It’s because it isn’t cheaper than running gas in large parts of the county. EFFICIENT doesn’t mean CHEAPER.
I did the math this past year with excel and chat GPT. Go to the side of your heat pump, look at the model number, go to the manufacturer website and pull the COP specs at every given temperature. Where I live in Chattanooga, TN, it can get down to 5-10 degrees for weeks at a time during December and January.
If you look up the cost of gas per therm, convert it to BTUs, and then the cost of electricity per kilowatt hour, and then compare the cost of running a heat pump vs the cost of gas at any given temperature based on the coefficient of performance of the heat pump, you will very quickly realize that depending on your local utility, there is no break even point. As in, for me, even if it was 68 degrees outside it is cheaper for me to run my gas furnace than it would be to run my heat pump, even if the COP was 4.
I did the math for Seattle (I don’t live there, I just looked at the local utility prices and went on their website and pulled some numbers) and based on current natural gas prices and electric prices in Seattle, it’s cheaper to use gas below 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Above that temperature, based on the gradually increasing COP with temperature, then the heat pump is cheaper. But only cheaper by about 10 dollars per month. The 30-40 bucks a year you save running your heat pump during the winter months you will NEVER make back if you are shelling out an extra 10k for an install versus a gas furnace. And that gas furnace produces hot toasty air instead of lukewarm air.
The price of electricity weighs heavily on if a heat pump is CHEAPER (cheaper, not EFFICIENT) to run than gas. For all but the most advanced heat pumps, if you run the numbers, in most areas of the United States, with the exception of some parts of California, under an average temperature of 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit it is cheaper to use gas to heat. And in many, many parts of the east coast, Midwest, and south, gas is always cheaper to use to heat no matter what temperature, even if you have the most ridiculously advanced heat pumps with a high COP, and even if it’s damn near 70 degrees outside. Gas is that cheap, and packs in that energy.
I want everyone to note how this article only notes that heat pumps are more EFFICIENT. Not CHEAPER. Just because something is efficient doesn’t mean it’s CHEAPER. I want to stress that point.
I also want to note that as someone who has a heat pump, I would pay an extra 10-20 dollars a month for some warm dry heat, instead of lukewarm air. And I would pay that very willingly.
You want to know what's even crazier, you can literally but it over the counter. I was at kroger the other day and I saw it next to the vitamins and I did a double take.
I know this isn't your family member, but if they were a 500-pound alcoholic smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, I suspect they probably felt like crap before the ozempic.
Yes, but I use QuickScan on iOS (which is free, with no ads) instead of adobe acan, and a variety of other apps, including apples own.
It’s a bit cumbersome to open the notes app or files app and make a new scan. And adobes app uploads everything to the cloud, which is an absolute no in particularly sensitive industries. You really can’t use adobe scan in healthcare, in finance, and I suspect in a lot of other places, which demotes it to only home use only.
You're not wrong, and honestly you raise a lot of good points. But remember I told yall to pretend to be broke for a second. If you live in apartment complex of 400 ppl, out in the semi-suburbs of a major city, there aren't nearly enough charging stations to charge everyone's car. Unless you dangle an extension cord out your 2nd story window and park right in front to charge your car.
That 2k cost for electricity you mentioned is for people charging at home, in their garage, with their own charger, and the latter two are things that people who live in the city are probably not going to have.
At 57 mpg (which is what the latest prius gets), and gas at 2.50 a gallon, and assuming electricity costs 0.13 cents per kwh, you only save 150 bucks a year in gas. Thats 12 dollars a month. That's nothing. If an electric car costs just 8k more than an equivalent gas car, thats 50+ years to break even.
12 dollars a month - broke people are just going to work an extra shift or 2 and make that money and not think about it. Better than than missing work because you couldn't find a spare charger in the city, or paying 20 bucks for a fast charge overpriced public charger.
As an aside, using a fast charger just once - just one time a month - is likely to eat whatever savings in electricity you would otherwise have from buying an EV.
I will concede that if you use the calculator above and plug in $5.00 a gallon, then the average payback comes down from 50+ years to around 10. But - at least in the states, the places that have gas at 5 dollars a gallon also have electricity kwh costs of ~30 cents per kwh. And if you plug that into the calculator, the payback goes back up to 50+ years. Actually, the numbers are suspiciously quite similar. It's almost as if you can't win. Is it a conspiracy? I don't know.
>Used cars buyers aren't typically considering what the cost of a replacement engine is when they're buying.
That's because engines, properly lubricated, and run at a set RPM (i.e highway miles), have a lifespan that is far in excess of what a normal person would reasonably drive in half their adult lifespan. Dependent on brand, of course. But plenty of people racking up 400k-500k miles on original engines. That shit used to be unheard of back in the day.
Engines degrade by use. This is not the case for lithium ion batteries based on the way they are used in electric vehicles. Degradation is based on DoD - depth of charge. You cycle a lithium ion battery between 50%-60% instead of 10-90%, and you increase the lifespan exponentially. It's not linear. It's exponential. If automakers wanted to, they could add 2k to the wholesale price of the car, make the battery pack 20% larger, cycle the pack in a more narrow window of its capacity, and if age wasn't a factor, no battery pack would fail before the 20 year mark. Unbalanced degradation with age, as it is, is virtually the only reason every battery pack fails.
When you have a prius, and your battery pack fails, all the places that sell refurbished packs do it by taking the battery packs apart, finding the one cell thats shot, replacing it, and magically the whole battery pack works again. Why is it that one cell out hundreds? It's not as if that one cell was charged or used more than the others, they are all in series/parallel. The car charges all the cells the same. That particular cell just degraded faster than the others. The technology currently exists to make lithium batteries that last 20+ years, but it is nigh impossible to predict that during year 17, cell #345 is going to degrade 0.0032% faster than its peers and will cause the whole pack to fail.
Almost 100% of priuses will need a battery replacement by year 15. It averages from 9-15 years, with the peak happening 12 years from manufacture. Oddly enough, on the PriusChat forums, there was someone who tabulated this but cars that spent most of their life in Canada and Northern states trended toward lasting longer than cars down along the gulf coast and in southern states. Not sure if there was a large enough sample for significance, but I'm sure with the sheer about of priuses that have been sold in the past 20 years, this can be figured out.
I'm going to get crucified for saying this, but I suspect hybrids will likely be the future, with EV use picking up slowly (if at all) over the next 20-30 years. Not saying EVs are like 3D TVs, but as it stands right now, EVs are far too expensive for the vast majority of the US population. I'm going to focus on the US for now. The readership for hacker news skews wealthier, but I would like you all to pretend to be broke, for just one second.
The cost of a battery pack replacement for EVs are exorbitant, and that battery pack replacement cost all but eliminates whatever potential monetary benefit an individual would derive from driving an EV in the first place. Yes, I know blah blah blah the environment, blah blah blah lower maintenance, but look - broke people already take their car the cheapest mechanic or have uncle joe take a look at it, or just don't maintain it at all. The vast majority of people are going to look and see if its cheaper to buy, own and insure than a regular gas car.
The price of a new battery pack for an EV is exorbitant. A chevy bolt battery pack is 8 grand. A tesla pack costs 15k. Other electric vehicles are in the same ballpark. There is no way to get these battery packs new, other than going to a dealer, because "refurbished" packs just keep failing every 2-3 years and you keep replacing cell by cell playing whack a mole until the next cell fails. Ain't nobody paying 10-15k for a battery. You can buy a whole ass car for that amount of money. The readership for hacker news skews wealthier, I know, but truly, there are a lot of people who buy cars for 5-10k and drive them for the next 8-10 years, with rarely an incident. There are a whole lot of people who have never bought a brand "new" car from a dealership in their life. And until EVs get cheap enough to percolate down to the masses, adoption is going to be at a standstill.
As an aside - The reputation of car brands is made and destroyed in the used car market. the Prius has an excellent reputation because (despite battery pack woes) there are people who drive those things for 300k miles plus, regularly. I guarantee that if an automaker rushes and builds shitty EVs that ultimately end up being pieces of unreliable shit 5-10 years later on the used car market, that is by far the easiest and fastest way to ruin their their company and drive themselves to insolvency. Tesla is on the cusp of learning this, unfortunately.
The App Store reviews are pretty damning. Pay 1 dollar to unlock dark mode, only to have an update roll it back, and charge 12 dollars monthly.
That’s a pretty high monthly cost for a 2fa app. Why would anyone use this over raivo or opt Authy? I mean, even bitwarden is 10 dollars a year, and it has password management and 2fa built in?
> The vendor lock-in is by definition there if there are any special Apple features.
This is ridiculous. Then no manufacturer, weather it be cars, or clothing, or industrial equipment would offer anything different than their competitors, lest it be deemed "vendor lock in".
But that is what happens, when you use the icloud backup. You log in, you you create a new passcode, and the app automatically looks in your icloud folder for a backup, then restores it automatically. There is no account creation involved in the process. What you are asking for already exists.
What you are asking for is the manual backup you create to automatically restore.
On August 21st, 2017, the USS John S. McCain collided with the Alnic MC, a Liberian oil tanker, off the coast of Singapore. The report provides a detailed overview of the actions that led to the collision: when crew members tried to split throttle and steering control between consoles, they lost control of the ship, putting it into the path of the tanker. The crash killed 10 sailors and injured 48 aboard the McCain.
Unpopular opinion, but they should ban all new touch screen controls on all new vehicles built past the year 2025.
I actually noticed this, but I consider this a feature, not a bug. In raivo, you are able to export an encrypted zip file, which I did and saved to a flash drive and put it next to my old iphone 6 in a drawer under my bed. It's reassuring in a sense, that if someone does obtain access to that encrypted backup file, they wouldn't be able to do some fuckery and automatically "recover" the backup on a phone that is not mine.
I will say that what surprised me about the exported backup encrypted zip file - it did not work the way I expected. I thought it was going to be some .txt file with a bunch of numbers and things I would have to input into a new 2fa app manually - but no, it's legitimately a a very nice html document that has every 2fa account laid out neatly with a QR code, section by section. When transferring these codes to my old iphone 6 (before I turned on icloud sync), I just held my phone up to my laptop screen and moved it inch by inch every 1 second (tapping accept in between) to scan and add 20+ codes with the camera. It took me 5 minutes to add them initially as I doubled checked the veracity of the 2fa codes generated... but truthfully you could probably add 20+ accounts in under a minute. If not quicker.
I don't consider the lack of an automated way to import the manual backups a bad thing. The encrypted icloud sync works remarkably well. The exported zip backup would, in in the worse case scenario, be where I lost my iphone 12, I lost my macbook air, someone stole my ipad mini, and in the same day, someone broke into my house, went under my bed, and additionally stole the beat up looking iphone 6 in the back of the drawer. But again, since the codes are backed up encrypted in iCloud, just because my devices are stolen doesn't mean I lost access to them. I could also drive 30 minutes downtown, walk into an apple store, buy an iphone on the spot, download raivo from the app store and have it automatically sync my codes from iCloud, and have access to my 2fa codes, all within an hour. Or I could go to craigslist and find someone selling an old ipad, iphone, or whatever and buy it off them for 50 bucks and have access to my codes. My wife also has an old iphone 7 that is laying unused on the bookshelf in our living room, which I could also just log in and access my codes as well.
Basically, what I'm saying, is that as long as an encrypted copy of my 2fa codes exist in icloud, I can log into any idevice and have access to my 2fa codes. The chance of me having to manually use my encrypted .zip backup is virtually nil. The only scenario I can envision is if someone stole every device I own, burned my house down, sim swapped my phone and stole my cell phone number, burned down the local google data center (likely centers) where my iCloud user data is stored on Google Cloud, and also bought every iphone, ipad, macbook, and apple device in a 100 mile radius, including used models, and including breaking into and robbing every apple store in the vicinity so I couldn't procure a new idevice. That is legitimately the only scenario I can foresee in where I would lose access to my 2fa codes.
Apple devices are ubiquitous in the US. I still have a windows laptop and desktop that I had considered as my "main" computers for the longest time. I had a real come to jesus moment several months ago when I realized my way of thinking was a bit outdated. I had thought that in order to reduce the attack surface, I would need to manually backup all my codes, print them out, make several copies so I wouldn't lose one of them, and use my 2fa codes only on one device. But truthfully - there is another way of ensuring ubiquitous access to my 2fa codes, and it didn't involve much more effort on my part.
Coincidentally, I switched over to raivo just several weeks ago. There is a way to extract all of your 2fa keys using a deprecated chrome extension, which is what I did. It's quite easy, it spits out everything in a PDF web page with QR codes - I printed the whole page as a backup, then used my phone to add my 20+ accounts in about 5 minutes with the QR code. I have used authy for over 6 or 7 years, but for some reason I was getting uncomfortable with having it tied to my phone number.
There is an ipad app, which I installed on my M2 macbook air, so I can access it on my laptop as well. I also downloaded a version onto my old iphone 6 I keep in a drawer under my bed, just as a backup in case something gets stolen. And I have an ipad mini that I use on a daily nightly basis for reading and browsing. In addition to a ~5 year old windows desktop and a windows laptop form ~2015.
I've been resistant to using apps that only exist in the apple ecosystem, because I generally have only used windows laptops and android phones. But now I use an iphone, I have an m2 macbook air, and quite honestly the quality just blows everything on the windows / android side out of the water. I finally just admitted to myself that there is probably never going to be a scenario where if my phone breaks, I would go out and buy an android phone. It won't happen. The sheer connivence of just getting a new replacement phone, logging in, and having all your settings and files and (2FA codes! - encrypted in icloud!) automatically download is understated.
The price of an old iphone 6 or 6s is ~25-40 dollars on ebay. The price of a yubikey is 50 or 60 bucks.
I did the math this past year with excel and chat GPT. Go to the side of your heat pump, look at the model number, go to the manufacturer website and pull the COP specs at every given temperature. Where I live in Chattanooga, TN, it can get down to 5-10 degrees for weeks at a time during December and January.
If you look up the cost of gas per therm, convert it to BTUs, and then the cost of electricity per kilowatt hour, and then compare the cost of running a heat pump vs the cost of gas at any given temperature based on the coefficient of performance of the heat pump, you will very quickly realize that depending on your local utility, there is no break even point. As in, for me, even if it was 68 degrees outside it is cheaper for me to run my gas furnace than it would be to run my heat pump, even if the COP was 4.
I did the math for Seattle (I don’t live there, I just looked at the local utility prices and went on their website and pulled some numbers) and based on current natural gas prices and electric prices in Seattle, it’s cheaper to use gas below 24 degrees Fahrenheit. Above that temperature, based on the gradually increasing COP with temperature, then the heat pump is cheaper. But only cheaper by about 10 dollars per month. The 30-40 bucks a year you save running your heat pump during the winter months you will NEVER make back if you are shelling out an extra 10k for an install versus a gas furnace. And that gas furnace produces hot toasty air instead of lukewarm air.
The price of electricity weighs heavily on if a heat pump is CHEAPER (cheaper, not EFFICIENT) to run than gas. For all but the most advanced heat pumps, if you run the numbers, in most areas of the United States, with the exception of some parts of California, under an average temperature of 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit it is cheaper to use gas to heat. And in many, many parts of the east coast, Midwest, and south, gas is always cheaper to use to heat no matter what temperature, even if you have the most ridiculously advanced heat pumps with a high COP, and even if it’s damn near 70 degrees outside. Gas is that cheap, and packs in that energy.
I want everyone to note how this article only notes that heat pumps are more EFFICIENT. Not CHEAPER. Just because something is efficient doesn’t mean it’s CHEAPER. I want to stress that point.
I also want to note that as someone who has a heat pump, I would pay an extra 10-20 dollars a month for some warm dry heat, instead of lukewarm air. And I would pay that very willingly.