No, I think you got it. You either have a lot of work to install ductwork or you're going to be doing lots of mini splits with ugly lines all over the exterior.
and that should be obvious right? Let's say you're familiar with how fast your car eats gas and you drive around on flats all the time.
When you take it into the mountains, it's not surprising that your gas gauge goes down a bit faster when you're pushing that gas pedal a little further than usual.
Perhaps the takeaway is that EVs shouldn't so prominently display the range as part of the "gas" gauge the way they tend to do.
I have it show percent, not range. Tesla defaults to percent on the main display. I'm not sure about other cars. When you use navigation then Tesla will show you the expected charge at your destination and it's been pretty accurate.
I drove my wife's Model 3 on a short trip from Sacramento, CA to Santa Cruz. 3.5hrs if you factor in traffic (2.5hrs without).
When we left, estimated range was 45% on arrival. We arrived with 27% range. Granted, we did encounter a crapload of traffic, but the Nav system took that into account because the time was accurate.
I don't fully fault Tesla for the range inaccuracy; an ICE car would probably have had a similar issue. But it's not as smart as I thought it was, which is a shame.
I obviously don’t have a reason why it was so off. We regularly drive from near sac to Santa Cruz and it’s within a few percent with plenty of speeding. I commute 100 miles a day on the freeway, so maybe it knows my freeway driving habits very well.
Home prices in the '80s were ~$60,000; equivalent homes now are about 10x that [0]. With inflation bouncing around 2-6% on average [1], and only modest wage increases over decades [2], that makes the median home today way less affordable even with these relatively low interest rates.
All 4 of my children, in various stages of degreedness, have told me they have no hope of ever owning a home of their own like they were able to grow up in.
True, but home prices are also much higher than in the past partly thanks to that long period of low interest rates. Taking on these huge loans with corresponding (comparatively) high rates is a different ballgame than it was in the past.
Half of the federal govt's $31 trillion debt comes due in the next two years. It will be refinanced at much higher rates...Or we'll see Yield Curve Control from the federal reserve. Take your pick.
These aren't the exact rates that ordinary folks will be borrowing at. See credit cards for instance (way higher), or mortgages (a little higher).
Counterintuitively, it is possible for mortgage rates to go down even when the Feds are raising their rates. The interest rates for us normies are dictated in large part to how confident the financial sector feels. If the Fed's raising of the interest rate makes the financial sector feel that inflation is under control, then mortgage rates may go down.
"The federal funds rate, which was about 11% in 1979, rose to 20% by June 1981. The prime interest rate, an important economic measure, eventually reached 21.5% in June 1982"
It doesn't really matter what rates were in the early 80s.
We're adjusted to the ZIRP rates from 2008-2021. Unprofitable business ventures that were kicking the can down the road rolling over cheap short term borrowing should go broke as their borrowing rates adjust higher. And sectors like commercial real estate are getting squeezed by remote work and online shopping, raising their borrowing rates should accelerate their failure.
I would like to see a MASSIVE increase in the amount of nuclear power in use around the world.
AND, I appreciate calling out conflicts of interest, astroturfing, and artificial "viral" information campaigns.
There is one problem with Nuclear power that was never talked about before the Ukraine War: War itself. More specifically, war in the area that is powered by nuclear. Damage to reactors, power plant workers fleeing, damage to nuclear waste containers, and more.
It actually seems to be a case study that empirically proves the opposite. Hundreds of thousands dead in the Russian invasion of Ukraine so far, untold injuries. Incredible amounts of destruction of cities and civilian infrastructure. But yet none from an exploding nuclear power plant. Why? Because its not really possible and it serves very little point. If the goal is to terrorize people and inflict damage there are much better ways as has been demonstrated.
> power plant workers fleeing
That is an argument for no power plants with workers anywhere.
In WW2 dams were attacked causing lots of damage. I haven't seen anyone using that as an argument that we should demolish all hydro dams lest they become targets in a future war. Strangely this kind of thinking only applies to nuclear power.
> But yet none from an exploding nuclear power plant. Why?
Interesting question.
I think the answer is that Russia didn't plan to occupy the largest nuclear power plant in Europe; they occupied Ukrainian territory, and there was a NPP in it. I think it's inconvenient for them to have international inspectors paying attention to the ZNPP. It's right on the frontline; it's on the shore of this huge reservoir on the Dniepro, and Ukraine occupies the opposite shore.
Russia doesn't need the energy from ZNPP; if there's one thing they have plenty of, it's energy.
And for Ukraine's part, they are playing a slow game. I think it suits them that Russia has this inconvenience in the middle of their frontline.
Control/operation of nuclear plants has already been a target of brinksmanship. And while your point about dams is a good one, disasters like a dam collapse (which just happened as a result of the Turkey/Syria earthquake, and is adding to the already catastrophic devastation), are more localized in time than nuclear incidents which present long-term environmental challenges. Sometime I'd like to visit Chernobyl, but I'm not sure I'd live there.
If a pressurized water reactor is hit breached with explosives, it instantly releases superheated water vapor carrying radioactive iodine and caesium.
For reactors that could be threatened, they should be "walk-away safe" and even more focused on recycling spent fuel so large quantities are not necessary to keep on hand.
As an add on to that - if nuclear energy did start becoming mass produced in the developed world where some modicum of safety/regulation around waste can be assumed, once all of the necessary reactors are built out to supply first world energy needs, at best, those same private developers/contractors will start lobbying efforts in more questionable parts of the world to build these things. Then it be framed as an equity issue - why is the first world preventing the rest of the world from catching up - even though its actually just a plain "it's not safe to build it in a country in the middle of a civil war".
The more likely scenario I would envision is that - under the guise of business "joint venture partnerships in next generation energy" - the technological know how and access to a steady stream of the requisite raw materials to build weapons will leak to more questionable parts of the world.
I think this is rather a silly thing to be concerned about given the consequences of the world either running out of cheap energy or continuing to dump huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. I will roll the dice on your crystal ball being defective rather than the alternative.
My hot take, pretending I was an environmentalist, is that fossil fuel/climate change is the object d'ire for environmentalists only because nuclear ended up not gaining traction. The masses of environmentalists have moved on to a different front of the battlefield for protecting the earth but would return if nuclear gained traction.
It's kind of like now that humans conquered polio and smallpox, the next challenge toward advancing the human race is ridding ourselves of cancer. If polio and smallpox returned, we'd be back to fighting those.
Your baseless theories ascribing borderline malicious intentions on the part of actors like environmentalists and nuclear construction interests are amusing, but I fail to see why they should be taken seriously.
afaik all modern designs for nuclear power are aimed at being small so they can be installed underground, which would make them much safer during these events.
Radioactive material is not something you can only find in nuclear plants (you can get same levels of radioactive materials in hospitals for example), there are also much easier ways to cause worse disasters (think about destroying a dam for example)
A destroyed dam is temporary damage. There are going to be eventually gravely ill Russian soldiers last year because they ignored the warnings in the Chernobyl exclusion area.
> In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Mr. Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the man, he said.
> But in invisible hot spots, some covering an acre or two, some just a few square yards, radiation can soar to thousands of times normal ambient levels.
> A soldier in such a spot would be exposed every hour to what experts consider a safe limit for an entire year, said Mr. Chareyron, the nuclear expert. The most dangerous isotopes in the soil are Cesium 137, Strontium 90 and various isotopes of plutonium. Days or weeks spent in these areas bring a high risk of causing cancer, he said.
"Temporary damage", really? The deaths of those downstream from a burst dam are no less permanent than the death of an irradiated Russian. And there are a lot more of the former than the latter.
how is destroying an entire dam easier than making an armed incursion into a nuclear power plant to steal radioactive waste? Just in terms of metric tons of ammunition needed
not to mention, maybe the place you want to attack doesn't have a dam?
