mecameron

The architect said to me that we'll never fully recoup our costs of putting the hat on the house. To which I replied that we don't always to things for economic reasons, and just do them because they are the right thing to do.

I am so frustrated with this analysis and sentiment when it comes to environmental investment. I understand that looking at it with a financial lens can and should be done to inform what we do, and it would be great if a project just paid for itself, but you look at all the other things we spend money on and the same calculus is not used.

People don't buy the cheapest car, house, clothing, or food they could possibly get by with, or analyze the marginal cost of moving up or down the possible price tiers available to them with only the financial payback as a guide. Yet we constantly hear the refrain that you shouldn't spend a given amount of money on solar, house improvements, appliances, etc. that might be better for the environment if the payback isn't somehow positive with a 10-20 year payback period.

I've constantly had to work with contractors to let them know that I still want to pay for the marginal costs associated with investment even knowing that the marginal financial benefit is smaller. For instance, with solar panels in less than ideal locations, tri-pane windows, etc. I have disposable income, and I think the world is trouble for the 8+ billion humans inhabiting it, so I think it's worthwhile that I would spend some of that to make it marginally better even if that means I don't have a positive financial return.

Gravie | Sr Platform (DevOps) Engineer | Onsite Minneapolis | Full-Time

Hi, we’re Gravie. We improve the way employers offer health benefits and provide employees coverage they can actually use. We’re looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to support our application infrastructure as we grow. Our ideal candidate is a highly motivated, goal-oriented, team-focused engineer with a passion for automating systems and infrastructure.

https://www.gravie.com/open-positions/co/engineering/5C.B1B/...

I've used ClojureScript with re-frame professionally for over 2 years, and it's been the first time in over 20 years of development that I've enjoyed working on the front-end. Unidirectional data flow with a single app atom has been a dream to work with.

Added sugar is not necessary for yeast. The yeast is breaking down and using the carbs naturally present in wheat. The simplest breads, like french baguettes, are only made with flour, water, salt and yeast. Sugar is added to many commercial breads because it can make production easier and more consistent and sell more to consumers, but it's not added because it's necessary.

Gravie | DevOps/Sys Admin | Minneapolis, MN | Full time | ONSITE

Gravie is reinventing health benefits, making them easier and more affordable for employers and employees.

We're is looking for an experienced and effective Jr. DevOps/Systems Administrator to support our infrastructure as we grow. Our ideal candidate is a highly motivated, goal-oriented, team-focused with a passion for automating systems and infrastructure.

Our development stack is JVM based, initially started with Groovy/Grails but we have been incrementally transitioning to Clojure/ClojureScript for the last 2 years. The DevOps group assists the product engineering team, but also supports other corporate infrastructure like Tableau, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics GP, and many SaaS offerings. We are exclusively hosted in AWS and use CloudFormation and Salt for configuration management.

Perks to working at Gravie: Flexible health insurance • Company retirement investment regardless of your investment • Unlimited vacation • Flexible work from home • Work/life balance

More: https://www.gravie.com/about-us/careers/

I think one thing missing in the responses here is that there is some culpability without intent. Assume there was not ill intent, the fact that so many things that went on still happens, means they didn't have sufficient controls, or checks and balances in the practices to prevent it from happening. That lack of control is itself part of the problem, and something they could have fixed any number of times.

My 9 year old son always rightfully claims that many of the harmful things he does was accidental. The problem is that he frequently leaves little margin for error in a lot of things he does. Follows his sister just a few feet behind his bike; of course your going to run into her if she stops quickly. Stacking your bowl, cup and silverware on your plate then bring it up one handed; of course they're going to spill.

Facebook's internal controls and practices are insufficient to manage their business. It doesn't matter if they didn't willfully intend to do all of the shit they did. They did intentionally create the controls, practices, and culture in place that allowed it to happen.

I bought a 2013 Model S recently that had its wheels swapped with a 2016 Model S by a third party before sale (I didn't care for the 21" wheels that were on the 2013, and the buyer of the 2016 wanted them). Shortly after driving away from the dealer, the tire pressure sensor system reported faults. After bringing it in to Tesla they said the newer tires and older car were not compatible, but they could easily downgrade the electronics in the wheels or upgrade the electronics on the car. They were both about the same cost, so I just had them update the wheels.

For when you can't find any more pretrained ones. Or to get someone for a lower salary and growing them that provides some loyalty and help solving the problem of not having enough pretrained ones in the first place.

This is the real problem. If the consumer price is $50 but the insurer is paying $250 behind the scenes, then we all pay that price with increased premiums.

We've been using Clojure for 3 years and ClojureScript for 1.5 years. We're actively converting more of our legacy codebase to Clojure/Script.

It's been a great choice for us and even the skeptics have become converts over time. I think it's a joy to work with and allows us to reason about our problems and solve them better than many alternatives.

Fortunately, gasoline cars are so inefficient that you only need about 1/3 of the comparable energy in an electric car to move the vehicle. Still a ways to go, but we don't need to get to all the way gasoline energy density for the equivalent range.

The surface of the Earth is finite in size and has no edges. You can keep progressing forward without hitting an edge.

I agree, I think they should have taken the high road and tried to build the whole market of any vehicle with a plug instead of the underhanded jab against the volt. There are so many other cars they could have put in that spot. Maybe a Hummer?

> Cost of fueling - electricity is cheaper than gas.

Nullified by the fact that charging stations are scarce AND that it takes a lot of time to finish a charge. People drive cars so that they can get somewhere faster. It does not help if they have to hunt around for a charging stations and have to wait an hour to get charged.

We can consider the cost difference to be a concrete advantage, when and only when the infra for electric charging is on par with a fuel refill.

You're really shifting the goalposts. It is much cheaper to drive electric if you can charge at home. It's true a significant number of people can't charge at home, but if they can, it's usually 25-35% of the cost of a gasoline car. I've owned BEVs for 6 years and have probably charged away from home 10 times or less and mostly it was just to get a better parking spot.

> more controllable torque curves than even the best ICE

Oh I am perfectly fine with the torque curve of an ICE. I am not racing on the roads, you know. With automatic transmissions, this is even less of an issue.

So because you don't think it's an improvement, then it's not an improvement for anyone?

If you've already decided there are no benefits to BEVs for you personally, then it doesn't matter what others say because it doesn't benefit you. Why bother asking for the benefits?

I could see that viewpoint if you've never driven electric, but I think ultimately it's just a better product. Quiet, quick acceleration, never visiting a stinky gas station (charging at home is so liberating), much cheaper and easier maintenance, etc. The counter points are quickly eroding and falling.

Nissan did a great commercial at the launch of the Leaf [1] showing a world where a lot of our electric appliances were powered by gas. It's obviously absurd, but that's part of the point. I think we'll look back on this period 30-50 years from now and wonder in amazement that we drove such obviously inferior polluting dinosaurs for so long.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvbDVGWwzQc

Except that EVs are uniquely situated to get cleaner after they are purchased. That's already occurring, so an EV purchased in 2013 is currently cleaner per mile than it was when it was purchased [1]. You could make a weaker argument that that might apply to FCEVs. Whereas all ICE vehicles usually need to be replaced en masse to improve emissions.

[1] https://insideevs.com/us-ev-emissions/

Personal experience with nearly all health care insurance plans since the 90's: Each year the premiums go up, the out of pocket costs increase, and benefits decrease (beyond more than general inflation).

You are not required to use the HSA provider that your insurer/employer is tied to. You can pick and contribute to your own HSA account elsewhere, with one caveat. Your contributions are deductible from federal and most state taxes, but are only deductible from payroll taxes (social security/medicare) if the HSA contribution is deducted from your paycheck by your employer (and thus deposited in their preferred HSA provider).

Two biggest issues: 1. This just reeks of "No true Scotsman". My biggest issue with this REST purist rhetoric is that it seems no one can actually implement REST, but apparently if someone could it would solve most/all of our problems. But after many years of smart people unable to implement REST properly according to these critics, then maybe the problem is with REST.

2. "If you implement REST, you use content negotiation, and thereby eliminate versioning and typing issues"

The author is conflating the issue of identifying a client version and actually responding with appropriate client specific version data. It's one thing to identify which version via some mechanism (e.g. URL, query string, content type), but you still need the latest code to handle all of the versions you want to support. The author seems to believe that that using content type will solve both problems, whereas the real problem is actually having an implementation that responds with the right client specific data and not break between releases.

Thanks. I actually mis-read the parent comment as "it's not even legal to import electric cars" instead of "it's not even legal to import _the_ electric cars" referring specifically to the Bollore Bluecars.

Though I don't know much about the local controversy with the blue car launch in Indy, I highly doubt the relevant federal agencies would allow the importing and driving of hundreds of vehicles that have not passed through the relevant steps.

As far as I know, it's not even legal to import the electric cars, much less drive them on public roads. They certainly don't meet NHTSA standards.

Why would it not be legal to import electric cars? The cumulatively most sold electric vehicle in the US, the Nissan Leaf, started off manufacturing in Japan only, and the initial batch in the US was all imported. The just launched BWM i3 and i8 are both imported, as well as the VW e-golf and a number of others.

And not be legal to drive? By the end of 2015 we will be at nearly 400k electric vehicles sold in just the US [1]. A faster adoption rate than hybrid vehicles [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_t...

I find it interesting when people take a proposal with a specific number then try to discredit it by talking about changing it drastically in one direction. When does any natural or human made system have a single parameter that we can make better by some adjustment in one direction, respond 10x better when we change the parameter 10x more? Almost every parameter has some optimal range, above and below which are sub-optimal. Vitamin C in the body, water/sunlight for plants, semiconductor voltage, radiation level in chemotherapy, etc. Simply taking a proposal to to distribute X as being good, and showing that 100X must be better, but it obviously is absurd and would lead to bad things, does nothing to discredit the original proposal.

Social mobility in the US is one of the highest it has ever been in history

No, social mobility in the US has actually decreased fairly significantly in the last 50 years, and is much lower than other countries. That the US is somehow highly socially mobile is an enduring myth engrained in our collective psyche that is utterly wrong at this point.

It took me less than a minute to google "social mobility in the US today" (non-leading query) to find the following examples with data (and there are many more from other respectful sources):

1. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/in...

2. http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-...

The SAE combo fast fast charger is well behind the CADdeMO standard for adoption [1]. This is in part because it was approved much later and part because there was no vehicle in the US with the SAE combo. Though they are both are starting from very low bases, and some companies are building chargers with both plugs [2].

[1] http://insideevs.com/chademo-reports-2501-charging-stations-... [2] http://insideevs.com/abb-first-to-bring-combined-charging-sy...

There are many reasons fuel cells have not been adopted. They are very expensive (in the $100k+ range), they don't last long, storing hydrogen on the car is hard, and their cold weather performance is bad or they do not work at all [1]. And yes, while hydrogen is abundant, we do not have a distribution system in place.

Contrast this with battery electric cars, they exist today are viable at decent price points, they do not degrade as fast as FCV, they work sufficiently in cold weather (I've driven a leaf in MN winter at -20), and the electricity distribution system in place will mostly meet our needs. Top this off with significant investment from diverse industries to improve battery storage and performance (consumer electronics, car manufacturers, power companies).

[1] (http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/fcv_challenges.shtml)

Since even you admit testing does not eliminate all bugs, there are still cases when defects make it into production. Novel cases do happen, and some can be quite difficult to understand. I can see how this tool could be useful in those situations.

Two big advantages that this study dismisses are local vs remote pollution, and an easier ability to take advantage of generation mix changes. Even if EVs have the same life life cycle cost, their pollution is always at a remote source further from population centers. That matters for the tailpipe emissions. Secondly, it's much easier to replace a few power plants, or improve their pollution output, than millions of internal combustion engines. If all cars were EVs fed from coal plants, it would be easier to make that clean than millions of traditional vehicles.