I should have proofread and edited. Fair warning for anyone considering buying the book.

I can convert my daughter's 2015 VW Bug for about $20,000
That includes about 160 miles of range.
Including the cost of the used ICE car brings the total up to around $30,000.

And it's still a much cooler car than the Bolt, or most Teslas, IMHO.
And still much cheaper too.

2020 Chevy bolt: $40,000
1960 fully restored Triumph TR3 EV: $36,000. (including the cost of the car and the conversion.)

I made my own EV. Featured in Jalopnik magazine --
https://jalopnik.com/this-dads...

And then I wrote a book about it.
      https://www.amazon.com/Convert...

Sure, it's not quite apples-to-apples, but I can convert my daughter's 2015 VW Bug for about $20,000 for a total cost (for about 160 miles of range), including the used ICE car, of around $30,000. And it's a much cooler car than the bolt too.

Of course, you have to do the work yourself. But I'd much rather be driving a 1965 Ford Mustang EV for less than half the price than any Tesla. But that's just me. And I'm not alone.
 

Decency is also not profiteering off of other peoples hardships.

Let them make a reasonable profit based on the cost to develop and manufacture, rather than a "what the market will bear to save their lives" basis.

I support the govt. buying the patents for a reasonable price (eminent domain style) then they can do whatever they want with them.

One more think I forgot -- Another reason I had to go back to the Roku device is because all the old browsers stopped being supported by the streaming services. I use Snow Leopard, which can't run the modern browsers, and my mac mini can't be upgraded to a more modern version of OSX. I haven't used Windows since they killed Windows 7.
So browser compatibility is also a problem.

I tried that too. The one and only reason I went back to a Roku device is the remote.
Even the apple TV remote doesn't work for web browser content.
A bluetooth keyboard still requires a mouse or track pad to move the pointer, and that's not easy to do on a bed (bedroom TV) and means I have to reach onto the coffee table if I'm lounging on the couch (yes, lazy as hell, I know.)
Solve the remote problem and I'll happily jump back to using a mac mini for my Streaming.
Any suggestions?

Agree 100% !

The whole idea of different words for groups of different kinds of things is just asinine and wholly unnecessary. I go one step further though. I refuse to even use flock, school, etc. I have a single generic term for any group of anything that I use all the time -- It's a group of birds, a group of fish, a group of black holes. etc.

Weird? Maybe. But it's my style, and perfectly within the rules of how languages work.

> You know your economy is doing well when people have $24,000 to blow on imaginary entertainment pseudoproperty.

Doing well? Or working like a lottery?
A few rich people and a million barely surviving ones isn't "working well."

We've talked about installing a Texas-sized array of solar panels in the Sahara Desert.
We've talked about giant mylar mirrors at the L1 position in space.
We've talked about aerosol injection into the stratosphere.
We've talked about seeding the oceans with iron particles to stimulate algae growth.

What about a Texas-sized strip of mirrors (or any extremely high albedo surface) at/near the equator? Wouldn't that be a (comparatively) low cost, low risk alternative to achieve similar goals? I've been pushing this idea for years but never get any traction. What am I missing?
(Also planting more trees. Let's do that too.)

I've lusted over Teslas since the beginning. But I'm absolutely done and rid of things that keep trying to be smarter than I am and second guess what it thinks I should do instead of what I actually want to do. The fastest way to lose me as a customer is to put the word "smart" on your product.

Finally I realized I wasn't lusting over the Tesla. I was lusting over an electric car that was cool and fun. So I stopped lusting and made my own.

It's not that hard. Take an older sports car, rip the motor out and replace it with modern electric components. I spent a total of $36,000 including the donor car (a real nice collector's item with a bad engine) and all LED lights. I get 100 miles of range and zero-to-sixty in about 7 seconds. It's not Tesla performance, but it leaves ALL the SUVs at the stoplight in my dust.

It took five months of working one day a week, and it wasn't even a full day. Now I think I can do it in a couple of weeks working a few hours every evening. By far the hardest part of the project was rewiring the dashboard.

I have physical switches to control everything, with separate indicator lights. Toggle the regeneration mode off/low/high, forward reverse is a simple toggle switch, 12 volt on/off toggle, a variety of lighting modes for fun, etc. Regenerative braking can be enabled or disabled at will, by feel, without taking my eyes off the road to search through sub-menus and iffy touch screens. CLick. Toggle is switched. No second guessing.

If you're a tinkerer or have any mechanical and electrical skills at all, I highly recommend this project.

Gaiageek, you're a genius!

All we need is a manned boring machine to launch a lava submarine under the crust, then hit the core with a few nuclear bombs to nudge the angular velocity in the right direct. Just have everyone on the surface hold onto something when it happens.

Maybe we can adjust the spin rate while we're at it to make the days 25 hours long and give everyone an extra hour of sleep every night, and fix the pesky calendar problem too. That would make the year 350 days long -- a lot easier to work with. !0 months of five weeks each with seven days makes sense to me. Then the -ember months will make sense again. Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec == 7th 8th 9th 10th...

Let's do this. It's a perfect solution. We just need some experts. Somebody call Hollywood. I think they did something like this before.

Don't underestimate the value of style and fresh design work.

When we went from horse-drawn buggies to horseless carriages, they looked pretty much the same. That changed.

There's no reason an EV has to look like a gas motor car other than ergonomics. That leaves a pretty wide margin for innovation. The old car companies are all wrapped up and invested in old design concepts. New ideas are more likely to come from start-ups.

It's going to get interesting.

Hey, can you fax me some paper?

San Antonio saw 11 inches of snow in one day back in the 1980s. I was there. The city shut down for an entire week.
We never lost power or water though.
In Dallas in the 1990s it got so cold one year my apartment's swimming pool froze over hard enough that I could walk on it.
We never lost power or water then either.
This weather is not unprecedented. The failure of our infrastructure is.

"So bitcoin is not a money. it's not an investment. it's a hedge."

I would argue it's not even a hedge. It's a collectible. Like Beanie Babies or Pogs.

Another fatal flaw -- eventually the last bitcoin will be mined, or more likely, the energy cost to continue mining them will make it unprofitable. At that point there will no longer be an incentive to validate transactions, and all the bitcoins become worthless. (because no one will want to take something that can't be verified as authentic.)

Two words: Kalman filter.

A relic of the Apollo program that makes all this possible.