Actualy I switched to a pellet stove. Get the wood that way in nice 40 lb bags with minimal hassle. If I had enough solar power, I could use electric heat.
The infrastructure to use electricity to power transportation just isnt there yet, even with the solar farms that are springing up. The sun only shines during the day, and it makes little sense to burn fossil fuels to turn it into electricity and then use the electricity to power the cars- when you can just burn the fossil fuels directly in the cars.

Exactly. government always wants to force people to do what they dont want to do. Its time to let people make up their own minds. i just bought another ICE car and will enjoy it. I dont want an EV right now, as the technology and infrastructure just isnt up to snuff yet.

If you only drive around town, or have another vehicle to travel in, that may be ok. We regularly make 250+ mile day trips, on back roads, even in the winter and summer, and an EV won't cut it, especially a cheaper one with shorter range.

My son-in-law bought a tesla and for the same trips, he has to take 45 to 90 minutes longer, depending on time of year.

Thanks, but I try not to blatantly loot others and assist the slave-masters in DC.

You can buy an all electric Chevy Bolt for $26k new less a 7,500 federal tax credit, less your state incentives ($3,000 in CO) for a total price of $15,500. That's a lot less than most gas cars. And you don't have to pay for gas, oil changes, transmission fluid, etc.

I wish they would keep making things that work, and not this annual refreshing to satisfy the automobile fashion police at Car and Driver, or the paid advertisers at Consumer Reports.

The 4.0 liter engine in the Ranger (and the 3.0 variant) are variants of the Cologne Engine from 1962! It was all over Ford products (2.6, 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, 4.0, et al), and converted to SOHC in the 1990s. That engine makes more horsepower and torque at lower RPM than the brand new Toyota 4.0 engine in the Tacoma!

I'm planning on pulling the one from my old 2004 Ranger and rebuilding it, with some head porting and chamber cleanup. Then putting it in my new 2004 Ranger (new 2004? sound goofy?). It still runs perfectly after 170k miles (screw you Consumer Reports), but why not freshen it up?

Those rangers are tough as nails.
One look at used car listings date filtered from the 1990s is empirical evidence that FORD had it all figured out.

Nukes for the WIN!
In more ways than one.

You forgot the “und shoo vill eat ze boogs!” part.
I’m glad I’m old. Only 30 more years of this BS at the most.

Thanks for sharing your experience and knowledge, t-t. 👍
It's almost as if the "leaders" in DC have the destruction of America, the land
of the free, as an ultimate goal. All the evidence indicates that is the case.
DC. NIFO to save America.

Hadn't heard that about gallium and aluminum. Need to read more. Thanks.

RadHard is a little different than EMP (or HEMP requirements). The former involves resistance to high energy particles. The latter is resistance to very high electric fields. These electric fields cause high voltages in little wires (antennae) and destroy sensitive electronics. The particles, depending on energy and type, damage the semiconductors directly. EMP can be protected against by essentially a Faraday cage. Rad Hard needs to block (or as you note "be immune" to) the particles.

Assume you already knew this. Just noting for the community.

Before I retired, I worked 35 years as a civilian contractor for the DoD. All Satellite work, aero-space, critical comms, and signal processing had to be made with RAD- Hard devices. While not completely RAD-Proof, they were very tough. The only drawback was feature size and propagation speed, meaning you couldn't have high performance, high density devices such as were available on the commercial market. The types of devices available, by definition, were relatively large and slow (as I.C.'s were concerned), To withstand neutron bombardment there had to be large traces inside the device so though even holes were punched through the traces from high energy particles, there was enough of the trace left to keep working. Not much has can be done to get around the physics.
Russians used and continue to use vacuum tube technology. Now before you start laughing, this are extremely tiny and robust devices, they are as small as transistors. The geometry is so small they don't need heater elements. After the fall of the wall in 1989 we went on a shopping spree, mostly in Ukraine, once we reverse engineered their most advance equipment, we understood their little secret and made our own Ultraminiature vacuum tube devices. One such aspect of this technology migrated to the commercial market in the form of plasma television displays. They consist of millions of microscopic CRTs, three for each pixel. RGB.
It would be a fatal error to underestimate Russians and their tech. Operation Paperclip: we got the Nazi engineers at the end of WWII, the Russians got the Nazi factory workers. We got the research aspect, the Russians got the practical, hands-on, how to build it, part.
President Kennedy addressed the graduating class of America University is June 1963, Quote: "No one suffered more than the Russians in WWII, they lost 20-25 million people, more than the rest of all combatants combined, lost an area the size of Chicago to the Atlantic, wiped off the face of the planet." Given the worse beat-down any nation has ever suffered, they kicked Nazi ass all the way back to Berlin. Kennedy ended by saying "We never want to start a fight with the Russians".
The Russians have now buddied up the the Chi-Coms and are giving them their tech. After depleting almost all of our ammunition stock and all of our treasury, in support of an (actual) Nazi regime, we now have a muppet of a stand-in pResident starting a war with both Russian and China. There is no nation with a greater hatred of Nazis than the Russian people. What could possibly go wrong? TraderJoe BuyDone is on the wrong side history on this. If he keeps going down this path, we are going to get the poop end of the stick. Big time.

Indeed. This great civilization of ours has existed for barely a blip in the historic timeline and it would be a shame for it to end because it ran out of easy to use energy. Alternatives to the carbon fuels need to be brought on board, but most of what I've seen aren't very good substitutes. On a massive scale (powering cities) nuclear seems best, but has its problems, for sure.

I would note that EMP proofing can be done on equipment with semiconductors. Microprocessors are the most susceptible. Power semiconductors, like diodes are better, last are electromagnetic machines like alternators, motors and starters.

As you note a completely mechanical car would be best. A car with simple diodes might be ok too, depending on the shielding. EV motor controllers operate in the presence of very strong EM fields all the time. These are far less susceptible than the microprocessors in an ICE engine control unit (ECU). However, if someone wanted to design any of these to resist EMP it can be done. We used to make engine generators for the Army and Marines that passed these requirements.

Wishing for an EMP to wipe out EVs is like wishing a storm to wipe out a brick house when you live in a wooden one.

Funny you mention that. My cousin and aunty are driving up from Maryland to NH, picking us up for a major road trip up to Maine then cross border to PEI, then to Quebec, Montreal, down through Vermont then back to NH to drop us off, where she will then head back to Maryland. I don't know how many miles that will be total, but that will be a major milage trip. She just bought a new Suburban and wants to break it in right. Talk about traveling in style.

Anything with a semiconductor is vulnerable to damage. An EMP proof car has these qualities:
> A generator not an alternator (it has diodes).
> A mechanical voltage regulator using relays.
> A point & condenser ignition system.
> A Mechanical fuel pump.
> A belt driven cooling fan.
> Carburetors or mechanical fuel injection.
There can not be a single semi-conductor device in the critical operational systems.
This pretty much rules out most cars and trucks built after 1965 when manufacturers started switching over to alternators and other semi-conductor-based devices.
These devices did make the cars more reliable, when the switch was made to electronic ignition, reliability went up even more. The final move to electronic fuel injection made yearly tune-ups a quaint thing of the past. Cars can typically go 100,000 miles before needing a major tune-up. (aside from oil changes and air filters) That used to be the typical life-span of our parents cars. The rust buckets we teenagers bought for $50 and drove them into the ground.
The sweet spot is when manufactures switched from 6 volt to 12 volt electrics (early or mid 1950's?) to about the late 1960's.
I had a 1967-1/2 Volvo 144S that met all the criteria for being EMP proof. Sweet ride. 4-wheel disc brakes, an indestructible tractor motor (1.8L) , a true overdrive 5-speed transmission with limited slip differential, Dual SU carbs. It wouldn't win any races, (the original flying brick) but it did last for 380,000 miles.

1980-ish? Corvettes came with an anti-theft device the eventually evolved into the "OnStar" system. By the Mid 1990's?, (citation needed) every GM product came equipped with it standard. Billed as an emergency help button and crash detection system, it also allowed police to disable a car reported stolen.
You will notice that almost every car built in the last 20 or so years has a little fin or roof wart on top. This is the GPS antenna, whether or not your car has GPS navigation, your car is always "phoning home".

Your rational personal actions account for most of your success reducing energy use. 👍
Double pane windows do work - better than single pane, but not very well compared to
much better designs with fewer windows and real insulation (or insulated shutters.)
Walls of glass are a foolish waste of energy.
Solar hot water is very smart where you live if you can do it at a reasonable cost.
When I was a boy, I visited Granddad's house in summer at the beach in NC.
Everyone showered in an enclosed outside shower when returning from the beach,
and the tank for that shower was in full sun all day and painted black. Warm water for free.

Next to water, oil is the next most abundant liquid on the planet. Scarcity is an illusion invented to drive up prices. The very term "fossil fuel" was a complete fabrication made up by Rockefeller, to delude people into thinking "there were only so many dinosaurs, therefore there is only so much oil." So pay up, sucker.
There is zero proof oil came from million year old rotting dinos. Think: mineral oil. A hydrocarbon extruded from particular rock formations.
We will run out of oil, just before we run out of water.

Definitely lose capacity after every charge.

Love my Ranger. Old one's frame rotted. Got a new one. Need to move the front Torsen differential and winch-bumper to the new one.

I need some of those. Only have a few boxes of that kind of ammo.

I have double pane windows, and heavily tinted windows. Living in FL, I can tell you the DO WORK.

If I was POOR. I would put a PLASTIC layer around my windows. For a few dollars it's the SAME EFFECT.

But I also have made sure EVERY nook/crany is sealed. The caulk around my windows is SOLID. Only some windows are Hurricane Rated.

We close the accordion shutters on 1/2 of our house almost year round, to keep the sun out.

I pay about 1/2 what my neighbors pay in electricity, and I work from home, and keep the house comfy!

Oh, and I double insulated my attic (probably the best return on $ ever). Along with increasing the A/C Vent into my office, so I can tolerate a lower A/C Setting while keeping my office 5 degrees cooler than the house.

99% is simple logic. It doesn't have to be expensive. My next investment would be a Solar Hot Water Heater (Black Bladder on the House, motor runs during the day to capture solar heat).
But our hot water heaters are already pretty efficient. I don't know if I could recoup the cost of setting up, maintaining, and repairing the system.

I don't know... Seems like you could hit them with a Fire Hose and get them to start the meltdown process. Maybe a 6,000 - 10,000 PSI pressure sprayer, buried under the road. Or a small shot upward, followed by a stream of water, through the hole.

My plan for the aluminum camera poles is gallium. Introduce that, and the aluminum lattice degrades and the metal becomes brittle. That and modified laser pointers to burn out the camera optics. :-)

Also, the flashing lights that tend to produce seizures... Let them watch those for a while.
We need a version that affects the AIs... LOL

Maybe efficiency will start to matter.
No way I'd buy a 'modern' house.
Energy efficiency is horrible. Double-paned windows?
What a foolish joke.
But no politician breathes a word about efficiency unless it's EV related.
Instead it's inane CO2 and climate change.