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Baloney on everything costing more. Most things in stores cost less here than many other places because of competition. As for housing, once you own a private home it's not bad. Taxes and utilities are under $1,000 a month. It's not just about money, either. Driving is slow, stressful, and...

It's a lot more complex than that. Right now there's a glut of suburban and exurban housing and a shortage of urban housing. On top of that, government at all levels directly or indirectly subsidizes auto use more than other modes. Despite these subsidies, owning a car is still hideously...

I'm sorry to hear that, Sed. It's funny but I have an ongoing dream (nightmare?) where for some reason I end up back in high school. Don't know the exact reasons but I think it's something along the lines of the school retroactively telling me I never met the graduation requirements. It's...

My aunt had one of those once. My uncle hated driving it. In his own words, it was "like driving a sofa".

I would try to chew them down first before worrying about financing. Good price or not, most people are amenable to negotiation if they have something they just want to get rid of. I would also keep the old Element as a parts car given that things will eventually need replacing if you plan on...

Most of those conditions would preclude a person from safely driving as well, particularly dementia, MS, MD, heart disease, and ataxia. It's a complete misnomer though about "exertion" being an issue. It's not necessary to use any more energy riding a bike than walking if you so choose...

Supposedly there's enough gold in the iron core of the Earth to cover the planet in a layer about 12-13 feet thick. Of course, if we were able to get at it that would make gold practically worthless. Along the same lines of thought however we may well start mining asteroids within our lifetimes...

The idea of living in a big city would be to dispense with a car altogether, meaning limited parking wouldn't be a concern. A car is hands down the worst way to get around in a big city anyway. Average car travel speeds in Manhattan are something like 7 mph. I average more than twice that speed...

I've heard this elsewhere. It's moot even if true because the "refill" time for oil fields if the theory is sound would be on the order of millenia. That's not even accounting for the pollution or global warming issues of continuing to use oil. We're better off transitioning to a non-fossil fuel...

Cargo bike? That would seem to be the answer here. They even have versions with electric motors in case you live in a very hilly area (or just don't feel like pedaling). Given your travel habits, if not a cargo bike it's sounding to me like you might get by with an electric scooter. Just...

Glad you're OK, Merc. Regarding getting another vehicle, it might be worthwhile to carefully examine your usage patterns, perhaps see if rentals and/or using services like Uber would be more cost effective. The hard fact is the economics of owning a motor vehicle have always been horribly...

If that's the case then there's no real reason why alternators and generators wouldn't be similar in size for any given output. Alternators generally require lower maintenance which is why I suspect they replaced generators in motor vehicles. The "downsizing" was just a result of technological...

Electronics will be able to do the boosting and lowering in the not too distant future. This has more to do with the fact that those old DC generators used permanent magnets which weren't all that powerful (hence the much larger sizes). Alternators use field windings instead. Much of the...

Given the prevalence of electronics in homes these days it may well make sense to have a low voltage DC distribution system inside buildings. I'm thinking something like 48VDC. This avoids the need to rectify and filter 120VAC before stepping it down to voltages electronics can use. The switch...

I vaguely recall that I did but I'm not 100% sure. I do remember seeing Silent Running in the theater but I'm just not sure if I saw Soylent Green also. The odd thing is some of this dystopian science fiction is becoming fact, such as the global warming in Soylent Green. It may be that any...

I have a lingering fear of ending up in Soylent version 8.0 when I'm no longer of any use to society. Remember world hunger problems caused by overpopulation will only make things worse by mid century. Who knows if the creator of Soylent will start altering the formula to include people by then...

There's a whole bunch of reasons for that. We're approaching the limits of lithography which means we can't easily make smaller, faster transistors. On top of that signals propagating through silicon face issues of their own as speeds increase. If you think about it, in one clock tick with a...

This is worth a read: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/10/kryders_law_of_ever_cheaper_storage_disproven/

I'm personally holding off any purchases of large drives (to me that's anything 2TB and over) for a few years until large SSDs get close to price parity with mechanical disks. My 2TB drive isn't even half full yet. Moreover, given the tiny size of the magnetic bits needed to reach these huge...

It's worth noting a family making $200K US in a place like NYC is strictly middle class. Sure, lots of people get by here even on $30K, but they're living on Ramen soup. It's exactly crap like this which should be illegal. Even from Wall Street's perspective this is bad business. Gut a company...

There's a huge underground economy in NYC with cash wages below minimum wage. In particular, you have both Mexican and Chinese illegal immigrants working for in some cases $2 an hour. Amen to all that. The only sure thing in a capitalist economy is the rich get richer at the expense of everyone...

I'm a big fan of ultra high resolution screens but even I think this is ridiculous in a 5.5" screen. The eye just can't resolve anything much smaller than maybe 0.05mm, even if someone has great close-up vision. That's 500 pixels per inch. The pixels on this screen would be 2,250 to the inch...

I actually soldered the broken off pin back on the one or two times this happened to me. It worked fine afterwards.

Thanks again everyone both for noticing I hit 3K, and joining me in the celebration. Now here's to 4K and beyond! Not that I'm there yet, but I may have another milestone coming up in my life soon. The Airborne titanium bike I bought on eBay in late 2011 might be coming up on 10K miles this...

Amen to that! Not sure I'd even want to talk to a significant other on the phone that long on a regular basis.

That's interesting. I'll be really curious as to the retail price. My longstanding theory here is the market for SSDs peters out once they start costing more than maybe $500 (and that's for the highest capacity "flagship" model). My reasoning then is the 2TB drive will probably need to come in...

If my assumptions are correct, this should mean Samsung increased the number of layers in their V-NAND. That should mean large price drops in their smaller size SSDs. I'm hoping 1 TB drops under $200.

Thanks, guys! I know 3K posts pales next to some of the others here but it says a lot for this place that I've stuck around long enough to get there at my less than proficient posting rate. If I continue at my present posting rate I'll finally get to 10K around maybe 2047 or thereabouts. :) And...

It's a people problem. In Japan for example public transit is spotless (and I'll guess their private autos are also). Here in the US people think of their car as an extension of their living room. And in some cases their bathroom. :hurl: It may be too late to change your lifestyle but then...

Have you considered the off-grid lifestyle? Nothing wrong with rural living if you rarely need to travel. I don't doubt that. A lot of people in this city are just slobs. I've seen personal cars here which are so gross they make the filthiest bus look antiseptic. You know a car is filthy when...

Buses? In general buses suck compared to rail transit. I get physically sick riding any kind of ICE-powered vehicle, whether it's a bus or a car. Trains and bikes are fine, though. Never got sick on either. It's a good idea to check for "foreign matter" before you sit down anywhere, even a car...

Not sure what you mean by that unwashed masses comment. People from all walks of life ride public transit here simply because it's faster than most other options. Incidentally on average a car costs a person $300K over their lifetime. Had you lived your life without one, you could have been...

Yep. Bike and/or public transit is the way to go. Your $983 could have bought a very nice bike, or over 200 round trips on the NYC subway. For what it's worth, particularly in a place like NYC with congestion, both of those options are typically faster than driving.

It looks to me like either a matte surface, or it's in a plastic bag. Either one would explain the less than optically clear properties. I imagine if polished out it would be as clear as glass.

Not to mention that those are continuous HP ratings. Typically you can overload an electric motor by 50% to 100% for a short time, assuming the battery can supply the power. That could give you in excess of 400 HP. Given electric motor torque curves, that's probably equivalent to a 500 or 600 HP...

More or less my feelings also. Although nothing happened to anyone I know, I've seen the negative impacts cars are having in NYC in terms of carnage, pollution, and overall quality of life. I'd just as soon that they disappear from large cities altogether. Never had a driver's license either but...

Regarding plan C, my brother has actually been seriously thinking of doing an EV conversion on his Mark VIII when it finally dies. It still may last a while, which I guess is good as battery technology will only get better. I think this car would be a perfect EV conversion. It's already very...

That really sucks. Here is an interesting idea if your tap water is relatively cool in the summer. I think they might also make regular air conditions where the condenser is cooled with tap water instead of a fan and heat exchanger. I personally feel very uncomfortable once a room gets much...

My first answer was going to be maybe the electrical lines aren't up to par to carry the load but given all the computers Merc runs that's highly unlikely. Either it's a central air unit for the entire building which the landlord refuses to fix, or this is one of those buildings which for some...

This is kind of funny because for years one of my sister's coworkers insisted that the government can spy on you through your TV (but according to her only when it's off). Now this was back in the days of analog NTSC TV, making her entire fear tin foil hat material. It's a bit ironic how this is...

Duplicate post-please remove.

When you consider that residences typically hold a temperature of maybe 20°F to 30°F above ambient due to insulation and power dissipation from various appliances you can probably drop the lower end of your range to 40°F or 50°F, perhaps even 30°F for a very well insulated home. It's also worth...

For what it's worth chances are good the cat would have survived if it had fallen from the plane. Fatality rates for falling cats peak at around 5 stories, and go down from there. In general though the survival rate in very high when cats fall from hundreds of feet up.

Nearly the same for me. Mine was a 386/33 with DOS 5.0 and Win 3.1 and 4 MB RAM. I soon upgraded to a friend's spare 386-40 which I maxed out at 16 MB of RAM. I also put in a 387 math coprocessor (anyone remember those). This was c. 1998. The machine was dated even for its time but it served me...

I'm not surprised at any of that. Both Verizon and TWC have virtual monopolies in large swaths of the city. And both suck in their own way. If you have service problems, you'll get lip service and maybe in two weeks someone will come by to see what's the problem. I had to fix my last issue on my...

The real question here would do they have a legal monopoly in these areas? Obviously in that case they're obligated to provide service regardless of whether or not that service is profitable in each and every case. If not, they might still be obligated if they accepted government subsidies to...

For what it's worth, there are places in NYC where you can't get decent internet access. Granted, it's not that many but they exist. That said, AT&T or anyone else shouldn't make promises they can't keep. That's really the heart of the issue here. They promised something which in the end they...

In all fairness to AT&T it looks like a lot of the places where this is happening are in the middle of nowhere. It's just not profitable to run the same array of services to areas where you have houses on 1 acre or 5 acre lots. People have to expect if they choose to live in a place like that...

Honestly, I'm surprised the networks are even in the top 25. I haven't regularly watched any of the major networks for decades. I want to say back in the 1970s their programming went down hill. Other than HBO, I'm surprised more of the movie stations didn't make the top ten. Many of the channels...

Actually temperatures can start to become dangerous even as low as the 90s if humidity is high. Anything much over about 100 to 110 is incompatible with human life in the long run.