As I have already pointed out, even in the US, the average daily mileage is only 30; and most people don't suddenly jump into their car and drive for days on any regular basis.

And there's very little problem with a 2 hour jam. It's a 7+ hour jam that does for your range.

I'm not saying that batteries don't degrade, only it takes more than a 'few years'. The batteries are expected to last 10 years/100,000-150,000 miles or more without significant degradation, and there's no evidence that this won't be achieved.

The other thing I haven't mentioned- cost. Yes, electric cars are fairly expensive right now, but they batteries are getting exponentially cheaper every year. Fossil cars, are NOT getting cheaper. We're right about at the crossing point now; electric cars are going to be cheaper- and second hand cars are becoming more and more available and more and more cost-effective, and they're cheaper to run. Pretty soon everyone will preferentially run an electric car, because it's cheaper.

I mean, sure, electric cars are better for only 99% of most people's journeys.

I'm in the UK; it has a half decent; but not fully decent infrastructure, some parts of the country don't have very much public charging infrastructure.

Obviously, if you don't have much public infrastructure around you, you shouldn't get the Leaf.

Nissan Leafs don't seem to lose much range; it's still a relatively new car, but so far it seems that there's very little degradation of the batteries; the idea that range plummets after a 'few years' is clearly bullshit.

Indeed, the second hand value seems to have gone up recently for vehicles of the same age.

The rule of thumb that Leaf drivers use is 70 mile range at 70 mph; note that the A/C or heating makes very little difference; unless you're stuck for hours in a traffic jam; which is pretty damn rare, but even then you have the choice of how much to use the A/C; it's not like you're going to be unexpectedly stranded, the car keeps you informed of the situation.

I never said it was the quietest car in the world, only that it's pretty quiet.

Bigger, heavier, gas guzzling, expensive cars may well be somewhat be quieter in some cases.

But the Nissan Leaf is still very quiet, and relaxing.

He started the journey only half full, in a region with hardly any charging infrastructure. Like, why?

If he hadn't done that, if he had been fully charged, he would have had far fewer problems.

It's because if he hadn't had done that, the review of the range extender would have been pointless. i.e. the charging infrastructure would have got him the whole way with less problems without using the extender.

And note, the reason the chargers weren't working was because he hadn't set the cards up, and when he did set the cards up, he got going again.

And note the hardware that did fail was the extender. Failures of pure electric cars are fairly rare. What do you expect from a much more complicated drive train?

So, no, it's a bullshit review; and the idea that he 'wouldn't have made it' is bullshit as well.

No, not double, even with a Nissan leaf, on very long journeys with fast charging, it's about 50% longer, not double (like 11 hours versus 7) and travel comfort is better if anything (cabin preheat). On journeys only slightly beyond maximum range there's far less difference, and there's hardly any difference with a Tesla at all, ever.

Obviously if you need to do a lot of long journeys, frequently, a Nissan Leaf is probably not the right car, but it can do it if you need to do that occasionally with no problem, provided there's fast chargers on your route anyway.

Nah. The average time it takes the owner to recharge is about 15 seconds, you plug it in, walk away. When you come back- it's fully charged.

Slightly less cynically, most users average 30 miles per day. On a ~3kW 240 volt charger (which is available in most places) that will only take about 3 hours to top up; but you don't really care, because almost certainly you won't be waiting for it, and you may well not need to recharge every day; it's like a cell phone. And most home chargers can do it faster than that.

Recharge stations depend where you are. But pretty much any wall socket that is anywhere near a road is a recharge station at a pinch.

That's not an electric car, it's a hybrid.

Actually the reason the Leaf looks a bit odd, is the headlights.

They're not a statement.

The headlights look like that for a good reason- it makes the car a lot quieter for the user; it deflects the air away from the side mirrors.

Because it's an electric car, it can actually be quiet, and then you actually notice these things.

In the UK, there's the Advertising Standards Agency, which bizarrely enough is a trade body, and not a government body, and they actual force advertisements to be, not misleading, and not dishonest.

It works surprisingly well.

Renewables are far more *energy* efficient, so yes, I do want reduced *energy* use.

If I drive a mile in a petroleum fuelled car, I get (say) 30 mpg, in an electric car, it's >100 mpg(e). So: lower energy.

And heating; it takes a lot less energy to use a heat pump than it does to heat a building with fossil fuels, or nuclear. So again, yes, lower energy.

Energy is NOT the same as comfort, or economics.

And I don't trust nuclear power; and I say this as someone qualified in physics; there's no known way to stop nuclear reactors that are sized for generating power from melting down at least sometimes. They've said that it was 'safe' too many times before, it's like the boy the cried wolf, in reverse.

But it doesn't really matter; renewables are growing far too fast for nuclear to ever see a resurgence. Renewables are growing with double digit growth, nuclear is basically shrinking overall.

Well they could ideally (from their point of view) go with an extraordinary rendition to America and put him through a legal process and then lock him up/shoot him to discourage others.

But I hope they don't; the guy is literally a hero.

Ridiculous why?

He explicitly said that that was what the cache was for; otherwise he would have been assassinated to silence him, but the existence of the cache meant they couldn't do that: presumably someone, somewhere would have released the key if he'd gone missing (i.e. a "dead man's handle").

Snowden deliberately filtered what was released to minimise the risks to agents. That cache is the really bad stuff.

Well, there's a way to know, if they really have cracked it Snowden would be assassinated/kidnapped and repatriated soon. That cache was what was keeping him alive.

Failing that he'd have to go into hiding; and the Russians will be able to tell him whether that's necessary or not.

If that doesn't happen, it probably hasn't been cracked.

So we just have to watch what Snowden does.

Still, maybe it has been, the security agencies would have to be pretty damn stupid to not realise that gaping whole in the plan. But if Snowden doesn't disappear one way or another, then yup; they're that damn stupid.

You're completely wrong on every point, flu is fucking scary to epidemiologists. I had swine flu, that was *awful*; but that was only slightly worse than normal flu.

But flu killed more people in 1918 than the whole of WWI; and there's no reason to think that's worse case. The 1918 flu took fit, healthy soldiers and people and left them dead surrounded by blood they'd coughed up within a day. It had something like a 10% deathrate.

Nobody can even predict earthquakes right now. An accurate series of predictions that were within one on the Richter scale would actually be a great triumph.

And earthquakes don't mutate; the doctors were terrified that Ebola would become more infectious, and then it could have spread into the West. For example, it did reach the West, but luckily when it becomes infectious, it gives obvious symptoms. What if that changed? What if it became more infectious and less obvious symptoms? Then we'd be fucked.

And they thought at one point that the Ebola outbreak had been ended; but it suddenly came back. That also terrified the doctors, when you don't understand your enemy, your enemy can kill you in huge numbers.

You just have no clue what you're talking about.

Cars aren't a contagious disease that grows exponentially.

You might think there's a big difference between 20,000 deaths and 200,000 deaths, but with exponential phenomenon you have to take logarithms, it's the difference between 4.3 and 5.3; the models were only off by 20%.

If the international response hadn't been what it was, it could have been 6 or 7, tens of millions of deaths.

Really, this whole post is the most dangerously stupid thing I've ever read. The modelling didn't fail, and even if you live in the West, if you weren't scared rigid by the Ebola outbreak, you didn't understand what just happened, and if you think the modelling failed, you don't understand what modelling can, and does do.

The Ebola outbreak wasn't just a single disease, Viruses evolve very quickly, and some previous versions of Ebola seem to have been infectious by inhalation. If Ebola had evolved to better do that, it could have been a worldwide pandemic with a 50% death rate.