Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:toyota is a dying dinosaur (Score 4, Insightful) 159

The one pure EV that Toyota makes was co-developed with Subaru and is in fact a terrible EV by current standards. It would have been a mediocre EV 10 years ago.

Perhaps "disappointing" is more appropriate? For a company that has decades of electric drivetrain experience is is perplexing that Toyota could produce something so subpar. They rode their battery patent exclusivity for so long they forgot how to be competitive in an evolving market.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:Free money! (Score 1) 106

> Please explain how it raises money with a tax rate that's below the existing corporate tax rate

15% minimum. You're a fool if you think a large corporation pays anywhere near the corporate tax rate. 15% is much more money than these businesses are paying now.

Some of them are so good at the game that they effectively "pay" a negative income tax. To pull the first example from that link; AT&T earned $29.6 and the Feds effectively paid them another $1.2B - effectively a -4% income tax. Under the IRA their tax bill goes from getting paid $1.2B to paying $4.4B

=Smidge=

Comment Re:lawsuit in 3..2..1... (Score 1) 49

Beyond the TOS, there are actual laws that might apply to this situation.

First thing that comes to mind? Depending on the method used, it might fall afoul of the The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Not all Discord messages are public, and if some technical abuse was involved in accessing messages in an unauthorized manner (peeking into DMs, servers you've not actually joined, etc) then that could be grounds for criminal prosecution.

=Smidge=

Comment Re:And in five years they have to do it again? (Score 1) 169

Considering there are EVs that are 10+ years old and still doing just fine, I challenge the "isn't insignificant" part.

BMW, Audi, Tesla, and Ford warranty their packs will retain 70% capacity for 8 years/100K miles. Hyundai does 70% at 10Y/100K. Rivian is 70% at 8Y/175K. This gives us a pretty good picture of what to expect at a minimum - The manufacturers are willing to put their money down on these numbers, so chances are good they will be exceeded for most owners.

People like GP are constantly wanting to conflate EV batteries with cell phone batteries. They are not even remotely the same.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:great, now think again (Score 1) 215

> the demand and supply must always match

Correct. Overproduction results in increase in grid frequency which can cause a lot of damage.

> this means that that you produce more than you need and have to either sell outside ... or switch off the source

Or import less (Cali imports up to ~30% of its power from Arizona and Utah). In this case, the a good chunk of that excess power seems to have been absorbed by temporarily increasing demand through charging grid scale batteries. That energy can be (and has been) released later in the day to help offset peak loads, allowing utilities to avoid spinning up expensive gas turbines.

> If on the other hand they invested in say nuclear this would not be necessary

Nuclear is far and away the most expensive and has the longest lead time. It also has a problem of needing large supplies of water, and that water needs to be not too warm or else they need to throttle or shut down the plant. Drought and heat waves are both issues in California so expanding nuclear power is difficult even if the local population was accepting of their presence.

=Smidge=

Comment Re:... for a small fraction of 30 of the last 38 d (Score 3, Informative) 215

> What the heck kind of tortured cherry picked thing is this?

It's pretty simple? For 30 of the past 38 days, renewable energy production exceeded energy demand for at least 15 minutes.

While the 38 days part is a little strange, this is overall good information. Paired with their burgeoning energy storage capacity it means we are starting to catch a glimpse of the break-over point where we have 100% renewable energy 24/7. 15 minutes of surplus means 15 minutes of not burning fossil fuels after the sun sets.

It's a start, and already more than the shills told us was impossible.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:Mobile Video Quality (Score 1) 41

> perhaps the ones that pay a kickback to the ISP

Kickback? What about apps *owned* by the ISP? Most service providers also offer their own brand of on-demand services. Even if anyone can buy priority traffic for better speeds, they can give it to themselves for free. It's extremely anti-competitive.

=Smidge=

Comment Re:In my experience 3rd party ink clogs print head (Score 3, Interesting) 116

Buy from a reputable source. Just because you don't like paying the extortionary prices for official HP ink and supporting their bullshit business model, doesn't mean you must, or should, buy the cheapest shit you can find off eBay or a random vendor at a convention.

At the very least buy from an established business that has a refund policy and customer service to complain to...
=Smidge=

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 86

> Son, I wrote and published one of the first 15,000 web sites.

That's great! Lots of people had shitty Geocities blogs, though. Doesn't mean you know shit about the internet, which you clearly don't if this is the credentials you front with. (And if you really know anything about the history of the internet, you'll know why Geocities specifically is relevant to your claim lol)

> Chickenshit money

0.09% of the federal budget for that year. The money you're complaining about now? 0.3%. Where's the line? At what point does it transition from "Chickenshit money" to something worth bitching about?

> The government came up with a bullshit number after everyone threw a fit over the first bullshit number??

No, conservative ne'er-do-wells came up with a bullshit number and you threw a fit over it, because you didn't think twice about what you were told. Probably didn't even think once, to be honest. The $93M is from the company that was contracted to build the site - which you'd know if you read the sources. Not like it's not a matter of public record or anything.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 86

> I helped build the Internet, Tubby. I know its history backwards and forwards. The federal government played a minimal role, if that.

Unless you're in your 70s, you're a lying sack of shit. Also wrong even if you are that old. (FYI $124.5M in 1970s money is about $1B today when you adjust for inflation)

And that's not even including all the investments since that initial research, like the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 which threw another $1B at it ($2.3B today's value) to actually built the physical "internet" in the United States. I suppose I shouldn't have needed to mention any of this if you actually know the history of the internet though...

> Therefore it is forbidden by the Tenth Amendment.

According to your own criteria, the Tenth Amendment doesn't exist because it wasn't part of the original Constitution ratified in 1789. You don't get to invoke it for your arguments. Too bad, so sad.

> Remember the $600 million health care web site that didn't work?

I don't, and neither do you, because the contract was only for $93 million. Fuck man, even Glenn Beck debunked that claim at the time. When Glenn Beck thinks you're wrong, that's something truly exceptional.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:This will not likely end well. (Score 5, Informative) 86

Also worth remembering that horses poop. A lot. A horse produces about 20 pounds of manure per day.

At the turn of the 20th century, New York City had an estimated 100,000 horses. That's about 2 million pounds of horse poop per day. Naturally this wasn't a problem unique to NYC.

To bring this back on topic; MacMann posts are similarly a nearly unmanageable amount of horse shit. For example, he conveniently disregards the billions of federal dollars poured into automotive infrastructure in the first half of the 20th century, so say nothing of the billions more spent on propping up the fossil fuel industry to power them.

We needed government funds to get those technologies into common use then, and I'd argue we need them more so today because we're up against much more powerful and entrenched incumbent industries.
=Smidge=

Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 86

"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."

Congress has the explicit authority to do make the laws needed to do their job. So what are the "foregoing powers?" Well one of them... the first one listed in fact... is the authority to provide, and collect taxes to pay for, the defense and general welfare of the nation.

It is unarguably in the nation's interest - its general welfare - to decouple our energy needs from international market influences for the sake of our independence and national security, to reduce local and global pollution for the sake of its citizen's health, to preserve critical resources, and to foster an environment that will support future the population.

The federal government has the legal authority to invest in clean energy in exactly the same way it had the authority to invest in literally everything else. If you don't like it, get off the internet, throw out all your computer equipment, and cut your power lines, because the federal government invested heavily in all that shit and you wouldn't want to be a hypocrite, would you?

> why don't we abide by those that were ratified in 1789

Because the world isn't like it was 235 years ago, asshole. Even the people who wrote the constitution understood that the world would change and included mechanisms to expand and evolve both the Constitution itself and the laws that apply it. Fuck man, by saying 1789 you even cut out the bill of rights (ratified 1791) so I guess you should throw out your guns, let the cops search and take your shit without a warrant, and let yourself be jailed without trial... none of that was in the 1789 version either.

=Smidge= /Bet you're super pissed about the 16th amendment too lol

Slashdot Top Deals

If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?

Working...