Posts by psdrake67 6 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2017
"last June" means June 2018. June 2019 would be "this June". June 2020 is "next June". Definitions for the first two become less clear toward the end of the year. By January 2020 "last" will definitely mean 2019 but "this" and "next" will probably both mean June 2020 for a few months at least. Fuzzy logic is required.
I registered my first.last@gmail.com and my first and last names are not uncommon so I regularly get misdirected emails. When informed they have the wrong email address and have reached the wrong <first last> most senders are never heard from again. I occasionally even get thanks. But one doofus from Australia is so prolific and consistent that I set up a filter to park all email from .au in a separate folder for later perusal.
But recently he tried to initiate an account recovery process with Google to "regain" control of his account. I politely indicated to Google that I had not in fact lost control of my account.
I'm all for calling out gratuitous Yank-baiting, but it wasn't. You pointed out that driving tests in some areas are suitably rigorous, and not in others. In doing so you have made the point for the poster when they said that a drivers license in the US does not prove you can drive. You may be able to, but since there are different standards in different places, and some places lacking complex roads, and licenses are generally portable when moving from state to state, the basic point is made.
In Nunavut there are no divided highways and no roads connecting to the rest of the continent. Heck, you could fit three Texas-sized states into Nunavut but the longest road is 13 miles. Get a license there and then drive a rental car all over the rest of North America with that Nunavut license.
Correction: Elon Musk isn't wealthy because of government handouts. He was wealthy long before Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX saves the government money on each and every launch. They will have saved the government an immense amount of money when all is said and done.
Tesla has received a limited amount of EV subsidies, but more in subsidies for setting up plants in various locations. Subsidies like that are available to anyone setting up a large plant (see Foxconn). The EV subsidies for Tesla haven't gone into corporate profits. They've been directed into more R&D. They don't make a profit but are valued at $50B. If you told any government in the world that if they provided $1.5B in EV subsidies and in return a bunch of investors would have $50B in capital gains then they would say yes. The taxes on the $50B far outweigh the $1.5B, and that's not including business activity, sales and income taxes, and the chance of future business profitability and corporate taxes on income.
A few commenters posted that Musk quit Trump's council because of Charleston. He didn't. He quit earlier because of the Paris Agreement.
But this isn't subsidizing specific technology. This is subsidizing any technology that doesn't emit carbon. Fuel cells, flywheels, highly pressurized gas canisters, high-energy capacitors. They are all zero-emission vehicles.
Also, lots of people seem to think the fact that some electricity is from coal or NG negates the benefit, but it doesn't. Large plants can have heavy equipment designed to reduce their environmental impact. Cars are much less efficient in that regard. Electrical distribution may cause losses, but so does gasoline distribution.
And anyone claiming electric vehicles will fail because they sell a lot less unless subsidized is ignoring the difference between a local maximum and a global maximum. Here's a handy real world example. Gasoline in your car engine is useless. It doesn't burn. You inject it and it just sits there. Sure if you add a spark it will burn but that's cheating somehow. You shouldn't have to subsidize it by adding any energy to make it go. Back to EVs, if you want to argue they don't create a path to a global maximum or at least a better local maximum then do that. But lots of experts disagree so prepare to have lots of folks arguing against the idea that cars will still be mostly fossil fuel powered far into the future.
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