What other options do they have? Let's walk through them.
- Include a USB-C charger and cable. People then complain that the phone won't plug into their USB-A only computers without an extra adapter. People would also complain about the phone being $20 more for having the more expensive charger. - Don't put any charger in the box. People then complain about the phone being useless without an extra cost charger. People would not care, or even stop to consider it, that the price is $10 lower for not including a charger. - Include both a USB-C charger and a USB-A charger. People would complain about the insanity of two chargers for one phone, and the extra cost this would impose on buyers. Perhaps then not two chargers but two cables, USB-C and USB-A, and the fast charger but then people would still find a reason to complain.
Also, your analogy fails in one major way, phone chargers are not consumables like razor blades. If you consider phone chargers as a consumable then I have to wonder about your mental state. Either you believe that phone chargers only last a week and you buy a new one every time you shop for groceries, or you are so forgetful about where you leave your chargers that you are forced to buy one regularly.
This is not all that different than when Apple stopped including keyboards and mice with their new computers. People complained about having to buy a keyboard and mouse with the computer every time they'd upgrade, so Apple stopped including keyboards (at least with the lower cost computers) and people complained. Apple flipped this around by advertising on how this gave people choices and an option to save money. I suspect Apple would rather not include a charger with their phones and offer people the choice to buy what they want but I also suspect that this could get them in trouble with regulators and cell phone service providers. So, Apple compromises, they include a cheap charger with the phone to satisfy any such rule or regulation on leaving them out. If you want the fast charging then get the nicer charger as an add-on, then put the cheap one in a drawer as a back-up in case the other fails or gets lost.
They've changed the iPhone connection port once in the entire history of the product and loads of morons still bitch about Apple unnecessarily changing ports and how they only do it to make money on cables.
If you include the entire line of "iDevices" and go all the way back to the original iPod the ports changed twice, from FireWire to 30-pin, and then 30-pin to Lightning. That's over 15+ years. Changing the charger port on such devices every 5 or 10 years doesn't seem excessive to me, especially when the capabilities of the devices have changed considerably in that time and inexpensive adapters are available (for some definition of "inexpensive").
If they changed away from Lightning now, they'd get it all over again. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
No doubt. The Lightning connector predates the USB-C connector, and the USB-C port isn't really catching on outside of smart phones. As evidence I give the many posts here on Slashdot on Apple putting USB-C ports on their laptops. Which is it? Is USB-C good or is it bad?
I'd prefer that Apple included a USB-C cable and charger with their iDevices, it would do away with this odd situation of having their laptops charge from USB-C out of the box and their pocket sized devices charge from USB-A out of the box.
A similar debate came up with Apple before about including a keyboard and mouse with their computers. It used to be that all of their computers came with a new keyboard and mouse, and ones that weren't all that bad either. I liked them anyway. People complained about having to buy a new keyboard and mouse every time they upgraded their desktop. So, in their lower cost lines, they stopped including a keyboard and mouse. Then people complained about not getting a keyboard and mouse with the computer. Comparisons to buying a car without tires came up.
Would people prefer Apple didn't include a charger and cable with their iPhones? That way people aren't buying a charger they may not need, especially if they are upgrading from a previous iPhone or already own an iPad. There's an idea, don't put a charger in the box. But then these are $500+ phones and the charger and cable cost $40 retail, it costs Apple less than that to make them of course. By not including the "inferior" charger it'd save what? $10 maybe on the final retail price.
Shut up about the charger already. Buy the overpriced phone. Then buy the charger you want. When you open the boxes and unpack everything then toss the "inferior" charger in a drawer and forget about it until you lose or break your preferred charger.
No, what I'm asking for is a company that claims to make a "durable" product back up that claim.
Both Craftsman and Snap-On offer free replacements on broken hand tools but no professional is going to buy Craftsman tools. Craftsman just overcharges so much for their cheap shit that they can afford to hand out free replacements until the owner figures out that a Snap-On tool is a much better replacement. Snap-On isn't cheap because they make stuff that is really hard to break. If for some reason you do break it (such as due to a random manufacturing flaw) then they'll give you a free replacement to keep you as a customer. The feedback in learning how their tools break so they can do better is worth "buying" the broken tool from you for the price of a replacement.
Lifetime warranties are worth nothing. It's the reputation that matters.
On the farm as a kid I wondered why there were all these pigeon feathers in front of the large ventilation fan in the wall of the barn. It was a very large fan, something like 3 feet across, and had very little for a protective mesh. My questions were answered one day when I opened up the barn door and startled a pigeon that got in the barn somehow. It took off for the running fan and... feathers everywhere. I realized why I never saw a dead pigeon when I saw one of the barn cats wander over to look for meat.
Also while living on the farm we'd hear the birds "thud" against the walls of the sheds, barn, and house. Turns out that birds run into things, even bright red sheet metal siding. Once in a great while we'll see the dead birds lying on the ground from hitting the walls before the cats found them. The cats did well in cleaning up that mess though, they'd find them eventually.
You've got that right. My iPhone is more than just a phone. In fact I rarely even use it as such. I even call it "my pocket computer" when referencing it in conversation and I can't recall anyone being confused by this.
I say I rarely use it as a phone but it's not like I don't communicate with people using it. I just rarely make phone calls. I regularly use e-mail and instant messaging with it.
I think back to when I saw "Serial Experiments Lain", which came out 20 years ago, where the characters in the series had these communication devices called a "NAVI". I guess that's an acronym (Network Attached Virtual Interface?) or shorthand for something (an internet navigator?). What they predicted then as a "high tech" communication device looks rather silly by comparison.
These pocket computers are rather life changing. People don't get lost like they used to, they can just use their "phone" to navigate. With built-in cameras these things have documented all kinds of events that would have been plausibly denied before. (There's good and bad with that, I know.)
These things are pretty amazing. It's difficult to imagine life without them any more.
What's a 1-word way to describe someone you're basically, but not legally married to?
The word you are looking for is "spouse". Just because the government doesn't have a piece of paper with your names and signatures doesn't mean you aren't married. Marriages predate governments so "legally" has nothing to do with it. I'm also pretty sure that in most every part of the world the act of "living as married people" makes you legally married. What makes you think "spouse" does not apply here?
If "wife" bothers you then may I suggest "common law wife" to make the distinction? Not one word but it's not terribly complicated to say and most anyone knows what it means.
If the goal is to "greenwash" your line of vehicles then you can do that with bio-fuels. The choice between electric and bio-fuel vehicles is not mutually exclusive so they could do both. As they intend to produce some models as hybrids then they could have bio-fuel compatible ICEs in those hybrids.
They want to make up for past sins of being polluters so they came up with the idea of electric vehicles. They could do that also with bio-fuels. I'm just curious why they aren't doing that. Jumping into electric vehicles with both feet like this seems risky to me.
The federal government already has a ban on cannabis, how does transporting it by a drone change that? Or any means of transport by air, water, or rail? (Rail? Why ban rail transport?)
Obama let this ride for years and now Trump and his DOJ has to do something about this eventually. It will be a year into this administration real soon now. I'll give a pass for a few months because he has to appoint people and deal with a lot of other damage left on his desk. He's given a lot of non-answer answers when asked about it before. At some point the law needs to change or be enforced. The status quo is a mockery of the rule of law.
Your post negates nothing I've said. As soon as someone figures out how to turn a cheap and green energy source, like hydro, into a valuable liquid fuel then electric vehicles aren't any more green than any thing else. They also start to look real expensive and inconvenient.
Turning wind and solar energy into a liquid fuel also solves the problem of storage. You might have hydro but not everyone else does. What people do have, almost by definition, is land to build a fuel synthesis plant. I say by definition since the land that a fuel synthesis plant would take is "free" since it can be put under solar panels or windmills. Even New Zealand has a use for synthetic liquid fuels.
I know that. You know that. Lots of people know that. You know who doesn't know that? Or, more likely, know it but would rather not admit it publicly? Legislators. They'll let this slide so long as voters will cast a vote for them over it.
Same for electric vehicles, they are a boondoggle too. Volkswagen will go for it so long as it makes people feel better and covers up past sins.
which leaves us with walking, horses or electric vehicles.
I believe electric vehicles will fall out of favor soon. We'll see some sort of synthetic fuel replace it. It might be hydrocarbons, or ammonia, or something else. It's not like we need a new energy source, electricity is already an energy sink when produced, not a net gain like petroleum. Electric vehicles make sense now because it uses cheap coal, nuclear, and natural gas, fuels that don't pour into a tank easily like gasoline. Find a way to convert the cheap energy into a liquid fuel and electric cars look real inconvenient, and no more "green" than anything else.
So what if it takes the area of India to get as much sun. (Did I get that right? Within 10% at least?) That solar energy is worthless if they can't ship it out somehow. Less than worthless if the rest of the world can get it from a closer and friendlier nation, connected by land. Mexico comes to mind for the Americas. (Yes, Mexico is like half the area of the Arabian peninsula but it's also not halfway around the world.)
It's not like there is a lack of land area between 30 degrees north and south on Earth. Middle East nations have a near monopoly on oil due to having a fairly unique access to this natural resource. If solar power replaces oil then they lose that monopoly. Europe (which has a voracious appetite for energy) might be connected by land to the Middle East which would make shipment of solar energy pretty trivial, no matter what form they ship it in, but Africa and Asia are just as close. (Yes, I can read a map. Africa is separated by water from Europe, so drop some wires and pipes in the water for that relatively short distance. It's been done before.)
If I were a big auto CEO, I'd go all in for synthetic fuel.
How hard can it be to make an engine compatible with burning ethanol or bio-diesel? I guess it must be more than trivial or else every new car would have it by now. Still, that's got to be easier to do than switch all of your manufacturing to a whole new kind of power plant.
The way cars are built now are to accommodate an internal combustion engine. Change that and the shape of the vehicle should shift with it. If you bolt an electric drive train to a vehicle built for an ICE then you're making compromises. The compromise will be in costs, efficiency, safety, etc. Having a whole fleet of vehicles available in ICE, electric, and hybrid versions means more compromises. This is a very bad idea.
A rocket is an aircraft, and any aircraft transportation is banned. I think I'll get in the business of delivering marijuana by caterpillar. For the sake of security I'll make deliveries in an armored caterpillar. One like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What? You thought I was going to make deliveries on the back of an insect? Well... know that I think about it, that would totally freak out the recipients if I did. How fast does a laden caterpillar crawl?
I remember seeing some CFL bulbs on the shelf that advertise "reduced mercury content". Hmm, so you're saying they still contain mercury? Isn't mercury bad for you? Even in "reduced" amounts? No thanks.
I'll use the CFL bulbs I have until they burn out because that's a sunk cost but I won't buy more. This is especially true now that I've seen the real life lifespan of these bulbs, I have incandescent bulbs that lasted many times longer.
Also, wouldn't be just as "green" if we used LED (or even incandescent) lights powered from wind or solar?
Dear Senator, Fix the problem at the source, don't mandate that I buy a lower quality bulb. Let people build some nuclear power plants already. Don't mandate nuclear power. Don't subsidize it. Just let people do it.
I also believe that in 100 years the Arabian peninsula will be covered in sheets of silicon, but for a different reason. They won't be photovoltaic but they'll still be forged with intense heat. The rest of the world will be better off though, living a life free from carbon dug from the ground. Also free from the energy superpowers in Saudi Arabia.
How would the people on the Arabian peninsula export this energy? Are they going to turn the sun into liquid hydrogen and ship that out or something? Arizona is just as big as the Arabian peninsula, closer to the people in the USA, Canada, and Mexico, and free from the endless wars in the region. I can make similar arguments for India, China, Russia, Brazil, or most any nation large and small.
Whatever energy source comes to replace oil is not likely to come from the Middle East. Whatever they have, except oil, the rest of the world also has plenty of access to. No one is going to have to go to the Middle East to get more of whatever that might be.
What if they get it wrong? I mean if electric vehicles are the future then just let it happen, no need to force it along with bans and subsidies.
We saw this with the CFL bulb subsidies. The government would give large rebates for people to buy CFL lighting but the bulbs are crap. They take 20 minutes to "warm up", interfere with IR remotes (that nearly drove me batty until I figured out that the lamp was what kept the TV remote from working), can't handle the heat of being in a closed fixture (who lights their house entirely with floor lamps and chandeliers?), and contain toxic mercury (broken bulbs happen, and in places like where our children sleep and where we prepare their food). Not long after LED lights came out and they are awesome. They light up immediately, don't interfere with remote controls, and don't burn themselves out if in a common light fixture. They aren't perfect, for example they still have a "funny" color to them, but they are getting better. Does anyone even buy CFLs anymore now that LEDs are just as cheap?
If not electric vehicles then what? I don't know, but as I recall few people saw LEDs coming to market as quickly as they did. What if the claims of algae based diesel fuel becomes a reality? Are we still going to ban internal combustion engines? Maybe ethanol gets real cheap because we found a new way to make it. Maybe we get synthesized hydrocarbons from wind and wave powered factories.
As inefficient as an internal combustion engine might be that inefficiency becomes largely irrelevant if the means to produce, store, and transport the fuels becomes "green", cheap, and plentiful. If algal fuels become viable then we aren't using electricity to produce it, it comes from the sun. If we can convert sun power to motive power by algae more efficiently than through photovoltaic panels and batteries then banning internal combustion engines is a problem.
A much smaller reactor for the training won't do, especially when you know how Indians work
It doesn't have to be "much smaller" only the same size. A nuclear submarine will have a reactor with an output in the ballpark of 100 MW, perhaps as high as 200 MW and perhaps as low as 80 MW. Nobody would model this with a 1000 MW or even a 500 MW reactor. The reactors in any current or planned nuclear submarine, or surface ship, are light water reactors fueled with highly enriched (25% to 90%) uranium-235. The planned civilian reactors that India is building are dominated by heavy water reactors that will be fueled with natural uranium and/or a plutonium/thorium mix. The light water reactors they plan are probably the largest, and fueled with lightly enriched (less than 5% or 6%) uranium-235.
Tell me something. When schools train people to build and maintain single cylinder 2-cycle gasoline engines for chainsaws and lawnmowers do they teach them with 4-cycle inline-6 diesel engines in dump trucks and bulldozers? The opposite might be true, at least at first, because a small engine that someone can pick up on their own is a good place to start before going to something much heavier, more expensive, and more complex. If the goal is to train people to build and maintain military style reactors then would it not make more sense to, you know, actually build military style reactors?
You could argue that the large nuclear reactors might be used to make plutonium for bombs, and there might actually be some truth to that. The problem with that though is that to make weapon grade plutonium (as opposed to the reactor grade plutonium produced in their planned heavy water reactors) the reactors would be worthless for power production. The process to turn uranium into weapon grade plutonium is to expose the uranium to short bursts of neutrons to maximize Pu-239 and minimize Pu-240. This means turning the reactor on and off constantly. For civil use the production of Pu-239 is desirable since it makes for good utilization of the U-238 in the fuel, but the production of Pu-240 is of little concern as it has little effect on power output. So, while heavy water reactors are good at making plutonium for other reactors to use as fuel they are terrible at making plutonium for weapons.
Nuclear is used as a backup because they don't want to put all eggs into one basket, not as a major contributor.
Define "major contributor". Going from about 5% of current electrical production to something like 25% in 10 years does seem like a shift from a minor contribution to a major contribution. That's just the ten year plan, they don't seem to want to slow down after that.
Would you support replacing the Confederate monuments with ones that celebrate the winning side and the end of slavery? If not, why not?
We should not tear down the Confederate monuments, for the same reason we don't burn books. We can learn from our mistakes, destroying evidence of our history can mean being doomed to repeat it.
A Confederate monument doesn't have to be a "celebration" of the how things used to be. Germany keeps their reminders of past wars, I've seen them. Perhaps instead of tearing them down we put a sign in front of them that reads, "Never again." https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Slashdot Mirror
What other options do they have? Let's walk through them.
- Include a USB-C charger and cable. People then complain that the phone won't plug into their USB-A only computers without an extra adapter. People would also complain about the phone being $20 more for having the more expensive charger.
- Don't put any charger in the box. People then complain about the phone being useless without an extra cost charger. People would not care, or even stop to consider it, that the price is $10 lower for not including a charger.
- Include both a USB-C charger and a USB-A charger. People would complain about the insanity of two chargers for one phone, and the extra cost this would impose on buyers. Perhaps then not two chargers but two cables, USB-C and USB-A, and the fast charger but then people would still find a reason to complain.
Also, your analogy fails in one major way, phone chargers are not consumables like razor blades. If you consider phone chargers as a consumable then I have to wonder about your mental state. Either you believe that phone chargers only last a week and you buy a new one every time you shop for groceries, or you are so forgetful about where you leave your chargers that you are forced to buy one regularly.
This is not all that different than when Apple stopped including keyboards and mice with their new computers. People complained about having to buy a keyboard and mouse with the computer every time they'd upgrade, so Apple stopped including keyboards (at least with the lower cost computers) and people complained. Apple flipped this around by advertising on how this gave people choices and an option to save money. I suspect Apple would rather not include a charger with their phones and offer people the choice to buy what they want but I also suspect that this could get them in trouble with regulators and cell phone service providers. So, Apple compromises, they include a cheap charger with the phone to satisfy any such rule or regulation on leaving them out. If you want the fast charging then get the nicer charger as an add-on, then put the cheap one in a drawer as a back-up in case the other fails or gets lost.
Will it charge even faster if I hook it up to my arc welder?
Of course. You'll just need the $39 arc welder to Lighting adapter cable. Good luck finding one in stock though, I hear they are selling fast.
They've changed the iPhone connection port once in the entire history of the product and loads of morons still bitch about Apple unnecessarily changing ports and how they only do it to make money on cables.
If you include the entire line of "iDevices" and go all the way back to the original iPod the ports changed twice, from FireWire to 30-pin, and then 30-pin to Lightning. That's over 15+ years. Changing the charger port on such devices every 5 or 10 years doesn't seem excessive to me, especially when the capabilities of the devices have changed considerably in that time and inexpensive adapters are available (for some definition of "inexpensive").
If they changed away from Lightning now, they'd get it all over again. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
No doubt. The Lightning connector predates the USB-C connector, and the USB-C port isn't really catching on outside of smart phones. As evidence I give the many posts here on Slashdot on Apple putting USB-C ports on their laptops. Which is it? Is USB-C good or is it bad?
I'd prefer that Apple included a USB-C cable and charger with their iDevices, it would do away with this odd situation of having their laptops charge from USB-C out of the box and their pocket sized devices charge from USB-A out of the box.
A similar debate came up with Apple before about including a keyboard and mouse with their computers. It used to be that all of their computers came with a new keyboard and mouse, and ones that weren't all that bad either. I liked them anyway. People complained about having to buy a new keyboard and mouse every time they upgraded their desktop. So, in their lower cost lines, they stopped including a keyboard and mouse. Then people complained about not getting a keyboard and mouse with the computer. Comparisons to buying a car without tires came up.
Would people prefer Apple didn't include a charger and cable with their iPhones? That way people aren't buying a charger they may not need, especially if they are upgrading from a previous iPhone or already own an iPad. There's an idea, don't put a charger in the box. But then these are $500+ phones and the charger and cable cost $40 retail, it costs Apple less than that to make them of course. By not including the "inferior" charger it'd save what? $10 maybe on the final retail price.
Shut up about the charger already. Buy the overpriced phone. Then buy the charger you want. When you open the boxes and unpack everything then toss the "inferior" charger in a drawer and forget about it until you lose or break your preferred charger.
No, what I'm asking for is a company that claims to make a "durable" product back up that claim.
Both Craftsman and Snap-On offer free replacements on broken hand tools but no professional is going to buy Craftsman tools. Craftsman just overcharges so much for their cheap shit that they can afford to hand out free replacements until the owner figures out that a Snap-On tool is a much better replacement. Snap-On isn't cheap because they make stuff that is really hard to break. If for some reason you do break it (such as due to a random manufacturing flaw) then they'll give you a free replacement to keep you as a customer. The feedback in learning how their tools break so they can do better is worth "buying" the broken tool from you for the price of a replacement.
Lifetime warranties are worth nothing. It's the reputation that matters.
I've been heating my house with AMD processors for years now.
Ah, but you see I write my password backwards on my forehead. I'm the only one that can read it, using a mirror.
On the farm as a kid I wondered why there were all these pigeon feathers in front of the large ventilation fan in the wall of the barn. It was a very large fan, something like 3 feet across, and had very little for a protective mesh. My questions were answered one day when I opened up the barn door and startled a pigeon that got in the barn somehow. It took off for the running fan and... feathers everywhere. I realized why I never saw a dead pigeon when I saw one of the barn cats wander over to look for meat.
Also while living on the farm we'd hear the birds "thud" against the walls of the sheds, barn, and house. Turns out that birds run into things, even bright red sheet metal siding. Once in a great while we'll see the dead birds lying on the ground from hitting the walls before the cats found them. The cats did well in cleaning up that mess though, they'd find them eventually.
You've got that right. My iPhone is more than just a phone. In fact I rarely even use it as such. I even call it "my pocket computer" when referencing it in conversation and I can't recall anyone being confused by this.
I say I rarely use it as a phone but it's not like I don't communicate with people using it. I just rarely make phone calls. I regularly use e-mail and instant messaging with it.
I think back to when I saw "Serial Experiments Lain", which came out 20 years ago, where the characters in the series had these communication devices called a "NAVI". I guess that's an acronym (Network Attached Virtual Interface?) or shorthand for something (an internet navigator?). What they predicted then as a "high tech" communication device looks rather silly by comparison.
These pocket computers are rather life changing. People don't get lost like they used to, they can just use their "phone" to navigate. With built-in cameras these things have documented all kinds of events that would have been plausibly denied before. (There's good and bad with that, I know.)
These things are pretty amazing. It's difficult to imagine life without them any more.
What's a 1-word way to describe someone you're basically, but not legally married to?
The word you are looking for is "spouse". Just because the government doesn't have a piece of paper with your names and signatures doesn't mean you aren't married. Marriages predate governments so "legally" has nothing to do with it. I'm also pretty sure that in most every part of the world the act of "living as married people" makes you legally married. What makes you think "spouse" does not apply here?
If "wife" bothers you then may I suggest "common law wife" to make the distinction? Not one word but it's not terribly complicated to say and most anyone knows what it means.
Not only that, I doubt kids these days have heard of Madonna.
And what are you trying to accomplish?
Being "green".
If the goal is to "greenwash" your line of vehicles then you can do that with bio-fuels. The choice between electric and bio-fuel vehicles is not mutually exclusive so they could do both. As they intend to produce some models as hybrids then they could have bio-fuel compatible ICEs in those hybrids.
They want to make up for past sins of being polluters so they came up with the idea of electric vehicles. They could do that also with bio-fuels. I'm just curious why they aren't doing that. Jumping into electric vehicles with both feet like this seems risky to me.
The federal government already has a ban on cannabis, how does transporting it by a drone change that? Or any means of transport by air, water, or rail? (Rail? Why ban rail transport?)
Obama let this ride for years and now Trump and his DOJ has to do something about this eventually. It will be a year into this administration real soon now. I'll give a pass for a few months because he has to appoint people and deal with a lot of other damage left on his desk. He's given a lot of non-answer answers when asked about it before. At some point the law needs to change or be enforced. The status quo is a mockery of the rule of law.
Your post negates nothing I've said. As soon as someone figures out how to turn a cheap and green energy source, like hydro, into a valuable liquid fuel then electric vehicles aren't any more green than any thing else. They also start to look real expensive and inconvenient.
Turning wind and solar energy into a liquid fuel also solves the problem of storage. You might have hydro but not everyone else does. What people do have, almost by definition, is land to build a fuel synthesis plant. I say by definition since the land that a fuel synthesis plant would take is "free" since it can be put under solar panels or windmills. Even New Zealand has a use for synthetic liquid fuels.
Biodiesel & Ethanol are boondoggles
I know that. You know that. Lots of people know that. You know who doesn't know that? Or, more likely, know it but would rather not admit it publicly? Legislators. They'll let this slide so long as voters will cast a vote for them over it.
Same for electric vehicles, they are a boondoggle too. Volkswagen will go for it so long as it makes people feel better and covers up past sins.
which leaves us with walking, horses or electric vehicles.
I believe electric vehicles will fall out of favor soon. We'll see some sort of synthetic fuel replace it. It might be hydrocarbons, or ammonia, or something else. It's not like we need a new energy source, electricity is already an energy sink when produced, not a net gain like petroleum. Electric vehicles make sense now because it uses cheap coal, nuclear, and natural gas, fuels that don't pour into a tank easily like gasoline. Find a way to convert the cheap energy into a liquid fuel and electric cars look real inconvenient, and no more "green" than anything else.
Dammit, I missed a decimal place!
So what if it takes the area of India to get as much sun. (Did I get that right? Within 10% at least?) That solar energy is worthless if they can't ship it out somehow. Less than worthless if the rest of the world can get it from a closer and friendlier nation, connected by land. Mexico comes to mind for the Americas. (Yes, Mexico is like half the area of the Arabian peninsula but it's also not halfway around the world.)
It's not like there is a lack of land area between 30 degrees north and south on Earth. Middle East nations have a near monopoly on oil due to having a fairly unique access to this natural resource. If solar power replaces oil then they lose that monopoly. Europe (which has a voracious appetite for energy) might be connected by land to the Middle East which would make shipment of solar energy pretty trivial, no matter what form they ship it in, but Africa and Asia are just as close. (Yes, I can read a map. Africa is separated by water from Europe, so drop some wires and pipes in the water for that relatively short distance. It's been done before.)
If I were a big auto CEO, I'd go all in for synthetic fuel.
How hard can it be to make an engine compatible with burning ethanol or bio-diesel? I guess it must be more than trivial or else every new car would have it by now. Still, that's got to be easier to do than switch all of your manufacturing to a whole new kind of power plant.
The way cars are built now are to accommodate an internal combustion engine. Change that and the shape of the vehicle should shift with it. If you bolt an electric drive train to a vehicle built for an ICE then you're making compromises. The compromise will be in costs, efficiency, safety, etc. Having a whole fleet of vehicles available in ICE, electric, and hybrid versions means more compromises. This is a very bad idea.
They'll just have a large "lubrication oil" tank. People will just have to refill it every 300 miles or so.
A rocket is an aircraft, and any aircraft transportation is banned. I think I'll get in the business of delivering marijuana by caterpillar. For the sake of security I'll make deliveries in an armored caterpillar. One like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
What? You thought I was going to make deliveries on the back of an insect? Well... know that I think about it, that would totally freak out the recipients if I did. How fast does a laden caterpillar crawl?
Oh, wait, this is California. Of course they were high when they drafted this rule.
I remember seeing some CFL bulbs on the shelf that advertise "reduced mercury content". Hmm, so you're saying they still contain mercury? Isn't mercury bad for you? Even in "reduced" amounts? No thanks.
I'll use the CFL bulbs I have until they burn out because that's a sunk cost but I won't buy more. This is especially true now that I've seen the real life lifespan of these bulbs, I have incandescent bulbs that lasted many times longer.
Also, wouldn't be just as "green" if we used LED (or even incandescent) lights powered from wind or solar?
Dear Senator,
Fix the problem at the source, don't mandate that I buy a lower quality bulb. Let people build some nuclear power plants already. Don't mandate nuclear power. Don't subsidize it. Just let people do it.
Is that because they send so many engineering students to the USA to learn or in spite of it?
I also believe that in 100 years the Arabian peninsula will be covered in sheets of silicon, but for a different reason. They won't be photovoltaic but they'll still be forged with intense heat. The rest of the world will be better off though, living a life free from carbon dug from the ground. Also free from the energy superpowers in Saudi Arabia.
How would the people on the Arabian peninsula export this energy? Are they going to turn the sun into liquid hydrogen and ship that out or something? Arizona is just as big as the Arabian peninsula, closer to the people in the USA, Canada, and Mexico, and free from the endless wars in the region. I can make similar arguments for India, China, Russia, Brazil, or most any nation large and small.
Whatever energy source comes to replace oil is not likely to come from the Middle East. Whatever they have, except oil, the rest of the world also has plenty of access to. No one is going to have to go to the Middle East to get more of whatever that might be.
What if they get it wrong? I mean if electric vehicles are the future then just let it happen, no need to force it along with bans and subsidies.
We saw this with the CFL bulb subsidies. The government would give large rebates for people to buy CFL lighting but the bulbs are crap. They take 20 minutes to "warm up", interfere with IR remotes (that nearly drove me batty until I figured out that the lamp was what kept the TV remote from working), can't handle the heat of being in a closed fixture (who lights their house entirely with floor lamps and chandeliers?), and contain toxic mercury (broken bulbs happen, and in places like where our children sleep and where we prepare their food). Not long after LED lights came out and they are awesome. They light up immediately, don't interfere with remote controls, and don't burn themselves out if in a common light fixture. They aren't perfect, for example they still have a "funny" color to them, but they are getting better. Does anyone even buy CFLs anymore now that LEDs are just as cheap?
If not electric vehicles then what? I don't know, but as I recall few people saw LEDs coming to market as quickly as they did. What if the claims of algae based diesel fuel becomes a reality? Are we still going to ban internal combustion engines? Maybe ethanol gets real cheap because we found a new way to make it. Maybe we get synthesized hydrocarbons from wind and wave powered factories.
As inefficient as an internal combustion engine might be that inefficiency becomes largely irrelevant if the means to produce, store, and transport the fuels becomes "green", cheap, and plentiful. If algal fuels become viable then we aren't using electricity to produce it, it comes from the sun. If we can convert sun power to motive power by algae more efficiently than through photovoltaic panels and batteries then banning internal combustion engines is a problem.
Let's not repeat past mistakes.
A much smaller reactor for the training won't do, especially when you know how Indians work
It doesn't have to be "much smaller" only the same size. A nuclear submarine will have a reactor with an output in the ballpark of 100 MW, perhaps as high as 200 MW and perhaps as low as 80 MW. Nobody would model this with a 1000 MW or even a 500 MW reactor. The reactors in any current or planned nuclear submarine, or surface ship, are light water reactors fueled with highly enriched (25% to 90%) uranium-235. The planned civilian reactors that India is building are dominated by heavy water reactors that will be fueled with natural uranium and/or a plutonium/thorium mix. The light water reactors they plan are probably the largest, and fueled with lightly enriched (less than 5% or 6%) uranium-235.
Tell me something. When schools train people to build and maintain single cylinder 2-cycle gasoline engines for chainsaws and lawnmowers do they teach them with 4-cycle inline-6 diesel engines in dump trucks and bulldozers? The opposite might be true, at least at first, because a small engine that someone can pick up on their own is a good place to start before going to something much heavier, more expensive, and more complex. If the goal is to train people to build and maintain military style reactors then would it not make more sense to, you know, actually build military style reactors?
You could argue that the large nuclear reactors might be used to make plutonium for bombs, and there might actually be some truth to that. The problem with that though is that to make weapon grade plutonium (as opposed to the reactor grade plutonium produced in their planned heavy water reactors) the reactors would be worthless for power production. The process to turn uranium into weapon grade plutonium is to expose the uranium to short bursts of neutrons to maximize Pu-239 and minimize Pu-240. This means turning the reactor on and off constantly. For civil use the production of Pu-239 is desirable since it makes for good utilization of the U-238 in the fuel, but the production of Pu-240 is of little concern as it has little effect on power output. So, while heavy water reactors are good at making plutonium for other reactors to use as fuel they are terrible at making plutonium for weapons.
Nuclear is used as a backup because they don't want to put all eggs into one basket, not as a major contributor.
Define "major contributor". Going from about 5% of current electrical production to something like 25% in 10 years does seem like a shift from a minor contribution to a major contribution. That's just the ten year plan, they don't seem to want to slow down after that.
Would you support replacing the Confederate monuments with ones that celebrate the winning side and the end of slavery? If not, why not?
We should not tear down the Confederate monuments, for the same reason we don't burn books. We can learn from our mistakes, destroying evidence of our history can mean being doomed to repeat it.
A Confederate monument doesn't have to be a "celebration" of the how things used to be. Germany keeps their reminders of past wars, I've seen them. Perhaps instead of tearing them down we put a sign in front of them that reads, "Never again."
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...