You don't idle the electric car. It does not consume any power other than keeping the computer alive and the airconditioner/heater. In a snow storm, even with heat off you will survive well inside the car. Just think of the car as a huge insulated jacket.

Already the original batch of engineers who worked with Elon have branched off pursuing other electric vehicles. Almost all the package delivery trucks (UPS, USPS, FedEX) can go electric. 90% of the school bus fleet can go electric. Garbage trucks that make lots of stops and starts will benefit greatly by going electric. Panel trucks used by mechanics, plumbers etc can also become electric. Elon is not pursuing them. But there is an active Elon alumnus working on these projects. With quick swap batteries, taxi fleet can become electric.

It is merely a question of financing. Interest rates are at historic lows. That is what is now fueling the solar panel installations and wind energy projects now.

What happened to the company?

Better range estimates to give the user the confidence of the number displayed on the dash. Or even using GPS to find the charging stations nearby and letting the user know where to juice up in an emergency etc. Or even coming to an agreement with a huge chain distributed all over USA that already has three phase outlets (like laundromats or even fast food franchises) to make charging stations available for tesla... Since it is a pure software update it could be along these lines.

But there are other ways too, have spare battery packs that can be towed along available through tow truck operators. Or towable gensets to be rented on demand from U-Haul like operators or through tow trucks operators...

At some point gas car rental companies should move in to grab a piece of the action. If they provide subscription based car rentals (20$ a month, for one day a month, accumulate up to 24 days ) more people will switch to electric cars. Imagine, one could use a low cost high reliability electric car for regular day to day usage, and check out a pick up truck to pick an appliance or a station wagon for the road trip. If electric cars with limited range becomes more popular, the rental companies stand to get lots of business for their gas car fleet. Rental companies should pitch this model to electric car makers to package two year subscription to sweeten the deal and introduce users into this mode of thinking.

I am going to write up a project proposal to do a scientific study about why scientific studies are exploding at exponential rate. But calling it exponential before the doing the study would be prejudicial, so I am going to have to do a prelim study to determine whether or not it *is* exponential.

Uber probably calls all its employers "partners" or "contractors". It is not the first company. There is this non profit behemoth in Pittsburgh called UPMC. It is totally vertically integrated owning everything from parking garages and ambulances all the way to world leading organ transplant and artificial organ works. But it calls itself non-profit but pays its top C?Os better than for-profit hospitals. Owns a web of companies which all act one-way-valves. Liabilities flow one way assets and profits flow the other way. It calls its employees contractors to avoid paying payroll taxes. Same way Amazon too is spawning shell companies and eventually is able to call all its employees temp staff provided by staffing agencies.

So laws protecting "employees" will not stand in court because Uber has no employees other than the top C?O team.

I am also amused by so many people with employer-provided health insurance dissing obamacare. In the last generation so many of the companies offered pensions and generous health insurance. Just in 10 years all the employees had been corralled into HMOs and the pension plans have disappeared. Just look at the speed at which HMOs were shoved down your throat. All it takes would be a couple of big employers opting out of providing health care, all other companies would follow suit. Remember how fast they competed with one another to out source IT jobs!. It will happen that fast.

It is time for people who work for a salary to re examine their long standing assumptions about their relationship with their employers.

Remember the guy? Whatshisname? John Wayne Bobbit right? Source of the eponymous term bobbitized. What happened to him?

You want proof? I will give you proof. You want citations? I will give you citations.

All I ask for is, give me half an hour and then check Wikipedia.

These rates might not hold. There was a time I was going at some 8784 wives/year rate. The very next day it dropped to a mere 366 wives/year. Now it has dwindled to 0.038461538 wives/year. What I am driving at is, these rates might not hold. http://xkcd.com/605/

Do you realize what you call wind is basically Sun whipping the atmosphere's ass.

When they are at it they will also provide a free service to lock all the barn doors. In fact it will be automated. Any time anyone lodges a police complaint about their horses being stolen, twitter see the complaint in FBI database in real time, and it will spring into action and send shock troopers to lock the doors of their barns as soon as possible.

Come on brown dwarfs are not really stars. It is a con job to call them stars. It is like these New Jersey cruise sales boilerrooms selling "Masala Cruise with Bollywood stars" and then on board you see one guy who played the corpses in a murder mystery starring the Amir Khan and another who was the fourth thug beaten by Rajnikant enthiran the robot.

*I* am a descendent of some random cave man, you insensitive clod!

1957 was the peak year for US streetcar ridership. Till about 1970 the bus lines, tramlines, streetcars, metro transit etc were the back bone of commuting for vast majority of the public. For sure they were undermined by illegal cartel and collusion between Firestone, Ford and Standard Oil. But do not ignore the role public and the politicians played in getting rid of these public utilities.

Structurally these utilities need massive insvestments, long build times, beset by NIMBYism. They pay off only when there is a critical mass of users. Only when the cost of investment is amortized over a very large user base, these projects are economically viable. Once the user base falls below the critical mass they get into a death spiral. Costs keep increasing for the remaining users, and as they drop out, it increases for the remaining users even more.

Electric utilities are looking at exactly the same scenario. In 1955 if someone predicted the demise of street car lines within 20 years, they would have been laughed at. But in 20 years almost all of them became moribund. Except for very high density locales like Chicago, Boston and New York it is mere shadow of its former selves.

As solar becomes cost effective, finance companies will jump in and simplify the financing and installation headaches and make direct head to head comparison possible. "All you pay for is the electricity you actually use based on the meter. All you do is to give us permission to install solar panels in your property. Compare it directly with your utility bill". As affluent customers start using more of solar and use less of the grid, the utility company will start levying "grid-connection fees". And at some point people would start cutting the grid. Then cost will start going up for the remaining users and the spiral would start.

The electric utilities are well aware of the situation. That is why they are fighting so hard.

One way out of their plight is for the utilities to start installing more and more of solar. Solar generation neatly matches the peak demand. If they can use solar for peak summer late afternoon demand and run their gas plants for base load they can survive or stretch it out for a long time. But no matter what, coal is out. Even dirty coal is costlier than gas, not much cheaper than solar. Clean coal just can't compete.

He seems to be coming from a long line of Learned men.

We know for a fact, clay tablets with wedges used for writing will last several thousand years. If the material is interesting enough the future generation will legions of college professors and graduate students to decode it. If it is not, it is not worth preserving.