Category Archives: Technology

Business, Culture, Environment, Technology

Going Green

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I own an electric vehicle. Call me Mr. Environmental Sucker. Here’s the issue.

The battery in my Nissan Leaf is going “Tango Uniform” as the folks in the military say. The car was originally touted as having a 100 mile range. Right now I’m limping around with about 50 miles of range and it’s still decreasing as time goes on. The simple solution should be, replace the battery. Here’s the problem.

Car companies would rather sell you a new vehicle instead of extending the life of an older model. What Nissan has been doing is raising the price of a replacement battery to make fixing the car unaffordable. According to kbb.com the car has a private party value of $5000. The trade-in value is half of that, around $2,700. How much is a new identical replacement battery from Nissan? About $10,000!

There are some shops that will replace the battery with a used battery from a wrecked newer car and prices vary from $5000 to $9,500 depending on the capacity of the used battery. The upper end batteries are almost double the capacity of the original battery, increasing the range to 160 miles, which is an improvement.

At this point, I’m not sure if spending more money on the electric car is worth it. On top of the repair costs, here in the People’s Republik of Kalifornia, the electric company has raised the rate of electricity. At peak times the charge is about $0.58 per kilowatt-hour. Compare that to the national average of about $0.12 per kilowatt-hour. If the battery were 100% efficient in charging (which it isn’t) and I was able to get the full 100 miles per charge (which I can’t) it would cost $14 to drive the 100 miles, best case. With gas at about $3.00 per gallon, the equivalent “gas mileage” is 21 miles per gallon. An equivalent sized gas car gets 30 or more miles per gallon, which means the gasser is 50% more cost effective to drive.  My bigazz, four-wheel drive, diesel pickup averages better than 25 miles per gallon beating the electric car on cost effectiveness.

Given all that, I have no idea what I’m going to to with my electric car.  Anyone want an electric vehicle?  I have a “Green New Deal” for you.

As an owner of an electric vehicle, “Going Green” means that “Green is Going out of my wallet“.

Culture, Government, Science, Technology

You Think We Can Go To Mars?

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NASA and the President talk about landing men on Mars.

I say that it won’t happen.

When the leadership in our country is worrying about renaming “Manholes” to “Maintenanceholes” because any word with “Man” in it is offensive to all of the 97 made up genders, there is NO way that we could come together to put men on Mars.

Additionally when the government leadership celebrates passing laws that prohibit a veterinarian from DECLAWING A CAT and that same leadership also celebrates passing laws allowing doctors to terminate a human baby’s life right up to the moment of birth, I somehow doubt we have the wherewithal to put together a program to land men on Mars.

Oh yeah, unlike John F. Kennedy who declared in 1961 “...of landing a MAN on the moon…“, we would today spend all of our time and money arguing about the gender declaration that would land on Mars.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and the other 95 genders are from Uranus.  Mars,  it ain’t gonna happen.

Culture, Politics, Science, Technology

Solar Panels To Save The Planet

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The overlords of the “New (stupid) Green Deal” want to “save the planet” by converting completely to renewable energy. Never mind the fact that the true purpose is to redistribute wealth, which I’ll cover in a future post.

Time to look at some numbers.

The United States has a yearly total electrical generation output of over 4,000,000,000,000,000 Wh. More than 4 Quadrillion Watt-hours if you don’t want to look at all those zeroes.  Now we are going to ignore the fact that solar doesn’t work at night which the “New GREED Dealers” also seem to ignore.  We are also going to ignore that SOLAR only produces 10% USEFUL electricity.  That means this analysis may actually be TEN TIMES more optimistic in favor of our “New GREED Dealer” overlords.  We will add in the energy requirements to replace dinosaur burning cars.

The US uses about 142,980,000,000 gallons of gasoline.  Almost 143 Billion gallons of gasoline.  The average fuel economy of cars is 26.2 miles per gallon.  Unlike most “New GREED Dealers”, I actually have an electric vehicle.  It gets about 4.8 miles per kilowatt-hours on a good day.  Teslas SUCK almost TWICE as much electricity, but we’ll use my consumption numbers and we’ll also ignore the conversion loss to charge the batteries (which in actuality is not small) to help the “New GREEN Deal” overlords’ case.  Working the math that means gasoline would need to be replaced by an additional 780,000,000,000,000 watt-hours.  Tack on a measly 780 TRILLION MORE Wh.  That gives us 4.78 Quadrillion Watt-hours of electricity we need to get from Mr. Sun.

I personally have a solar system on my house in the Sun Belt of the US and I’m the climate denying MAGA guy who drives an electric car. How many of the “New GREED Dealers” have solar?   My system generates about  9 MILLION Watt-hours per year. That would mean that we would need 531 MILLION installations similar to mine to replace the electrical production of the US.

Can that be accomplished?

That means EVERY MAN, WOMAN, and CHILD in the United States would be on the hook for nearly 2 solar installations. Doesn’t everyone LIVING PERSON own 2 houses to put solar panels on?

And how much would this cost?

$9,600,000,000,000.00.  That’s $9.6 TRILLION DOLLARS again if you don’t want to count all the zeroes.  EVERY MAN, WOMAN, and CHILD would need to be taxed $30,000.00!  $120,000.00 for that mythical family of four.  Good thing we’ll all have free college tuition because there goes that college fund.

Since political pundits like throwing around Gross Domestic Product (GDP) numbers, that would be about HALF of the United States GDP!

But wait it gets better!

Have the “New GREED Dealers” looked at where the money goes? Of course we know that they looked at where the money comes from and that would be taxes. But where does the money go?

About 2/3rds of the money goes to the maker of the panels. And who makes the panels you might ask? The answer would be our best friends in CHINA!

We will send $6.4 TRILLION buckaroos to CHINA to satisfy our overlords of the “New GREED Deal”.

Again to throw GDP numbers around, that would boost China’s GDP by 52%! A 52% boost to the second largest economy in the world.  Take from the socialist US and give to the communist Chinese.  Yeah baby!

Remember these numbers might be only 10% of what it may actually cost.  That means $96 TRILLION (almost 5 TIMES US GDP!) will be coughed up by we of the “industrial proletariat” (quoting socialist favorite Karl Marx) and the “bourgeoisie New GREED deal” will give $64 TRILLION of that to our good friends in CHINA.  Talk about a big TRANSFER OF WEALTH.

Hey, “New GREED Dealers”, which do you recommend that I learn to speak, Mandarin or Cantonese?