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posted by
CoolHand
on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:37AM
from the tonight-they're-going-to-pollute-like-its-1999 dept.
from the tonight-they're-going-to-pollute-like-its-1999 dept.
Both houses of the California legislature have passed a bill called SB-32 which would tell the California Air Resources Board "to ensure that statewide greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to 40% below the 1990 level by 2030." The state's Democratic governor has issued a statement indicating that he intends to sign it into law.
The Western States Petroleum Association and the California Manufacturers & Technology Association expressed their opposition to the bill.
links:
- the bill
- governor's statement
- Western States Petroleum Association statement
- San Jose Mercury-News
- UPI
- Vox
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California Likely to Impose Drastic Carbon Dioxide Restrictions
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I consider the day misspent that I am not either charged with a crime,
or arrested for one.
-- "Ratsy" Tourbillon
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:10AM
Penalties for people who buy gasoline-powered vehicles
Perhaps someone should make sure first that EVs exist that have the same cost and the same range as the gas cars? Plenty of people have to drive a hundred miles per day or more. I know some who live in Sacramento and work in Santa Clara. Plenty live in Gilroy, considering that they can't buy anything closer. Not every EV can do that reliably - and those that can (some Teslas) are too expensive. In the end, nothing will change, except that every new car will come with an extra tax - and it is cheaper to pay the tax and get a decent car than to skip the tax and get a useless EV.
Hydrogen-powered trucks. [...] A big push for batteries to store energy at homes.
We know perfectly well that businesses and rental places will not bother with that. They will simply shift the burden of the tax onto the renters and customers. In many cases there is no realistic scenario of upgrading a rental place or to deploying tens of chargers. The power grid in the Bay Area is bad enough already, strung up on a wooden poles in many places.
"California is still subjecting its manufacturers to costs that other states aren't imposing," she said.
The flight from CA is ongoing. Businesses and people alike move out as soon as they can. The weather is great, but the cost of living had already transformed the land of Google and Apple into a forbidden territory, where only a lucky few can pay rent, and hardly anyone who is not a multimillionaire can buy a house. This might be OK for a lone hacker, but quite a few people still adhere to the obsolete notion of a family and a private home. You can't get one anywhere close to the Silicon Valley. Lack of workers forces local businesses to look elsewhere. High tech businesses are left high and dry, as technology giants vacuum up every graduate and every engineer who can add 2 and 2 on a calculator. Basically, if you are such a business, move out - you won't hire anyone who is worth their pay.
The business climate is already bad enough. Now if they add extra taxes on everything (as energy includes every aspect of our existence,) relocation sounds like a really good idea. Preferrably as far away as possible from geniuses who demand that we buy EVs before they make sure that we can always charge them. At this very minute I have nowhere to charge an EV if I had one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:16AM
Good! It's over-crowded and the traffic sucks.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:28AM
Good! It's over-crowded and the traffic sucks.
The traffic sucks because people have to live in a farming community (which has no jobs for them) and drive 100 miles to work for tech giants like Intel. I know people who live in Central Valley; Gilroy for them is just where they turn east on the way home! They spend 2-3 hours on the road, one way! What we see here is a failure of capitalism. By chasing the maximum rent, the landlords are driving all lower-paid workers out of town. This will cause a correction, of course, but the correction will result in hundreds of businesses closing and tens of thousands people going broke. The heartless market does not care.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:17AM
I have noted the freeways start getting busy at 6AM these days...
Helluva long workday, with way too many hours spent in commute.
I thought the gas crisis of a few years ago was gonna make businesses invest in their own communities - help the locals with schooling their kids, in exchange for a well-trained labor pool instead of expecting to "offer an employment opportunity" and have people from hundreds of miles around vying for it.
God knows how much I would like to blame employers for this economic debt slavery we find ourselves in, but from what I have seen, we - the public - did it to ourselves, signing loan papers , signing legal debt instruments to buy stuff we did not need.
Mostly to try to impress someone else. Show her you care - buy her a tennis bracelet!.... while all we did was demonstrate a gullibility to any hockhead with a microphone. We need to stop signing all these damned debt instruments! When the hockhead erupts "you gotta have this", you need to ask yourself "do I really *need* this?".
From what I have seen, debt is the main driver for all this misery, wasting our living hours, and forcing us to do things in a most polluting manner.
Economic fun fact... prices are set by the buyer, not the seller.
Do you really think they would stop making epi-pens if no-one would spend more then $5 for it? When you look what's really in it, its a dollar-store item! WE are the ones who are bidding the price up on everything, and the takers are having a heyday at our tolerance of bidding up the price at artificial monopolies, as well as not organizing against taxation. WE are the ones selling ourselves into slavery... aka... debt.
Sign their papers, and "they" OWN you! Often for a bauble.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Oakenshield on Wednesday August 31 2016, @12:03PM
You fail basic economics. Pricing is set by a meeting of the minds between buyer and seller. A seller can refuse to sell if the buyer is unwilling to pay the price desired and the buyer can refuse to buy if the seller sets the price too high.
Yes. I am certain that there is more than $5 in governmental regulation involved. The Auvi-Q (epipen clone) left a market with a gigantic profit margin over a dosing problem recall. The cost of Asthma drugs skyrocketed in recent years when the FDA banned all CFC propellants in drugs causing manufacturers to have to go through the process of recertifying old drugs with new delivery methods. Albuterol which had been generic for years tripled overnight when generics disappeared despite the fact the drug did not change. GlaxoSmithKline is one of the most profitable pharma companies in the world because of Advair/Seretide despite the drug being off patent for years. The delivery device is the sticking point.
The problem is that there are people whose lives depend on the epipen. That makes it very valuable to them. The question is, should we as a soceity allow pharmaceutical companies to take advantage of that demand in order to maximize profits? I believe that we are finally seeing a shift in public opinion. Now, will government actually do anything about it, or will lobbyists win again?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:53PM
> Now, will government actually do anything about it, or will lobbyists win again?
They will always win. The question is how much will they win. And that answer is directly correlated with campaign finance. I don't mean quid-pro-quo (as the simpleton Trump has alleged) but rather access. When politicians have to spend 40% of their time every week talking to assholes with money they end up living in an information bubble largely defined by those assholes. They don't deliberately do favors for those asshole, they just never hear any other sides of the story. Kind of like a child raised by ultra religious parents- all they ever hear are stories about jeebus so it is extremely difficult for them to even conceive that there are other perspectives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @03:01PM
In my case it was buying stuff that I needed after I was thrown out of my parent's house (nearly literally, accused me of "drugs" and wanted to throw me in jail to teach me whatever f'ed up lesson they thought I needed, only one I learned was Austin 3:16 DTA Don't Trust Anybody).
I'm not the only person to get thrown out a day after turning 18.
What option is there? You want a decent job and you need a place to live. So you work a minimum wage job part time 45 hours per week with no benefits just to pay rent. Then you go massively into debt getting an education. Then you try to build a career with your shiny new degree only to learn that instead of the boundless opportunities you were promised as a child if you chose the profession you did, cleaning toilets has more job prestige and social status and when you ask for enough to at least have some hope of paying all your debt back and at least getting your head above water, they have you train your H1B replacement.
Baby boomer and gen X assholes think it's still 1960 and you can still buy a car and get through college with a summer job living in your own place.
If I'm ever able to have kids, I intend to focus on making sure they're financially able to leave the nest. Also like hell I'm sending them to the prisons that are government schools. Either my wife or I will need to stay at home to educate them. Make sure they don't grow up being force-fed shit and lies while being psychologically abused by peers, administrators, and dumbfuck teachers. (Remember, air pressure is what keeps things on the ground, not gravity, FFS how can you be that stupid and be allowed to teach?! And don't ask why A^2 + B^2 = C^2, just memorize that it does, because the teach has no fucking clue how to prove it out and is angry that you embarrassed him by asking an innocent question.)
Want to know where all our debt comes from? The Selfish Generation. The Me, Me, Me Generation. Yeah, a lot of people on this site will get pissed off. You know when your adult kids decide to stop talking to you and cut you out of their life for good? Look in the mirror for the reason. You can't lie your ass off to somebody about how the world works for 18+ years, throw them out homeless in the name of "tough love," and expect them to still be able to stand the sight of you 15-20 years and 2-3 economic crashes later when they're still struggling to get their head above water.
My dad gets stupider the older I get. Funny that. But keep on believing I just haven't "hard work"ed enough and am just lazy. I hope social security vanishes in 10 years. I'm prepared to retire without it. Can the Me, Me, Me Generation live without government handouts?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:40PM
the landlords are driving all lower-paid workers out of town. This will cause a correction, of course, but the correction will result in hundreds of businesses closing and tens of thousands people going broke.
Much more likely is that California will see zoning reform that permits the construction of high density housing. Japan has very lax zoning control - if you own the land you can build practically anything you want. That's resulted in people building some crazy ass houses [japlusu.com] because their neighbors can't stop them. But it also means they can build high-density housing. Which is the primary reason the Tokyo real-estate market has not bubbled [ft.com] the way it has in major metros in America and Europe.
In the US we don't allow businesses owners to veto a competing business next door. We need to stop giving homeowners the ability to veto a new home next door. And I say this as a homeowner who has fully paid off his mortgage and thus has the most to lose when my local property bubble pops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:16AM
Don't forget the roads.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:28AM
Goodie, that's totally not going to make people rush out and buy more gasoline-powered vehicles now (sarcasm, for the English impaired). How about instead making electric vehicles more attractive and viable?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:46AM
You make a good point. However, the bill doesn't specify that, or the other measures quoted by the original poster, specifically. The Mercury-News says those are "among the possibilities, experts say." If made law, SB-32 would leave it up to the California Air Resources Board to decide exactly how to achieve the desired reduction in emissions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:34AM
i agree with this which is why i think gasoline cars should be heavily taxed and used to subsidize EV purchases.
those are exactly the people who should be punished! seriously, if you are using that much gas every day, you are a huge polluter!
the proper solution to this is to then use the tax to subsidize the trucks and home batteries until it makes the same amount or more sense to get them than not. unfortunately, unless this is already part of the law, that's not going to happen.
businesses and people can run from taxes but they cannot escape climate change.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:56AM
those are exactly the people who should be punished!
I presume you understand that those are the poorest, least compensated people who clean your office, fix water leaks, protect you from crime, sell you apples, and perform many other tasks like that?
Let's imagine that one day they cannot come to the Bay Area from Morgan Hill, Pleasanton, and other places. The roads will be empty. Your office will be empty. Your LAN will be down. There will be no coffee in the machine. What will you do?
The problem here is that the market is not interested in providing inexpensive accommodation. I saw many times how affordable homes are demolished and expensive condos built in their place. Note that the valley is pretty small. The society wants one thing, but the market wants another. The society has no say. Taxes on cars will only make matters worse. It is a good idea to wean ourselves from gasoline, but you start with tax benefits to those who provide chargers! You make sure that people can have two cars, one electric and one regular, for longer trips. Or you make sure that it is easy to rent one on a moment's notice and that it is cheap. You create conditions when people want to use ev. Today people hate them because they are not good enough for most people. No tax will make them good enough. Only construction of infrastructure where every parking spot has a charger will get you there. Punishment will only make people mad at you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:12AM
I very much doubt Gravis understands that. He's in his ideological zone where reality is taxed to death.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:33AM
Excellent points. My question is mostly why we are considering a vehicle driver ( which must, by definition, have a highly portable energy source ) to be a heavy recipient of cutbacks, when the goal is overall CO2 emission lowering?
My take is that encouraging solar for static installations is the way to go. We discussed here a few days ago about advances in solar roofing. This needs to catch on. Big-time.
I was at the city hall a few days ago inquiring about replacing my patio and putting in solar. They were full of all sorts of requirements, hoops, and property tax paperwork.
I feel if the State of California came down on cities about reducing energy loads, the city government would have been all over themselves when a homeowner approached wanting to go solar as much as a homeowner coming in inquiring how he could pay additional sales tax. The last thing they should do is discourage the guy with all sorts of hoops and procedures for going solar. Help the guy as much as they can, and for gawd's sakes, don't ram the guy with tax disincentives and messes of paperwork!
Its gonna be a lotta work to get another pound of CO2 savings from the automotive sector, but for static things like houses, we can still get substantial improvements at a much lower cost.
I don't want to foist the burden of this on the vehicle owner. We still have a lot of easy pickings out there by encouraging adoption of solar and refrigeration designed for being powered by solar.
Mostly for things where the end use of the energy is thermal management.
There are alternative energy storage techniques than storage batteries to tide us over when the sun is not shining. Batteries excel for storing electrical energy. However, the elephant in MY house is thermal management. So I need far more thermal storage than electrical... and what stores thermal energy quite nicely? Water! Pure plain simple tap water. Make ice with it when solar energy is abundant, melt the ice when I want to cool the house. Or make ice when I want to warm the house, and use the solar panels in thermal mode to keep the ice melted. Thermodynamics. Heat Pump technologies.
I will deteriorate a battery by repeatedly charging and discharging a battery, however, I have not witnessed anyone wearing out water by repeatedly freezing and thawing it. And it stores a helluva lot of thermal energy over the phase change from liquid to solid.
We have barely even started with this kind of stuff yet.... there are a very few people aware of these technologies - and the few installations I am aware of were put in by the super-rich for their vacation homes in the middle of nowhere. However, these technologies have nothing in them that are expensive! Its friggen water, and propane gas used as a refrigerant!
In the event one fears cross-contamination, one can always use a heat transfer loop of something like water/alcohol ( we can't have alcohol! People might drink it! ).
Governments will spend more money than you care to imagine chasing hard to get savings, and tell people like me that I can't use propane as a refrigerant because of its flammability, yet they let me have a car with far more explosive gasoline in it on the road. I have the wild suspicion that those laws are to protect the business models of freon patent holders, who manufacture an environmentally far more toxic product.
I am really being disillusioned as to having spent so many years of my life studying the science behind this kind of stuff, only to be told that I am re-inventing the wheel, and one can already buy air conditioners at WalMart. I am rapidly getting too old to transfer what I have learned and train a younger generation to take the reins of this and go with it. I feel the kind of stuff I am interested in doing, differently from anyone else, is best done in a third-world country that economically has to tolerate innovation, as they can't just print themselves the money they want to buy executive-level handshakes.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:21PM
What you're talking about exists and has been around for decades. It's called a ground source heat pump (GSHP). The principle is 6ft down the earth is a constant 55F. So you sink a loop carrying water + antifreeze into the ground and run it back into the house, where you blow air across a manifold to cool the place or boost the temperature 15 deg and circulate through a radiant floor system. It's lovely, comfortable, and saves thousands on heating/cooling costs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:27PM
Or if you live by a lake/sea, you can put the pipe in there.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:28PM
Not quite. The lake or sea is ok for cooling, but doesn't work at all for heating. You want to sink it down into a bunch of solid rock (or equivalent...loose stones don't give as good conduction, and water tend to make things cooler. Then you will end up with a yearly average temperature. (I wouldn't claim 55 F, as I suspect it depends on the mean temperature for your area...with a lot of thermal ballast.) You might want to heat or cool away from this temperature, but it would certainly reduce the amount of heating or cooling significantly and THAT reduces the energy requirements. If you keep it running all the time, then it should, over time, adjust to being exactly the temperature you want it to be.
Please note: You still need to insulate your house well. A well insulated house is the prime requirement, and heaters and coolers should be purely modifiers to that basic temperature. I've heard, though I doubt it, that a house can be insulated well enough that it can be heated in a snowstorm by a candle. This is a bit too extreme to believe, and any house that well insulated would have air quality problems, but it gives you a basic framework. With poor insulation you won't be comfortable unless you like the external temperature no matter what your heater and air conditioner are doing. With good insulation you can get away with quite weak temperature modifications.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday September 01 2016, @08:21AM
What you're talking about exists and has been around for decades. It's called a ground source heat pump (GSHP). The principle is 6ft down the earth is a constant 55F.
Exactly. Its not exactly rocket science. Like you say, not even new. My only twist is phase changing both propane and water in order to store thermal energy ( either to heat or to cool ) driven by solar energy, so that one can continue to have a boosted GSHP operating during times the solar panels aren't putting out sufficient to do the job.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:30PM
What will you do?
Leave, which is exactly what they should do anyway because they have no water in the desert.
Its kinda the whole point... get rid of 40% of the population and/or population related economic activity.
Thats whats so weird about it, I know it has to drop more than 40% due to water supply issues, so why stop there?
The funny thing is people used to have doom and gloom conversations about Detroit before it collapsed... But oh no, silicon valley or LA or SF will never fall, no never LOL.
Eventually, one way or another, cooperate or not, CA is going back to cattle ranch haciendas and some minor coastal trade. 1800 AD is coming back, like it or not. That doesn't mean everybody gotta leave, and high tech means more can stay than were sustainable in 1800, but most of them gotta go somewhere else. If you want water we have more than we know what to do with east of the mississippi.
Its kind of a dumb idea anyway ... here's an unsustainable situation that's on its way to crashing, I know lets burn irreplaceable fossil fuels to floor it as we fly off the cliff in order to squeeze the last drops of blood from that stone.
Any tradesman or coffee maker or whatever you list should move to a higher standard of living area NOW while they can still get gasoline and settle into the community. I mean, everybody's gonna have to leave CA sooner or later and the first guy jumping on the lifeboat always ends up better off than the last guy to try.
Gosh doctor, this hammer is defective, every time I hit my thumb with it, my thumb hurts...
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Wednesday August 31 2016, @03:08PM
This sounds like a variation on Malthus, which hasn't had very good predictive power.
Besides, there is a great deal of catastrophe and pain to occur before people take flight, which it seems like California is attempting to ameliorate, even if it is through questionable means. You'll note the poorest of the poor are the ones still left in Detroit. They don't have the means to move, and definitely don't have the means to rebuild.
Much of the problems can be traced back to Henry George's observation about San Francisco back in 1871, and really haven't improved since. If anything, much of the problems can be traced back to property tax rates being too low and attempting to capitalize on economic rents.
http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2014/09/san-francisco-property-tax-rate-slated-drop-next-year.html [socketsite.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNYViRmSUBE [youtube.com]
The high CO2 emissions are just a by-product of the confluence of those two events.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:18PM
Having known some of them, I explicitly *don't* know that those are the lowest paid people. The lowest paid people can't afford the commute, and have to live in inferior housing in undesirable areas. The long commutes are made by people who want to live in a 1950's middle class life-style, but can't afford the prices in the closer suburbs. These aren't the highest paid people, but they are quite far from being the lowest paid people.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:27PM
It's hard to speak for others, but among my personal acquaintances one plumber commutes to Bay Area from Santa Cruz, one mechanic commutes from Pleasanton, one engineer commutes from Gilroy, another engineer commutes from Modesto, and another contractor lives in Santa Cruz and is effectively excluded from most of the business that occurs here. Some of them are low paid, other (engineers) are what you say.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:32PM
Some of these workers will go away, thereby reducing property value. Some of these workers will get paid more. Neither change would be bad.
(Score: 2) by EQ on Thursday September 01 2016, @05:36AM
Gravis, So its government's job to punish groups of people who have committed no crime other than to not be able to afford to live close to their workplace? You advocate punishing groups by government fiat without any regard to individual circumstance - and rewarding favored groups, commanding prices on things by laws according to your whims? Who let you out of North Korea? Or else you've done a very good job of trolling as a parody of a collectivist eco-nazi
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @08:33AM
Solar (PV) panels possible?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:53AM
We are rapidly becoming a nation of apartment dwellers.
Their options are severely limited by not owning any square feet of area to erect a panel.
Also, at today's conversion efficiencies, it takes a home rooftop fully populated to provide a charge rate consistent with a timely charge for an EV pack [batteryuniversity.com]. ( ~7KW continuous DC feed ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by computersareevil on Thursday September 01 2016, @05:12PM
And for that home rooftop to charge the vehicle, the vehicle has to be at the home.
Which it's not because the owner is at work paying for the car, the panels, and the home.
So the owner (if they're lucky) has to grid-tie the panels, then pay a fee to an electric company to have that electricity transported many miles away to where their car is.
Or buy the electricity back at a loss to charge the car when they get home in the evening.
And that all assumes the panels aren't covered with snow today. And the inverter works.
So even a home dweller has issues with solar.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:14AM
This is just the Invisible Hand doing its job, surely? Fossil fuels have been too cheap
The Market is correcting itself. The Tea Party will be pleased.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:07PM
Lack of workers forces local businesses to look elsewhere.
Like India.
Oh! You were implying that businesses were realizing that tech can happen outside of a small geographical area? Hahahahaha!
We'll just keep throwing H1Bs at the problem.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:24PM
But see, part of that is the California conceit. In plenty other places people live in things called apartments in highrise buildings, to supply the needed housing at a price they can afford. California could do that too but people all labor under the delusion that they're owed a ranch and open highways for their big pickups to get them to work.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @01:59PM
No it is nothing like that. People clearly want to live in apartments. That's why rent for apartments in big cities is sky high.
The delusion is that if you own a house you deserve to stop someone from building a multi-family unit next door because property values. As if your personal wealth gives you the right to dictate how your neighbor uses their property.
Remove the artificial restriction on supply and the market will fix the problem.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @04:07PM
As a personal anecdote, I experienced both the homeowner's burdens and the renter's uncertainty. I am renting now and have no plans to go back to owning a house in any foreseeable future. Not until I retire, at least - and even then it might be a few hundred miles away from everything. A private home requires too much work, and you are paying for the whole army of contractors who come to you at random time to very inefficiently perform repairs, for which they charge ridiculous money. At a rental place most of that is handled by the staff, and I do not need to deal with mowing, cleaning, appliances, water leaks, electrical issues, and everything else. I can focus on my life. I don't need to wait for three contractors to come and give me quotes. Also, as a renter, I am highly mobile, whereas a homeowner is anchored to his house.
Highrises could be a solution, and technically they can be built. They are built in Japan even. But the vast majority of the land is covered by one-story buildings, private homes among those. No surprise that we ran out of the land. Private homes will never be sufficient for such industrial area, they just don't provide enough population density, and they require cars to even get to a store. We don't need to build an arcology yet, but someone, like the planning commission, should ensure that many highrises are constructed as apartments. Otherwise it will be 100% businesses and zero workers.
Some say that there is no water. Desalination plants are needed, working on nuclear power. This land is valuable enough just because of what is already here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:05PM
Why must the perfect be the enemy of the superlative?
80% of families are two-car households with one of those cars being driven exclusively less than 40 miles a day. The original Nissan Leaf from several years ago is perfect for those people -- twice as much range as they need in a very comfortable and high-performance four-door five-passenger family sedan.
And not only do they never have to stop at the gas station or get an oil change or have messes to clean up, they have less range anxiety than in a gas-powered car. The car starts every day with a full "tank," in stark contrast to a gas-powered car that you might have to fill up on the way to work when you're already running late or else you'll have to call AAA.
Now, is it easy to come up with examples of people for whom such a vehicle is a poor fit? Sure. But it's just as easy to come up with examples of people for whom an SUV is a poor fit, or a pickup, or a tractor-trailer rig, or a Lamborghini...yet why is it that we only hear about the people for whom an electric commuter car is a poor fit? Especially when the EV is the perfect fit for overwhelmingly larger numbers of people than those other categories I just listed?
You never hear people whining that the Honda Civic is a totally useless idea for a car because it can't tow a motorhome over the Rockies. But even hint that commuters might like the best commuter car ever made, and we're instantly shouted down by horror stories of realtors hauling 20-ton loads of horseshit through Minnesota on their vacations to race in the Indy 500.
We get it. You're a special snowflake. But that's just the point -- you're special, so what makes you think your own idiosyncratic limits have any bearing on everybody else who isn't special like you?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:18PM
80% of families are two-car households with one of those cars being driven exclusively less than 40 miles a day. The original Nissan Leaf from several years ago is perfect for those people
Perhaps because they have nowhere to charge this wonder? I thought that I already mentioned this sad fact. Besides, I think that your 80% relates to families only - and there are plenty of people who do not fall under that definition. Most rental places only give you one parking spot, and a single person has no use of a second car. His gf has her own, also one car.
they have less range anxiety than in a gas-powered car. The car starts every day with a full "tank,"
Only if their day is extremely regular. Such as there is never a need to hurry home from work to rush a child to a doctor. If your life is not predictable, most today's EVs (except Teslas with adequate range) will not be a good choice. It's not I who tells you that - it's the customers who by and large stick to gasoline cars. They are not stupid! But those who find an EV good for them, buy them! I see them on the roads more and more. If you are a homeowner and you never have a need to unexpectedly travel too far, why not? But if you are young, mobile, active, you have no house to charge at; you probably rent, and you probably travel from one end of the state to another on a whim. I still do. You are trying to sell an EV to a wrong demographic!
We get it. You're a special snowflake. But that's just the point -- you're special
I have thick skin. But the important fact is that there are many people like me. We are trying to tell you how things are in our land, but for some reason you refuse to listen! You seem to resort to insults instead. “Jupiter, you are angry, therefore you are wrong.”
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday August 31 2016, @07:03PM
Yet more FUD.
I challenge you to find a suburban garage that lacks a 110-volt outlet. And that outlet will be far more than enough to put a full charge in an empty Leaf battery overnight.
Did you not read a word I wrote? Where, exactly, did I even hint at suggesting that EVs are good for everybody? How on Earth did you miss my comparison with SUVs and pickups, which are themselves laughably bad options in just as many not-hard-to-find circumstances?
Oh, give me a break. For normal people, the distances involved in those sorts of things are well within range of an EV. You're having more snowflake fantasies.
And you completely utterly failed to comprehend a word of what I wrote. How many times do I have to write that EVs aren't for snowflakes, and that snowflake specialness is as irrelevant to the suitability of EVs for the masses as the power-to-weight ratio of SSO rockets?
Oh, the ironing.
I'm not even vaguely hinting that an EV is good for you. I'm typing practically in every sentence that EVs are not an universal solution.
Whereas you're the one insisting that, because an EV is bad for you, EVs are bad for everybody. Despite your simultaneous pride at being part of a minority.
Let me guess: you and everybody you know only wears Birkenstocks, and you'd argue just as vociferously and insanely at a suggestion that most people (but not you and your friends) are going to be well suited to wearing closed-toe shoes, right?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @03:12AM
No, I think he's saying that if California goes this route, it's going to fuck over a number of poor people, the very people many politicians claim they want to protect. So instead of imposing broad restrictions that create such collateral damage, maybe they should make a more focused effort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @09:39PM
My commute has never exceeded 15 miles, and is usually under 5. I have however moved from California to Texas to Massachusetts to Florida. Am I expected to sell the car and buy a new one? Am I expected to pay to have it towed?
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:01PM
If your concept of moving doesn't involve moving vans, you're far enough out of the mainstream that you're not relevant to the question.
If it does, then you'd deal with it the same way most people do with their own daily drivers. If you're doing it on the cheap and renting the van and driving the van yourself, you also rent a tow hitch or dolly or whatever. If you're more typical middle class, you pay somebody else to worry about it at the same time you pay somebody to worry about the sofa. And, yes, for some that'll mean selling the old and buying the new in the new city -- or, just as likely, doing a trade-in on the lease.
Think of the typical suburban family with 2.5 kids. How do you think they move both his and her cars?
Or, think about all those classic cars out there that only go on weekend drives to the park and would make lousy road trip cars. No different.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:51PM
The semi-cheap long-haul way is to hire ABF. I did it from Massachusetts to Florida with 2 kids, 1 wife, and 1 car.
You get a 28-foot trailer (rear part of a short 18-wheeler) dropped off for you to load. You get a couple days to load it, then the driver comes back and heads off with it. (adding commercial freight behind your stuff to reduce costs; you pay partly according to the portion of the trailer occupied) While he drives, you drive the car(s). You can beat him, since he has to deal with the commercial freight. He drops the trailer off at your new place, giving you a couple days to unload.
This... does not work with an EV.
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday August 31 2016, @11:21PM
Obviously.
Nor are most suburbanites cutting costs by renting shared space on commercial freight vans and going on a 24-hours-of-driving road trip.
Realistically, that's two hotel stays, much better done with three. Add in two days each of loading and unloading and you're looking at an entire week of nonstop hard manual labor for the whole family. followed by all the usual chaos and disruption of unpacking, a new school for the kids, all the rest.
Or, in other words, you are most emphatically not part of the 80% of the population for whom an EV is a good fit. Which is okay! Good for you that you can pull off that sort of thing, but the 80% for whom an EV is a good fit would think you barking mad to even suggest an ordeal as what you put yourself though.
That 80%...would pay a moving company for the whole mess. They would spend more upfront on the cost of the truck, yes, but they'd at least break even with you, if not come out ahead, by the end of the week...because, while you were paying for hotels and your own gas and what-not, you also weren't getting paid to work. They, on the other hand, took exactly one day for the move, and probably on a weekend: they took a taxi to the airport, took another taxi to their new home, slept on the floor that night (or maybe in the new beds they were wanting to get anyway), and were off to the new job the very next day. After a few days of "roughing it" in their new home -- or even in an hotel -- the movers showed up and had everything magically unloaded while they were at work and the kids were at school.
If you enjoyed your odyssey, all the more power to you. But most of the rest of us would think you penny wise and pound foolish -- and perhaps penny foolish, to boot.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01 2016, @12:44AM
Well, I didn't have to drive a truck, didn't have strangers touching all my stuff, and didn't have to pay $$$$$ for special car shipping. I got at least 2 full days on each end, so more than 48 hours. I got so far ahead of the truck driver that I stopped to spend most of a day at the Jacksonville Zoo. The trip was in fact kind of interesting.
Even if I went full-service (them packing and loading/unloading) there would still be the matter of a car. That costs extra, especially if you don't want it towed and probably damaged. Really, I'd end up driving it in that case too.
The main reason I can see for flying is states that won't let you pass through with things you own, such as guns. This is of course a conflict with other stuff that might need to go by car, such as an aquarium with live fish. I have a coworker who did Florida to Texas with a desktop PC running off of a UPS so that he wouldn't need to reboot.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:22PM
The flight from CA is ongoing. Businesses and people alike move out as soon as they can.
That's a pretty odd statement to make about the 17th fastest growing state in the union. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:31PM
Purely personal observations... I cannot tell who comes in, but I know for a fact that many leave. I'm not leaving yet because I can afford burning a lot of cash on convenience and pleasant weather. But I have minimal expenses otherwise. YMMV. One of my coworkers is buying a house in Gilroy this very moment; he will be spending more than 1 hour in a gridlock on Hwy 101 to and from work.