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Comment Re:Chicken vs. Egg (Score 1) 275

With an EV, it depends how I drive my vehicle. If I drive 50 miles every day for 200 days out of the year and I have a home charger, I will occupy a public charger for approximately 0 minutes. I will spend approximately 0 minutes filling up my car over the course of the year.

If I drive 25 miles every day for 200 days out of the year and take 10 road trips each at 500 miles round trip (with only my home charger at the beginning and end of the round trip) then I will have to find a public charger for ~250 miles of the trip.

It's not possible to distill this down to a simple calculation like you suggest for gas cars, because there isn't one single charging speed to consider. We can take some guesses that the roadtripper will only use fast charging (150kW+) and the car will charge at the full rate on average for this time.* If the car gets 3.3mi per kWh (per EPA this is the average) then it's about 75kWh of charging needed per roadtrip, or 750kWh per year. This is about 5 hours of charging at public stations, way above your 85 minute estimate for gas.



*this is a broad simplification but consider that nearly all Tesla's can charge at 250kW when near empty, and can charge at over 150kW when 1/3 full, it makes sense. Other more modern EVs can charge at even higher rates, but finding a charger that supports it is very limited.

Comment What student makes $300K+? (Score 1) 135

Here's what I don't understand: what medical student's family makes $300K?

These are 23-, 24-, 25-year-olds who are full grown adults usually taking on debt to pay for medical school. Plenty of them are getting help from their parents but aren't they technically not dependent on their parents' income from a financial aid perspective? Sure plenty of these students have parents earning over $300K, but is that relevant for the financial aid calculation? Isn't the student's family defined as them + spouse and their kids, instead of their parents income?

Comment Re:As someone who drives an Electric car... (Score 1) 179

You're not entirely wrong about public charging infrastructure, but as an EV owner myself, I don't think your experience is particularly instructive, especially to someone who is buying a vehicle manufactured in the last 3 years.

Tesla owns the market for used right now and for new cars is still outproducing and selling nearly everyone else combined. That means most American EV owners are getting the Tesla Supercharger experience, which is an extremely reliable public charging solution. It's flat out awesome in most cases, and even when crowded, it's not unlikely that you can find another Supercharger within ~30 minutes. This sounds like a lot of driving, but it's nothing if you're on a roadtrip.

The rest of the charging infrastructure is hit or miss, but your 2014 Leaf can't charge on CCS (I'm pretty sure about this but tell me if I'm wrong!) and that rules out a lot of public infrastructure, especially modern fast chargers. You're limited to L2 charging, which was always meant to be a small supplement and never a full solution. For non EV owners, this is like walking around with an Android that charges on Mini USB, and complaining that every time you ask someone to plug in your phone, they only have Lightning cables (Tesla Superchargers), and some people have USB-C (CCS).

But all of this hardly matters. Home charging has always been where it's at. You're correct that unfortunately most people do take a long trip to see family only once or twice a year, and they have to buy a car for that experience. The public infrastructure really only needs to be used in those cases. We can absolutely be 80%+ electric for passenger vehicles (not talking about trucks) with the limited public infrastructure we have planned today.

Comment Re:"Containers"? I thought this was a (Score 1) 48

Density is the big difference here.

Also, unlike many other dense US cities, NYC doesn't have alleys. Philadelphia, for instance, uses alleys for trash, so the trash isn't sitting on the sidewalks. Manhattan specifically doesn't have any access to the buildings except through the street and sidewalk front entrance.

But in NYC, you can't just put it in a trash can and wheel it to the curb when you have 30 - 50 floors of residences, or 100 floors of offices stacked on top of one another, each generating a ~bag per day. Because NYC doesn't want to give away any street parking, that leaves the sidewalk as the only place for trash to exist outside of the buildings. We're hoping that this containerization strategy (that has worked well elsewhere in the world!) will fix this.

Also, just in case you don't think this is a problem that needs solving, you can get a feel for what this looks like on a daily basis, as all the buildings put their trash outside by looking for #TrashCity on Twitter.

Comment Re:No, Over Canada (Score 1) 116

I assume you mean Edmonton? There's no way you could fly supersonic over Edmonton (not sure what mileage clearance you'd have to give to go around) but after Edmonton, you're pretty much smooth sailing until you hit Belfast/Glasgow depending on the exact route. You get close to Reykjavik, but I assume the path could be altered pretty easily to get out of Iceland airspace. In fact, the only other city I see on the entire map after Edmonton is Fort McMurray which is a city of ~60,000 people and likely pretty avoidable.

Also, it would likely only take 90 minutes to go Seattle to Edmonton at subsonic speeds, at which point you could go supersonic for however many hours it takes to get to the UK.

By the way, this flight pattern is very similar for Seattle to Amsterdam, Berlin, and a few other European northern cities.

Comment Re:No, Over Canada (Score 2) 116

Only if you are flying from the east coast.

I guess I should have been more clear - I mean western US cities heading to Asia, and eastern US cities heading to Europe.

Also, not for nothing - Seattle to London is mostly over nearly completely unpopulated land (Greenland, Nunavut) and a bunch of water - so I suppose it's possible Canada and Denmark would allow Supersonic over their land, but I am just a guy looking at maps.

Comment Re:NOT TRUE... anyone wishing to use characters... (Score 1) 237

Can someone help explain this to me? Steamboat Willie - the actual artwork, and presumably the audio - can be repurposed, printed on t-shirts, hats, remixed, etc. etc. But the other artwork that Disney has created around the IP of Mickey cannot be repurposed, correct? So, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006) is still off limits - you can't steal a frame from that and use it as a logo, right?

But new original artwork, using the likeness of Mickey is OK, I think? So, if I draw something that looks exactly like Mickey Mouse and call it "Mickey Mouse" - I can profit from that, if the copyright expires? But all the other stuff Disney has created is still owned by Disney -- until that copyright expires (presumably 95 years after the material came out). Did I get it right?

Comment "Are you talking? Your mic is muted." (Score 3, Insightful) 23

How did people think they were doing the alert identifying to the user when their mic was muted? Magic? I suppose you could process this all locally, but there's very little chance of any of these companies doing anything like that when they can easily collect the data and process it centrally where the CPU/network usage is a rounding error. Use a hardware mute. Don't ever trust software if you can control the hardware.

Comment Re:Probably not.. (Score 1) 249

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. And the oscars there were really covering all 3 movies.

Thank you! This is correct. My quick search didn't come up with LOTR as winning the box office because it was a December release, and thus didn't technically win either 2003 or 2004 for highest grossing. However, across 2003 and 2004, LOTR Return of the King was the highest grossing movie that was released in 2003. It didn't outright win 2003 because of Finding Nemo, and it got crushed in 2004 by Shrek 2. Regardless of technicalities, LOTR is a great case of something that was insanely popular commercially and also won a lot of awards.

Comment Re:Probably not.. (Score 1) 249

Agree, but this comparison is worse than that. What's the last movie that led the box office that also won an Oscar in a directing, acting, or writing category? (Answer below) Box office has never been correlated with the Oscars, not even the slightest. It's always been an industry's way to honor what the others in the industry think are the best, not necessarily the ones with the biggest mass appeal.

The issue for me is that TV, especially "prestige TV" is stealing so much of the oxygen - writers, actors, directors, and media buzz - that movies used to have. Nearly every 10-part limited series on Netflix or HBO or Disney could have been a great 2 hour movie (if told differently) but artists are finding more freedom with 8+ hours of TV (released all at once, and sometimes watched over multiple nights) than they could get by releasing it as a movie.

Personally, I still love movies over TV, because the stories are contained. I don't have to watch for 8 hours, I don't have to carry these characters and their stories around for years in my mind as a great show turns into a mediocre season 2, 3 and so on and so on. Even a mini series is a week long commitment compared to a single night for a movie.

The last movie to win a directing, acting, or writing Oscar and the Annual Box Office is Titanic. The Box Office Mojo box office numbers only go back to 1977, but as far as I can tell, for the last 50 years, Titanic is the only movie to win the Box Office and one of those big Oscars. I'm sure there's a few from the golden age that did so as well, but the Oscars have been decoupled from the box office for a long, long time.

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