You still need to do x amount of work to turn the wheels.

A series hybrid like the Nissan gets 25-35% efficiency going gas -> electricity -> battery -> electric motor -> wheels turning.

But add in regenerative braking and you get some of that back as charge versus just generating heat on a regular car.

Using gas soley to turn the wheels is roughly 15-30% efficient. So it looks like the hybrid straight out wins. But once you get up to a constant RPM like highway driving modern ICE engines can hit 40% efficiency.

So if you have a lot of 55-70MPH driving with speeding up and slowing down. Gas will beat hybrid.

The EV nutters will of course go off saying a grid powered EV is 70-90% tank to wheel. But that's only the efficiency of the battery charge to work. It's ignoring the loss taken creating the electricity in the first place. If you have solar and enough storage to only drive off the sun? Great you win the efficiency war. Just as long as you never need to charge anywhere that's not sun powered

We'll see if Nissan's direction with the 2027 Rogue hybrid is the direction others take. It's driven solely by the electric motor so it feels like an EV with the ICE only being used to charge the battery along with a bypass mode that lets the ICE engine directly power the electric motor.

That will let manufacturers use the knowledge they developed creating EVs. Though the hybrid is really just an EREV (extended range electric vehicle) on steroids. Hauling around a generators everywhere isn't that great as going from gas -> electricity is more lossy that having gas directly turning wheels.

Honda's hybrid system is similar, but has a clutch and can turn the wheels with the ICE engine at highway speeds.

Toyota then has their own thing going that's been developed for the last 30 years and is now hitting 50-60 miles/gal in the real world which really makes EVs look questionable to me.

Ya, time of day pricing where peak is often from roughly 4pm-7pm. Right when people are getting home and their EV needs a charge.

It's a feature that sounds great, until one actually thinks about the times they'd need to use their vehicle which no longer has a charge.

Even the emergency black outs scenarios. What happens when you later need to evacuate?

Even charging off Solar during the day for overnight usage doesn't make sense. Just get a stationary battery bank.

It's sad when Apple has you beat on price with the Macbook Neo.

Or everyone post Gen X era is creatively bankrupt and can't create anything new.

Graphic novels are incredibly popular with kids today. Many are reading them instead of novels. We'll see more kids make the jump to regular books, but from what I've seen it's only a small percentage.

But in Japan you have manga aimed at adults. Why are stories told only with words somehow superior to a drawing an dialog? As they say a picture is worth 1,000 words.

Which is fine. It's to stop laying off the entire IT department and and outsource it to one of those companies who fill out thousands of H1B applications a year and pay $60-80,000/yr.

96, and still kicking unless something just happened and hasn't been reported yet.

You don't need portable. Just get a mini split.

Now if the recycling actually happened versus the ease of creating new plastic from the basically free raw materials that are byproducts of refining gasoline.

Your utopia didn't turn out so well for Germany. Shutting down all their nuclear plants and going green. Only to need to pay inflated prices to import power from France's nuclear plants.

Then there's all the industries leaving Germany because they can't get reliable power to operate manufacturing plants.

The sun doesn't always shine, wind doesn't always blow, and extended droughts can cause water to not flow. There needs to be alternative sources. And modern nuclear plants are preferable to coal and gas plants.

Just as long as it's outside of those periods of completely end ending darkness.

Solar is simple to rollout, it's used on Mars which is even more inhospitable than the arctic poles.

Large storms can still cause problems and those aren't rare.

Or maybe just heavy snow on the panels which can make them produce 0%.

Take Winnipeg for example. In December the Peak Sun Hours calculation is 1. That means they on average product 1KW/h per square meter PER DAY.

https://peaksunhours.app/canad...

Perhaps you don't live in a north climate and instead are in the sun belt so you are unaware of these challenges. The Earth also does this tilt as it rotates, and in the winter months Canada has very short days with little to no sun due to clouds that can last a week or more.

Add in terrible Canadian policy and you have the wild fires chocking the air with smoke which further reduces solar production.

Someone slapping solar panels on their roof to lower their electricity bill? That could be all right. A country wide deployment? Whoever pushes that policy will be tar and feathered when a bad winter hits and there are month long outages due not just to snow on the panels, but also damage to them requiring replacement in sub zero temperatures. With a half meter or more of snow to get through.

The Intel N100 is the performance of an 8th gen i5 at drastically lower power draw and includes the iGPU media engine that was included in 12th-14th gen chips. That can handle 4K media transcoding including h.265 HEVC and AV1 decoding in hardware.

I ran a 2nd gen SandyBridge monolith system with storage and services for near a decade. And that got long in the tooth and struggled to transcode.

I've moved to using TrueNAS for storage as I determined having storage on its own layer is fine as storage capacity is the bottleneck there and I can keep hardware around for longer. I keep that system as just storage using a Z-RAID2 with ZFS and some offsite replication for important data. I have a desktop backup service as a Docker app, and a VM running ProxMox Backup Server hosted on the TrueNAS as I feel those are really just storage.

I then run ProxMox on the Mini PC and have separate LXC containers for each service. If I find I need more compute I can always get an extra PC or a more powerful one and migrate the containers. I've been able to spin up new services to trial run and get rid of ones I don't like.

If things do south I can build an entirely new ProxMox host, point it at the ProxMox Backup Server and be back up and running in ~15-30 mins.

Which CPU are you using? Pre-Skylake CPUs should still have an iGPU and support some level of hardware transcoding.

I switched to having a separate N5095 based NAS, with an N100 based mini PC as the application host. The N100 can do hardware 4K and HDR tone mapping and sips 6W of power and spikes that max out around 15W. My overall max power of both system is in the mid 60Ws with the majority of that being spinning rust.

RAM and storage prices have currently killed off the cheap Mini PC. But they used to be ~$130 for a complete system with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of NVME storage. Rarely do you save money by lowering power usage. But that price to performance did in only a handful of months.