Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
That would be why I included the caveat about someone already shopping for a new car.
You have to understand that the majority of buyers will not countenance buying a salvage titled vehicle and restoring it, let alone doing the work on it themselves. You’re in a rather unique situation there which is not going to be applicable to most people.
You can even buy solar panels at Harbor Freight these days. At the moment, nominal 100 watt panels for $95 each. If you can drive the screws and find somewhere to stick them, there’s no need to sign up for a predatory lease. To level one charge (i.e. 120v at 15 amps, 1800 watts) you’d only need 18 of the things, maybe call it 20 to have some fudge factor built in, that’s $1880 plus probably some bits and bobs for a frame and wiring, inverters, and so on.
That’d only be 151 square feet of panels. Your local code authority will probably have less to say about it if you have a solar carport plugged directly into your car and nothing else versus nailing them to your house’s roof, as well.
No. They use electricity. And my average monthly power bill is already over $400 a month. You think I want that to be even higher? No way.
Fueling costs per mile (using the term “fuel” rather loosely for EVs) are significantly lower for electric vehicles than combustion, even taking into account plugging the thing in at home with an extension cord. It’s going to be a rather long break even period when comparing to a salvage title clunker, but for someone shopping for a new car to begin with it makes sense.
It’s not costing anyone “less” to be paying at the pump. It’s just an easily forgotten regular expense that everyone is used to. Meanwhile, people have been conditioned to have a cow over seeing any increased number on their electricity bill even if it’s only a couple of bucks. Right now with local gasoline prices it costs something like $60 to fill up my Subaru from empty and nearly $150 for my truck (it has a 35 gallon tank!) and the former I could easily do twice a month if I weren’t riding so many motorcycles this time of year instead. In the Scoob, that’s around 784 miles of driving for $120 in fuel. That’s only be $47.04 if I had a reasonably recent EV and charged it at home.
I went through the same rigmarole replacing my house’s oil heat with mini splits. Yes, my electricity bill went up… On average something like $40 a month. Meanwhile I stopped paying $300 to $400 a month to my former oil company for five or six months out of the year. $2000 - $480 = a $1520 or so net yearly savings I proceeded to blow on camera lenses and more motorcycle parts.
We could try a pretzel. It almost worked on Bush the 2nd.
It’s the same way they raised the drinking age to 21 despite there being no national drinking age laws nor a theoretically legal/constitutional method for enacting one. The latter was, obviously, successful.
That, and the leviathans become a total non-issue once you get the stasis gun. You can find the blueprint fragments in fairly safe and easy to reach places (albeit in a somewhat RNG dependent manner, I believe). A fully charged shot freezes one in place for a full 30 seconds. An uncharged shot nails it there more than long enough for you to make the next one a fully charged one. Then you can either knife them to death trivially or, if you’re a weenie, simply swim away.
Sure, but I built my previous rig in 2012 and kept it in service up until I put together my latest one just at the end of last year. Even with the best will in the world I had absolutely no intention of building yet another new gaming computer any time in the next two years regardless of geopolitical fuckery.
In the immortal words of Daniel Rutter (again): If nothing else, backups are necessary because at some point in your life you will confidently instruct your computer to destroy your data.
Yes. The problem with that is of course that this is tacit FUD which reads, whether intentionally or not, “I don’t want an EV therefore it won’t make sense for anyone else to drive one, either.”
There’s more than enough misinformation floating around about electric cars already. I specifically want to address the “your electric [sic] will go up real high!!!” argument I hear on a seemingly weekly basis these days, which is something that seems to make people particularly antsy.
Obligatory Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NG4hycq8n0