or most of this info for security (purportedly in the fight against terrorism), but not for Marketing uber alles. And they're especially pissed when a company collecting it for marketing purposes loses it.
They could have "editors" who don't bother to read and correct submissions before publishing them.
I thought the way/. was supposed to work was that readers vote on submissions (via the firehose), and the most highly voted submissions get promoted to the front page. I'm not sure what the editors are for if they're not reading and correcting submissions. At least Reddit voters have the excuse that they read TFA elsewhere so are voting on it despite not having clicked the link on Reddit.
I own a boat. Every metal I put into the sea turns into its oxidized form (i.e. ore) within months, if not weeks. I have to work my butt off to prevent this (paint, coatings, sacrificial anodes, galvanic isolator). There are above-water metal parts which I thought were thoroughly painted, yet a few days after being splashed with seawater I notice extensive corrosion.
If metallic glitter can somehow survive in the ocean for more than a few months with zero maintenance effort, then I wanna know what metal it's made out of so I can build my boat out of it. I'm completely on board with a ban on plastic glitter (I've had to vacuum way too much of that crap up out of my carpets). But I seriously doubt metallic glitter is worthy of such a ban.
Electric cars are taking off because CARB (the California agency regulating air quality) mandates that a certain percentage of each automaker's sales have to be zero emissions. Currently this is EVs (though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle for sale). The target last year was less than 1%, but the target for 2025 is over 15%.
If an automaker fails to met the percentage, they have to buy credits from a manufacturer which exceeded their quota. This is what keeps Tesla afloat.
If an automaker fails to earn or buy enough credits, they're banned from selling cars in California. And because 9 other states automatically adopt CARB's ZEV guidelines, they're banned from selling in states representing about 30% of the U.S. by population. So every automaker is working their butts off to build and sell vehicles which meet CARB's mandates. Not because they like the technology or because they think there's demand, but because it's the only way they'll be allowed to keep selling ICE vehicles.
So not exactly a dedicated marketing campaign, but it's definitely not due to a massive rise in popularity. To meet their quota, automakers have offered some ridiculous pricing (on top of the $7500 Federal tax credit and the $1500-$3500 California credit) in order to get people to buy or lease EVs. A couple years ago I almost pulled the trigger on a 3-year lease for a VW e-Golf at just $79 per month. It was $1500 down, but VW was also giving a $500 credit to first-time VW buyers and California was throwing in a $1000 EV incentive, so it was basically no money down. And structuring it as a lease means that VW gets the Federal tax credit, meaning you don't have to be in the top 25% income bracket to claim the entire $7500. (I would've been willing to pay $79/mo just to have it sitting in my garage for a few occasional short trips each week. The only reason I didn't get it was because insurance would've doubled the price, tipping the economic balance back in favor of a single ICE vehicle instead of ICE + EV.)
Typically, a "cycle" is defined as discharging to 0% and recharging to 100%. Partial charges and discharges (e.g. you notice battery is getting low so you charge it at 20%, then take it off the charger at 80% because you figure that's enough to get through the rest of the day) are much less stressful, and your battery can survive a lot more of those partial cycles. That's the strategy employed by EV makers to maximize battery longevity.
That about covers why a superior and subordinate at work shouldn't enter a relationship. Most people assume it's to protect the subordinate from improper pressure to enter the relationship. But it's also to protect the superior from false accusations of pressuring the subordinate to enter the relationship. Although people usually assume the subordinate is the victim, either can be the victim.
While it is certainly good to have figured out the technology involved in electric engines, it will require a revolutionary new battery technology that has vastly better energy density than what we have now to make this practical.
Planes are extremely weight-sensitive. If a stewardess accidentally loses a sugar packet in a crevice somewhere, it ends up making the plane burn something like an extra half pound of fuel each year. Batteries suffer a double-whammy because the weight of fuel decreases as you burn it off. But you have to carry the full weight of batteries the entire trip, whether or not they're holding any charge.
I suspect the intent here is to carry just enough batteries to power the plane through the (low power) descent phase of a flight. That's when the engines are currently operating at their lowest efficiency. Apparently there's enough engine inefficiency at this stage to warrant seriously considering carrying around the extra weight of batteries and electric motors. (Yes idling on the taxiway would burn more fuel per distance traveled since you aren't moving. But it doesn't really cost much fuel since no thrust is required.)
The efficiency of any engine (even electric motors) varies with how much power it's producing. Gas turbines hit their highest efficiency at highest load. Since as you point out the majority of a plane's time is spent at cruise speed, you want the engines to be tuned for optimum efficiency at cruise speed.
That's not possible though because the ~15 minute ascent phase of the flight requires more power than cruise. So this forces cruise to operate at a lower than optimum efficiency. In theory an electric motor boost could obviate this need, and allow jet engines to cruise more efficiently. I'm not sure there's much to be gained here though because modern twin-engine airliners are required by regulation to operate (both cruise and ascent) with one engine out. So cruise efficiency is already pretty far down the curve.
The approx 20-30 min descent phase of the flight requires running the engines at low power, far from their optimum efficiency point. This is where a lot of fuel could potentially be saved.
Both the ascent and descent phases of the flight run the engines outside this max-efficiency range. The question is whether the fuel saved can offset the extra fuel burned carrying around the electric motors and batteries.
Electric cars aren't becoming an important market segment because of fuel cost. They're becoming an important market segment because CARB (the California agency which sets pollution regulations) is requiring a certain percentage of an automaker's car sales to be EVs, otherwise they'll be prohibited from selling cars in California. If they can't hit the required percentage, they have to buy EV credits from a company which has extra (which is what keeps Tesla afloat). Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's rules, this would force the automaker out of about 1/3 of the U.S. by population. So they comply with CARB's rules whether or not they make financial or environmental sense.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Just understand that the EVs you see on the road are there entirely because of regulatory pressure. Not because they make economic sense.
. "Vacuum-based muscles have a lower risk of rupture, failure, and damage, and they don't expand when they're operating, so you can integrate them into closer-fitting robots on the human body,"
The disadvantage of basing it on vacuum pressure is that their force is limited to ambient pressure. For sea level that's 14.7 PSI, or about 10 Newtons per square cm of muscle cross sectional area. The typical human muscle can pull with a force of about 35 N/cm^2. So these artificial muscles are considerably weaker than biological muscles. Sorry all you Mechwarrior fans.
It might turn out to be useful in underwater applications. Pressure underwater increases by 1 atmosphere approximately every 10 meters of depth, so it wouldn't take much depth to greatly exceed human musclepower. The problem might actually be being able to pull a vacuum under those pressures.
Each new iceberg that breaks away exposes taller and taller cliffs
Antarctica's average precipitation is 166 mm per year. Its surface area is 14 million square km. Therefore it receives an average of:
(0.166 meters)*(14 million km^2)*(1000 m/km)^2 = 2.324 trillion cubic meters of precipitation each year
Since water weighs one ton per cubic meter, that.s 2.324 trillion tons of water falling onto Antarctica every year. Unlike most of the other continents, this precipitation does not flow to the sea as water. it mostly ends up locked up as snow or ice (there are a handful of "rivers" - mostly small streams of glacial meltwater running to the sea). If you assume the ice on the continent has reached equilibrium (amount it gains equals amount it loses each year), that means it has to lose 2.324 trillion tons of ice each year, mostly as icebergs. If it loses more than that, sea levels go up. If it loses less than that, sea levels go down.
That massive iceberg (4x the size of Manhattan) that broke off earlier this year was estimated at 1 trillion tons. While that's a huge amount to lose all at once, it's less than half the amount Antarctica needs to lose every year to maintain equilibrium. The press likes to hype up outlier events like that because it appears to confirm the belief that Antarctica's ice is melting. But outliers are just that - outliers, and not necessarily representative of what's actually happening. The last scientific net gain/loss study I saw actually concluded that Antarctica is gaining ice. Not losing it. Enough to lower sea levels by 0.23 mm per year.
These guys sorta but don't completely get what the problem is. The key difference with their idea is that presumably you'd have a choice of multiple VPN companies you could subscribe with. That provides competition, which keeps the VPN companies honest. If you find out your VPN is throttling certain traffic or spying on your browsing, you can simply cancel and switch to a different VPN provider.
See, the problem isn't that ISPs are trying to throttle Internet traffic unless the website pays a toll (making them the very definition of an Internet troll). The fundamental problem is that the ISPs have a local monopoly. Their customers are unable to switch to a different ISP no matter how crappy their service is. The moment you introduce competition, the problem vanishes. Any ISP which tries to throttle Netflix because it didn't pay their toll is shooting themselves in the foot. Their customers notice Netflix isn't working right, but their neighbor reports it's working just fine for them. So they cancel service with the troll ISP, and switch to their neighbor's ISP. Problem solved, no net neutrality needed. The only reason ISPs like Comcast and Verizon can get away with being a troll is because they have a service monopoly - they're essentially holding their customers hostage from access by the rest of the Internet.
So ask yourself - why do these ISPs have a local monopoly? The local government gave them the monopoly. Net neutrality is trying to solve a problem caused by government regulation, with more government regulation. You don't need more government regulation to fix this. You simply need to remove the original regulation which caused the problem - allow multiple ISPs to provide service so there's competition.
If the local government is worried about unsightly masses of wires on the telephone poles due to there being two dozen cable companies providing TV and Internet service, then they simply have to do what's done for electricity and natural gas utility service. Designate one company to install and maintain the wires or pipes, but prohibit them from selling what travels through those wires or pipes. Then allow anyone else to sell electricity, gas, TV, or Internet over those wires/pipes by paying the maintenance company a fixed transport fee. All providers pay the same rate, so the only difference will be the quality of service they can provide at the lowest price.
The anger directed at Thiel over the Gawker case is reminiscent of the anger about the DNC's hacked emails. Those who are angry completely overlook that if Gawker/the DNC hadn't done anything wrong, there wouldn't have been any fallout in the first place. Gawker never would've been sued for publishing Bollea's sex tape. There would've been no evidence of the Democratic party leadership tampering with the primary process. They don't want to hear the message, so they do their best to ignore it and try to shoot the messenger.
If Thiel had bought judges to engineer some grave miscarriage of justice, I'd have some sympathy for Gawker. But the fundamental truth is most people don't think the right to a free press includes the right to publicize a sex tape recorded without consent. Literally everyone can see themselves somehow winding up in Bollea's (Hulk Hogan's) situation, and they do not want anyone, even the press, to have the right to publicize that tape without their consent. That, plain and simple, is why Gawker lost in a jury trial. That's what bankrupted them, not Thiel helping pay for the lawsuit.
If you don't want to be bankrupted, don't do stupid, illegal, or ethically questionable things which could bankrupt you. This above all: to thine own self be true. Follow that rule and the only thing you have to worry about is being framed. I think Wikileaks is biased and disagree with its MO, but that doesn't mean I automatically side with the people whose stupid, illegal, or ethically questionable secrets Wikileaks reveals. On the contrary I usually think those people are despicable for doing those stupid, illegal, or ethically questionable things.
1) A disc never stops working (when treated right)
In theory, a disc never stops working, period. You're not buy a disc. You're buying a license to view its content whenever you like, forever. As the studios are so fond of telling us, you're not buying a movie, you're buying a license to view the movie. Even if the media fails, the license is still in effect.
Unfortunately, only one studio has been openly holding up their end of the bargain. Disney will replace your broken discs (and tapes) for a modest media fee and shipping. Probably because so many kids destroyed the originals, and their parents would've gotten together to file a precedent-setting class action lawsuit if Disney hadn't held up their end. I think there was one other studio which had a similar replacement policy, buried deep in their website where you'd never find it. The rest expect you to purchase another license rather than honoring the one they already sold you. And they wonder why people pirate their movies.
FWIW, I'm in the U.S. and have never felt the need for this type of legislation because I usually get faster speeds than advertised. My current plan is advertised as 100 Mbps, and that's what I get. I used to get slightly less than that because of occasional slowdowns. But about a decade ago my cable company switched to burst service. The first few megabytes of a transfer can go at up to 2x the speed I'm paying for. So since I do very few large file transfers (e.g. filesharing), on average I'm now getting more than 100 Mbps.
The problem is more with DSL, where the speed decreases with phone line length (distance to the central office). The phone companies tend to use overly optimistic assessments of what speed a line is capable of, meaning most of the time you get slower speeds than what you're paying for. But cable Internet bandwidth is usually artificially capped by software, not limited by hardware. So despite their many other faults, they do a pretty good job of delivering the speeds they advertise.
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If you're making $10/hr, it took you 24 minutes of work to earn that $4. So you're actually losing 4 minutes out of this deal. i.e. If you paid $4 for breakfast every morning so you could save time and sleep in 20 minutes, in order to have the same amount of money in your bank account at the end of the year (all other things being equal) you'd have to work 24 minutes more each day. Resulting in a net loss of 4 minutes free time each day.
That's really the point here - your time isn't valued by how much that sleep is worth to you. It's valued by how much time you have to spend working to earn your rmoney. If you're a millionaire investor then $2.50 for a cup of coffee is trivial and won't affect your finances in any appreciable way. It's just that people who got rich by being miserly tend to remain miserly even after they've become rich. But if you're making minimum wage or close to it (with hopes of becoming a millionaire investor in the future), no way in hell does that $2.50 cup of coffee make sense.
When digital phone networks were first introduced in Asia, texting was included for free. The messages are sent over the same bandwidth that's used to ring your phone when you get a call. Since there's rarely an incoming call at any given time, that leaves a lot of free bandwidth. So the carriers figured might as well use it for something. And since it didn't cost them anything to provide, they just threw it in as a freebie. So text messaging ended up being free in Asia and Europe.
The U.S. had an extensive and functional analog cellular network, and that inertia made it slower to switch over to a digital cellular network. That gave the carriers time to see what features were popular in the rest of the world. That's how we ended up with 99 cent ringtones and 15 cent text messages - things that cost the carriers almost nothing to supply. There was no genius involved, only greed. If there had been more competition, prices would've dropped quicker. But alas putting together a cellular network is not a trivial task. There were only a half dozen or so carriers (true carriers, not MVNOs), and all of them decided to overcharge for texts. Still, two decades of what little competition there is has driven text prices down close to what they cost to provide - almost zero.
Market price is dynamic and ephemeral. Every sale alters the market price slightly (removes one unit of supply and one unit of demand). Or at least it should. Unless the owner of the IP has done something stupid like put a MAP (minimum advertised price) condition on its retailers. That throws a monkey wrench into the market process, resulting in items left on the shelf because the retailer can't drop the price down to its true market price.
Product being left on the shelf because the price has been driven too high by scalpers actually isn't a problem. That means the scalpers have overestimated demand, meaning they (or at least some of them) are going to be stuck with product they were hoping to flip. Either they don't know about sunk costs and will hold onto it (maintaining the high price) and eventually eat the loss (or make less profit if the first few sales were ginormous). Or they'll eat the loss, causing the market price to drop.
That's actually a problem with how the U.S. measures fuel efficiency. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel efficiency. So the bigger the MPG number, the less fuel you're saving. The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. e.g. Suppose you needed to drive 100 miles. How much fuel would you need to use?
6.25 MPG tractor trailer = 16 gallons
12.5 MPG full-size SUV = 8 gallons
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG Prius = 2 gallons
100 MPG supercar = 1 gallon
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the fuel saved over the previous step is halved? Economy cars like the Prius are the worst place to put a hybrid engine. It's already a very fuel-efficient vehicle without a hybrid motor. Adding a hybrid motor and batteries doesn't save you very much fuel. Say a non-hybrid Prius got 33 MPG (3 gallons per 100 miles). Converting it to a hybrid only reduces its fuel consumption to 2 gallons per 100 miles. That +17 MPG may look big, but it's only saving you 1 gallon per 100 miles.
The best place to put a hybrid motor is in the gas guzzlers - tractor trailers and SUVs. Precisely the vehicles the environmentalists scoffed at hybridizing. If you can improve a 12.5 MPG SUV's mileage to 14.3 MPG (+1.8 MPG), that will save 1 gallon per 100 miles. Exactly as much as putting a hybrid in a Prius-type vehicle. The +1.8 MPG and +17 MPG represent the same fuel savings. (Yes you can save more by switching from the SUV to the econobox, but that has nothing to do with hybrids nor is it a viable option for people who might need the SUV.)
Likewise if you can improve a tractor trailer's 6.25 MPG to 6.67 MPG (+0.42 MPG), that also saves 1 gallon per 100 miles. This is why Elon Musk was so insistent on developing an electric tractor trailer. He understands that MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency, and that the best way for the country to reduce it's fuel consumption is to improve the efficiency of low MPG vehicles.
The cost of the eGolf lease is dependent on the $7500 Federal EV tax credit, and probably the $2500 California credit as well. Add that $10k to the eGolf's lease price and you get a very different picture. Which was GP's point.
Also, I'm curious where you were able to find it for a $50/mo lease payment. When I almost leased one a couple years back, the lowest price I could find was $79/mo.
Do note that EVs are not more efficient than ICE vehicles. Take the ~40% efficiency of an electricity-generating coal plant, multiply it by 90% transmission losses, by the 75% battery charging efficiency, and approx 85% electric motor efficiency, and you get (0.4)*(0.9)*(0.75)*(0.85) = 0.2295. Or 23% energy efficiency for EVs.
Contrast that with an average efficiency of about 21% for gasoline ICE cars and EVs aren't really that different.
It may surprise you to learn that diesel ICE cars and trucks are 30%-40% efficient. Diesel engines are much more efficient at extracting energy from the fuel source - about as efficient as an industrial-scale coal plant. That's what's being glossed over in the environmental movement's crusade to eliminate diesel vehicles based solely on emissions. Diesel engines have significantly higher energy efficiency (convert less of the source fuel into waste heat) than other types of engines and turbines.
It's this high efficiency which creates more pollutants - the higher temps and lean mixture causes some atmospheric oxygen to combine with atmospheric nitrogen (instead of with carbon or hydrogen in the fuel to create CO2 and H2O), creating nitrous oxides. So penalizing technologies solely based on pollution emissions is equivalent to penalizing higher energy efficiency. Higher efficiency and higher pollution come as a package deal with combustion processes.
EVs are cheaper to operate than gasoline vehicles not because an EV is more energy-efficient, but because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline.
For the same amount of energy, coal is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for higher energy efficiency. Your EV wastes more energy than my diesel.
By themselves these pieces of information are quite harmless (though you had the option of paying the phone company for an unlisted number). Even a few of them together (name, address, phone number) is fairly innocuous.
What's changed is the ability to cross-reference massive amounts of data to build up a profile of each person. Name, address, phone number, age, gender, marital status, job, income, education, SSN, what kind of car you drive, what type of phone you have (and have had since 2005), how many credit cards you have, size of mortgage on your house, what games you like to play, what movies you like, shoe size, pics from your vacation this past summer, that you're expecting a 2nd child in 3 months, computer you use, the last 1000 websites you've visited, that you still wear superhero underwear, your furry fetish, etc. Suddenly this is no longer about an anonymous name in a phone book; your entire personal life and details are laid bare.
If the only data companies could collect were name, address, and phone number, I don't think people would be making a big deal about this (or said information being lost in a hack). But add in all that other stuff (some of which nobody should be allowed to collect in the first place) and you have a big problem. People are willing to give up some or most of this info for security (purportedly in the fight against terrorism), but not for Marketing uber alles. And they're especially pissed when a company collecting it for marketing purposes loses it.
Actually, in this case I suspect submitter used "Democrat" to make the subject line fit within slashdot's arbitrary length limit.
They could have "editors" who don't bother to read and correct submissions before publishing them.
/. was supposed to work was that readers vote on submissions (via the firehose), and the most highly voted submissions get promoted to the front page. I'm not sure what the editors are for if they're not reading and correcting submissions. At least Reddit voters have the excuse that they read TFA elsewhere so are voting on it despite not having clicked the link on Reddit.
I thought the way
I own a boat. Every metal I put into the sea turns into its oxidized form (i.e. ore) within months, if not weeks. I have to work my butt off to prevent this (paint, coatings, sacrificial anodes, galvanic isolator). There are above-water metal parts which I thought were thoroughly painted, yet a few days after being splashed with seawater I notice extensive corrosion.
If metallic glitter can somehow survive in the ocean for more than a few months with zero maintenance effort, then I wanna know what metal it's made out of so I can build my boat out of it. I'm completely on board with a ban on plastic glitter (I've had to vacuum way too much of that crap up out of my carpets). But I seriously doubt metallic glitter is worthy of such a ban.
Electric cars are taking off because CARB (the California agency regulating air quality) mandates that a certain percentage of each automaker's sales have to be zero emissions. Currently this is EVs (though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle for sale). The target last year was less than 1%, but the target for 2025 is over 15%.
If an automaker fails to met the percentage, they have to buy credits from a manufacturer which exceeded their quota. This is what keeps Tesla afloat.
If an automaker fails to earn or buy enough credits, they're banned from selling cars in California. And because 9 other states automatically adopt CARB's ZEV guidelines, they're banned from selling in states representing about 30% of the U.S. by population. So every automaker is working their butts off to build and sell vehicles which meet CARB's mandates. Not because they like the technology or because they think there's demand, but because it's the only way they'll be allowed to keep selling ICE vehicles.
So not exactly a dedicated marketing campaign, but it's definitely not due to a massive rise in popularity. To meet their quota, automakers have offered some ridiculous pricing (on top of the $7500 Federal tax credit and the $1500-$3500 California credit) in order to get people to buy or lease EVs. A couple years ago I almost pulled the trigger on a 3-year lease for a VW e-Golf at just $79 per month. It was $1500 down, but VW was also giving a $500 credit to first-time VW buyers and California was throwing in a $1000 EV incentive, so it was basically no money down. And structuring it as a lease means that VW gets the Federal tax credit, meaning you don't have to be in the top 25% income bracket to claim the entire $7500. (I would've been willing to pay $79/mo just to have it sitting in my garage for a few occasional short trips each week. The only reason I didn't get it was because insurance would've doubled the price, tipping the economic balance back in favor of a single ICE vehicle instead of ICE + EV.)
Typically, a "cycle" is defined as discharging to 0% and recharging to 100%. Partial charges and discharges (e.g. you notice battery is getting low so you charge it at 20%, then take it off the charger at 80% because you figure that's enough to get through the rest of the day) are much less stressful, and your battery can survive a lot more of those partial cycles. That's the strategy employed by EV makers to maximize battery longevity.
That about covers why a superior and subordinate at work shouldn't enter a relationship. Most people assume it's to protect the subordinate from improper pressure to enter the relationship. But it's also to protect the superior from false accusations of pressuring the subordinate to enter the relationship. Although people usually assume the subordinate is the victim, either can be the victim.
Planes are extremely weight-sensitive. If a stewardess accidentally loses a sugar packet in a crevice somewhere, it ends up making the plane burn something like an extra half pound of fuel each year. Batteries suffer a double-whammy because the weight of fuel decreases as you burn it off. But you have to carry the full weight of batteries the entire trip, whether or not they're holding any charge.
I suspect the intent here is to carry just enough batteries to power the plane through the (low power) descent phase of a flight. That's when the engines are currently operating at their lowest efficiency. Apparently there's enough engine inefficiency at this stage to warrant seriously considering carrying around the extra weight of batteries and electric motors. (Yes idling on the taxiway would burn more fuel per distance traveled since you aren't moving. But it doesn't really cost much fuel since no thrust is required.)
The efficiency of any engine (even electric motors) varies with how much power it's producing. Gas turbines hit their highest efficiency at highest load. Since as you point out the majority of a plane's time is spent at cruise speed, you want the engines to be tuned for optimum efficiency at cruise speed.
That's not possible though because the ~15 minute ascent phase of the flight requires more power than cruise. So this forces cruise to operate at a lower than optimum efficiency. In theory an electric motor boost could obviate this need, and allow jet engines to cruise more efficiently. I'm not sure there's much to be gained here though because modern twin-engine airliners are required by regulation to operate (both cruise and ascent) with one engine out. So cruise efficiency is already pretty far down the curve.
The approx 20-30 min descent phase of the flight requires running the engines at low power, far from their optimum efficiency point. This is where a lot of fuel could potentially be saved. Both the ascent and descent phases of the flight run the engines outside this max-efficiency range. The question is whether the fuel saved can offset the extra fuel burned carrying around the electric motors and batteries.
Electric cars aren't becoming an important market segment because of fuel cost. They're becoming an important market segment because CARB (the California agency which sets pollution regulations) is requiring a certain percentage of an automaker's car sales to be EVs, otherwise they'll be prohibited from selling cars in California. If they can't hit the required percentage, they have to buy EV credits from a company which has extra (which is what keeps Tesla afloat). Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's rules, this would force the automaker out of about 1/3 of the U.S. by population. So they comply with CARB's rules whether or not they make financial or environmental sense.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Just understand that the EVs you see on the road are there entirely because of regulatory pressure. Not because they make economic sense.
"Man commits suicide after becoming depressed that Facebook flagged his regular posts as suicidal."
The disadvantage of basing it on vacuum pressure is that their force is limited to ambient pressure. For sea level that's 14.7 PSI, or about 10 Newtons per square cm of muscle cross sectional area. The typical human muscle can pull with a force of about 35 N/cm^2. So these artificial muscles are considerably weaker than biological muscles. Sorry all you Mechwarrior fans.
It might turn out to be useful in underwater applications. Pressure underwater increases by 1 atmosphere approximately every 10 meters of depth, so it wouldn't take much depth to greatly exceed human musclepower. The problem might actually be being able to pull a vacuum under those pressures.
Incidentally, air pressure is also what they use to make zero-g weightlifting exercise equipment.
Antarctica's average precipitation is 166 mm per year. Its surface area is 14 million square km. Therefore it receives an average of:
(0.166 meters)*(14 million km^2)*(1000 m/km)^2 = 2.324 trillion cubic meters of precipitation each year
Since water weighs one ton per cubic meter, that.s 2.324 trillion tons of water falling onto Antarctica every year. Unlike most of the other continents, this precipitation does not flow to the sea as water. it mostly ends up locked up as snow or ice (there are a handful of "rivers" - mostly small streams of glacial meltwater running to the sea). If you assume the ice on the continent has reached equilibrium (amount it gains equals amount it loses each year), that means it has to lose 2.324 trillion tons of ice each year, mostly as icebergs. If it loses more than that, sea levels go up. If it loses less than that, sea levels go down.
That massive iceberg (4x the size of Manhattan) that broke off earlier this year was estimated at 1 trillion tons. While that's a huge amount to lose all at once, it's less than half the amount Antarctica needs to lose every year to maintain equilibrium. The press likes to hype up outlier events like that because it appears to confirm the belief that Antarctica's ice is melting. But outliers are just that - outliers, and not necessarily representative of what's actually happening. The last scientific net gain/loss study I saw actually concluded that Antarctica is gaining ice. Not losing it. Enough to lower sea levels by 0.23 mm per year.
These guys sorta but don't completely get what the problem is. The key difference with their idea is that presumably you'd have a choice of multiple VPN companies you could subscribe with. That provides competition, which keeps the VPN companies honest. If you find out your VPN is throttling certain traffic or spying on your browsing, you can simply cancel and switch to a different VPN provider.
See, the problem isn't that ISPs are trying to throttle Internet traffic unless the website pays a toll (making them the very definition of an Internet troll). The fundamental problem is that the ISPs have a local monopoly. Their customers are unable to switch to a different ISP no matter how crappy their service is. The moment you introduce competition, the problem vanishes. Any ISP which tries to throttle Netflix because it didn't pay their toll is shooting themselves in the foot. Their customers notice Netflix isn't working right, but their neighbor reports it's working just fine for them. So they cancel service with the troll ISP, and switch to their neighbor's ISP. Problem solved, no net neutrality needed. The only reason ISPs like Comcast and Verizon can get away with being a troll is because they have a service monopoly - they're essentially holding their customers hostage from access by the rest of the Internet.
So ask yourself - why do these ISPs have a local monopoly? The local government gave them the monopoly. Net neutrality is trying to solve a problem caused by government regulation, with more government regulation. You don't need more government regulation to fix this. You simply need to remove the original regulation which caused the problem - allow multiple ISPs to provide service so there's competition.
If the local government is worried about unsightly masses of wires on the telephone poles due to there being two dozen cable companies providing TV and Internet service, then they simply have to do what's done for electricity and natural gas utility service. Designate one company to install and maintain the wires or pipes, but prohibit them from selling what travels through those wires or pipes. Then allow anyone else to sell electricity, gas, TV, or Internet over those wires/pipes by paying the maintenance company a fixed transport fee. All providers pay the same rate, so the only difference will be the quality of service they can provide at the lowest price.
If you map the earth in a spherical reference frame, it's flat.
The anger directed at Thiel over the Gawker case is reminiscent of the anger about the DNC's hacked emails. Those who are angry completely overlook that if Gawker/the DNC hadn't done anything wrong, there wouldn't have been any fallout in the first place. Gawker never would've been sued for publishing Bollea's sex tape. There would've been no evidence of the Democratic party leadership tampering with the primary process. They don't want to hear the message, so they do their best to ignore it and try to shoot the messenger.
If Thiel had bought judges to engineer some grave miscarriage of justice, I'd have some sympathy for Gawker. But the fundamental truth is most people don't think the right to a free press includes the right to publicize a sex tape recorded without consent. Literally everyone can see themselves somehow winding up in Bollea's (Hulk Hogan's) situation, and they do not want anyone, even the press, to have the right to publicize that tape without their consent. That, plain and simple, is why Gawker lost in a jury trial. That's what bankrupted them, not Thiel helping pay for the lawsuit.
If you don't want to be bankrupted, don't do stupid, illegal, or ethically questionable things which could bankrupt you. This above all: to thine own self be true. Follow that rule and the only thing you have to worry about is being framed. I think Wikileaks is biased and disagree with its MO, but that doesn't mean I automatically side with the people whose stupid, illegal, or ethically questionable secrets Wikileaks reveals. On the contrary I usually think those people are despicable for doing those stupid, illegal, or ethically questionable things.
In theory, a disc never stops working, period. You're not buy a disc. You're buying a license to view its content whenever you like, forever. As the studios are so fond of telling us, you're not buying a movie, you're buying a license to view the movie. Even if the media fails, the license is still in effect.
Unfortunately, only one studio has been openly holding up their end of the bargain. Disney will replace your broken discs (and tapes) for a modest media fee and shipping. Probably because so many kids destroyed the originals, and their parents would've gotten together to file a precedent-setting class action lawsuit if Disney hadn't held up their end. I think there was one other studio which had a similar replacement policy, buried deep in their website where you'd never find it. The rest expect you to purchase another license rather than honoring the one they already sold you. And they wonder why people pirate their movies.
FWIW, I'm in the U.S. and have never felt the need for this type of legislation because I usually get faster speeds than advertised. My current plan is advertised as 100 Mbps, and that's what I get. I used to get slightly less than that because of occasional slowdowns. But about a decade ago my cable company switched to burst service. The first few megabytes of a transfer can go at up to 2x the speed I'm paying for. So since I do very few large file transfers (e.g. filesharing), on average I'm now getting more than 100 Mbps.
The problem is more with DSL, where the speed decreases with phone line length (distance to the central office). The phone companies tend to use overly optimistic assessments of what speed a line is capable of, meaning most of the time you get slower speeds than what you're paying for. But cable Internet bandwidth is usually artificially capped by software, not limited by hardware. So despite their many other faults, they do a pretty good job of delivering the speeds they advertise.