"if local government is using public funds to run fiber, allow other telcos the use of that fiber at cost"

That's the best solution. The item that it naturally scarce is owned by the people, serviced by contractors every few years. Then we can have a real competitive market by leasing access to the network.

This might not be a problem if they just disclose what chemicals they're pumping into the ground. Then, we would either 1. Not need to worry or 2. setup monitoring stations to check for those specific chemicals.

So I did the math. To store just 1 MWH of energy using a weight would require 8 thousand tons.

Check my math:

1 MWH = 1MJ x 3600s = 3.6 x 10^9J.

Energy = mass x gravity accel x height. mass = energy / (gravity x height)

mass = 3.6 * 10^9J / (9.81N/kg x 50m) = 7339450 kg = 8090 ton.

Just a data point for those interested in SUVs. I've got a diesel Jeep Grand Cherokee with a great 4-wheel drive system and 7,000 lb. towing capacity. On my recent trip trip to Atlanta, I drove 620 miles mostly highway on one tank using just shy of 20 gallons of diesel. That's 31 mpg for a vehicle with true utility.

I wasn't referring to loan repayment. In response to your "potential for future" statement, I was referring to the ROI in terms of progress and advancement. There's no guarantee the grad student will do anything significant in return for the loan. Tesla on the other hand, already has.

"but low and middle income grad students, who really are the future"

How so? Does the government get some guarantee on these grad students that's any better than what the DOE has? I don't think so.

My issue is that context is often ignored. You already know it's a rocket launcher, that you want it to launch now is obvious and make is superfluous. It should be:

rocketlauncher.go()

Yea, foo is stupid, but your example is to the other extreme.

I tuned into "Rush" today for some entertainment. According to El Rushmo, the NWS is full of liberals who love crisis and government control - and so the "overreaching" forecasts were just for their pleasure.

As for the crisis part, I could only think of Fox News with its constant "ALERT" banners. Compared to the "liberal" NPR, which helps me go to sleep.

GM actually did a cool ground-up design that was called Autonomy (looks like they changed the name to Hy-Wire) since I followed it. It used a skate-board chassis very similar to what Tesla uses now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

You could use battery packs as buffers. 1 MWH of battery buffer should do nicely.

60 mph is 26.8224 meters per second. At 3.2 seconds, that's 8.382 mps2 / gravity (9.8 mps2) = 0.85G. I'll bet it's even higher off the line.

How do you think the model 3 development is funded? This IS the business model. Make expensive cars to raise money for the development of (lower margin) affordable cars. Also, this doesn't inhibit the model 3's development. It's not like they have to do one thing at a time.

Huh? What's your point? Are you being sarcastic?

Also they will likely take less than the 25% margin they take on the model S. So if they shoot for a 10% margin @ $35K they need to build it for $31.5K vs. $26K for a 25% margin.

I always felt awkward saying Windows Phone Phone.