I called you daft for not understanding the concept that someone who runs a swapping service station covers all costs related to their business activities and rolls them into what they charge for service, just like every other business does.
I raised the question because it's a point you seemed to ignore. There are costs inherent in there, which means the cost of battery swap is significantly higher than the cost of charging your own batteries.
Really, you think that bad fuel can't damage an engine? It can and does. And it's the supplier who ultimately bears the cost. No, "bad electricity" is not a proper analogy (although your sarcasm in this regard is funny given how many devices are damaged by surges every year); a gas station fuels vehicles by insertung fuel into them, while a swapping station fuels vehicles by inserting pre-charged batteries into them. Batteries correspond to fuel in this context.
Nope, you're using the fallacy of whole body analogy: X has aspect similar to Y, therefor X is similar to Y in all aspects. The problem is fuel and electricity are most similar, although bad fuel can damage a car and bad electricity can't. Swapping a battery for a defective battery can also damage a car (much worse, if it catches fire), but so can swapping in a bad radiator.
The battery is a car part. It isn't simply fuel, and it can't be fully analogized to fuel. You're swapping in a car part which may be bad and may damage the car or kill the driver.
In what world do you live where car parts are regularly inspected by the manufacturer after being installed into the vehicle?
A battery is a type of fuel tank. It's a storage container holding an electron charge (energy). This is substantially similar to a propane tank swap, which, yes, every single tank is individually inspected in the industry. Batteries, of course, don't fully analogize to propane tanks; they do tend to EXPLODE WHEN DAMAGED, and they explode or burn with the energy they contain: a Tesla 80kWh battery has as much energy as 64kg of TNT. A stick of dynamite is equivalent to.216kg of TNT, so that battery is potentially 300 sticks of dynamite.
Do you think inspection regulations for damaged and dangerous batteries won't appear overnight?
Lastly, you're still stuck in bizarro world where ICE vehicles full of combustible fuel are incombustible,
We don't routinely swap critical fuel management components in gasoline and diesel cars for other components which came out of other, random cars. We tend to install new or refurbished parts, and even then in vary rare cases (every few hundred thousand miles). Gasoline and diesel also don't massively explode, although Li+ batteries tend to burn--more rapidly than gasoline and diesel would, but they still tend to not detonate (they can). Both failure modes are more likely and more dangerous than liquid fuel failures, and harder to cease (dry chemical or CO2 onto gasoline will put it out; that won't work with a battery, because it's an oxidizer and reducer in one package--it has its own oxygen source).
You can live in a delusion where people (and, subsequently, governments) won't demand safety inspections on every single battery swap, but reality will happily ignore you.
Go back and read it again: "this isn't marketed at the premium price point ".
Listen you fallacy-of-equivocation prick, I said it's a PREMIUM OFFERING. It's their premium offering. It doesn't matter if it doesn't cost as much as an expensive-ass HTC phone; a Chevrolet Cobalt SS doesn't cost as much as a Mustang Cobra, but the Cobalt SS is a premium car (which costs $25k). Why? There's a base model, and a premium model.
No, it isn't. Nowhere did I write or imply that.
I said the 64GB model is their premium offering. You said it's "nuh-uh".
It's worth noting that mortgage interest is tax deductible
So your interest, minus about $12,000, is cut down by about 2/3, and given back to you. If you pay $25,000 in interest this year, you get $8,000 back from the Government. Cool.
in addition to the other misc. tax benefits of home ownership.
Which are all lower than the costs of home ownership.
In my city, a mortgage payment is significantly lower then the corresponding rental prices
That's why I bought my house. Normally, rent costs less than a mortgage, slightly; it also saves you on maintenance and homeowner's insurance ($892/year HOI, $118/year RI), as well as taxes (although my house is reported as worth $3,000, so I only pay $72; if it were reported as the $50,000 I paid for it, it would cost about $1,200/year in taxes, or roughly 3 month's 15-year mortgage). In this case, house prices had dropped, and rents hadn't followed (a lot of realtors had new mortgages...); a lot of houses got abandoned, and I picked one up from an investor cheap.
How does home ownership give you more control over your finances?
I managed to plan to pay my mortgage off in 3 years, and then decided to divert that to updating the insulation (cut my heating needs by 80%), installing a split system (cut my $500 heating bills by 2/3, not counting insulation), and installing new windows--it'll be a 5 year pay-off instead.
I tend to take ~$10k loans to do work in blocks. I took $10k for a project to remove the trees from my back yard (before they eat the sewage line, and of course so I could kill the poison ivy by saturating the ground with triclopyr--90 days to non-kill levels, 420 days to complete decomposition, and any run-off immediately decomposes in water), and also to buy a piano. That leaves several thousand dollars in my bank account, instead of just draining my accounts (and then my car needed $1000 of work, so you can see why I took a loan instead of paying out of pocket). I'll pay that down in a few months, and then get another $10k loan to install a split heat pump system, insulate the rear wall (foam panel exterior), and rebuild the master bedroom (drafty, no insulation, gets hot and extremely humid during the summer).
Each cycle will end with more cash-on-hand, and the months I take to pay down those loans only holds me to a $250/mo obligation in case of financial trouble. I can take them down by $1000-$2000 each month otherwise. Same with my $450/mo mortgage that I dump $1200 on, when I'm not managing other loans. Flexibility.
All true, and it stands with my point well; I'll point out that your argument distinctly is not a counter-point. There is no way you can buy yourself into a house to the point that you can't scrounge $20 more to make on the payment each month and expect to actually make your payment every month in the first place; it is almost guaranteed that your ability to easily afford your payment every month doesn't imply any ability to find an extra $600 every month to add to it. Buying into a slightly-cheaper house (location, size) would magnify the effects I describe in high-interest-rate markets; it is, in fact, the strategy I took even with 2.875% interest rates, hence my 3-year mortgage.
Seriously, you can't be this daft. The operator, of course, with the price rolled into the service cost.
You claimed that you're unlikely to have more than a dud or two in a truck, dismissing the idea that failure rate *per* *battery* would be the same as anything else, when I pointed out that the operator would have to manage the cost of rotating out end-of-life batteries.
Your answer to "how will the operator handle disposal costs of bad batteries?" was "Oh, that's not a real consideration." Then you call me daft for pointing out that it *is* a real thing.
No, they're not. Even your laptop battery estimates its capacity, and that's about as simple as li-ion battery packs get.
I said estimating capacity is easy, but estimating integrity is hard. Will the fucking battery EXPLODE UNDER YOUR TRUCK? A simple capacity measure won't tell you if it's dangerously damaged.
No, it's the manufacturer's issue to ensure that the product meets its stated usage specs - in this case, the specs including safe handling of damage and X number of swap cycles.
Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn't have control of the batteries once they've been placed into a truck.
Just like gas stations check their gas for impurities that can cause damage to an engine?
You may as well have said "they'll inspect the electricity they charge it with to make sure it's clean power" if you wanted to make a show of being that stupid.
Tesla's battery packs have an 8 year, unlimited-mile warranty
You still don't know how many 72-pound pieces of iron road debris have smashed into the battery, if the driver used a defective charger to charge the battery at extremely high voltages, if the battery's been damaged by *other*, less scrupulous stations mishandling it, if it's experienced flood damage somehow, and so forth. Determining the actual physical condition of the battery requires labor-intensive inspection, unless you want to just tell everyone those swapped-out batteries carry no warranty and may explode on them and it's not your fault if they do.
In the parallel world where EVs are always catching on fire, and petroleum-fueled vehicles aren't - quite unlike our actual world.
More like in the current world, where the crisis of a vehicle on fire either means the driver is getting roasted or his cargo is getting roasted. If it happens 1 in 10 million times, there's still about 150 million trucks on the road. 200 fatal hazmat incidents occur per year in the US, meaning fuel tanker trucks and (notably) oxygen tankers blowing up. Managing to keep defective, poorly-inspected, "Wull it dun held a chawj, Jeb" batteries from killing your driver is an important risk consideration.
I've ridden my bike on 25-35mph roads going 15mph. If I were going 25-35mph, I wouldn't get hit as much; fortunately, getting sideswiped by a car isn't the biggest deal in the world, aside from smashing up their passenger mirror.
When it comes to a truck which will have a sizeable number of large batteries, you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to never have more than a dud or two so long as the battery management process is sound.
In one truck, yes. The frequency of dead batteries, however, will be the same as passenger vehicles; who will dispose of those? The swap-off center will occasionally find a dud battery it can't reinstall in a customer's vehicle, which it then must replace with a new battery it purchases.
By, for example, any of the dozen or so methods already used for this purpose?
All of which are relatively involved. Testing a battery for charge capacity is one thing; testing and inspecting a battery for damage and danger conditions so you don't install it into someone's vehicle and get a lawsuit for "vehicle exploded in a giant flaming blaze" (or drive all your customers away with "we don't test our batteries for anything but charge, and damaged batteries may set your truck on fire") is wholly different. The amount of human labor required will make these inspections labor-intensive.
By rolling that into the swapping cost?
That may result in diesel being the cheaper fuel by far. You could take even odds on the batteries and lure people into your high-margin restaurant while the swap occurs, or try to tack on high-margin value-add services like general mechanical inspections and maintenance.
Battery swap in the much harder case of cars can be done in less than a tenth that time.
There are a lot more batteries on a truck.
You already have, today, stuff mounted to the underside of trailers. It's right where the structural strength is already located and you have tons of open space underneath for easy access and standard form factors.
Fortunately, if you mount batteries under there without a bunch of armored doors and other shit to hold it all together, the cargo container catches fire when the batteries become damaged.
It's also fortunate that most of the air and electronic braking lines are out of the way, instead of bolted all over the bottom of the truck. That doesn't mean mounting won't be a problem--especially mounting in some sane manner, with armored plating to protect the batteries--but it does mean you at least don't have to deal with drive shafts, exhaust systems, and all kinds of other shit, some of which fortunately doesn't even exist in electric cars.
I said their premium model is +$50. You said it's not a premium phone. You just reiterated that it's not a premium phone. The fact of the matter is it's their premium offering.
Oh what a terrible problem! They sell two options, how awful!
The problem isn't with what they sell; the problem is with your argument. Your argument is they don't have a premium phone; the problem with your argument is they sell two options: the basic 16GB option and the premium 64GB option. The fact that their PREMIUM OPTION is cheaper than some Rolls Royce bullshit doesn't mean it's not a premium option.
Of course you can try to dance around words like a politician trying desperately not to let on that he thinks the audience is filled with retards, but I won't let you.
Yes it's all a big conspiracy that all the phone makers - who are also competitors - are colluding on
Ant theory. I've already explained that it's not lucrative to offer SD cards slots on mainline-model phones.
On some models they prefer not to have an exposed, mechanical and relatively bulky (if you're looking at the thinness of modern devices) mechanism for storage and instead use soldered memory to avoid these problems
"Some" being all modern mainline phones, which largely have exposed SIM card slots, exposed USB readers, exposed speakers, and exposed headphone jacks (not even the self-sealing type of jack that repels water).
The reader for my MicroSIM card is at least as large as a MicroSD reader. The MicroSIM is at least 70% thicker than a MicroSD, and itself sits in a plastic carriage that makes it even thicker; this may or may not mean the MicroSIM reader is thicker than a MicroSD reader, since you could certainly make a thick reader to hold a thin card if you really wanted to. You could also make an extremely thin reader, which most are.
I'll accept that. I think personal ownership of trucks makes that untenable; however, commercial interests may lease truck transit time, such as how city goers lease car time from ZipCar. Wabash may in fact not own any trucks, having ZipTruck, and so being able to charter a truck and return their truck for charging, exchange trailers, and continue to deliver Wabash goods on a Wabash-branded freight trailer pulled by some random ZipTruck. ZipTruck won't handle logistics; you pay Wabash to get your freight from one end of the country to the next, and Wabash pays ZipTruck to provide an engine. These are separate tasks.
You, sir, are a man of vision; at least you needed less a nudge than I. This is why I would surround myself with smart people if I ever ran a business: I may be able to envision great things with broad-reaching implications, but I need prompting or I may as well just stare directly into the sun.
For that matter, I think I'd want a quality cabinet if I ever became a member of Congress.
No, but the brief of it is as obvious as gravity was in Newton's time (when everyone knew things fell down and planets orbited other large things, but nobody had described gravity).
All costs are human labor. Oil and coal require manpower to mine; the machines and fuel used require manpower to build, operate, and maintain, as well as to mine, refine, and ship. At the root of all of it is wages paid to workers.
Considering this briefly, imagine two mines producing coal, both by the same method. They each need the same manpower to mine a 100 cubic meter block of coal; however, one mine produces a solid anthracite block, while the other produces anthracite mixed with 50% rocks and dirt. The second mine spends twice as much labor per 100 cubic meters of coal (not counting refinement--removing those rocks and dirt), so that coal costs twice as much. Think about that when someone says a restriction of supply causes prices to rise: if your next best competitor needs to spend $100 more per unit than you, he can't undercut your prices unless you raise your profit margin to more than $100 per unit, which is how supply gets restricted.
My theory, in simple explanation, is as follows.
Each improvement in efficiency is a reduction of human labor time invested in each unit of production. Where it takes 8 hours to make a chair by hand, hand-tool making of chairs on an assembly line produces twice as many units in the same time investment--essentially 4 hours to make that same chair--and so the chair costs half as much.
By this manner, each improvement in efficiency CREATES UNEMPLOYMENT, concentrating the wealth of the unemployed into the hands of the employed consumer: by competitive market forces (a great many more than just as my coal competition example), consumer demand arises for lower prices (either by another supplier charging less, or by consumers seeing a different good they find more important than yours). Since your prices come down, consumers, as an immediate effect, have more wealth (represented by money, but, more directly, buying power).
This residual wealth creates an opportunity: these consumers--a great many consumers, often--now make up a demographic owning more buying power than they currently exercise. That means you can sell them things which they previously could not afford.
The cost of producing your new goods is the cost of labor you consume, directly or indirectly. That CREATES EMPLOYMENT, which recovers the displaced labor--this may happen months, years, or decades down the line (industrial revolution created multiple generations of high unemployment)--and, of course, means the consumer must pay for that labor per unit new good created.
That is a basic outline of my theory of wealth. This theory implies many things, and lends itself to understanding many things.
For example: progressive taxes are good, as they reduce labor costs, which for obvious reasons I agree with; however, creating the production capacity to employ displaced labor does cost money, and so taxing the living fuck out of "The Rich" has a negative economic impact. When you roll in Social Security, a flat tax would be around 39.2%, whereas our progressive system is 39.6% above $400k and 16.2% at the lowest income bracket (if you don't flatten social security, the flat tax is about 26%, and everyone making under $117k pays 32.2% in taxes). An extra 0.4% taxes on the fabulously wealthy is absolutely acceptable in exchange for cutting taxes by 23.4% on labor.
My reasoning for a Citizen's Dividend at the ruthlessly bare levels is along the same lines: it *works*--it's amazingly profitable for any enterprising business choosing to sell needed goods and services to the poor--and it's, in total, just slightly cheaper than our existing welfare system. At the same time, it puts several thousand dollars into the hands of consumers; and I'm sure you can recognize the implication of keeping the tax percentage flat, thus following the growth of wealth and incr
That $300,000 house was a $100,000 house before the interest rates dropped. Its price skyrocketed during that "housing bubble" thing, you know, the minor issue that tore down our economy.
Do you imagine that $300,000 house, at 14%, will simply command a $3550 monthly payment? When interest rates recover and return to 1980-level rates, do you imagine middle-class families will beat a path to the banks's doors to put their entire monthly paycheck plus whatever they can beg off welfare into their mortgage payments?
In 1990, the average middle-class family spent 47% of their income on housing--mortgage or rent. When the interest rates dropped from 10%-ish to around 3%-ish, do you know how much the average middle-class family spent on their new homes that they just bought, those same homes that other families sold at an immense profit? 47% of their income. A lot of people make arguments like "you're getting more equity now!" to explain this away.
When the interest rates go up again and people try to sell their overpriced houses, how much do you think people will pay for that $300,000 house?
Uh. Germany specifically labels street lamps with "you may park here without parking lamps on" signs on street lamps that don't turn off at night, because they ticket you if you park next to one that turns off at midnight.
Changing batteries carries other engineering problems. How old are the batteries? Do you own your battery? What is a battery worth? Do you load your truck with aging, unreliable batteries to swap-off with other aging, unreliable batteries? As a service station manager, how do you test each of these batteries to ensure its safety and reliability (its level of aging), and swap them out? As a service station manager, how do you offset the cost of rotating out old batteries traded in by truckers?
Changing batteries in something like a truck is a labor-intensive process. Mounting the batteries affects balance, thus handling, thus safety; mounting may preclude a fast removal operation. Batteries are heavy, and large machinery is required to remove the batteries. Running a 200A cable to a truck is one thing; but if you want to swap batteries, you're going to have to get in line. The operation may take 40 minutes overall--so may an 80% charge. Even in an EV like the Leaf or Tesla Model S, swapping out those enormous batteries--they're the size of the whole god damn car--is akin to swapping engines, or at least oil pans or transaxles; expect to be there an hour or two.
Think about it as if you were going to swap an entire, pre-filled gas tank, rather than just fill the tank. Sure, it sounds good in theory; but that kind of mechanic work takes space, labor, and time. Filling a tank is faster. Filling a battery is slower than filling a tank, but not that damn slow.
besides, why does a driver-less truck need to wait for food?
A driverless truck would use the rail system as freight transport, and drive last-mile. Labor costs would be cheap enough to justify the longer driver-miles of such crude distribution. Driverless trucks can spend a lot more time just driving all the fuck around with no cargo, since it costs 1/5 as much for fuel, and the driver's wage is eliminated.
In much of Europe, it's mandatory to leave your parking lights on overnight. The battery should last more than 30 hours fine with them continuously on.
The point was it's not possible to "pay as much on your principle as you can" (or it's not very beneficial, at least) if your interest rate is low.
A low interest rate leads to saving, at most, 8% by paying extra principle--if you can pay the whole damn loan off in full on day one, meaning never getting a loan in the first place. At higher interest rates--that is, in a market where interest rates are high, and your lowest obtainable rate is a comparatively high rate--you can save 63% by paying extra principle.
Likewise, in the high-interest-rate market, your early payments can save you 65 times as much total cost as the initial payment (you pay $18 and save $1166). In the low-interest-rate market, you get a 111% return (you pay an extra $560, and save $625). It is a fool's errand to try and save money by paying extra into your mortgage in a low-interest-rate market; you'd have to be fucking rich, in which case you've probably taken steps such as buying points or lunking down a big down-payment.
Not necessarily. I imagine additional engineering may come into play, but you can realistically charge trucks fairly quickly. Rather than a battery, you'd use a bank of batteries with a high-flow fan for thermal protection; you'd use a high amount of voltage to charge them the first 80%, which can pull that off in as little as half an hour.
With that kind of power draw, you may need kinetic storage. Roller coasters can't fire off from a standing start because they'd blow the power grid; some roller coasters spend a full minute or so accelerating a flywheel, and then connect it to a generator or direct mechanical drive to launch. A truck stop may provide high-speed charging likewise, driving a dynamo from a flywheel. From that standpoint, you'd recharge your truck while waiting for food, since a 20-30 minute rest stop to eat twice per day is all but unavoidable.
I look forward to a more wealthy economy in which people own a car and an alternate means--a motorcycle, for example, if not a bicycle or skilled use of public transit--so as to defray those costs. A low-end motorcycle, such as a Honda or Kawasaki 250cc (actually 249cc, to avoid regulations on 250cc+ bikes), provides excellent fuel economy for single-person transit.
Most people counter-argue with me here by pointing out that the average passenger carry of a motorcycle is 1.2, while a car can carry 5 people; I find this dishonest, since a great many cars carry one person driving to work alone. With carry capacity for light shopping--I've carried groceries on a bicycle, and have seen motorcycle panniers frequently--and 78% of commuters driving solo, the doubling of mpg and great reduction of maintenance costs (two wheels, bike itself costs $4000) is an excellent way to defray financial costs and extend the life of your expensive passenger vehicle.
Bicycles and public transit require more effort, carry more risk (bicycles particularly--at least a motorcycle can travel with traffic, and not simply in the same direction), and demand more time investment than a motorcycle. While I personally leverage these mode of transportation fine, I don't imagine most people could more smoothly transition to a motorcycle; an ebike sits somewhere between, with its 20-25mph limit.
I own a home, but don't own it as an investment. When I inevitably dispose of it, I won't make any sort of return on that home; in fact, homeownership will be a financial loss--possibly even a loss compared to renting, although it'll likely be some small gain. Homeownership gives me more temporal control over my finances, however: I've invested quite a lot of money into small returns, such that the amount of money I must spend month-to-month is lower.
If we could get an interest rate market around the 14% mark, homeownership would easily be an attractive option, since you could spend very little to clear your debt. At 2.5%, a home with a payment of $1180 requires an extra $500+/month to skip a payment in the very early months, and more as you get deeper into payments, with the total interest paid at around $26,000; at 14%, a home with a payment of $1180 comes to the same projected total cost at the end of a 30-year loan period, but allows you to skip early payments with as little as $18 additional payment. If you raise your payments by $150, that 30-year loan at 14% interest becomes a 15-year loan, saving you $162,000 in interest--more than six times the total interest cost of the same home in a 2.5% interest rate market where buyers can afford (and do pay) much higher sale prices.
In the end, a house's investment return is a gamble at best, and one that doesn't really work out unless general market interest rates are high when you buy and suddenly drop just before you sell, ratcheting the sale price of your house up extremely high. What we need most is financial education in the next high-interest-rate market, creating a cultural habit of 15- or, better, 10-year mortgages, where people reject the idea of banker fiefdom for 20-30 years. Even if your home is a complete write-off, hitting an age of 30 and realizing you suddenly have $1500-$2500 more to spend every month creates quite a different economic climate--both in your personal finances and in the wider market.
I'd make one hell of a banker, but I decided to go economist on that front. Bankers obviously want people to go for long, high-balanced loans; as an economist--as *the* economist, since I've developed a formal economic theory which unifies and correctly explains all current theory--I see the great value in accelerating and strengthening the wealth cycle. The mortgage market behaviors I've described don't really make banks (much) poorer--in fact, taking the full function of banks into account, they probably only reduce the proportion of bank income from consumer mortgages, and increase its income in business loans and other consumer loans--but they leave more residual wealth in the consumer's hand, creating market opportunities for businesses to sell more goods and services, thus creating demand for new labor.
Even automation would only cut production costs, having the same effect--unfortunately, at an excessively high rate, leading to a serious economic disruption that would require several decades to heal in exactly the same way--with an interesting difference in that you'd need much less new labor to produce new products, and so would produce a much greater volume of new products and services to capture that residual wealth, so long as dynamics of competition come into play (fortunately, competition can be outside market: does the consumer want your overpriced diamonds, or my overpriced cakes? Perhaps one of us--or both of us--must reduce our prices to come closer in line to our actual costs, slimming our profit margins while still retaining a healthy profit... no guarantees there, though).
I'm sure you can imagine why, while I want to protect the income of businesses and high-earners (meaning I'd like to minimize any new taxes), I'm also chiefly concerned with maximizing the wealth of consumers. Many of my economics policies proposals focus on reducing labor costs, increasing income security, and doing so with little expansion or, interestingly, a reduction of total taxes necessary to fund these new sy
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I called you daft for not understanding the concept that someone who runs a swapping service station covers all costs related to their business activities and rolls them into what they charge for service, just like every other business does.
I raised the question because it's a point you seemed to ignore. There are costs inherent in there, which means the cost of battery swap is significantly higher than the cost of charging your own batteries.
Really, you think that bad fuel can't damage an engine? It can and does. And it's the supplier who ultimately bears the cost. No, "bad electricity" is not a proper analogy (although your sarcasm in this regard is funny given how many devices are damaged by surges every year); a gas station fuels vehicles by insertung fuel into them, while a swapping station fuels vehicles by inserting pre-charged batteries into them. Batteries correspond to fuel in this context.
Nope, you're using the fallacy of whole body analogy: X has aspect similar to Y, therefor X is similar to Y in all aspects. The problem is fuel and electricity are most similar, although bad fuel can damage a car and bad electricity can't. Swapping a battery for a defective battery can also damage a car (much worse, if it catches fire), but so can swapping in a bad radiator.
The battery is a car part. It isn't simply fuel, and it can't be fully analogized to fuel. You're swapping in a car part which may be bad and may damage the car or kill the driver.
In what world do you live where car parts are regularly inspected by the manufacturer after being installed into the vehicle?
A battery is a type of fuel tank. It's a storage container holding an electron charge (energy). This is substantially similar to a propane tank swap, which, yes, every single tank is individually inspected in the industry. Batteries, of course, don't fully analogize to propane tanks; they do tend to EXPLODE WHEN DAMAGED, and they explode or burn with the energy they contain: a Tesla 80kWh battery has as much energy as 64kg of TNT. A stick of dynamite is equivalent to .216kg of TNT, so that battery is potentially 300 sticks of dynamite.
Do you think inspection regulations for damaged and dangerous batteries won't appear overnight?
Lastly, you're still stuck in bizarro world where ICE vehicles full of combustible fuel are incombustible,
We don't routinely swap critical fuel management components in gasoline and diesel cars for other components which came out of other, random cars. We tend to install new or refurbished parts, and even then in vary rare cases (every few hundred thousand miles). Gasoline and diesel also don't massively explode, although Li+ batteries tend to burn--more rapidly than gasoline and diesel would, but they still tend to not detonate (they can). Both failure modes are more likely and more dangerous than liquid fuel failures, and harder to cease (dry chemical or CO2 onto gasoline will put it out; that won't work with a battery, because it's an oxidizer and reducer in one package--it has its own oxygen source).
You can live in a delusion where people (and, subsequently, governments) won't demand safety inspections on every single battery swap, but reality will happily ignore you.
Go back and read it again: "this isn't marketed at the premium price point ".
Listen you fallacy-of-equivocation prick, I said it's a PREMIUM OFFERING. It's their premium offering. It doesn't matter if it doesn't cost as much as an expensive-ass HTC phone; a Chevrolet Cobalt SS doesn't cost as much as a Mustang Cobra, but the Cobalt SS is a premium car (which costs $25k). Why? There's a base model, and a premium model.
No, it isn't. Nowhere did I write or imply that.
I said the 64GB model is their premium offering. You said it's "nuh-uh".
It's worth noting that mortgage interest is tax deductible
So your interest, minus about $12,000, is cut down by about 2/3, and given back to you. If you pay $25,000 in interest this year, you get $8,000 back from the Government. Cool.
in addition to the other misc. tax benefits of home ownership.
Which are all lower than the costs of home ownership.
In my city, a mortgage payment is significantly lower then the corresponding rental prices
That's why I bought my house. Normally, rent costs less than a mortgage, slightly; it also saves you on maintenance and homeowner's insurance ($892/year HOI, $118/year RI), as well as taxes (although my house is reported as worth $3,000, so I only pay $72; if it were reported as the $50,000 I paid for it, it would cost about $1,200/year in taxes, or roughly 3 month's 15-year mortgage). In this case, house prices had dropped, and rents hadn't followed (a lot of realtors had new mortgages...); a lot of houses got abandoned, and I picked one up from an investor cheap.
How does home ownership give you more control over your finances?
I managed to plan to pay my mortgage off in 3 years, and then decided to divert that to updating the insulation (cut my heating needs by 80%), installing a split system (cut my $500 heating bills by 2/3, not counting insulation), and installing new windows--it'll be a 5 year pay-off instead.
I tend to take ~$10k loans to do work in blocks. I took $10k for a project to remove the trees from my back yard (before they eat the sewage line, and of course so I could kill the poison ivy by saturating the ground with triclopyr--90 days to non-kill levels, 420 days to complete decomposition, and any run-off immediately decomposes in water), and also to buy a piano. That leaves several thousand dollars in my bank account, instead of just draining my accounts (and then my car needed $1000 of work, so you can see why I took a loan instead of paying out of pocket). I'll pay that down in a few months, and then get another $10k loan to install a split heat pump system, insulate the rear wall (foam panel exterior), and rebuild the master bedroom (drafty, no insulation, gets hot and extremely humid during the summer).
Each cycle will end with more cash-on-hand, and the months I take to pay down those loans only holds me to a $250/mo obligation in case of financial trouble. I can take them down by $1000-$2000 each month otherwise. Same with my $450/mo mortgage that I dump $1200 on, when I'm not managing other loans. Flexibility.
That needs to go away. We need an Ethernet protocol extension with BCH or Hamming code support.
All true, and it stands with my point well; I'll point out that your argument distinctly is not a counter-point. There is no way you can buy yourself into a house to the point that you can't scrounge $20 more to make on the payment each month and expect to actually make your payment every month in the first place; it is almost guaranteed that your ability to easily afford your payment every month doesn't imply any ability to find an extra $600 every month to add to it. Buying into a slightly-cheaper house (location, size) would magnify the effects I describe in high-interest-rate markets; it is, in fact, the strategy I took even with 2.875% interest rates, hence my 3-year mortgage.
Seriously, you can't be this daft. The operator, of course, with the price rolled into the service cost.
You claimed that you're unlikely to have more than a dud or two in a truck, dismissing the idea that failure rate *per* *battery* would be the same as anything else, when I pointed out that the operator would have to manage the cost of rotating out end-of-life batteries.
Your answer to "how will the operator handle disposal costs of bad batteries?" was "Oh, that's not a real consideration." Then you call me daft for pointing out that it *is* a real thing.
No, they're not. Even your laptop battery estimates its capacity, and that's about as simple as li-ion battery packs get.
I said estimating capacity is easy, but estimating integrity is hard. Will the fucking battery EXPLODE UNDER YOUR TRUCK? A simple capacity measure won't tell you if it's dangerously damaged.
No, it's the manufacturer's issue to ensure that the product meets its stated usage specs - in this case, the specs including safe handling of damage and X number of swap cycles.
Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn't have control of the batteries once they've been placed into a truck.
Just like gas stations check their gas for impurities that can cause damage to an engine?
No you miserable fucking idiot, more like how Blue Rhino inspects and tests every tank for safety defects at every exchange. The gas station doesn't swap your god damned fuel tank, so they don't have to inspect it for dangerous leaks and rust spots.
You may as well have said "they'll inspect the electricity they charge it with to make sure it's clean power" if you wanted to make a show of being that stupid.
Tesla's battery packs have an 8 year, unlimited-mile warranty
You still don't know how many 72-pound pieces of iron road debris have smashed into the battery, if the driver used a defective charger to charge the battery at extremely high voltages, if the battery's been damaged by *other*, less scrupulous stations mishandling it, if it's experienced flood damage somehow, and so forth. Determining the actual physical condition of the battery requires labor-intensive inspection, unless you want to just tell everyone those swapped-out batteries carry no warranty and may explode on them and it's not your fault if they do.
In the parallel world where EVs are always catching on fire, and petroleum-fueled vehicles aren't - quite unlike our actual world.
More like in the current world, where the crisis of a vehicle on fire either means the driver is getting roasted or his cargo is getting roasted. If it happens 1 in 10 million times, there's still about 150 million trucks on the road. 200 fatal hazmat incidents occur per year in the US, meaning fuel tanker trucks and (notably) oxygen tankers blowing up. Managing to keep defective, poorly-inspected, "Wull it dun held a chawj, Jeb" batteries from killing your driver is an important risk consideration.
Passenger cars have 482km range on batteries alone; do you honestly think a truck would have a 300km range?
I've ridden my bike on 25-35mph roads going 15mph. If I were going 25-35mph, I wouldn't get hit as much; fortunately, getting sideswiped by a car isn't the biggest deal in the world, aside from smashing up their passenger mirror.
When it comes to a truck which will have a sizeable number of large batteries, you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to never have more than a dud or two so long as the battery management process is sound.
In one truck, yes. The frequency of dead batteries, however, will be the same as passenger vehicles; who will dispose of those? The swap-off center will occasionally find a dud battery it can't reinstall in a customer's vehicle, which it then must replace with a new battery it purchases.
By, for example, any of the dozen or so methods already used for this purpose?
All of which are relatively involved. Testing a battery for charge capacity is one thing; testing and inspecting a battery for damage and danger conditions so you don't install it into someone's vehicle and get a lawsuit for "vehicle exploded in a giant flaming blaze" (or drive all your customers away with "we don't test our batteries for anything but charge, and damaged batteries may set your truck on fire") is wholly different. The amount of human labor required will make these inspections labor-intensive.
By rolling that into the swapping cost?
That may result in diesel being the cheaper fuel by far. You could take even odds on the batteries and lure people into your high-margin restaurant while the swap occurs, or try to tack on high-margin value-add services like general mechanical inspections and maintenance.
Battery swap in the much harder case of cars can be done in less than a tenth that time.
There are a lot more batteries on a truck.
You already have, today, stuff mounted to the underside of trailers. It's right where the structural strength is already located and you have tons of open space underneath for easy access and standard form factors.
Fortunately, if you mount batteries under there without a bunch of armored doors and other shit to hold it all together, the cargo container catches fire when the batteries become damaged.
It's also fortunate that most of the air and electronic braking lines are out of the way, instead of bolted all over the bottom of the truck. That doesn't mean mounting won't be a problem--especially mounting in some sane manner, with armored plating to protect the batteries--but it does mean you at least don't have to deal with drive shafts, exhaust systems, and all kinds of other shit, some of which fortunately doesn't even exist in electric cars.
I said their premium model is +$50. You said it's not a premium phone. You just reiterated that it's not a premium phone. The fact of the matter is it's their premium offering.
Oh what a terrible problem! They sell two options, how awful!
The problem isn't with what they sell; the problem is with your argument. Your argument is they don't have a premium phone; the problem with your argument is they sell two options: the basic 16GB option and the premium 64GB option. The fact that their PREMIUM OPTION is cheaper than some Rolls Royce bullshit doesn't mean it's not a premium option.
Of course you can try to dance around words like a politician trying desperately not to let on that he thinks the audience is filled with retards, but I won't let you.
Yes it's all a big conspiracy that all the phone makers - who are also competitors - are colluding on
Ant theory. I've already explained that it's not lucrative to offer SD cards slots on mainline-model phones.
On some models they prefer not to have an exposed, mechanical and relatively bulky (if you're looking at the thinness of modern devices) mechanism for storage and instead use soldered memory to avoid these problems
"Some" being all modern mainline phones, which largely have exposed SIM card slots, exposed USB readers, exposed speakers, and exposed headphone jacks (not even the self-sealing type of jack that repels water).
The reader for my MicroSIM card is at least as large as a MicroSD reader. The MicroSIM is at least 70% thicker than a MicroSD, and itself sits in a plastic carriage that makes it even thicker; this may or may not mean the MicroSIM reader is thicker than a MicroSD reader, since you could certainly make a thick reader to hold a thin card if you really wanted to. You could also make an extremely thin reader, which most are.
None of your arguments actually have any merit.
I'll accept that. I think personal ownership of trucks makes that untenable; however, commercial interests may lease truck transit time, such as how city goers lease car time from ZipCar. Wabash may in fact not own any trucks, having ZipTruck, and so being able to charter a truck and return their truck for charging, exchange trailers, and continue to deliver Wabash goods on a Wabash-branded freight trailer pulled by some random ZipTruck. ZipTruck won't handle logistics; you pay Wabash to get your freight from one end of the country to the next, and Wabash pays ZipTruck to provide an engine. These are separate tasks.
You, sir, are a man of vision; at least you needed less a nudge than I. This is why I would surround myself with smart people if I ever ran a business: I may be able to envision great things with broad-reaching implications, but I need prompting or I may as well just stare directly into the sun.
For that matter, I think I'd want a quality cabinet if I ever became a member of Congress.
No, but the brief of it is as obvious as gravity was in Newton's time (when everyone knew things fell down and planets orbited other large things, but nobody had described gravity).
All costs are human labor. Oil and coal require manpower to mine; the machines and fuel used require manpower to build, operate, and maintain, as well as to mine, refine, and ship. At the root of all of it is wages paid to workers.
Considering this briefly, imagine two mines producing coal, both by the same method. They each need the same manpower to mine a 100 cubic meter block of coal; however, one mine produces a solid anthracite block, while the other produces anthracite mixed with 50% rocks and dirt. The second mine spends twice as much labor per 100 cubic meters of coal (not counting refinement--removing those rocks and dirt), so that coal costs twice as much. Think about that when someone says a restriction of supply causes prices to rise: if your next best competitor needs to spend $100 more per unit than you, he can't undercut your prices unless you raise your profit margin to more than $100 per unit, which is how supply gets restricted.
My theory, in simple explanation, is as follows.
Each improvement in efficiency is a reduction of human labor time invested in each unit of production. Where it takes 8 hours to make a chair by hand, hand-tool making of chairs on an assembly line produces twice as many units in the same time investment--essentially 4 hours to make that same chair--and so the chair costs half as much.
By this manner, each improvement in efficiency CREATES UNEMPLOYMENT, concentrating the wealth of the unemployed into the hands of the employed consumer: by competitive market forces (a great many more than just as my coal competition example), consumer demand arises for lower prices (either by another supplier charging less, or by consumers seeing a different good they find more important than yours). Since your prices come down, consumers, as an immediate effect, have more wealth (represented by money, but, more directly, buying power).
This residual wealth creates an opportunity: these consumers--a great many consumers, often--now make up a demographic owning more buying power than they currently exercise. That means you can sell them things which they previously could not afford.
The cost of producing your new goods is the cost of labor you consume, directly or indirectly. That CREATES EMPLOYMENT, which recovers the displaced labor--this may happen months, years, or decades down the line (industrial revolution created multiple generations of high unemployment)--and, of course, means the consumer must pay for that labor per unit new good created.
That is a basic outline of my theory of wealth. This theory implies many things, and lends itself to understanding many things.
For example: progressive taxes are good, as they reduce labor costs, which for obvious reasons I agree with; however, creating the production capacity to employ displaced labor does cost money, and so taxing the living fuck out of "The Rich" has a negative economic impact. When you roll in Social Security, a flat tax would be around 39.2%, whereas our progressive system is 39.6% above $400k and 16.2% at the lowest income bracket (if you don't flatten social security, the flat tax is about 26%, and everyone making under $117k pays 32.2% in taxes). An extra 0.4% taxes on the fabulously wealthy is absolutely acceptable in exchange for cutting taxes by 23.4% on labor.
My reasoning for a Citizen's Dividend at the ruthlessly bare levels is along the same lines: it *works*--it's amazingly profitable for any enterprising business choosing to sell needed goods and services to the poor--and it's, in total, just slightly cheaper than our existing welfare system. At the same time, it puts several thousand dollars into the hands of consumers; and I'm sure you can recognize the implication of keeping the tax percentage flat, thus following the growth of wealth and incr
Low beams
High beams
Any questions?
You're not getting this.
That $300,000 house was a $100,000 house before the interest rates dropped. Its price skyrocketed during that "housing bubble" thing, you know, the minor issue that tore down our economy.
Do you imagine that $300,000 house, at 14%, will simply command a $3550 monthly payment? When interest rates recover and return to 1980-level rates, do you imagine middle-class families will beat a path to the banks's doors to put their entire monthly paycheck plus whatever they can beg off welfare into their mortgage payments?
In 1990, the average middle-class family spent 47% of their income on housing--mortgage or rent. When the interest rates dropped from 10%-ish to around 3%-ish, do you know how much the average middle-class family spent on their new homes that they just bought, those same homes that other families sold at an immense profit? 47% of their income. A lot of people make arguments like "you're getting more equity now!" to explain this away.
When the interest rates go up again and people try to sell their overpriced houses, how much do you think people will pay for that $300,000 house?
Uh. Germany specifically labels street lamps with "you may park here without parking lamps on" signs on street lamps that don't turn off at night, because they ticket you if you park next to one that turns off at midnight.
Changing batteries carries other engineering problems. How old are the batteries? Do you own your battery? What is a battery worth? Do you load your truck with aging, unreliable batteries to swap-off with other aging, unreliable batteries? As a service station manager, how do you test each of these batteries to ensure its safety and reliability (its level of aging), and swap them out? As a service station manager, how do you offset the cost of rotating out old batteries traded in by truckers?
Changing batteries in something like a truck is a labor-intensive process. Mounting the batteries affects balance, thus handling, thus safety; mounting may preclude a fast removal operation. Batteries are heavy, and large machinery is required to remove the batteries. Running a 200A cable to a truck is one thing; but if you want to swap batteries, you're going to have to get in line. The operation may take 40 minutes overall--so may an 80% charge. Even in an EV like the Leaf or Tesla Model S, swapping out those enormous batteries--they're the size of the whole god damn car--is akin to swapping engines, or at least oil pans or transaxles; expect to be there an hour or two.
Think about it as if you were going to swap an entire, pre-filled gas tank, rather than just fill the tank. Sure, it sounds good in theory; but that kind of mechanic work takes space, labor, and time. Filling a tank is faster. Filling a battery is slower than filling a tank, but not that damn slow.
besides, why does a driver-less truck need to wait for food?
A driverless truck would use the rail system as freight transport, and drive last-mile. Labor costs would be cheap enough to justify the longer driver-miles of such crude distribution. Driverless trucks can spend a lot more time just driving all the fuck around with no cargo, since it costs 1/5 as much for fuel, and the driver's wage is eliminated.
In much of Europe, it's mandatory to leave your parking lights on overnight. The battery should last more than 30 hours fine with them continuously on.
The point was it's not possible to "pay as much on your principle as you can" (or it's not very beneficial, at least) if your interest rate is low.
A low interest rate leads to saving, at most, 8% by paying extra principle--if you can pay the whole damn loan off in full on day one, meaning never getting a loan in the first place. At higher interest rates--that is, in a market where interest rates are high, and your lowest obtainable rate is a comparatively high rate--you can save 63% by paying extra principle.
Likewise, in the high-interest-rate market, your early payments can save you 65 times as much total cost as the initial payment (you pay $18 and save $1166). In the low-interest-rate market, you get a 111% return (you pay an extra $560, and save $625). It is a fool's errand to try and save money by paying extra into your mortgage in a low-interest-rate market; you'd have to be fucking rich, in which case you've probably taken steps such as buying points or lunking down a big down-payment.
It takes like 40 minutes to charge a Tesla 80% of the way. That's a stop-off at KFC to eat while you use the charger in the car park.
I'm sure you meant -40 in Farenheit.
My heat pump works to -15F at 80% of its full efficiency.
The Model S has a 320 mile range; my Mazda 3 ranges 260-315 miles on a full 12-gallon tank.
Not necessarily. I imagine additional engineering may come into play, but you can realistically charge trucks fairly quickly. Rather than a battery, you'd use a bank of batteries with a high-flow fan for thermal protection; you'd use a high amount of voltage to charge them the first 80%, which can pull that off in as little as half an hour.
With that kind of power draw, you may need kinetic storage. Roller coasters can't fire off from a standing start because they'd blow the power grid; some roller coasters spend a full minute or so accelerating a flywheel, and then connect it to a generator or direct mechanical drive to launch. A truck stop may provide high-speed charging likewise, driving a dynamo from a flywheel. From that standpoint, you'd recharge your truck while waiting for food, since a 20-30 minute rest stop to eat twice per day is all but unavoidable.
I look forward to a more wealthy economy in which people own a car and an alternate means--a motorcycle, for example, if not a bicycle or skilled use of public transit--so as to defray those costs. A low-end motorcycle, such as a Honda or Kawasaki 250cc (actually 249cc, to avoid regulations on 250cc+ bikes), provides excellent fuel economy for single-person transit.
Most people counter-argue with me here by pointing out that the average passenger carry of a motorcycle is 1.2, while a car can carry 5 people; I find this dishonest, since a great many cars carry one person driving to work alone. With carry capacity for light shopping--I've carried groceries on a bicycle, and have seen motorcycle panniers frequently--and 78% of commuters driving solo, the doubling of mpg and great reduction of maintenance costs (two wheels, bike itself costs $4000) is an excellent way to defray financial costs and extend the life of your expensive passenger vehicle.
Bicycles and public transit require more effort, carry more risk (bicycles particularly--at least a motorcycle can travel with traffic, and not simply in the same direction), and demand more time investment than a motorcycle. While I personally leverage these mode of transportation fine, I don't imagine most people could more smoothly transition to a motorcycle; an ebike sits somewhere between, with its 20-25mph limit.
I own a home, but don't own it as an investment. When I inevitably dispose of it, I won't make any sort of return on that home; in fact, homeownership will be a financial loss--possibly even a loss compared to renting, although it'll likely be some small gain. Homeownership gives me more temporal control over my finances, however: I've invested quite a lot of money into small returns, such that the amount of money I must spend month-to-month is lower.
If we could get an interest rate market around the 14% mark, homeownership would easily be an attractive option, since you could spend very little to clear your debt. At 2.5%, a home with a payment of $1180 requires an extra $500+/month to skip a payment in the very early months, and more as you get deeper into payments, with the total interest paid at around $26,000; at 14%, a home with a payment of $1180 comes to the same projected total cost at the end of a 30-year loan period, but allows you to skip early payments with as little as $18 additional payment. If you raise your payments by $150, that 30-year loan at 14% interest becomes a 15-year loan, saving you $162,000 in interest--more than six times the total interest cost of the same home in a 2.5% interest rate market where buyers can afford (and do pay) much higher sale prices.
In the end, a house's investment return is a gamble at best, and one that doesn't really work out unless general market interest rates are high when you buy and suddenly drop just before you sell, ratcheting the sale price of your house up extremely high. What we need most is financial education in the next high-interest-rate market, creating a cultural habit of 15- or, better, 10-year mortgages, where people reject the idea of banker fiefdom for 20-30 years. Even if your home is a complete write-off, hitting an age of 30 and realizing you suddenly have $1500-$2500 more to spend every month creates quite a different economic climate--both in your personal finances and in the wider market.
I'd make one hell of a banker, but I decided to go economist on that front. Bankers obviously want people to go for long, high-balanced loans; as an economist--as *the* economist, since I've developed a formal economic theory which unifies and correctly explains all current theory--I see the great value in accelerating and strengthening the wealth cycle. The mortgage market behaviors I've described don't really make banks (much) poorer--in fact, taking the full function of banks into account, they probably only reduce the proportion of bank income from consumer mortgages, and increase its income in business loans and other consumer loans--but they leave more residual wealth in the consumer's hand, creating market opportunities for businesses to sell more goods and services, thus creating demand for new labor.
Even automation would only cut production costs, having the same effect--unfortunately, at an excessively high rate, leading to a serious economic disruption that would require several decades to heal in exactly the same way--with an interesting difference in that you'd need much less new labor to produce new products, and so would produce a much greater volume of new products and services to capture that residual wealth, so long as dynamics of competition come into play (fortunately, competition can be outside market: does the consumer want your overpriced diamonds, or my overpriced cakes? Perhaps one of us--or both of us--must reduce our prices to come closer in line to our actual costs, slimming our profit margins while still retaining a healthy profit... no guarantees there, though).
I'm sure you can imagine why, while I want to protect the income of businesses and high-earners (meaning I'd like to minimize any new taxes), I'm also chiefly concerned with maximizing the wealth of consumers. Many of my economics policies proposals focus on reducing labor costs, increasing income security, and doing so with little expansion or, interestingly, a reduction of total taxes necessary to fund these new sy