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[This is a re-post of an older comment of mine from July 29 2021. Copied it to my Journal for easier reference]

Let's put some actual numbers on this:

Extracting oil is about 93% efficient,[1] and moving it to the refinery varies in efficiency depending on method; pipelines are best at 78%.[1] Let's assume just that one method.

Refining oil into gasoline is about 85% efficient.[2]

I can't be sure on figures for moving the refined gasoline to the pump, but since it's a liquid, it's probably similar to moving crude oil around, so let's use numbers from the oil transportation article. 78% efficiency for a pipeline, 10% efficiency for short-distance road. Let's further assume that a quarter of the gasoline's travel is by road (pretty much every gas station I've ever seen gets its tanks refilled by a truck), so 0.78 * 0.75 + 0.10 * 0.25 or about 61% efficiency for the trip.

An internal combustion engine at best reaches 50% efficiency, with claims of up to 56% on the horizon,[3] but that's on a race track, or in the lab under strictly-controlled conditions, not in a normal daily-driver dealing with real-world road travel. That 4-banger in your driveway gets closer to 35% efficiency [4] if it's reasonably modern.

A manual transmission is around 94% efficient, while an automatic is around 86% efficient.[12] Let's give our car a manual transmission, to maximize the efficiency here.

0.93 * 0.78 * 0.85 * 0.61 * 0.35 * 0.94 ≈ 0.124

Now for electric:

Coal is generally considered just about the worst, least efficient fuel to power the grid with, but we're trying to make electric look bad, so let's just pretend that 100% of the juice to power our EVs comes from coal.

Extracting coal from the ground is about 82% efficient.[5]

Transporting it to a power plant varies by method, but most coal is transported by trains, which is at best 85% efficient.[6]

Turning the coal into power is at best 45% efficient.[7]

Transmitting that juice to the charging station is around 98% efficient.[8]

The charging station itself will be around 86% efficient.[9]

I couldn't find "general" numbers for EV motors and inverters, but I did find numbers for Teslas parts, and it's not unreasonable to assume other EV manufacturers have similar efficiencies.

Tesla claims the inverter between the battery and motors is 99% efficient.[10]

Their motors range between 80 and 94% efficient.[10] Let's take the average, 87%.

0.82 * 0.85 * 0.45 * 0.98 * 0.86 * 0.99 * 0.87 ≈ 0.228

So by the raw maths, you'll get about 12.4% efficiency from oil well to wheels for your average ICE, versus about 22.8% efficiency at the worst from coal mine to wheels to move an EV around.

Even though I was trying to favor ICE, EV is still almost twice as efficient. If you pick the best production setups for both vehicle types, and add-in all the things each type can do that the other can't (like EVs have regenerative braking, while ICEs can heat the cabin with waste engine heat), and factor in whatever limitations I've forgotten here, EVs end up being something like 3 times as efficient as ICEs.

And that's not even factoring how much or how little each car type pollutes when driving, fueling, charging, etc. I mean, consider the degree of pollution controls you can put into place on the power plant providing the juice for the EV, versus what an ICE car can reasonably drag around with it, and also consider that in reality, coal only makes up 19% of all power generation in the US,[11] while the above estimate pretends that the EV is using 100% coal power. Every improvement in power generation, transmission, or conversion directly leads to an increase in overall efficiency for an EV, no matter how old or new it is -- joules are joules, no matter how they get to the car. The same could maybe be said for refining and transporting oil/gasoline, but I think we're pretty much already maxed-out there; I don't think there's any more efficiency to be had on that side of the gas pump.

Plus, we'll never run out of sunlight, wind, waves, or magma to provide the grid with power for EVs, but sooner or later we'll run out of fossil fuels, leaving ICEs to the museums and hobbyist market.

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Sources:

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Efficiency-of-crude-oil-extraction-and-transportation_tbl3_276835929
[2] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/oil-electricity-more-efficient-oil-gas/185046/#:~:text=On%20average,%20the%20refining%20process,conversion%20(or%20about%2021,000%20Btu.&text=4%20Fuel%20Oil%20(burned%20in,energy%20to%20produce%20every%20gallon.
[3] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a35646974/nissan-50-percent-thermal-efficiency/#:~:text=Toyota%20is%20believed%20to%20offer,achieves%2041%20percent%20thermal%20efficiency.
[4] https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/how-efficient-is-your-cars-engine
[5] https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2013/11/f4/coal.pdf --- page 16
[6] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0aad/34e11201abfcb8a573d3119ec30273bd2d13.pdf --- page 5
[7] https://www.ge.com/power/transform/article.transform.articles.2018.mar.come-hele-or-high-water#:~:text=Figures%20from%20the%20World%20Coal,rates%20are%20around%2040%20percent.
[8] http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/#:~:text=So%20even%20though%20electricity%20may,are%20high,%20around%20four%20percent.
[9] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7046253
[10] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34046953/tesla-range-strategy-details/
[11] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php
[12] https://www.nap.edu/read/21744/chapter/7#:~:text=These%20factors%20contribute%20to%20a,loss%20for%20conventional%20automatic%20transmissions. --- warning, interstitial ad that tries to sell you a book.

(I tried to pick sources that were clear, seemed credible, and weren't too old to be relevant. Note that I had to rearrange this list at least once, so don't be surprised if some refs in the text above are out of order, or if some point to the wrong links here)

This journal entry started out as an angry reply to someone on another site, but it occurs to me that it would be better if I calm down a bit and write it in a slightly more general manner. I am not naming the project or any individuals here because it doesn't matter. The problem I address here is not limited to one project. In fact, it's out of control.

--------------------

Background:

As is my normal practice, I filed an issue for a bug I ran into in a piece of software I use. Maybe it's just a common oversight, but this same issue affects another project that does the same job, as a matter of fact. Some discussion ensues, then it hits a wall when I finally request after a few weeks that it be addressed before the next major release of the project. Nope - it's decided that my issue is a new-feature request, even though it's clearly a bug.

Let's suppose that I'm looking for a short, money-agnostic term when referring to a group of people who have a monetary and/or business connection with a major corporation, and who as part of their commercial efforts, maintain a popular open source package.

So in my reply to that decision, I chose the word "contributors", simply for lack of a better term. My comment was misread, despite context that should have made it clear to the person I was talking to, that I was talking about the above paid crowd, not the unpaid contributors like him and I.

In any case, the result was a comment indicating that my bug report had been, shall we say, "de-prioritized".

That goes along with a "take it or leave it" comment I noticed in another exchange (different issue in the project, not involving me).

So my rant:

Hey, coders, all those kinds of responses say to an outsider is one of the following:

* "It's our product and we'll do what we want. Go get bent."
* "We don't care about that, because the company can make more money elsewhere."
* "Someone is paying me to do something else."
* "My time is worth X amount per hour, even time which I would otherwise spend away from my day job."

Yes, I have in fact run into all of these attitudes (clearly stated as such) in different projects, and in general chat not associated with any one product. I have had long discussions with people about that last one. One day that these attitudes need to get ground back down into the mud they're coming from.

Look, you have no time to work on something? Fine, just politely say so and walk away. Don't invoke priorities, business concerns, the underlying bug's longevity, or anything having to do with income or earning money.

Most importantly, don't get nasty about it. It does no one any good, and just makes you look like an asshole. People don't like to work with assholes. In a business context, assholes cost a company money by driving customers or partners away; a competent employer will fire such people and replace them with decent, equally-skilled people, even if it's only to reduce such losses (they should fire on principle, too, but money's an easier tool to wield in this case).

So long as it hasn't been, or doesn't turn into some long, protracted lack of time (to me, that would be 6 months or more, or two major releases), the worst you'll probably get from me will be something like "Bummer. Well it'll get fixed sooner or later". At least, at first.

But that's not how it went, and I see this happen to other people WAY too often.

How can I not be upset? In the past, I've filed issues, opened pull requests when I still could, discussed, and waited. In some cases, I'm still waiting, years later.

Granted, I've only been using the project in question for a matter of a few weeks, but this bug is old as dirt (probably dating back to the start of the project)... at what point do I have the right to run out of patience?

You know, they may be overkill much of the time, but now I realize just why these "code of conduct" things have been seeing increasing use lately. The software world really *does* need them.

As someone who's been on both sides of the fence, users just do not care about such things, and they shouldn't be expected to. They just want the program to work right, and in some fields, a program not working right can directly cost the end user money (in wasted electricity, restocking wasted materials, and replacing worn-out parts more often, at least).

I thought FOSS wasn't supposed to be about getting paid to code? That a project working really nicely for everyone was all the reward there needed to be? Write it yourself, but make it possible for others to reports problems, and for people to come along with solutions? "Scratch your own itch", maybe with the help of a back scratcher someone else contributed?

When I last checked, bug reports, testing, discussion, theories, etc. were considered important contributions, even if they're not necessarily as valuable as the code itself. Of course, a project without code can't exist, but a project with aspirations of wide usage, but without bug reports and feature requests, is a project that stagnates.

I may not have the hardware skills or coding prowess of the big names out there, and maybe I'm "not that bright" as someone here said once, but I've been doing what I can for open source software for about 30 years (i.e. since before it became known as such). I'm no superstar by any stretch; not as many people know me as I'd like, but it takes little more than a web search to find out that I'm not some unknown, either.

If I could do more for the open source world, including fixing bugs myself and offering pull requests for such fixes, I would.

But... between most modern languages being gibberish to me (even after having learned C in college in the early 90's), and having lost most of my skills to a stroke in late 2017, I just can't do much anymore, and I hate that fact. It pisses me off.

Basically, I have all but given up on the idea of trying to learn modern languages and techniques so that I can offer some actual code.

I've watched enough contributors leave from various projects because their code or issues are either ignored, deemed uninteresting to the project maintainers, or just considered unimportant enough that they've been left to lie fallow so long that the contribution is eventually rendered unusable (requiring a complete rewrite). Happens with bug reports, too. I doubt there's a single major open source project out there that doesn't have at least one legitimate bug report or unmerged pull request that's over a year old. I have a few out there like that. Don't blow smoke up my skirt, that's not "we don't have time". That's "no one cares".

I've been encouraged in the past to move beyond just bug reports and feature requests, and have even been invited-on as a core developer of one project, but I declined, for some of the above reasons (plus at the time, I had my own projects to take care of).

I mean, what the hell is the point of contributing to someone else's project, when my code would most likely stop working and have to be ripped out of my local copy anyway, as the underlying project carries on? I'm not saying I expect someone else to maintain that code, but code that gets merged is code that's orders of magnitude less likely to break as the project moves along.

If that's what I have to look forward to, why bother doing anything beyond bug reports and related?