The state does not subsidize your solar project. The taxpayers subsidize it.. how do you morally justify stealing from other hard working people to pay half of your solar panel costs?

YUP! Welcome to the left coast. Keep your lawn and shrubs well manicured and buy an EV. Too bad you can't water the lawn and shrubs and you can't charge the EV. Makes me want to pack up and move right out there, NOT!

Oh gosh that picture looks like so much fun! My earliest computer memories are the Eniac (?) that took up several rooms. Some show on TV was talking about it.

That depends on the reasons for the push. An electric grid incapable of supporting mass EV use is a feature of the goal is control.

There are limited cases where it does make sense to use them, though from a pollution standpoint they do not make sense. This is because at best one trade speculative harm for real and uncontroversially recognized harms.

But, as with roof PV, from a cost perspective they don’t make sense if you’re wanting to save money. Even if you are off grid with your own power for charging, gasoline is still cheaper and will likely always be so absent heavy handed government mandates.

A real eye opener is to consider an electric rover versus a liquid fuel rover on Mars. As the economics involved are dominated by transport costs and transport is limited by rocket capacity, even their liquid fuel rules supreme.

So if in a fully new space where there is no existing industry and infrastructure to compete with, EVs can’t compete, what hope is there for them to compete against that same tech when it has the infrastructure and industry to support it?

And just to be clear, the things WV rovers lose out on would be quite familiar: range, resupply time and expense (energy), maintenance, repair, flexibility, and cost to power.

I am just finishing putting solar panels on top of my manufacturing building in Illinois. We are paying about half the cost ($500K). The balance is state subsidies. Technically this is a below average business decision. The ROI is projected 11 years. Normally I would not choose an investment with an ROI over 6 years. But the uncertainty of energy prices and wanting to support this industry we went ahead with it. This is the beauty of capitalism. We can all have opinions but as objectivist I think we all agree that the market should determine the future of EVs and Solar. No one entity should be making these decisions for us. Anyone who believes that is the enemy of an Objectivist.

You comments reminded of a 1954 Popular Mechanics issue that I subscribed to in my younger days. Now the photo is being evaluated by Snopes to see if it's true or not. I remembered the photograph well, I was so impressed. https://www.jsu.edu/news/july_dec2004...

And about 6 years later I got to see some real computers that took up whole buildings at Rocketdyne in Canoga Park. I got a job at their test facility in the Santa Susana mountains, now contaminated from a Sodium Reactor and other things we knew little about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_S...

It's like solar power.

We had a solar salesman give us a presentation at our new house. I've been attracted to solar for a number of years and was curious.

Doing some "pre-sales" research, we discovered that our electric bill was averaging $53 a month (we have natural gas) and was 1/3 the cost of our old house.

After all his calculations, we figured we would be paying $115 a month, for the next 20 years, just to pay off the solar installation.

With both of us in our 60's, we'd never see a payback on the system, so we politely declined.

Yes. The trap is closing rapidly.
I've been preparing for some 20 years. Watching the methodology of comfort and security traded for freedom and liberty.

John Calhoun's experiments with mice and rats in closed environments is becoming human reality. Aberrant behaviors of heightened aggression and withdrawal. No meaningful rights of passage for maturing young adults. The distractions of prosperity degrading into subjective hedonism (compare 1920s to 2020s) in drugs, alcohol, fetishes.

EVs put the cart in front of the horse. Our grid is not even close to being capeable of handling the added demands and the battery technology is far from adequate. I believe the push to go electric is at least 10 years too soon.

I think this YouTube Video tells it all concerning the mining of Cobalt, necessary for EV Batteries:
https://youtu.be/piXwDW36jBQ

I would like to see EVs developed but WITHOUT the government shoving them down our throat. Let the well-off early adopters work out the bugs, get them cost effective, and then maybe they will be ready for prime time. For SOME purposes. If I commuted a reasonably short distance every day, an inexpensive EV might be the ticket. But I am retired, and I like to take road trips, and they are NOT cost-effective, even with subsidies. So ... no EV for me in the forseeable future.

I can clearly remember wondering what in the HECK anybody would want with a computer at their house! (My failure has always been a lack of imagination, I suppose.)

My favorite review was about the "CARBON" consumption over the lifespan of the vehicle...

Basically, you have to own this thing for like 8 years to get to 70% OF a normal cars carbon.

If you own it for 2yrs, you are under water on Carbon damage. (It would have been better to drive a normal vehicle, your total carbon footprint would be smaller).

Now, some of this is a problem of SCALE, and some of this is the DIRTY Mining for the elements...

Not ready to be released upon us? Not trustworthy? Still in EXPERIMENTAL STAGE? Cannot see in the present situation we are in!?

Gosh...where did I hear thus just recently? What was the reaction by my fellow non-Gulch citizens?

Haha....

Recharge time is irrelevant when you bill by the hour - post initial fee just to show up, of course.

Awesome! Back in the late '60s I hung around with a guy with a jeep and we'd go out and do the same thing. Yes. it paid well for the time!

Hate to tell you but way back in the 60's a jet pilot friend of mine transferred to the far north and he drove a jeep. So he put a hook up on it and pulled people out of the snow for a small fee! Believe it or not! Paid well.

an EV would make sense is some use scenarios

i used to drive 70 miles back and forth to work
in the worse conditions, using a EV for that range would be possible (cold hurting battery charge, cold requiring the heater, ect)
but that would mean it is a second vehicle

possible
but the recharge time is a question

they would need enough to get to a safe place

but a valid idea to explore

Could there be a business opportunity here? Put a diesel generator on my gasoline powered pickup and answer calls from EVs stuck on the road - charge a fortune. Of course, they'd have to be more prolific than they are now to make it worthwhile.

For a Bop around Town car....I’d use one. But I just happen to have that kind of environment.

i understood what you meant
but it also opens a bigger door

some EVs can be turned off on people

I'm talking repurpose. Without transponder battery cannot be located.

Oh yeah! Very interesting. N