JoshuaFalken

A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can't charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.

Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that's about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don't go on long drives the vast majority of time and don't more than fifty or so miles of range.

I'll use Tesla as the example here only because it's the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:

A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.

They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.

Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it's probably moreso the auto industry's fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.

If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won't bother.

Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.

I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.

Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.

It's a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won't have politicians that can be bought. That's a different discussion altogether.

In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.

Jail time isn't a likely outcome. It just isn't the world we live in, unfortunately.

I was looking at the Volt a couple years ago but the only ones around were over 25k. Then I started looking for a BMW i3, but, like so many of the cheaper EVs, there's not many for sale. It's a shame these smaller vehicles, even a hybrid, aren't pumped out the factories left, right, and centre.

It'd be so much safer - and quieter - in the city if smaller cars were more pervasive.

It's almost like they knew in the sixties that they were in for some problems and have since been devising ever more complicated methods of disinforming the public in order to maintain their wealth. Does my head in sometimes.

Without knowing any examples of the vehicles that are for sale everywhere except, roughly, half the world, I can't really say much them. What I can say is that compared to the monstrous subsidies the oil and gas industry recieve, it does seem like those tariffs could be done away with. At least on the face of it, perhaps the issue is more intricate than that but I'm sure you grasp my meaning.

I see what you're getting at but this would be difficult for a publisher to stick with in the event the game does horribly. Requiring them to keep their word to the date advertised would end up with them only guaranteeing a week, or send ramifications through all industries requiring truth in advertising.

A middle ground would be simply to legislate that when games require online connectivity for any reason, the appropriate software is released to allow a locally run server to enable online function at the time the company decides to decommission their servers. Then require them to hold these files in an accessible manner for at least as long as the servers had been active for.

That would be difficult in the event the company goes out of business, but I'm sure this would be a difficult thing to explain to most politicians so maybe not so simple after all.

When 52% of all trips made are less than 3 miles and less than 2% are over fifty miles, I don't think battery swapping is something any individual needs on a regular basis.

I could get on board if manufacturers were making $10,000 sub 50 mile vehicles that were compatible with a swap station so you could switch to a larger battery for the weekend. This would have to be a standard adopted by all however, and even before that, they'd have to make small cars. Which they won't, because we all know they are too busy making trucks and SUVs.

Not sure if this image from the DOT is actually of this specific shipment because I found this image from April when they moved the eighth part and it's less that half the weight. Here's a two minute video of it.

Seems like you're describing renting in an apartment complex or similar. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison to owning a single family home.

Not that you've raised bad points. Renting does have the benefits you've described, though lawn care in my experience is hit and miss. The issue is getting these benefits must cost something. So long as having them doesn't mean the rent is double the mortgage, then it's worthwhile.

Otherwise, renting is just another more expensive option for all the people that can't afford the upfront cost of getting into the housing market.

I see what you mean. People use their devices at different levels. That may not be the best way to put it.

My meaning is that a portion of the users will be the type to spend a couple hours digging through each setting on a new device to set it to their needs. Another group will use the device with minimal initial adjustments, and tweak things as they find things they don't like. Then there's a third group that will almost never open a preferences panel and just use a device by its factory settings, likely to never consider potential improvements to their user experience.

From what you've said, I imagine your in that second group. I myself am in the first one I described; I look at the options of any hardware I purchase or software I download before I actually begin to use it.

Unfortunately - in the context of this post - the number of people in that third group I imagine outnumber us by multiple orders of magnitude, and therefore companies with shareholders to appease will always manufacture devices with as much bloat and advertising and invasive data mining as they can be paid to put in.