It took a few levels of clicking, but I was able to get the actual BCAA report. Thankfully, at the end, they list the assumptions that go into the calculations. Here they are, so that we can try to keep the semantic bickering to a minimum:
Total 5-year cost includes initial purchase price, financing and fuel costs at $1.17 per litre, less applicable tax rebates. Does not include maintenance or insurance costs.
Annual driving distance is 20,000 kilometres.
Long-term depreciation and resale values remain unknown so are assumed to be neutral.
The Toyota Matrix/Prius comparison was used due to similar design and specifications.
MSRP and PDI information obtained from CanadianDriver.com or direct from manufacturers.
Financing rates assumed to be the same on both vehicles. Monthly payment calculated using Loan Payment Calculator on Coast Capital Savings website.
Fuel consumption data from National Resources Canada - 2009 Fuel Consumption Guide or direct from manufacturers.
The full results of the Hybrid Cost Study, with all 36 vehicles and more details, is available at: www.BCAA.com
Seems reasonable. It would be interesting to know how things would pan out if they extended the time horizon further, to 7.5 years or 10 years, which would de-emphasize the capital cost difference and enhance the fuel savings. While it was prudent to leave it out due to a lack of data, it would have been nice if the depreciation or resale value could have been factored in. I have heard that hybrids tend to have higher resale value, but that could just be anecdotal.
It would also be interesting to see how the distance traveled influences things. The 20 km/year figure is a decent average to work from. At first blush, I would guess that more distance driven would give an advantage to more fuel efficient vehicles. Of course, the breakdown in city vs highway miles makes a big difference.
In other words, it would have been nice if, in addition to the summary results, they could have made the full calculations available for others to tinker with.
Gasoline burns, hydrogen explodes. There's a difference.
To get nit-picky: there is no difference in this context. One just happens to release its energy a bit faster.
It is also important to note that neither substance will burn unless there is an oxidizer present. An airship filled with hydrogen isn't going to spontaneously blow up unless significant quantities of oxygen somehow infiltrate in. Making oxygen-impermeable membranes is easy. If you're airship punctures, it is much more likely that you'll have hydrogen leaking out than oxygen leaking in, so you'll have other problems to worry about.
Gasoline burns, hydrogen explodes. There's a difference.
To be nit-picky, there is no difference between burning and exploding in this context - they're both just rapid oxidation in an exothermic reaction.
And it is important to note that neither of them will do anything unless there is an oxidizer present. An airship filled with hydrogen is fine unless oxygen gets into it.
If 10 major ISPs decide tomorrow to do a "little favor" to Bing (God forbid), this would immediately and effectively hurt Google - massively.
It is certainly unlikely, but not impossible.
Maybe Google would be ashes by the time it got sorted out, but that kind of behavior is called collusion and restraint of trade and would immediately get slapped with an FTC lawsuit.
If an electrical connection can control an arm, how much longer until you can control a whole body?
Perhaps I don't give proper credit for exponential growth, but my response is "a freakin' long time." It's a really hard problem to even a handful of control inputs from a neural interface - enough to control an arm. To control a whole body, even in a simplified fashion, would require tens, if not hundreds. For The Matrix kind of integration, probably a few million. It will take a few decades, maybe longer.
To put it in another light: a surgeon acquaintence who has done research in prosthetics believes we are closer to limb regeneration than we are to full cyborg limb replacements.
the Luke arm comes from a competitor Deka, which is owned and run by Segway inventor Dean Kamen
Not competitor, exactly. When DARPA started the Revolutionizing Prosthetics project some five years ago, they created two independent development paths. DEKA was tasked with making the most advanced prosthetic arm available with current technology, while APL was tasked (primarily) with developing a neural interface for a prosthetic. APL also developed an arm, which they'll be using in their trails, but you don't hear as much about that. The division was primarily between applied engineering, leading to an actual product, and research translation that is a longer-term effort.
Beyond the radioactive isotopes, I would worry about the release of so many heavier elements, nearly all of which are toxic in miniscule doses. In other words, while Chernobyl may no longer be all that hot, I'd think it's still on par with any other industrial disaster site in terms of conventional pollution.
And let's hope that the containment sarcophagus doesn't suddenly collapse one day, or you'll end up with a toxic plume of concrete dust.
Well, India is in good company. It appears that the United Arab Emirates will ban Blackberries starting in October because the government can't eavesdrop through the encryption, and Saudi Arabia may do the same.
Worse than that, since the smartphones don't actually have any physical cash.
All your bits-that-provide-access-and-represent-money-in-an-account-that-is-itself-just-a-representation-of-cash-you-could-have-in-your-hand are belong to us. Much more fungible than cash.
Yes, I know that there is no chemical or industrial limitation that prevents you from synthesizing all of those organic molecule chains from more basic components, so long as you have abundant energy.
This is why I included in my next sentence: "Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil." Even if the energy cost you nothing, I still wonder if the cost for synthesizing would be low enough for broad adoption.
The number of models coming to showroom floors in the next few years is irrelevant. There are 250 million motor vehicles in the United States. Sales figures fluctuate, but are in the range of 10 million per year. Let's be generous and say that within 5 years half of all new cars sold are substantially electric (meaning that they are fully electric or plug-in hybrids). You do the math and tell me how long it'll take to replace a substantial portion of the US fleet.
I have not forgotten it, I just recognize the infeasibility of it. Even over a 40-year build out, we would have been hard pressed to build enough nuclear power to displace petroleum as an energy input even for today's usage, let alone synthesizing petroleum replacements.
This graphic is particularly informative. Alas the units are a bit archane (quadrillion BTUs, or quads, as a measure of energy. One Quad = ~300 terawatt-hours), but you can see the relative proportions easily enough.
Electrical energy is about 40% of our total energy consumption in the U.S. Transportation is about 30%, industrial ~20%, residential ~10%. The U.S.'s energy comes about 37% from petroleum, and only about 8% from nuclear. So, to replace the energy petroleum gives us, we'd need to have about 6 times as much nuclear energy as today, or about as much energy as we get from coal and natural gas combined. Most of that natural gas goes to heating and industrial processes, not electricity production. That's just energy for transportation and heating - it doesn't begin to cover the petroleum we use as feedstock for various industrial processes.
If my math is correct, it's about another 1200 GW of installed nuclear capacity - about as much power as the entire US grid currently produces. At a cost of several billion per GW of nuclear plant, that works out to a couple trillion dollars. So not only would our total electrical production need to roughly double, but it would leave the grid about 2/3 nuclear-based. I know that there is precedent: France's electric grid is 80% nuclear. But France's electrical power output is a relatively tiny amount of energy compared to US's nuclear capacity today.
I'd be thrilled to see more district heating implemented in the United States. Cogeneration is a way to drastically increase the overall thermodynamic efficiency of a plant and reduce the necessary cooling infrastructure. Nuclear-heated steam doesn't make me squeamish, it's passed through about three heat exchangers by the time I feel that warmth.
But alas cogeneration doesn't work everywhere, and it can't be used all the time, and that is one reason why it doesn't see greater adoption. A lack of steam distribution infrastructure is probably the main reason - it is damn expensive to pipe that in, even when doing new construction.
This doesn't mean it couldn't be rolled out in more places. I wish it would. My point in my original post is that even though we can (and dare I say, should) do these things, I don't think it likely without a huge amount of subsidy, top level support, quality leadership, and user buy-in. Please forgive me for being pessimistic.
I reiterate the last sentence of the first paragraph: "Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil."
I'd be quite happy to use geothermal for both heating and cooling in my house. But in reality it is much more cost effective to tighten the place up and improve efficiency first. That reduces the need for both chemical heating (fuel oil, nat. gas, wood pellets, etc.) and/or electricity, no matter the source. Next I'd focus on ways of augmenting the central heat with passive solar, which is likewise cost effective and reduces the need for other energy sources (other than the sun, obviously).
Why does everyone think of nuclear power (or coal, or natural gas, or renewables) and oil as some sort of zero-sum game? Oil is used for three things mainly: transportation fuel, heating fuel in some parts of the country, and as a raw material for industrial processes. Nuclear power is good for one thing: generating electricity. While I will admit that there is plenty of small ways that we can trade off oil usage for nuclear-generated electricity, there aren't many wholesale ways of reducing oil consumption via nuclear. Are you going to heat your New England home with nuclear electricity? Will you create plastics feedstock from nuclear electricity? Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil.
The big one is electricity, and I for one am pessimistic that we'll see a wholesale shift away from gasoline/diesel (i.e., more than 1/3 of all vehicles on the road propelled by electrical power)in anything less than 25 years.
And even then, it's not like we'll magically be trading nuclear electricity off for only imported oil. Oil is a global commodity. The determining factor of where the U.S. gets its oil from is where how much it costs. If it's cheaper or more profitable to bring it by tanker from the Middle East than it is to pull it from the Gulf of Mexico, you can bet that is where we'll get most of it. In truth, where does the U.S. import most of its oil from? Canada. Mexico provides us with as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We get more from non-OPEC nations than we do from OPEC [lots of stats here]. I am glad that the summary used the term "dependence on oil" rather than the more politically useful "foreign oil". I just wish that everyone else could wrap their head around it.
This is mostly true. However, I have had legitimate uses for a laptop while in a bright outdoorsy environment. For instance, I've worked on rovers of various sorts that I drove using a laptop. Even when they operated autonomously, I would still trail along behind with a laptop for data collection purposes, or to just keep on eye on what they were doing. This was especially difficult when the rovers were working out in the middle of a snow/ice field. Between the sun shining overhead and the glare of the snow, the laptop screen was almost unreadable.
Would you rather have a decent chance of dumping a tank of hot oil if someone knocks the cord? Or, by extension into the laptop realm, have a decent chance of your $$$ laptop going flying when some nincompoop trips over your power cord in the library/living room/airport?
There is little to account for that except gross incompetence
There is nothing routine about spaceflight, and there are innumerable things that cannot be controlled for that can ruin a flight. People are always amazed at the redundant systems and awesome engineering that goes into spacecraft, but there is only so much redundancy, fault tolerance, and testing that one can do before you end up with a craft that is either too heavy or too expensive to fly.
I for one am willing to give these guys a pass, at least until there is more information. This was an experimental craft with a lot of untested systems. The mission was a test of them, and the sample return was largely a means to that end. Since the cause of each of the failures is not fully known, it is not possible to say whether they were due to some human failing, something breaking because of the challenging environment, or if one small root failure caused a cascade of otherwise functional parts to fail.
They built a spacecraft that lasted for years in space and managed to return a probe to the earth, something that every other space-faring nation has had problems doing. It takes time, and failure, to get good at these things. It's expensive, true, but anyone who has ever built anything has experienced this.
Hold off on being so preachy and judgmental until we have a sense of what went wrong.
Well, having achieved a God-like power (and I don't mean the ability to manipulate genes to create crops that are "ready" to be doused with herbicides - that's bupkis compared to the power Monsanto has over every farmer on the planet), it seems natural that this Monsanto engineer would ascribe the whole of creation to the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems reasonable. It would be interesting to know how things would pan out if they extended the time horizon further, to 7.5 years or 10 years, which would de-emphasize the capital cost difference and enhance the fuel savings. While it was prudent to leave it out due to a lack of data, it would have been nice if the depreciation or resale value could have been factored in. I have heard that hybrids tend to have higher resale value, but that could just be anecdotal.
It would also be interesting to see how the distance traveled influences things. The 20 km/year figure is a decent average to work from. At first blush, I would guess that more distance driven would give an advantage to more fuel efficient vehicles. Of course, the breakdown in city vs highway miles makes a big difference.
In other words, it would have been nice if, in addition to the summary results, they could have made the full calculations available for others to tinker with.
To get nit-picky: there is no difference in this context. One just happens to release its energy a bit faster.
It is also important to note that neither substance will burn unless there is an oxidizer present. An airship filled with hydrogen isn't going to spontaneously blow up unless significant quantities of oxygen somehow infiltrate in. Making oxygen-impermeable membranes is easy. If you're airship punctures, it is much more likely that you'll have hydrogen leaking out than oxygen leaking in, so you'll have other problems to worry about.
To be nit-picky, there is no difference between burning and exploding in this context - they're both just rapid oxidation in an exothermic reaction.
And it is important to note that neither of them will do anything unless there is an oxidizer present. An airship filled with hydrogen is fine unless oxygen gets into it.
Maybe Google would be ashes by the time it got sorted out, but that kind of behavior is called collusion and restraint of trade and would immediately get slapped with an FTC lawsuit.
Perhaps I don't give proper credit for exponential growth, but my response is "a freakin' long time." It's a really hard problem to even a handful of control inputs from a neural interface - enough to control an arm. To control a whole body, even in a simplified fashion, would require tens, if not hundreds. For The Matrix kind of integration, probably a few million. It will take a few decades, maybe longer.
To put it in another light: a surgeon acquaintence who has done research in prosthetics believes we are closer to limb regeneration than we are to full cyborg limb replacements.
Not competitor, exactly. When DARPA started the Revolutionizing Prosthetics project some five years ago, they created two independent development paths. DEKA was tasked with making the most advanced prosthetic arm available with current technology, while APL was tasked (primarily) with developing a neural interface for a prosthetic. APL also developed an arm, which they'll be using in their trails, but you don't hear as much about that. The division was primarily between applied engineering, leading to an actual product, and research translation that is a longer-term effort.
Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Beyond the radioactive isotopes, I would worry about the release of so many heavier elements, nearly all of which are toxic in miniscule doses. In other words, while Chernobyl may no longer be all that hot, I'd think it's still on par with any other industrial disaster site in terms of conventional pollution.
And let's hope that the containment sarcophagus doesn't suddenly collapse one day, or you'll end up with a toxic plume of concrete dust.
Well, India is in good company. It appears that the United Arab Emirates will ban Blackberries starting in October because the government can't eavesdrop through the encryption, and Saudi Arabia may do the same.
Damn you, Schrödinger!
Worse than that, since the smartphones don't actually have any physical cash.
All your bits-that-provide-access-and-represent-money-in-an-account-that-is-itself-just-a-representation-of-cash-you-could-have-in-your-hand are belong to us. Much more fungible than cash.
There's bound to be some sort of koan in there, along the lines of the tree falling in the forest:
If a really freakin' huge star is created in the universe and no one is around to observe it, does it break a record?
If one is using SI units, then it is appropriate to measure things in kilograms.
Yes, I know that there is no chemical or industrial limitation that prevents you from synthesizing all of those organic molecule chains from more basic components, so long as you have abundant energy.
This is why I included in my next sentence: "Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil." Even if the energy cost you nothing, I still wonder if the cost for synthesizing would be low enough for broad adoption.
The number of models coming to showroom floors in the next few years is irrelevant. There are 250 million motor vehicles in the United States. Sales figures fluctuate, but are in the range of 10 million per year. Let's be generous and say that within 5 years half of all new cars sold are substantially electric (meaning that they are fully electric or plug-in hybrids). You do the math and tell me how long it'll take to replace a substantial portion of the US fleet.
I have not forgotten it, I just recognize the infeasibility of it. Even over a 40-year build out, we would have been hard pressed to build enough nuclear power to displace petroleum as an energy input even for today's usage, let alone synthesizing petroleum replacements.
This graphic is particularly informative. Alas the units are a bit archane (quadrillion BTUs, or quads, as a measure of energy. One Quad = ~300 terawatt-hours), but you can see the relative proportions easily enough.
Electrical energy is about 40% of our total energy consumption in the U.S. Transportation is about 30%, industrial ~20%, residential ~10%. The U.S.'s energy comes about 37% from petroleum, and only about 8% from nuclear. So, to replace the energy petroleum gives us, we'd need to have about 6 times as much nuclear energy as today, or about as much energy as we get from coal and natural gas combined. Most of that natural gas goes to heating and industrial processes, not electricity production. That's just energy for transportation and heating - it doesn't begin to cover the petroleum we use as feedstock for various industrial processes.
If my math is correct, it's about another 1200 GW of installed nuclear capacity - about as much power as the entire US grid currently produces. At a cost of several billion per GW of nuclear plant, that works out to a couple trillion dollars. So not only would our total electrical production need to roughly double, but it would leave the grid about 2/3 nuclear-based. I know that there is precedent: France's electric grid is 80% nuclear. But France's electrical power output is a relatively tiny amount of energy compared to US's nuclear capacity today.
Nuclear power is not a panacea, end of story.
I'd be thrilled to see more district heating implemented in the United States. Cogeneration is a way to drastically increase the overall thermodynamic efficiency of a plant and reduce the necessary cooling infrastructure. Nuclear-heated steam doesn't make me squeamish, it's passed through about three heat exchangers by the time I feel that warmth.
But alas cogeneration doesn't work everywhere, and it can't be used all the time, and that is one reason why it doesn't see greater adoption. A lack of steam distribution infrastructure is probably the main reason - it is damn expensive to pipe that in, even when doing new construction.
This doesn't mean it couldn't be rolled out in more places. I wish it would. My point in my original post is that even though we can (and dare I say, should) do these things, I don't think it likely without a huge amount of subsidy, top level support, quality leadership, and user buy-in. Please forgive me for being pessimistic.
I reiterate the last sentence of the first paragraph: "Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil."
I'd be quite happy to use geothermal for both heating and cooling in my house. But in reality it is much more cost effective to tighten the place up and improve efficiency first. That reduces the need for both chemical heating (fuel oil, nat. gas, wood pellets, etc.) and/or electricity, no matter the source. Next I'd focus on ways of augmenting the central heat with passive solar, which is likewise cost effective and reduces the need for other energy sources (other than the sun, obviously).
Why does everyone think of nuclear power (or coal, or natural gas, or renewables) and oil as some sort of zero-sum game? Oil is used for three things mainly: transportation fuel, heating fuel in some parts of the country, and as a raw material for industrial processes. Nuclear power is good for one thing: generating electricity. While I will admit that there is plenty of small ways that we can trade off oil usage for nuclear-generated electricity, there aren't many wholesale ways of reducing oil consumption via nuclear. Are you going to heat your New England home with nuclear electricity? Will you create plastics feedstock from nuclear electricity? Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil.
The big one is electricity, and I for one am pessimistic that we'll see a wholesale shift away from gasoline/diesel (i.e., more than 1/3 of all vehicles on the road propelled by electrical power)in anything less than 25 years.
And even then, it's not like we'll magically be trading nuclear electricity off for only imported oil. Oil is a global commodity. The determining factor of where the U.S. gets its oil from is where how much it costs. If it's cheaper or more profitable to bring it by tanker from the Middle East than it is to pull it from the Gulf of Mexico, you can bet that is where we'll get most of it. In truth, where does the U.S. import most of its oil from? Canada. Mexico provides us with as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We get more from non-OPEC nations than we do from OPEC [lots of stats here]. I am glad that the summary used the term "dependence on oil" rather than the more politically useful "foreign oil". I just wish that everyone else could wrap their head around it.
This is mostly true. However, I have had legitimate uses for a laptop while in a bright outdoorsy environment. For instance, I've worked on rovers of various sorts that I drove using a laptop. Even when they operated autonomously, I would still trail along behind with a laptop for data collection purposes, or to just keep on eye on what they were doing. This was especially difficult when the rovers were working out in the middle of a snow/ice field. Between the sun shining overhead and the glare of the snow, the laptop screen was almost unreadable.
Would you rather have a decent chance of dumping a tank of hot oil if someone knocks the cord? Or, by extension into the laptop realm, have a decent chance of your $$$ laptop going flying when some nincompoop trips over your power cord in the library/living room/airport?
There is nothing routine about spaceflight, and there are innumerable things that cannot be controlled for that can ruin a flight. People are always amazed at the redundant systems and awesome engineering that goes into spacecraft, but there is only so much redundancy, fault tolerance, and testing that one can do before you end up with a craft that is either too heavy or too expensive to fly.
I for one am willing to give these guys a pass, at least until there is more information. This was an experimental craft with a lot of untested systems. The mission was a test of them, and the sample return was largely a means to that end. Since the cause of each of the failures is not fully known, it is not possible to say whether they were due to some human failing, something breaking because of the challenging environment, or if one small root failure caused a cascade of otherwise functional parts to fail.
They built a spacecraft that lasted for years in space and managed to return a probe to the earth, something that every other space-faring nation has had problems doing. It takes time, and failure, to get good at these things. It's expensive, true, but anyone who has ever built anything has experienced this.
Hold off on being so preachy and judgmental until we have a sense of what went wrong.
Let me google that for you.
That's OK, I make it a point to only listen to parabolic headlines, with just a touch of linearity.
Well, having achieved a God-like power (and I don't mean the ability to manipulate genes to create crops that are "ready" to be doused with herbicides - that's bupkis compared to the power Monsanto has over every farmer on the planet), it seems natural that this Monsanto engineer would ascribe the whole of creation to the same.