Ignorance is not a counter-argument.

The people buying Tesla can afford to pay the full price.

I "can afford to pay the full price" of a Tesla, but I NEVER, EVER would. Supply/demand is a curve. Raise the price of a Tesla by 10%, you'll see a significant decline in sales, even if every single one of their customers "could" afford to pay more. "can afford to pay" is only relevant when it comes to life-or-death matters, not anywhere that there are options.

we should be reimbursing the purchase of bicycles. EVs don't help the environment, they just destroy less of it. Bicycles have even less impact.

There's nothing magic about bicycles. If I put a battery and electric motor on my bicycle, do I still get green cred? How is that not a motorcycle?

Rain might be a nuisance... How about a fully enclosed 4-wheel bicycle? Good? Still okay if I add an electric motor onto it?

You actually can't say adding an efficient motor is bad... But human power is terribly inefficient. For the distance covered, it's vastly more environmentally friendly to generate the electricity needed than to produce the food your body very inefficiently converts to energy. Burn the food in an engine, and you'll get far more work out of it! If human power was better, the industrial revolution would have involved millions of men on hamster wheels...

The later are the natural conclusion of increasing fuel efficiency standards, anyhow.

the people buying Tesla can afford to pay the full cost. Why are we subsidizing luxury cars for the higher wage earners?

Because there's no carbon/pollution tax, so subsidizing zero-emission vehicles is the flip side of the coin, paying them back just a little bit for the savings in health care costs from zero-emissions vehicles, that will be spread over a large population.

Encouraging the early adopters also helps quickly get the production costs falling, which, in a few years, will help the rest of us to afford to buy EVs.

There's no denying Tesla has done a hell of a lot to stimulate EV production. The money Tesla is paying to Li-Ion battery manufacturers is helping to get higher capacities developed quickly... And by that I mean: faster than "Moore's Law" improvements. The Chevy Volt came out after GM looked at Tesla and got scared of being left in the dust by the upstart. And before the Tesla Roadster debuted in 2007, most hybrids and EV were using NiMH batteries... Afterwards, only the Prius kept using them, while every other new vehicle quickly switched to Li-Ion.

And those subsidizes are not specific to Tesla. You can buy a much cheaper plug-in hybrid or a shorter-range EV like the popular Nissan Leaf, and get thousands in tax credits on it.

Oddly enough, MP3 players aren't using up any more resources today than they did 4 years ago, so no.

And being that this phone runs Gingerbread, yeah, some of the newest apps won't be available.

Running out of inittab sacrifices all the boot order and other features of SysV scripts. That's not a viable workaround, nor is writing your own keepalive scripts. In fact that's a vastly uglier hack than most other alternatives.

FWIW, a lot of the Y2K non-event was a result of a lot of hard work leading up to it.

No it wasn't. The Russians didn't go crazy over it like we did, and yet the year rollover didn't cause them to accidentally nuke us to the stone age.

We might well be able to stop an asteroid. We aren't going to stop Yellowstone.

By the time we've got the technology to deflect an asteroid, we'll probably similarly be able to drill down into a caldera and release the pressure in strategic locations.

Why cares? Why is this slashvertisment posted on /.?

You really think linking to a $20 phone is a slashvertisment?

It's actually an interesting subject I've discussed around here quite a bit lately. Cheap smartphones are immensely useful, for everything from WiFi video surveillance cameras, time-lapse cameras, inventory/barcode scanners, etc. A little thinking out-of-the-box, and these dirt-cheap cellphones can replace a lot of expensive equipment.

"Shitty smartphone can do smartphone stuff although shitty" - You don't say?

That "shitty smartphone" would have been a bleeding-edge high-end $600+ smartphone ~4 years ago. It's ridiculous to claim it's useless now, when it was invaluable back then.

The trick is to respect the device's limits and keep down the number of apps you install.

What?!?! That phone has better specs than the highest of the high-end $600+ smartphones just 4 years ago. It's got specs as good as my $200 mid-tier smartphone from 2 years ago.

They could handle multiple apps back then, they can now, too.

For the benefit of anyone reading, jklovanc is still talking out of his ass, but I've wasted too much time on this nonsense already. Goodbye.

You're correct, I was just using overly-simple wording trying to make sure my point got across. I often find it necessary to do so, here.

It would have been rather wordy to write it more pedantically... something about "adjusting combustion to increase/decrease the steam output to a turbine", and might have confused or detracted from the point I was trying to make.

Look up the efficiencies of electric motors and water turbines. They are nowhere near 100%.

Of course I never said either was 100% efficient. Why you're wasting my time with volumes of mindless drivel, I may never understand.

Notice that it is in New York State so evaporation would be minimal.

New York State doesn't have any evaporation? I guess that must mean they don't ever get any rain, then. It takes a twisted mind to throw around accusations at others when you're completely ignorant of the topic.

The only link I can find that mentions efficiency of pumped storage is this one and it is a summary of all US pumped hydro storage.

And how does that, in your twisted mind, make the 87% figure less relevant? How is it that you're now just ignoring it, since it doesn't agree with you, and firing off a bunch more anecdotal numbers?

Don't you think that if evaporative losses were a big factor and easily remedied that these installations would not have done it by now?

Nope, there are innumerable reasons not to do so. Even 70% efficiency is pretty good with cheap electricity, and it's not a trivial effort to combat the evaporation, nor would it be popular with residents, and free of environmental consequences.

Helms Pumped Storage Plant is a power station that uses Helms Creek canyon for off-river water storage. It never was a conventional dam.

No? Everyone else in the world seems to think Courtright Dam and Wishon Dam are... wait for it... dams.

Most of your sources that just state total losses and don't bother to separate out the evaporative losses, don't lend ANY support to your assertion at all.

Some you are using out of context... "something like 90%", "assumed" and "small amount" are obviously not meant as rigorous and exact figures, yet you try to use them as such.

Yelling without up backing you statement with references just weakens your case.

You never asked, nor even argued with my statement... You just acted like it didn't exist and then quoted more nonsense that doesn't speak to the issue either way...

How would you feel about a source for 87% real-world efficiency?

http://www.heco.com/portal/sit...

And as for conversions of dams to pumped storage, the first one that comes up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Most references to pumped storage efficiency refer to 70% to 85% efficiency.

...BECAUSE OF EVAPORATION (Which is something that can be addressed). Just like I said before... It's like talking to someone with a head injury that can't form short-term memories.