That is true whether the batteries are in a car on in a Powerwall. Normal day-to-day cycling in the 20%-80% range does not cause much degradation
These batteries would be in a car which also needs to drive around, and are added wear on the (material and labor expensive) battery. Cycling between 80% and 70% or 20% and 30% cause the same wear; and cycling between 20% and 80% (once) is the same as cycling between 70% and 80% six times.
In other words: if the car can go 280 miles on 60% of its capacity, then cycling between 20% and 80% once is exactly the same as 280 miles of driving.
The Tesla gets 208 miles on 60kWh, or 3.4 miles per kWh; its 80%-20% range is 124 miles. I drive that in 4 days; so every 80%-20% cycle (36kWh) would put 4 days's worth of driving on my car. Note that if you're oscillating--drawing a kWh, charging a kWh, drawing again, etc.--you're producing the same charge cycles as your total movement (if you charge-discharge 1,000kWh in minor oscillations, you've eaten 16 2/3 full charge-discharge cycles of that battery's life), so acting as a giant capacitor for the grid does a lot more than what you might see at the end of the day (i.e. you might see you went down by 2kWh or moved inside a 1kWh state of charge range, but that doesn't tell you how much wear you did on your battery).
If it's doing a total charge-discharge of 60% of the battery capacity in total each day, that's adding 1,157 days of driving to the wear on the battery per year--on top of the 280 days of real driving. A battery that lasts me 20 years suddenly lasts only 4.
Umm... I think you are missing something. You charge when power is cheap, and feedback to the grid at a higher price. So this is income, not tax
Except that the cost of the battery is not income. In the above, with a $5,000 battery (Tesla has suggested $12,000 for replacement including labor at some point; GM does their 18kWh one for $7,000), a $5,000 cost over 20 years becomes a $25,000 cost.
In other words: you get to spend $1,000/year to be a battery for the grid. Good luck making that up with electricity arbitration of 5 cents per kWh.
There isn't, really. Current flow is a matter of voltage and resistance; and energy doesn't magically move. A bunch of electricity isn't "energy"; it's the potential difference that creates flow, kind of like putting a tonne of water up five km high.
In other words: all movement of electricity uses energy. There's a reason 750kW of movement generates 750kW of heat: 100% of all electrical energy consumed is released in the process of consumption, generally as heat. You can keep wires cool by reducing the current, but only by increasing resistance at some point and increasing voltage between the two ends of your power source: 100V 100A is 10,000W, and the wire gets hotter than if you use 1,000V 10A instead. You're still going to release 10kW of power somewhere; and 2,000V 10A is going to release 20kW of power.
I'm not an EE; I grew up doing this stuff as a hobby due to having an EE in the house. It's a little slow coming. Still, that's how electricity works. Point is you can't magically turn up voltage and turn down current: Current is Voltage divided by Resistance.
The energy density of the supposed "breakthrough" supercapcitor isn't stated, so I'm going to assume a team that is working on it for automotive use are not so boneheaded as to purse something for automotive use that is so large as to make it prohibitive for automotive use.
You must be new around here. You might be interested in learning why there are 53 papers about how skipping breakfast makes you fat even though it turns out to not be true.
and then the batteries should have no problem flowing enough amperage to charge the vehicle supercapacitor in a short time
Li+ will detonate. Besides that the battery chemistry has about 1/100 of the power density of a supercapacitor, its internal resistance will result in generating enough heat to boil and then ignite the media. You could build a cooling system to vent the heat; it would ignite anything flammable at the discharge point--including metal (yes, metal can catch fire, with magnesium being the most notable example, although aluminum ignites at or above 2100K). I'm not sure you can get thermal efficiency enough to sink the heat properly, transport it in a liquid or phase-change medium, and vent it; you would likely need wet sink into a ground water source, which would boil.
At 50 Kv, that would be 15 amps. Sounds doable.
Maybe. We're still ignoring one problem: you don't select amperage.
You can set voltage by a voltage differential. You get current by voltage and resistance.
In other words: if you put 50,000 volts onto a copper wire, you will definitely not transfer at 15 amps. You're going to vaporize that wire.
To get more out, you need to run at a higher resistance. To get 15 amps at 50,000 volts, you're looking at 3,333 ohms. That's P=RI^2 as well. This of course makes sense: the whole system has to have that kind of resistance (the wire going down doesn't), and you're going to vent 750,000W in heat to the atmosphere.
Assuming the resistance at the supercapacitor is about 0, you're going to vent all of that in your battery (and it explodes). Problem: the lithium ion battery has 0.320 ohms of resistance, so you need to put some kind of highly-resistive load down at the supercapacitor or else you're going to send like 152,000 amps down that wire. If you put the highly-resistive load down there, it'll get damned hot.
Which part do you want to become a 750kW space heater?
The quoted article says 180 watt-hrs/Kg for the supercapacitor, as opposed to 100 -120 Wh/Kg for lithium
That's the specific energy, not the energy density.
Supercapacitors range around 0.05 MJ per liter of physical space, whereas lithium ion batteries range 0.9-2.63 MJ per liter, depending on chemistry. That means the 18kWh battery that takes up twice the volume of the rear seats in the Chevrolet Volt would be larger than the entire car if it were a supercapacitor, and weigh only about twice as much as the battery as-is.
Yes, it would be about 40 times bigger. Think styrofoam versus iron.
Use 1000 batteries and wire them in series temporarily during the charge, so you connect up to 50,000 volts with smaller amps?
You'll need an enormous transformer for that, which will get hot. It will be bigger than your car. You'll still have to feed it from mains, which means it has to draw power through your service line, meter, and service panel at 240V. You're not getting a 50,000V feed to your house off the pole.
If you short a 50,000V transformer on your side (which shouldn't even exist), you'll probably detonate and set fire to everything on your block. The power will pulse back through the mains line, meet impedance at the transformer on your pole, and go down to all your neighbors's houses fed by the same transformer. A power fault, thus, will cause several million dollars's worth of damage and likely loss of life.
Supercapacitors have 1/100 the energy density of modern batteries. They've got better power density. Charging the battery that fast might melt your cable, though: a 48kWh battery charging in 10 minutes draws 1,200 amps. That's enough to vaporize a 1cm-thick steel rod explosively (there would be an expanding fireball detonating in your face almost instantly).
Current flow occurs when there is a potential difference across a resistance. The battery's internal resistance, its tendency to heat up rapidly, or its lack of total power would be the only modifier. A spark plug is throwing 25,000V across an air gap with enormous resistance, so discharges a few mA; a short circuit would discharge that 25,000V at an incredibly-high amperage, and for a shorter duration (yeah that's a hell of a thing to consider, right?).
The Powerwall costs extra money, but you will already have your car battery, so there is no additional capital cost other than an inverter.
Yep. It makes sense from a capex standpoint; not sure if it makes sense overall. Those batteries degrade with charge-discharge cycle, and the constant cycling could shift the expense of storage directly onto the consumer--a regressive tax when we have enough electric cars (i.e. they're just cars regular folks have), since rich people don't have N cars for N*x income where x is the income of a single-car family.
Batteries are the wrong tech for city-grade storage; and distributed batteries are the kind of fancy talk people sell to uneducated laymen (the power still has to travel all the way from the power station to the battery and the endpoint; and the battery array will create a potential difference without complex BMS across the whole grid, cross-charging; and labor to maintain the battery has to travel to the fault site). CAES is much cheaper, and recouperating adiabatic CAES is theoretically 100% efficient but in practice only about 90%, which is better than batteries.
Unfortunately, people keep trying to cheat: rather than build a large underground tank, the last two US plants were cited with large underground caverns. Those caverns were porous sandstone and failed.
One day, I want to see a large inconel chamber built for a heat engine. With operating temperatures above 1,800 degrees, you can sink that right into a 1,600 degree magma chamber to build a geothermal power station. That will be much more interesting.
then your $25/hr factory job gets shipped overseas and you can only get a $8/hr job as a bartender
Depends, really. We create more high- and low-paying jobs over time.
You are attempting to argue on principals of comparative and absolute advantage. These theories only explain that more goods and services might be produced. But they DO NOT EXPLAIN TO WHERE THEY ARE DISTRIBUTED.
So, pants cost 1.83 hours of minimum-wage labor if made in China and bought by Americans. They cost 3.0 hours of minimum-wage labor if made in America and bought by Americans. That's your answer of to where they are distributed.
You also have to realize that trade and technology are roughly the same, in this sense: they both reduce the (local) jobs required to produce a thing, and leave your economy to adjust the labor force by spending the increased consumer buying power elsewhere. When the differential between the price of goods in trade is sufficiently-large (for US vs. China goods, this can be the difference between $25 pants and $14 pants, based on $10/hr factory labor vs $3.20/hr), you get more jobs in your economy in total by trade for the cheap ones. Paying the factory workers more only diminishes the number of factory jobs created while (by) also making the poor even poorer, diminishing the number of jobs in shipping, retailing, and other supporting infrastructure.
The end-run around someone else being in a better position to produce--which may not be just wages, but also that the climate is better for fiber growth, the fiber farms are right there, thus there's less labor in shipping things around; or it may be that they're better developed for this and so can just do it with less effort--and thus providing a much-cheaper product isn't to block them off and pay your factory workers a lot; it's to make high-paying tech jobs (or other jobs) and shift your industry. Then the poor don't get any poorer (they get wealthier) and your job economy stays healthy, while the wage distribution stays similar or even improves.
Do we want America to be a nation of steel mills and farmers, or a nation of doctors and space shuttle engineers? Donkey-pulled carts or flying cars?
If we make everything overseas, it would eliminate US poverty altogether!
We practically do. We make computer chip designs here, as well as software, medicine, and of course infrastructure. We provide services here. We do technology research and engineering here. Most of the stuff we've ever made is now acquired from overseas, except farming.
Speaking of farming...
We used to employ 90% of the workers (at 80-100 hour work weeks) as farmers--down to age 13 (or below). We used to put kids in factories for these long hours, too. Child labor. Remember that?
Through a long series of technological improvements, the amount of labor expended on the farm has fallen to below 2%. About 30% of our industry is involved in farm support, but not 30% of our industry's output: shipping, chemical, power, mining, and so forth provide a great deal of production, and farming uses something of all of them in some major way.
We didn't ship those jobs anywhere; we just started leveraging more technology.
Technology does not mean you move from 40 hours of human labor to 10 hours of labor doing that work and 30 hours doing the work to make the machines. Technology means you move from 40 hours of human labor doing the work at hand to 10 hours of labor in total designing and building the new tools, shipping them, training to use them, and operating them to achieve the same output.
Arbitration of labor efficiency by trade is not sustainable: the amount of labor invested on the other end eventually exceeds labor available. Guess how we expand the labor available on each end of the trade pipe and thus get wealthier.
You can't believe it's possible to just plop down intellectual property in a place and have it go from agrarian to post-industrial in a single generation without massively negative social consequences.
Well, only in India, where that's exactly what happened with rice.
that's not even counting the erosion to our economy that will accompany it.
That argument was already commented on in 1944.
There are people who burrow through our Nation like unseeing moles, and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other Nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.
The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power- and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighboring countries with whom it trades.
Then there was some babbling about common sense, which is a stupid and broken argument; the empirical argument is correct, but "common sense" is arbitrarily wrong and thoughtless.
"giving" anything to anyone for free is contrary to our cultural values as well as our economic interest. We tend to believe that things should be earned and that the people who earned them have a right to benefit from them.
United We Stand, Divided We Fall; or, in layman's terms: do for yourself and let America burn.
Wait, no, that's not what that--or any other core belief of the American ideal--means. It means we work together to be stronger.
The only thing I really care about is the diminishing of suffering and the stabilization and strengthening of the economy. Strong welfare reduces the instability of both business and individuals, and reduces the costs in our economy which strip away the wealth of good working men. A nation without a working social and economic safety net has a less-prosperous economy because it must spend a great deal on containing the harms brought by the progress which makes us wealthier, and thus expends the labor of the hard worker on this rather than on achieving a higher standard-of-living.
The same is true of trade: a neighbor with a stronger industrial base behind a product of which they are better-capable of producing can trade to us for a lower price, thus enriching America as a whole and the people within it. It is difficult to achieve this in isolation, while working hard just to squeeze the meager means into the minimum needed to survive, with little left over to progress.
Of course I am not unfamiliar with people who claim to be ready to pay $10,000 more each year in taxes--a full 5% or more of their own income--for the assurance that none of "their" money will go to "someone who hasn't earned it". It strikes me as highly-unusual that a person would be willing to take a step downward toward poverty, to live a much-less-well-off lifestyle, simply to ensure the next person over is similarly miserable.
For every $1,000 the average family had in 1900, they spent $400 on food. They couldn't afford to go out and eat at restaurants all the time, so they cooked food at home rather than pay additional expense for support of another location and wage of employees cooking their food for them.
For every $1,000 the average family had in 2010, they spent $120 on food. They ate out 4-5 times per week, paying not just for food, but for the wages of restaurant workers, for the rent of the restaurant, for operating electricity and gas, additional taxes, and so forth.
$120 is less than $400. Buying food and paying servants to prepare it, serve it, and clean up after your mess is buying more than just the food and preparing and cleaning yourself.
Likewise, the great majority of Americans worked 12-14 days even in 1910. The Adamson act established the 8-hour day in 1916 for railroad workers; the Fair Labor Standards Act made it the natural and common working day in 1937. People worked 80-hour work weeks for that income in pre-WW1 America, which means that $400 comes from half the per-hour pay that it would have from a 40-hour week--or you could just think of it as $800, although trying to resolve that with income share will make your head hurt (it's quite simple: every person worked two of today's full-time jobs to survive, and expended 200% of the income share comparing a modern full-time job).
That means Americans spent more than 6.6x as much of their labor effort on food back in pre-WW1 US. Where you might work for an hour to afford a thing, a pre-WW1 American worked for over seven.
Imports reduce the amount of American labor spent on obtaining a thing (i.e. you work 3 hours for American-made pants, 1.86 hours for the same exact quality of Chinese pants, and more than 3 hours for American-made pants at a higher quality, assuming the American manufacturing industry has equivalent or better experience and expertise in manufacturing compared to China). That reduces American poverty and frees up American labor to do things like build great new technology industries. If the cost differential is more than trivial, it net-creates American jobs because moving and selling all those goods also requires labor.
Exports utilize American labor to draw in monetary benefits: an excess American labor force can be built, unsustainable in the country (no welfare will hold it up; without the export market, they will starve). That allows more tax revenue and a bigger GDP, as well as potentially greater GDP-per-capita; although without achieving a bigger GNI-per-capita, you're actually not increasing the capacity to supply government services (you've got more people for whom to serve). You can build bigger militaries, though. If your buyers decide the next nation over does it better, they can pull the plug on your economy and cause an economic collapse.
Both of these are encouraged by the UN: since both hold up a nation's capacity to sustain an economy and wage war, a third world war becomes difficult due to its tendency to remove the ability of warring nations to conduct a war.
The dollar? Bud, look at the standard of living. Back in 1917, the average family-sized apartment was under 400sqft. Never mind what counted as a "car" that cost over half your income, compared to the same thing you get for 56% of your income today. The average household spent over 40% of their income on food, and had to prepare that food at home instead of eating out 4-5 days per week because how would we pay all these servants to make our cheeseburgers and large fries?
The wooden shipping pallet eliminated 92% of loading and unloading labor in shipping. The amount of the median (and the per-capita) income that goes into the shipping portion of anything you buy is much lower, and shipping distances are longer. The same goes for all kinds of other stuff we've got today that was unaffordable or unavailable.
Cell phones used to cost $4,000 with $250/month service if you talked 2 hours per week; now we have these insane smart phones and I get unlimited voice and text plus 2GB data for $17/month. I have an internet connection for which I pay $87/month; could have had the same bandwidth in 1998, if I paid $58,000/month.
Clothes cost 1/4 the share of the income than they did in the early 1990s; they cost a hell of a lot more than that back in 1917.
You go ahead and play with your inflation measures. Meanwhile the world today has moved on past donkey-pulled carts, rough-cut wooden planking walls, and 80-hour work weeks just to barely feed your family as the sharp blue-collar worker with the high-paying job.
People keep telling me that we need to test different drugs differently because it's expensive and takes forever, and some drugs are obviously less-dangerous. I usually point out that tilting a single methyl group in a molecule to one side or the other determines if it's a harmless nasal decongestant or high-potency methamphetamine.
For these complex cases, you can counsel the patient into a high-risk experimental drug program. High-risk programs would be highly-irregular and so would put a lot of warning in front of the patient. Your first-pass should tell you if there are really bad risks (this one had a concern about twice as much death happening in the experimental group as in the placebo group).
It's kind of crap, but it's better than putting the drug into the "normal drug with scary warning labels like every other drug for this condition" class by flatly approving it for normal dispensation in normal pharmacies. The real problem is that psychotic patients aren't capable of really considering all of the risks (as if anyone really is), so you're still facing an ethics crisis.
Not really. You can have two parallel schemes and a neutral state if they're easily-differentiated and meaningful to the user (e.g. friends and people versus corporations).
The false-positive and false-negative rate is zero in signature validation. The no-information rate is non-zero.
we can move on to how it is you think it's possible for "us" (presumably US and Canada) to "fix" Mexico.
Well, the sharing of technology helps. So do some international treaties. Right now, they expend about 10x as much labor per unit of agricultural production as the US, for example; correcting for this would cost comparatively-little, whereas Mexico is quite capable of farming some foods we consume in large quantities but which grow poorly here (thus have a high cost). That would also reduce costs for the US, increasing our own wealth.
It works both ways, however: we have lead-acid battery recycling factories in Texas with strong environmental controls; many recyclers ship those batteries 50 miles away to Mexico, where people hack them open with axes. They have a lot of chemical spill, lead poisoning, and polluted land and air around these factories. Requiring environmental controls and better working conditions would push this forward, but raise costs of the outsourced service closer to domestic costs.
Americans have been enjoying lower-cost cars by performing a lot of final assembly of engines and transmissions in Mexico, although we do most of the work here in the US in total. That has helped to build up Mexico's economy as well, while enabling American manufacturers to compete in the global market and sell more cars to Europe.
Agriculture accounts for roughly 51% of Mexican employment, versus under 2% in the US (although 30% of US jobs function as some sort of input to agriculture, such as shipping, chemical, steel manufacture, etc.--so, John Deere and friends). Agriculture in the US is 6 times the size of Mexico's entire economy.
This will increase the need for energy; and of course Mexico has plenty of land to install solar panels. Reducing the cost of their agricultural operations frees up economic resources for construction of a better energy infrastructure.
It's not something you can whip up overnight, but it's doable with little input cost and large returns to the US.
You mean to people who know that the world isn't just "tariffs" or "not tariffs", but a combination of tariffs, technology, global market health, etc.?
Funny enough, back prior WW1, we were at today's North Korean wealth levels.
The US is a large market, has vast domestic resources, has one of the most diverse economies in the world... I can go on. It is easily capable of being an exception given the long list of things that makes the US unusual.
"Vast domestic resources" have to reflect a per-capita context to reflect the health of the market. Even then, a market disturbance quickly damages the resources we have. Nothing you've said here suggests that the US can do anything more than survive--in the same way that North Korea is surviving: as a nation, if a very poor and malnourished one.
I'm taking the entire trade situation the US had prior to WW1 into consideration.
Yes, the trade situation, not the economic situation.
I could stab you through a major artery and then tell you that you're perfectly-healthy and should have no medical issues: I'm taking your entire immune situation into consideration, and you have no viral infections, no bacterial infections, and no parasites. Then: you die.
The US's technology is different than pre-WW1. The size of the population is different. The way our businesses provide services is different. If you just cut computers or even communications, we collapse. Our economy critically relies on high-volume, instantaneous communications to keep rapidly-changing facts flowing through commercial logistics management, and would fail with the Pony Express.
Our economy is built around many businesses which rely on consumer buying power to survive. Making e.g. steel more expensive starts cutting back consumer buying volume, which impacts domestic and international sales by American businesses. The matter of carry capacity shifts, and the maximum population we can sustain actually goes down. Then: the US becomes a lower standard-of-living nation, and possibly must go through severe famine and death before stabilizing at that lower level so as to shed the excess, unsupportable population.
Trade has increased consumer buying power. It's a big part of that "why is the US so wealthy and why would it suffer in a trade war?" equation: we need to buy from outside. If China starts shutting us out, they'll break their economy worse; and Indonesia right next door is currently selling us cheap, high-quality manufacturing as well, so we'll go next door.
We set up the free trade system to support Cold War policy
Oh really?
The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word, security.
And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors.
It means also economic security, social security, moral security, in a family of nations.
In the plain down-to-earth talks that I had with the Generalissimo and Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill, it was abundantly clear that they are all most deeply interested in the resumption of peaceful progress by their own peoples, progress toward a better life.
All our allies have learned by bitter experience, that real development will not be possible if they are to be diverted from their purpose by repeated wars, or even threats of wars .
The best interests of each nation, large and small, demand that all freedom-loving nations shall join together in a just and durable system of peace.
In the present world situation, evidenced by the actions of Germany, and Italy and Japan, unquestioned military control over the disturbers of the peace is as necessary among nations as it is among citizens in any community.
And an equally basic essential to peace, permanent peace, is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations.
Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.
There are, of course, people who burrow, burrow through the
Does repealing FOSTA and the TCJA put me out of the running, or will you still donate to my campaign? I'll have a look into the CLOUD act; I'm not liking what I'm hearing, but no firm position until I actually take the time to digest the damned thing. If it's anything like FISA 702 it needs to go.
Granted I still have to convince Congress this is all stupid, so it might not get done regardless of what I do. Still, I'm unhappy with quite a number of things lately, and have every intent to drive back this ludicrous stream of bad legislation and get something sane in place.
Comcast provides "Boost": your Cable Modem does 2Gbps but you pay for 200Mbit/s, and they de-throttle the pipe so you get a gigabit for that one TCP stream if you're downloading a large file.
T-Mobile allows any streaming music service provider to send them an e-mail and have their streaming media data exempted from all data metering, no charge. The only requirement is that you actually have a streaming media data service. They identify that type of data flowing from you and exempt it. Hundreds of small and obscure services have signed up.
T-Mobile scales down video to 1.5Mbit/s 1080p and exempts it from metering; customers can opt-out (this is critical: this particular enhancement modifies the data, so it must be quick and easy for the customer to turn that off).
AT&T does the same thing with streaming music providers as T-Mobile, but only if the provider pays them. AT&T is violating Net Neutrality principles and must cease and desist this undemocratic behavior right this damned minute.
Most IT services have enormously-fractional labor costs: you work for 2,000 hours to provide something consumed by 200,000,000 customers. For a $250,000 engineer, that's $1.25 of revenue required from each customer one time to pay for that thing.
To put this into real-world perspective: Comcast has 22 million subscribers and an unusually-overpaid CEO with not just $3.6 million of salaries and cash bonuses (shrug), but $7.4 million of non-equity incentives (stocks don't come out of corporate revenue and don't count for anything important, such as service prices or the corporation's capacity to provide wages and benefits). Most CEOs of corporations that large have $2-$4 million of total CEO compensation excluding stocks. That's 50 cents paid per subscriber per year to pay the CEO (and $69 per employee).
For 159,000 employees, Comcast has one employee per 138 customers. For every $1,000 it spends on each one employee, it has to collect $7.25 from each one customer. That allows it to average $144,000 employee cost if every customer buys Blast! Internet for $87/month and Comcast has no other costs. You'd have to multiply that by the proportion of employee costs (so if 40% goes to wages, $57,600 average Comcast salary-plus-benefits-plus-payrolls) for a real figure.
Since that proportion is not 100%, the cost you describe is even smaller.
But yes, with the 22 million employees, the above scenario would be more like $12 from each of your customers to cover those 2,000 engineering hours.
It's a sore spot. My district is like 30% Republican? I represent them, too; and I have already committed to completely ignoring their objections to my policies. That happens when you're a policymaker: people all have their own wants, and you try to strike a balance. Project Stakeholder Management and the whole requirements and scope management thing are all based on maximizing stakeholder outcomes even though some wants directly conflict.
The best I have, based on long experience, is to understand their need. People have concerns, they have pains, they have problems. They might have a policy they want that they're not going to get; if you resolve their problem, that's usually good enough--and it's your responsibility, anyway.
I spoke with a fellow who used to burn half a tonne of coal every day to heat his 20,000 square foot factory. That's not to run the forge; that's just to keep warm in the winter. It cost him $1,000/month.
When Obama's new regulations went in, he couldn't afford to switch. Cleaner gas cost him $5,000/month. He wasn't sitting on tons and tons of profits in that small factory.
I suggested we should have identified this problem early by getting public input and speaking with impacted stakeholders, and then passed new subsidies during the rule update. Solar over parking lot is actually cheap and enormously efficient. By providing a subsidy to install a large amount of on-site solar PV capacity and a commercial-scale geothermal heat pump installation, we could have massively offset his new costs. A GSHP on that scale will have a COP of 5 to 6, meaning a $6 million PV installation will generate, at 3/5 of its peak output, enough power to provide the heat of 2.7 tonnes of coal every hour.
That's actually not a large installation.
The excess power, of course, goes back into the grid; and if he comes up short, he can burn a little natural gas. His furnace is enormous, and his excess power generation will offset coal, oil, and natural gas electricity, so we're not actually burning more natural gas every time he fires up on a cloudy day; we're just burning it elsewhere. On the other hand, on a cloudy day he might just pay for heat pump electricity, and then feed it back to the grid on a sunny day to turn the meter backwards.
So, a coal-burning Republican factory manager has a need. I can fill that need. Not by letting him burn more coal in dirty, aging furnaces, but like I said: I'm not here to give you everything you want; I'm here to make sure you're represented. The above represents this man's need.
I'm not sure if that makes me more or less liberal than today's liberals.
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That is true whether the batteries are in a car on in a Powerwall. Normal day-to-day cycling in the 20%-80% range does not cause much degradation
These batteries would be in a car which also needs to drive around, and are added wear on the (material and labor expensive) battery. Cycling between 80% and 70% or 20% and 30% cause the same wear; and cycling between 20% and 80% (once) is the same as cycling between 70% and 80% six times.
In other words: if the car can go 280 miles on 60% of its capacity, then cycling between 20% and 80% once is exactly the same as 280 miles of driving.
The Tesla gets 208 miles on 60kWh, or 3.4 miles per kWh; its 80%-20% range is 124 miles. I drive that in 4 days; so every 80%-20% cycle (36kWh) would put 4 days's worth of driving on my car. Note that if you're oscillating--drawing a kWh, charging a kWh, drawing again, etc.--you're producing the same charge cycles as your total movement (if you charge-discharge 1,000kWh in minor oscillations, you've eaten 16 2/3 full charge-discharge cycles of that battery's life), so acting as a giant capacitor for the grid does a lot more than what you might see at the end of the day (i.e. you might see you went down by 2kWh or moved inside a 1kWh state of charge range, but that doesn't tell you how much wear you did on your battery).
If it's doing a total charge-discharge of 60% of the battery capacity in total each day, that's adding 1,157 days of driving to the wear on the battery per year--on top of the 280 days of real driving. A battery that lasts me 20 years suddenly lasts only 4.
Umm ... I think you are missing something. You charge when power is cheap, and feedback to the grid at a higher price. So this is income, not tax
Except that the cost of the battery is not income. In the above, with a $5,000 battery (Tesla has suggested $12,000 for replacement including labor at some point; GM does their 18kWh one for $7,000), a $5,000 cost over 20 years becomes a $25,000 cost.
In other words: you get to spend $1,000/year to be a battery for the grid. Good luck making that up with electricity arbitration of 5 cents per kWh.
There isn't, really. Current flow is a matter of voltage and resistance; and energy doesn't magically move. A bunch of electricity isn't "energy"; it's the potential difference that creates flow, kind of like putting a tonne of water up five km high.
In other words: all movement of electricity uses energy. There's a reason 750kW of movement generates 750kW of heat: 100% of all electrical energy consumed is released in the process of consumption, generally as heat. You can keep wires cool by reducing the current, but only by increasing resistance at some point and increasing voltage between the two ends of your power source: 100V 100A is 10,000W, and the wire gets hotter than if you use 1,000V 10A instead. You're still going to release 10kW of power somewhere; and 2,000V 10A is going to release 20kW of power.
I'm not an EE; I grew up doing this stuff as a hobby due to having an EE in the house. It's a little slow coming. Still, that's how electricity works. Point is you can't magically turn up voltage and turn down current: Current is Voltage divided by Resistance.
The energy density of the supposed "breakthrough" supercapcitor isn't stated, so I'm going to assume a team that is working on it for automotive use are not so boneheaded as to purse something for automotive use that is so large as to make it prohibitive for automotive use.
You must be new around here. You might be interested in learning why there are 53 papers about how skipping breakfast makes you fat even though it turns out to not be true.
and then the batteries should have no problem flowing enough amperage to charge the vehicle supercapacitor in a short time
Li+ will detonate. Besides that the battery chemistry has about 1/100 of the power density of a supercapacitor, its internal resistance will result in generating enough heat to boil and then ignite the media. You could build a cooling system to vent the heat; it would ignite anything flammable at the discharge point--including metal (yes, metal can catch fire, with magnesium being the most notable example, although aluminum ignites at or above 2100K). I'm not sure you can get thermal efficiency enough to sink the heat properly, transport it in a liquid or phase-change medium, and vent it; you would likely need wet sink into a ground water source, which would boil.
At 50 Kv, that would be 15 amps. Sounds doable.
Maybe. We're still ignoring one problem: you don't select amperage.
You can set voltage by a voltage differential. You get current by voltage and resistance.
In other words: if you put 50,000 volts onto a copper wire, you will definitely not transfer at 15 amps. You're going to vaporize that wire.
To get more out, you need to run at a higher resistance. To get 15 amps at 50,000 volts, you're looking at 3,333 ohms. That's P=RI^2 as well. This of course makes sense: the whole system has to have that kind of resistance (the wire going down doesn't), and you're going to vent 750,000W in heat to the atmosphere.
Assuming the resistance at the supercapacitor is about 0, you're going to vent all of that in your battery (and it explodes). Problem: the lithium ion battery has 0.320 ohms of resistance, so you need to put some kind of highly-resistive load down at the supercapacitor or else you're going to send like 152,000 amps down that wire. If you put the highly-resistive load down there, it'll get damned hot.
Which part do you want to become a 750kW space heater?
The quoted article says 180 watt-hrs/Kg for the supercapacitor, as opposed to 100 -120 Wh/Kg for lithium
That's the specific energy, not the energy density.
Supercapacitors range around 0.05 MJ per liter of physical space, whereas lithium ion batteries range 0.9-2.63 MJ per liter, depending on chemistry. That means the 18kWh battery that takes up twice the volume of the rear seats in the Chevrolet Volt would be larger than the entire car if it were a supercapacitor, and weigh only about twice as much as the battery as-is.
Yes, it would be about 40 times bigger. Think styrofoam versus iron.
Use 1000 batteries and wire them in series temporarily during the charge, so you connect up to 50,000 volts with smaller amps?
You'll need an enormous transformer for that, which will get hot. It will be bigger than your car. You'll still have to feed it from mains, which means it has to draw power through your service line, meter, and service panel at 240V. You're not getting a 50,000V feed to your house off the pole.
If you short a 50,000V transformer on your side (which shouldn't even exist), you'll probably detonate and set fire to everything on your block. The power will pulse back through the mains line, meet impedance at the transformer on your pole, and go down to all your neighbors's houses fed by the same transformer. A power fault, thus, will cause several million dollars's worth of damage and likely loss of life.
Supercapacitors have 1/100 the energy density of modern batteries. They've got better power density. Charging the battery that fast might melt your cable, though: a 48kWh battery charging in 10 minutes draws 1,200 amps. That's enough to vaporize a 1cm-thick steel rod explosively (there would be an expanding fireball detonating in your face almost instantly).
Current flow occurs when there is a potential difference across a resistance. The battery's internal resistance, its tendency to heat up rapidly, or its lack of total power would be the only modifier. A spark plug is throwing 25,000V across an air gap with enormous resistance, so discharges a few mA; a short circuit would discharge that 25,000V at an incredibly-high amperage, and for a shorter duration (yeah that's a hell of a thing to consider, right?).
The Powerwall costs extra money, but you will already have your car battery, so there is no additional capital cost other than an inverter.
Yep. It makes sense from a capex standpoint; not sure if it makes sense overall. Those batteries degrade with charge-discharge cycle, and the constant cycling could shift the expense of storage directly onto the consumer--a regressive tax when we have enough electric cars (i.e. they're just cars regular folks have), since rich people don't have N cars for N*x income where x is the income of a single-car family.
Batteries are the wrong tech for city-grade storage; and distributed batteries are the kind of fancy talk people sell to uneducated laymen (the power still has to travel all the way from the power station to the battery and the endpoint; and the battery array will create a potential difference without complex BMS across the whole grid, cross-charging; and labor to maintain the battery has to travel to the fault site). CAES is much cheaper, and recouperating adiabatic CAES is theoretically 100% efficient but in practice only about 90%, which is better than batteries.
Unfortunately, people keep trying to cheat: rather than build a large underground tank, the last two US plants were cited with large underground caverns. Those caverns were porous sandstone and failed.
One day, I want to see a large inconel chamber built for a heat engine. With operating temperatures above 1,800 degrees, you can sink that right into a 1,600 degree magma chamber to build a geothermal power station. That will be much more interesting.
then your $25/hr factory job gets shipped overseas and you can only get a $8/hr job as a bartender
Depends, really. We create more high- and low-paying jobs over time.
You are attempting to argue on principals of comparative and absolute advantage. These theories only explain that more goods and services might be produced. But they DO NOT EXPLAIN TO WHERE THEY ARE DISTRIBUTED.
So, pants cost 1.83 hours of minimum-wage labor if made in China and bought by Americans. They cost 3.0 hours of minimum-wage labor if made in America and bought by Americans. That's your answer of to where they are distributed.
You also have to realize that trade and technology are roughly the same, in this sense: they both reduce the (local) jobs required to produce a thing, and leave your economy to adjust the labor force by spending the increased consumer buying power elsewhere. When the differential between the price of goods in trade is sufficiently-large (for US vs. China goods, this can be the difference between $25 pants and $14 pants, based on $10/hr factory labor vs $3.20/hr), you get more jobs in your economy in total by trade for the cheap ones. Paying the factory workers more only diminishes the number of factory jobs created while (by) also making the poor even poorer, diminishing the number of jobs in shipping, retailing, and other supporting infrastructure.
The end-run around someone else being in a better position to produce--which may not be just wages, but also that the climate is better for fiber growth, the fiber farms are right there, thus there's less labor in shipping things around; or it may be that they're better developed for this and so can just do it with less effort--and thus providing a much-cheaper product isn't to block them off and pay your factory workers a lot; it's to make high-paying tech jobs (or other jobs) and shift your industry. Then the poor don't get any poorer (they get wealthier) and your job economy stays healthy, while the wage distribution stays similar or even improves.
Do we want America to be a nation of steel mills and farmers, or a nation of doctors and space shuttle engineers? Donkey-pulled carts or flying cars?
If we make everything overseas, it would eliminate US poverty altogether!
We practically do. We make computer chip designs here, as well as software, medicine, and of course infrastructure. We provide services here. We do technology research and engineering here. Most of the stuff we've ever made is now acquired from overseas, except farming.
Speaking of farming...
We used to employ 90% of the workers (at 80-100 hour work weeks) as farmers--down to age 13 (or below). We used to put kids in factories for these long hours, too. Child labor. Remember that?
Through a long series of technological improvements, the amount of labor expended on the farm has fallen to below 2%. About 30% of our industry is involved in farm support, but not 30% of our industry's output: shipping, chemical, power, mining, and so forth provide a great deal of production, and farming uses something of all of them in some major way.
We didn't ship those jobs anywhere; we just started leveraging more technology.
Technology does not mean you move from 40 hours of human labor to 10 hours of labor doing that work and 30 hours doing the work to make the machines. Technology means you move from 40 hours of human labor doing the work at hand to 10 hours of labor in total designing and building the new tools, shipping them, training to use them, and operating them to achieve the same output.
Arbitration of labor efficiency by trade is not sustainable: the amount of labor invested on the other end eventually exceeds labor available. Guess how we expand the labor available on each end of the trade pipe and thus get wealthier.
You can't believe it's possible to just plop down intellectual property in a place and have it go from agrarian to post-industrial in a single generation without massively negative social consequences.
Well, only in India, where that's exactly what happened with rice.
that's not even counting the erosion to our economy that will accompany it.
That argument was already commented on in 1944.
There are people who burrow through our Nation like unseeing moles, and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other Nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.
The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power- and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighboring countries with whom it trades.
Then there was some babbling about common sense, which is a stupid and broken argument; the empirical argument is correct, but "common sense" is arbitrarily wrong and thoughtless.
"giving" anything to anyone for free is contrary to our cultural values as well as our economic interest. We tend to believe that things should be earned and that the people who earned them have a right to benefit from them.
United We Stand, Divided We Fall; or, in layman's terms: do for yourself and let America burn.
Wait, no, that's not what that--or any other core belief of the American ideal--means. It means we work together to be stronger.
The only thing I really care about is the diminishing of suffering and the stabilization and strengthening of the economy. Strong welfare reduces the instability of both business and individuals, and reduces the costs in our economy which strip away the wealth of good working men. A nation without a working social and economic safety net has a less-prosperous economy because it must spend a great deal on containing the harms brought by the progress which makes us wealthier, and thus expends the labor of the hard worker on this rather than on achieving a higher standard-of-living.
The same is true of trade: a neighbor with a stronger industrial base behind a product of which they are better-capable of producing can trade to us for a lower price, thus enriching America as a whole and the people within it. It is difficult to achieve this in isolation, while working hard just to squeeze the meager means into the minimum needed to survive, with little left over to progress.
Of course I am not unfamiliar with people who claim to be ready to pay $10,000 more each year in taxes--a full 5% or more of their own income--for the assurance that none of "their" money will go to "someone who hasn't earned it". It strikes me as highly-unusual that a person would be willing to take a step downward toward poverty, to live a much-less-well-off lifestyle, simply to ensure the next person over is similarly miserable.
Since when do insurance companies pay for new drugs?
Let's try this slowly.
For every $1,000 the average family had in 1900, they spent $400 on food. They couldn't afford to go out and eat at restaurants all the time, so they cooked food at home rather than pay additional expense for support of another location and wage of employees cooking their food for them.
For every $1,000 the average family had in 2010, they spent $120 on food. They ate out 4-5 times per week, paying not just for food, but for the wages of restaurant workers, for the rent of the restaurant, for operating electricity and gas, additional taxes, and so forth.
$120 is less than $400. Buying food and paying servants to prepare it, serve it, and clean up after your mess is buying more than just the food and preparing and cleaning yourself.
Likewise, the great majority of Americans worked 12-14 days even in 1910. The Adamson act established the 8-hour day in 1916 for railroad workers; the Fair Labor Standards Act made it the natural and common working day in 1937. People worked 80-hour work weeks for that income in pre-WW1 America, which means that $400 comes from half the per-hour pay that it would have from a 40-hour week--or you could just think of it as $800, although trying to resolve that with income share will make your head hurt (it's quite simple: every person worked two of today's full-time jobs to survive, and expended 200% of the income share comparing a modern full-time job).
That means Americans spent more than 6.6x as much of their labor effort on food back in pre-WW1 US. Where you might work for an hour to afford a thing, a pre-WW1 American worked for over seven.
Imports reduce the amount of American labor spent on obtaining a thing (i.e. you work 3 hours for American-made pants, 1.86 hours for the same exact quality of Chinese pants, and more than 3 hours for American-made pants at a higher quality, assuming the American manufacturing industry has equivalent or better experience and expertise in manufacturing compared to China). That reduces American poverty and frees up American labor to do things like build great new technology industries. If the cost differential is more than trivial, it net-creates American jobs because moving and selling all those goods also requires labor.
Exports utilize American labor to draw in monetary benefits: an excess American labor force can be built, unsustainable in the country (no welfare will hold it up; without the export market, they will starve). That allows more tax revenue and a bigger GDP, as well as potentially greater GDP-per-capita; although without achieving a bigger GNI-per-capita, you're actually not increasing the capacity to supply government services (you've got more people for whom to serve). You can build bigger militaries, though. If your buyers decide the next nation over does it better, they can pull the plug on your economy and cause an economic collapse.
Both of these are encouraged by the UN: since both hold up a nation's capacity to sustain an economy and wage war, a third world war becomes difficult due to its tendency to remove the ability of warring nations to conduct a war.
What exactly is an unfair trading practice?
The dollar? Bud, look at the standard of living. Back in 1917, the average family-sized apartment was under 400sqft. Never mind what counted as a "car" that cost over half your income, compared to the same thing you get for 56% of your income today. The average household spent over 40% of their income on food, and had to prepare that food at home instead of eating out 4-5 days per week because how would we pay all these servants to make our cheeseburgers and large fries?
The wooden shipping pallet eliminated 92% of loading and unloading labor in shipping. The amount of the median (and the per-capita) income that goes into the shipping portion of anything you buy is much lower, and shipping distances are longer. The same goes for all kinds of other stuff we've got today that was unaffordable or unavailable.
Cell phones used to cost $4,000 with $250/month service if you talked 2 hours per week; now we have these insane smart phones and I get unlimited voice and text plus 2GB data for $17/month. I have an internet connection for which I pay $87/month; could have had the same bandwidth in 1998, if I paid $58,000/month.
Clothes cost 1/4 the share of the income than they did in the early 1990s; they cost a hell of a lot more than that back in 1917.
You go ahead and play with your inflation measures. Meanwhile the world today has moved on past donkey-pulled carts, rough-cut wooden planking walls, and 80-hour work weeks just to barely feed your family as the sharp blue-collar worker with the high-paying job.
People keep telling me that we need to test different drugs differently because it's expensive and takes forever, and some drugs are obviously less-dangerous. I usually point out that tilting a single methyl group in a molecule to one side or the other determines if it's a harmless nasal decongestant or high-potency methamphetamine.
For these complex cases, you can counsel the patient into a high-risk experimental drug program. High-risk programs would be highly-irregular and so would put a lot of warning in front of the patient. Your first-pass should tell you if there are really bad risks (this one had a concern about twice as much death happening in the experimental group as in the placebo group).
It's kind of crap, but it's better than putting the drug into the "normal drug with scary warning labels like every other drug for this condition" class by flatly approving it for normal dispensation in normal pharmacies. The real problem is that psychotic patients aren't capable of really considering all of the risks (as if anyone really is), so you're still facing an ethics crisis.
Not really. You can have two parallel schemes and a neutral state if they're easily-differentiated and meaningful to the user (e.g. friends and people versus corporations).
The false-positive and false-negative rate is zero in signature validation. The no-information rate is non-zero.
we can move on to how it is you think it's possible for "us" (presumably US and Canada) to "fix" Mexico.
Well, the sharing of technology helps. So do some international treaties. Right now, they expend about 10x as much labor per unit of agricultural production as the US, for example; correcting for this would cost comparatively-little, whereas Mexico is quite capable of farming some foods we consume in large quantities but which grow poorly here (thus have a high cost). That would also reduce costs for the US, increasing our own wealth.
It works both ways, however: we have lead-acid battery recycling factories in Texas with strong environmental controls; many recyclers ship those batteries 50 miles away to Mexico, where people hack them open with axes. They have a lot of chemical spill, lead poisoning, and polluted land and air around these factories. Requiring environmental controls and better working conditions would push this forward, but raise costs of the outsourced service closer to domestic costs.
Americans have been enjoying lower-cost cars by performing a lot of final assembly of engines and transmissions in Mexico, although we do most of the work here in the US in total. That has helped to build up Mexico's economy as well, while enabling American manufacturers to compete in the global market and sell more cars to Europe.
Agriculture accounts for roughly 51% of Mexican employment, versus under 2% in the US (although 30% of US jobs function as some sort of input to agriculture, such as shipping, chemical, steel manufacture, etc.--so, John Deere and friends). Agriculture in the US is 6 times the size of Mexico's entire economy.
This will increase the need for energy; and of course Mexico has plenty of land to install solar panels. Reducing the cost of their agricultural operations frees up economic resources for construction of a better energy infrastructure.
It's not something you can whip up overnight, but it's doable with little input cost and large returns to the US.
You mean to people who know that the world isn't just "tariffs" or "not tariffs", but a combination of tariffs, technology, global market health, etc.?
Funny enough, back prior WW1, we were at today's North Korean wealth levels.
The US is a large market, has vast domestic resources, has one of the most diverse economies in the world... I can go on. It is easily capable of being an exception given the long list of things that makes the US unusual.
"Vast domestic resources" have to reflect a per-capita context to reflect the health of the market. Even then, a market disturbance quickly damages the resources we have. Nothing you've said here suggests that the US can do anything more than survive--in the same way that North Korea is surviving: as a nation, if a very poor and malnourished one.
I'm taking the entire trade situation the US had prior to WW1 into consideration.
Yes, the trade situation, not the economic situation.
I could stab you through a major artery and then tell you that you're perfectly-healthy and should have no medical issues: I'm taking your entire immune situation into consideration, and you have no viral infections, no bacterial infections, and no parasites. Then: you die.
The US's technology is different than pre-WW1. The size of the population is different. The way our businesses provide services is different. If you just cut computers or even communications, we collapse. Our economy critically relies on high-volume, instantaneous communications to keep rapidly-changing facts flowing through commercial logistics management, and would fail with the Pony Express.
Our economy is built around many businesses which rely on consumer buying power to survive. Making e.g. steel more expensive starts cutting back consumer buying volume, which impacts domestic and international sales by American businesses. The matter of carry capacity shifts, and the maximum population we can sustain actually goes down. Then: the US becomes a lower standard-of-living nation, and possibly must go through severe famine and death before stabilizing at that lower level so as to shed the excess, unsupportable population.
Trade has increased consumer buying power. It's a big part of that "why is the US so wealthy and why would it suffer in a trade war?" equation: we need to buy from outside. If China starts shutting us out, they'll break their economy worse; and Indonesia right next door is currently selling us cheap, high-quality manufacturing as well, so we'll go next door.
We set up the free trade system to support Cold War policy
Oh really?
The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word, security.
And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors.
It means also economic security, social security, moral security, in a family of nations.
In the plain down-to-earth talks that I had with the Generalissimo and Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill, it was abundantly clear that they are all most deeply interested in the resumption of peaceful progress by their own peoples, progress toward a better life.
All our allies have learned by bitter experience, that real development will not be possible if they are to be diverted from their purpose by repeated wars, or even threats of wars .
The best interests of each nation, large and small, demand that all freedom-loving nations shall join together in a just and durable system of peace.
In the present world situation, evidenced by the actions of Germany, and Italy and Japan, unquestioned military control over the disturbers of the peace is as necessary among nations as it is among citizens in any community.
And an equally basic essential to peace, permanent peace, is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations.
Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.
There are, of course, people who burrow, burrow through the
What do you think I'm doing?
Does repealing FOSTA and the TCJA put me out of the running, or will you still donate to my campaign? I'll have a look into the CLOUD act; I'm not liking what I'm hearing, but no firm position until I actually take the time to digest the damned thing. If it's anything like FISA 702 it needs to go.
Granted I still have to convince Congress this is all stupid, so it might not get done regardless of what I do. Still, I'm unhappy with quite a number of things lately, and have every intent to drive back this ludicrous stream of bad legislation and get something sane in place.
I don't feel like making a statement from ignorance, so I asked a question when the answer is easy to guess.
The second amendment doesn't prevent regulations. That's a NGRA/NRA myth.
Comcast provides "Boost": your Cable Modem does 2Gbps but you pay for 200Mbit/s, and they de-throttle the pipe so you get a gigabit for that one TCP stream if you're downloading a large file.
T-Mobile allows any streaming music service provider to send them an e-mail and have their streaming media data exempted from all data metering, no charge. The only requirement is that you actually have a streaming media data service. They identify that type of data flowing from you and exempt it. Hundreds of small and obscure services have signed up.
T-Mobile scales down video to 1.5Mbit/s 1080p and exempts it from metering; customers can opt-out (this is critical: this particular enhancement modifies the data, so it must be quick and easy for the customer to turn that off).
AT&T does the same thing with streaming music providers as T-Mobile, but only if the provider pays them. AT&T is violating Net Neutrality principles and must cease and desist this undemocratic behavior right this damned minute.
Most IT services have enormously-fractional labor costs: you work for 2,000 hours to provide something consumed by 200,000,000 customers. For a $250,000 engineer, that's $1.25 of revenue required from each customer one time to pay for that thing.
To put this into real-world perspective: Comcast has 22 million subscribers and an unusually-overpaid CEO with not just $3.6 million of salaries and cash bonuses (shrug), but $7.4 million of non-equity incentives (stocks don't come out of corporate revenue and don't count for anything important, such as service prices or the corporation's capacity to provide wages and benefits). Most CEOs of corporations that large have $2-$4 million of total CEO compensation excluding stocks. That's 50 cents paid per subscriber per year to pay the CEO (and $69 per employee).
For 159,000 employees, Comcast has one employee per 138 customers. For every $1,000 it spends on each one employee, it has to collect $7.25 from each one customer. That allows it to average $144,000 employee cost if every customer buys Blast! Internet for $87/month and Comcast has no other costs. You'd have to multiply that by the proportion of employee costs (so if 40% goes to wages, $57,600 average Comcast salary-plus-benefits-plus-payrolls) for a real figure.
Since that proportion is not 100%, the cost you describe is even smaller.
But yes, with the 22 million employees, the above scenario would be more like $12 from each of your customers to cover those 2,000 engineering hours.
It's a sore spot. My district is like 30% Republican? I represent them, too; and I have already committed to completely ignoring their objections to my policies. That happens when you're a policymaker: people all have their own wants, and you try to strike a balance. Project Stakeholder Management and the whole requirements and scope management thing are all based on maximizing stakeholder outcomes even though some wants directly conflict.
The best I have, based on long experience, is to understand their need. People have concerns, they have pains, they have problems. They might have a policy they want that they're not going to get; if you resolve their problem, that's usually good enough--and it's your responsibility, anyway.
I spoke with a fellow who used to burn half a tonne of coal every day to heat his 20,000 square foot factory. That's not to run the forge; that's just to keep warm in the winter. It cost him $1,000/month.
When Obama's new regulations went in, he couldn't afford to switch. Cleaner gas cost him $5,000/month. He wasn't sitting on tons and tons of profits in that small factory.
I suggested we should have identified this problem early by getting public input and speaking with impacted stakeholders, and then passed new subsidies during the rule update. Solar over parking lot is actually cheap and enormously efficient. By providing a subsidy to install a large amount of on-site solar PV capacity and a commercial-scale geothermal heat pump installation, we could have massively offset his new costs. A GSHP on that scale will have a COP of 5 to 6, meaning a $6 million PV installation will generate, at 3/5 of its peak output, enough power to provide the heat of 2.7 tonnes of coal every hour.
That's actually not a large installation.
The excess power, of course, goes back into the grid; and if he comes up short, he can burn a little natural gas. His furnace is enormous, and his excess power generation will offset coal, oil, and natural gas electricity, so we're not actually burning more natural gas every time he fires up on a cloudy day; we're just burning it elsewhere. On the other hand, on a cloudy day he might just pay for heat pump electricity, and then feed it back to the grid on a sunny day to turn the meter backwards.
So, a coal-burning Republican factory manager has a need. I can fill that need. Not by letting him burn more coal in dirty, aging furnaces, but like I said: I'm not here to give you everything you want; I'm here to make sure you're represented. The above represents this man's need.
I'm not sure if that makes me more or less liberal than today's liberals.