The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-23/the-way-humans-get-electricity-is-about-to-change-forever <comment><USER3> This article doesn't mention some serious problems that affect power grids reliant on renewable energies:

1 - The grids becomes vulnerable to the weather. There's no solar energy at night and it's greatly reduced in cloudy days. Wind power is unpredictable and closely matches the output of hydraulic power, so that the two sources can't complement each other. You can check Brazil in recent history to check the effects of droughts in the power grid. In the end there is a need of conventional power plants always ready to backup the grid when the renewable energy is not available.

2 - The majority of losses of the power distribution network are on the last mile, when the voltage is lower and the current is higher. If every house and electric car become consumers and providers to the grid, most power movements occur in the low voltage networks. There's also the issue of batteries storing energy for later consumption. Lithium batteries have a 80%-90% efficiency storing energy.

3 - Since we are talking of the environment, rare earth metals have a very pollutant and energy intensive extraction process which in most cases is not accounted in the environmental cost of solar panels.

Replacing the majority of energy production by renewable energies will result in an net efficiency loss. I would rather support a balanced production with nuclear (fusion?) power plants providing the fixed needs of the grid and renewable energies making up the rest.

<comment><USER4> 3 - The rare earth mining operations in China which provide the raw materials for solar panels, batteries, and many other electronics products are reportedly quite filthy and require massive energy (diesel trucks, processing plants, etc.) [http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare- earth-m...](http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/rare-earth-mining- china-social-environmental-costs)

The push for renewable energy would not be possible at its current scale if it weren't so attractive to the political elite (and subsidized as well), for the shortcomings you mentioned. Fossil fuels and nuclear simply better fulfill the role of consistent, cheap, plentiful energy. Unfortunately, even though nuclear is quite safe, has very few emissions, and emits a ton of energy, it takes a Herculean effort to get federal approval to build a plant.

<comment><USER5> Fossil fuels are massively subsidized by being allowed to pollute without paying for the consequences. They are not cheap when you account for the externalities they're allowed to impose.

The decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is a political one and it's pretty much the only reason renewables are even still a question instead of being the obvious answer.

<comment><USER6> I think the decision to allow fossil fuel users to poison us all is motivated, at least in the case of electricity, historically, by the improvement in air quality as people moved away from burning wood for heating and cooking.

The small city I live in, ~100k population, is powered almost entirely by hydro electricity. Some small percentage still burn wood for heating and even that makes the air around town hazy, I'd hate to think what it would be like if everyone was still doing it.

It's interesting to think about this. Those burning wood for heating are polluting the air locally -and globablly- and aren't paying a premium for the privilege, and at the same time all new hydro electricity in Australia was permanently shelved after the Franklin River Dam project was successfully blocked by The Wilderness Society 1983.[1]

So Australian's can thank the 'environmental movement' for pushing us toward being one of the world leaders in CO2 polluters per capita - I think we're the OECD leader, if I remember correctly.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy)

(Edit: a letter)

<comment><USER5> I thought the historical motivation was just that there was not much of a concept of pollution harming people far away, so this sort of activity has traditionally been allowed by default. For thousands of years, you could burn your wood on your land and everybody was fine with that. At most you might have some trouble with your neighbors if they don't like your smoke. But the idea you'd cause diffuse harm to millions is pretty new, and has a lot of inertia to overcome.

<comment><USER7> This is actually incorrect. When I was digging through old new york times articles from the 1900s and 1930s (using the online search) I stumbled across numerous articles expressing concern about the pollutants being released by factories and combustion-engine automobiles, and how they not only affect the immediate area but surrounding towns. Don't have links to the sources at the moment, or the time right now to pull it up, will check back later, but if you search on nytimes.com you should be able to pull them up.

<comment><USER5> I'm thinking an order of magnitude or two farther back. Humanity spent thousands of years making fires, but widespread awareness of how the pollution it emits can hurt people is only a century or two old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article does a pretty good job of synthesizing why I'm fairly optimistic about climate change despite believing the scientific models. I think that there is an austerity/flagellant meme within environmental circles that states that we have sinned against the environment, and unless the solution involves a heroic self-sacrifice (a la Kyoto protocol) then we cannot be saved.

In reality, all power is solar power, and innovation and market forces will eventually make it more efficient to skip the fossil-fuel middleman. The process could be accelerated by a carbon tax, but it will happen either way.

Responding to the 'Climate is still screwed' point, once we're on track to stabilizing emissions, geo-engineering methods that were dismissed as stopgaps can always be used to hold the climate over for the next century.

<comment><USER9> > In reality, all power is solar power

If you're going to use that metaphor, then really, all power is nuclear power, since that's how all that solar energy is generated.

<comment><USER10> Not quite - tidal power is purely gravitational, and doesn't rely on nuclear forces at all.

<comment><USER9> That same argument applies to the (metaphorical) claim that all power is solar, which is what I was poking fun at.

<comment><USER10> Oh, of course - I'm just playing the game too. Technically correct: the best kind of correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As others have already pointed out, the article contains a lot of handwaving arguments and seemingly inaccurate claims.

So, for anyone interested in a more thorough and quantitative discussion of the problem I highly recommend David MacKay's book "Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air", which is available __for free __online:

[http://www.withouthotair.com/](http://www.withouthotair.com/)

It contains detailed discussions of many of the problems that we would face when shifting our energy production to renewable sources and decentralizing it, and he provides a lot of data and calculations to give you a feeling of how to overcome them.

<comment><USER12> This is an excellent book, very well reason, quantitative, and clearheaded. I do wish it was a little less UK focused (I have the same problem with many books that are US focused; it's a world problem and leaving out the BRICs is missing a lot of the story).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How to lie with graphs: use a log/log plot. In this article the GDP/capita vs the energy consumed/GDP. I know they did this to cram a lot of data onto one compact space, but it's very misleading. Overall the trend is to the lower right, which sounds great, and it's mostly straight lines. But on a log/log plot, all polynomials are straight lines.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log%E2%80%93log_plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log%E2%80%93log_plot)

Second, the energy consumed per capita is not _going down_, it's actually still going up--it's just going up slower than GDP. The fact that GDP keeps going up would also seem to be a good thing, but it isn't always, e.g. if the economy is producing superfluous goods that don't actually improve the quality of life, and if life demands ever more services for basic necessities, this is also not a win.

The simple fact remains that the total resource consumption per person is still rising. And the population is still rising, too.

</comment><comment><USER14> My problem with all of this is that, as renewables get cheaper, people use less fossil fuels. But this drives the price of fossil fuels down. Eventually all you're extracting is the low-hanging fruit that can be pulled out of the ground very cheaply and running tight margins on it. So you have kind of a vicious cycle. Meanwhile most people just assume that fossil fuel prices will increase inexorably. I doubt it.

In other words, absent regulation keeping fossil fuel costs high (carbon tax!), I think the shift to renewables will take longer than the optimists think.

<comment><USER15> Only for some types of fossil fuels. Saudi light crude costs very little to extract -- a few dollars a barrel -- whereas shale oil has an extraction cost of around $70-$90.

You're right in that the Saudis will likely never stop extracting. But there are much larger deposits in the Americas that we quite likely will never develop if solar brings down the price of energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article was so optimistic, right up until the sixth section: "The Climate Is Still Screwed".

<comment><USER17> The next few decades are gonna be a _great_ time to say "I told you so." :-/

<comment><USER18> 19 years and 6 months with a statistically insignificant temperature trend. UAH 6.0 brings the UAH data inline with the RSS data. As the years go on, catastrophic warming seems less and less likely - or at least so the hard satellite data says.

[http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html](http://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html)

<comment><USER19> I have a coral reef to sell you.

<comment><USER18> You mistake my argument. I don't doubt ocean acidification, rise in ocean levels, or global warming. My point is that the best data we have conflicts with the IPCC consensus of 4 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. And there wasn't a single model that showed 2 decades of flat temperatures until the latest IPCC assessment, when it became obvious there were definitely 2 decades of flat temperatures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I work at ShaleApps [http://shaleapps.com/](http://shaleapps.com/) a Oil and Gas focused start up in West Virginia. Investment in the industry is plummeting because of low oil prices. The price of oil is around $60 a barrel right now, but the oil sands in North Dakota and Canada are only profitable at >$100. Coal is getting killed in the US for regulator reasons, but I don't see why other countries would make the massive investment to switch to natural gas. I think coal will like be seen as the "bridge fuel" by later generations.

<comment><USER21> > I don't see why other countries would make the massive investment to switch > to natural gas.

Quite a few countries have substantial natural gas reserves.

<comment><USER20> True but with a lack of certainty in demand few companies will invest to extract those reserves.

<comment><USER22> Right now the efficiency over oil is enormous. At current market price youre getting over 3x the energy per dollar for natural gas, IIRC. Methane is also by definition the cleanest burning hydrocarbon, with the fewest CO2 molecules per energy provided. In the US alone, it's estimated that nat gas has the average household pocketing $800 yearly since the fracking boom. In addition, a geoscientist recently told me it's estimated that we're only extracting about 10% of the natural gas available per well, meaning there's tons more down there. It has serious potential, and at least the US's electric infrastructure is rapidly changing to accommodate it. Anyway, what I'm getting at is maybe we shouldn't count out natural gas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My main issue is that electricity prices are not going to reflect the reduction in costs to the consumer, and instead, between stagnant companies fighting decentralization via corruption of local politics and big monopolies taking over, electricity will be high as ever.

A good example is my local town, where the city council are all bought out, don't even rely on the single electricity provider because they live in a different part of the city, but still keep voting on jacking up prices more and more all while the electrical company that was originally a publicly owned company, (pushed private by our congresscritter), is probably the most hated entity in town for it's shady business practices and constant rate hikes.

(For example, last summer they said they underbilled in May, but didn't catch it till June, and then added the new "back-owed" charges at the new rates in July, one of the hottest times of the year, handily raking in tons more money than they would have. No one did a thing because all our politicians are corrupt. Of course this is in one of the most conservative towns in America, where everyone pays jingoistic lip-service to "family values" like "honesty", but when it really comes down to it we're just as bad as the beltway.)

<comment><USER24> Public isn't much better, here in Canada the corrupt kleptocrats running my province clean out the profits of the public hydro corp which disappear into general revenue, so the corp has to increase rates every year as they have no way to save any income, and are increasing filled with more crony management positions with sky high salaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Related: [http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war- on-c...](http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/inside-war-on- coal-000002)

</comment><comment><USER26> A question for one of you build-it types.

For large scale energy storage, what's wrong with pumping water up high and then making electricity on the way down. IE, make a dam. Make electricity at night. Refill the top part during the day.

<comment><USER27> already exists. It's called pumped storage hydroelectricity: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped- storage_hydroelectricit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped- storage_hydroelectricity)

Here's one (built in 1977.. uses power from the grid), and can produce 3000MW (stores 24000MWH): [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/27/2524501/hydro- pu...](http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/27/2524501/hydro-pumped- storage-climate-change/)

Many of them were built to make nuclear plants more efficient.. nuclear plants turbines are most efficient at full power.. so they would store the water during the night (when demand is low) and then use it the next day to handle peak demand.

So they were also made to start generating electricity quickly.. the one above takes 5-10minutes.. but there are others that respond within a minute. Much faster than starting a oil-fired generator.

These account for the vast majority (90%+) of stored capacity worldwide.

There's no reason they couldn't be used to store solar/wind energy.

<comment> david-given There's a couple in Scotland, where I grew up. My school did a tour once. (The tour was uninspired and rather dull. The nuclear reactor tour was way more interesting.)

They're strictly limited as to how much they can store. Ben Cruachan (the one I visited) can generate 440MW for up to 22 hours before the reservoir empties. It's used for emergencies and buffer usage spikes; Ben Cruachan can spin up in two minutes from standby, or thirty seconds if they have some warning, and is used to provide power while the much slower reacting gas or coal plants rev up. I don't know how quickly it can pump water uphill, but it's probably a lot slower than it consumes it. Round-trip efficiency looks to be ~70%.

According to Wikipedia the UK uses about 40GW of electricity at peak, so you'd need a hundred Ben Cruachans to store enough to run the country for under a day.

Here's a picture of the upper reservoir: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Cruachan...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Cruachan_Reservoir_- _geograph.org.uk_-_171791.jpg)

See the grey border around the water? Hydro power reservoirs are ecologically pretty bad --- freshwater life isn't equipped to deal with what are basically irregular tides, and so the shorelines are always completely barren.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This might be one of the most trivial questions, but I always tried to find the answer, failing always.

How is it that Solar energy is 'clean' and 'renewable', (or for that matter, any natural source of energy that plays a significant role on earth ecology), for if we make use of solar energy, will it not break the environmental equilibrium (temperatures, weather patterns etc) thereby making it 'unclean'? I see that using solar energy doesn't create any direct poisonous residue, but what about the unintended indirect effects? Did researchers already prove that there won'e be any effects or that the effects are far less significant than existing energy sources? (I would like to read actual research, apart from opinions/thoughts)

<comment><USER29> Why would you think there's a possible break in environmental equilibrium due to solar energy. They amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere won't change. The only thing that changes is instead of the energy being wasted, it will be used to generate electricity. Conservation of energy guarantees this.

You asked for research, so here's a link from UCS. While they don't address that particular point, they do point out various potential problems. [http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy- choices/renewa...](http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy- choices/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-solar-power.html#.VYmIO_lVhHw)

<comment><USER28> > They amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere won't change

True

> The only thing that changes is instead of the energy being wasted

The solar energy that is falling on earth and that is not yet captured by the solar panels is doing a good number of direct things, such as Photosynthesis (not that Photosynthesis is stopped by putting solar panels, but one example of direct things Sun is doing), and an unknown number of indirect things such as Heating the atmosphere by scattering back from earthly-surface (causing many ecological reactions). Would you consider all these effects waste?

If we do know all these effects and also know that redirecting this solar energy into our energy needs won't significantly annihilate the effects, then it's good. I am curious to know about studies in this regard. If there are no studies and my question itself is pointless, I want to be enlightened, because I haven't had a satisfactory explanation yet.

One argument might be that, all the solar energy that's captured and used by us will also generate heat back into atmosphere and thereby not changing the ecological reactions in earth atmosphere - but I just made it up

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Oil is constantly underestimated. Underestimated hopefully in most cases but underestimated nonetheless.

A - Demand for oil is notoriously inelastic. If demand drops a little, a big shift in price will "compensate." If solar starts genuinely digging into oil's market share the oil prices will drop by a lot, fast until almost the same amount of oil gets bought as before. Whatever you are assuming is the "cheaper than oil" flip point, is very likely to be too optimistic. It is likely to just be cheaper than the most expensive marginal 5%.

This is inherently speculative because economics and because real marginal costs of oil production are closely guarded secrets, but over the last 50+ years this has usually been correct. This isn't disruptive tech land where the cheaper-worser becomes the cheaper-better and wins total victory. This is substitutable commodity land where prices drop like rocks but total volume produced barely moves.

^Much cheaper power for slightly less carbon is still a good thing, but more on the prosperity front than the climate change front.

B - There is a lot of oil down there. Even "dry" wells are usually only slightly drier than they were when we started drilling them. We just got the easy oil out and then stopped. FInding oil really means finding "accessible" oil. Our methods of finding and our methods of accessing are technology too. It's advancing, like solar tech is.

This is what "fraking" is. It's a new way of accessing.

C - Speaking of fraking… It's only just begun, probably. It's happening in the states because that's where it happens to have been invented. There is no reason to think that it is not equally applicable in Russia, S. America, the Persian Gulf or anywhere else with oil.

I like the elegance of solar though, and I hope it succeeds. Decentralization seems like it can take a big part of the residential market. In rich countries, a lot of people can afford it and with between incentives, people's general interest and the real estate value (people like investing in their home), it seems like it will have a good run.

In poor and/or dysfunctional places, going off grid is always a favored option. Solar power can do what mobile phone did. Anything that relies on less infrastructure is more suitable for these places. This is an especially attractive idea. Mobile phones/modems mean that phone infrastructure is much easier to come by. Solar + battery could mean the same for electricity. Add in rainwater + home purification systems (progress here too) and all we'll need is hover cars to deal with potholes.

<comment><USER30> You make an excellent argument for a carbon tax.

<comment><USER26> No. No. I don't.

I need a Terry Pratchett philosopher to help here, but they're all in the bath.

First, the inelasticity means that a tax is a great way to raise taxes, but a terrible way to reduce use. Oil has gotten more expensive lots of times, when has it ever made people take the bus? We've seen oil price fluctuations. A tax will work just like a natural price hike. A nasty painful tax (with street protests just short of revolution) might get you a 10% reduction in emissions, maybe 30% over a really long time if your tolerance for civil unrest is above average. Probably less. Also, flat taxes hit poor people hard.

Second, a carbon tax is an almost hopeless mission. We're having enough trouble with money taxes. I mean we might be able to make carbon tax or cap- and-trade or something in that family of thing work in a country. We might even be able to get it partially functional in the EU, NAFTA or some group level. We are absolutely not ready to pull off this level of cooperation at international scale yet.

We will have cheating and defecting. Carbon tax evasion and carbon tax loopholes and carbon tax havens, or whatever the gasey equivalents of monetary tax mess are.

A great book (though slightly dated now) on climate change is "Climate Wars" by Gwynne Dyer. He's a shining beacon journalist and an ex soldier-scholar tip. He made the argument (I'm paraphrasing) that we're lucky we hit this problem now, when we have a chance of cooperating at this scale. Imagine if you had to get China, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Canada and everyone else to cooperate in the 1700s. I like the thinking, but I think he's overestimating our chances. It's straddling the border region between optimisms and lunacy.

We have spent the last 20 years trying to come up with a light weight agreement for minimal reductions in rates of expansion. The idea was, put in a framework, make it easy and painless at first. Then turn the crank. We failed! We failed at ground level, well before the point where it even starts to sting. Even though the targets were way under what we need to be targeting in order to avert disaster based on the median models (or the most lenient ones), we failed to agree on them. And, when we did agree them, we failed to meet them.

Technology is the only way out of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Decentralized solar might work in some places, but we have a long, long way to go before our existing grid can start to make use of it. We still need old school generating capacity (read: nuclear) to serve peak demand.

The other reason solar has become so attractive is because the spinup time is so much lower than for other traditional sources.

<comment><USER32> Except that nuclear plants do not serve peak demand in any way, unless by "peak" you mean something other than the electrical supply industry means by that term; nukes are by nature very much baseload generation, taking days and weeks to spin up and synchronise. Pumped storage, gas turbine, large-scale hydro,... those are peak supply generation that can be brought onstream in minutes to hours to meet peak demand.

<comment><USER31> And don't forget the good old diesel generators that are the last line of defence when all other capacity is maxed out.

<comment><USER32> As we currently experience to great cost here in South Africa currently, where, due to a decade of neglected maintenance and capacity building brought about by a short-sighted government, rolling blackouts (euphemistically called "load shedding") are the norm, and diesel generation is brought to bear as a poor substitute for baseload capacity, at - as you may imagine - <USER2> financial cost. Something in the region of USD400million a month for diesel fuel. Boy, are we in for some price hikes coming up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How can you make projections like "between now and 2040" with a straight face? It makes me instantly lose respect for an article attempting to be serious.

</comment><comment><USER34> With a combination of solar and energy storage overall consumption and demand can drop dramatically. Intelligent storage systems can curb demand and drastically reduce carbon footprint. I'm surprised that wasn't mentioned in the rift about cheap rooftop solar.

</comment><comment><USER35> It'll be a while before it is cheaper than the hydro-electricity we generate here in Quebec.

But yeah, anywhere else it makes sense. Also wonder how cost effective it is in harsh climates where there is less sun.

<comment><USER36> But it _never_ has to be cheaper than hydro-electric. ;)

It just has to be cheaper than pure coal/natural gas/etc. plants.

<comment><USER37> Well, it is never going to be cheaper than _existing_ hydro-electric.

It could well be cheaper than installing new capacity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the article:

> So even as people rise from poverty to middle class faster than ever, BNEF > predicts that global electricity consumption will remain relatively flat. In > the next 25 years, global demand will grow about 1.8 percent a year, > compared with 3 percent a year from 1990 to 2012. In wealthy OECD countries, > power demand will actually decline.

The doubling time at 1.8% per year is 39 years.

This must be some alternate definition of the term 'flat' I was previously unaware of.

</comment><comment><USER38> "The lifetime cost of a photovoltaic solar-power plant will drop by almost half over the next 25 years".

Can someone explain how big of an impact this is?

<comment><USER39> I'm confused as to whether that means "if you build a plant today, your de- amortized annual running costs will fall" or "in 25 years time, the projected lifetime cost of a solar plant will be half of what it is today". The latter is .. not useful today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Re: the essentially unavoidable coming climate change - Perhaps it will be the impetus to learn how to control the climate, knowledge which in turn could be applied to making Mars more habitable? Just fanciful pondering, but cool to think about nonetheless (while also recognizing that for that impetus to exist, we're going to go through some rough times climate-wise for a while).

</comment><comment><USER41> How do we get power at night? Batteries?

<comment><USER42> Yes. Also we probably use less power at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> does anyone else have HUGE issues with their chart? it makes it seem like solar provides something like 20% of the world electricity and hydro electric is not even a mention. meanwhile, as far as I know (wikipedia) solar is only 1% of the worlds total electricity and hydro around 16%

<comment><USER44> The first chart is energy capacity _additions_ ... which confused me too...

<comment><USER43> ah, thanks for the clarification. hmm, that seems like a stat cherry picked to suit its narrative

<comment><USER45> Additions are what's called a leading indicator. They are predictive about the direction of change in a system. If there is much more solar added than coal, then the overall make-up of the system will shift towards more solar, less coal overall... It is future-looking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The governments of the world will allow decentralization only to the point where it starts to cut into the tax proceeds of centralized energy. In the U.S., solar isn't going to move to rooftops, it's going to move to panel arrays on large swaths of government-owned land out west where it can still be metered and taxed.

<comment><USER47> This is reminiscent of the argument that marijuana could never be legalized because no one could figure out how to tax it. Different angle of attack, I suppose, but just as inapplicable to reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Who else thought the article might be about Skunk Works Fusion Reactor?

</comment><comment><USER49> Hasn't it been on the verge of changing forever forever?

</comment><comment><USER50> Okay, let's consider some of that:

First, sure, for the usual _renewables_ , need either storage or transmission lines across continents and/or oceans. So, assume renewables need storage.

=== Home Batteries?

For residential electric power, why have home batteries instead of grid batteries? Likely grid batteries will be cheaper due to economy of scale and also, due to parallelism and better engineering and maintenance, better reliability.

=== Wholesale Electric Prices

We need to keep in mind, for someone in the US paying their local electric utility 12 cents per KWh, that the wholesale price on the grid is surprisingly low. E.g., at

[http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mark...](http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_markets.cfm)

can see that the wholesale price is often, depending on geographic location and time, ballpark 1-2 cents per KWh.

That's a current reference, but as I recall not so many years ago the wholesale price was commonly 0.5 cents per KWh.

Lesson: In the US, electric power, the actual power itself, as generated, at the plant, and ready to put on the grid, is surprisingly cheap. So, talking about something cheaper has some challenges.

So where does the rest of the 12 cents go? Sure, to running the grid.

=== Charging for a Grid Connection

So, basically, assuming the wholesale price of 2 cents per KWh, for an electric bill of $100 at 12 cents per KWh,

         (10/12) * 100 = 83.33

dollars are for basically just the grid connection alone.

So, if you tell your electric company that you want to use their power only when there is two feet of snow on your roof, then they will have their public utility commission let them tell you that, fine, and now, the good news, your cost of electricity is reduced from 12 cents per KWh to 2 cents per KWh but, the bad news, there is now a flat fee of $83.33 per month for just the grid connection itself.

Else, ballpark, the electric company loses money, and the public utility commission doesn't much like that.

=== Rugged Rooftop Solar

Roof-top solar will need to be more reliable than asphalt shingles or will need to be replaced, say, each 10 years due just to wind and weather.

Just the labor cost for the replacement will be significant even if the panels are just dirt cheap. If they are cheaper than asphalt shingles -- terrific! Somehow I doubt that rooftop solar panels will be cheaper per square foot than shingles; ask the shingle guys -- I doubt that they are worried!

Gotta keep those solar panels in good shape. So, ballpark need a new roof each, maybe, 10 years.

=== Off the Grid!

Suppose want to have no grid connection at all. Four issues:

(1) If want electric cars, then need one heck of a slug of electric power and the grid again. Else get to drive for groceries maybe once a month. Look up the arithmetic -- e.g., for charging stations, we're talking megawatts.

(2) I'm skeptical that rooftop solar can drive whole house A/C in warm climates. Then, what about the standard summer afternoon thunder storms -- the A/C will be pulling one heck of a load out of the batteries.

Uh, a lot of the load on A/C is not to cool the air but just to condense the humidity as the air cools and keep the humidity nicely below 100%. So, even if the thunder storms cool the air, the A/C still has to remove humidity.

Sure, a totally sealed up house, no air leaks at all, an air to air heat exchanger, special windows, fantastic insulation, etc. can work wonders (if you are not over a radon source), but only a tiny fraction of houses were built that way.

(3) How to heat the house in the winter, say, the snow last winter in Boston? No sunlight to the solar panels for days. So, no electric power even to drive the pump for burning fuel oil.

(4) If want electric heat in the winter (and I believe we should hope for that), then will need the grid again, at least when have two feet of snow on the solar panels. Then for the grid, will be back to that $83.33 a month fixed charge for the grid connection.

=== Cover the US SW

So. sure, cover the US SW with solar panels. Also put wind turbines on the Rockies, all over Kansas, etc.

Assume all this is for free, both capex and opex.

Now, what will the batteries cost?

And the conversions between DC and AC?

Net, we need to hear about not just cheap solar panels but about a lot of really cheap batteries.

Also we're talking paying for those batteries -- capex plus opex -- with ballpark 1 cent per KWh, maybe less, in wholesale electric prices.

=== Tests

To me, the OP fails both the sniff test and the giggle test.

=== The Hidden Agenda

So, what's really going on?

I smell carbon taxes and, net, higher electric bills. No thanks.

=== High Speed Trains

Japan has high speed trains. So do the Chinese. So does France. Just get on board and zip to your destination -- clean, modern, quiet, smooth, comfortable, fast, safe. Right?

Wouldn't you really like to see lots of high speed trains, a nice grid, connecting all the important US cities? Pride of the US! Great for the US infrastructure! Benefits beyond ability to count! Changes everything! Why have we waited so long?

If China can build high speed trains, then surely US engineering can also. Is there something wrong with US engineering; does it need to catch up with China? Do we need to wake up US engineering? Why does the US want to fall behind China?

What to do with the carbon taxes? Sure, high speed trains, general revenues, etc.

=== Cost/Benefit Analysis

Of course, there are problems with the US Federal Government building high speed trains: About 100 years ago a lot of people saw that could build big water resource projects and make the desert bloom.

So, smart real estate entrepreneurs, buy up some cheap desert land, have the Feds build a big water resource project, make the desert bloom and that land valuable, sell the land, and retire rich, all from the generosity of the US taxpayers.

Well, that situation, I didn't actually call it a _scam_ , was the case a few times too often, and then a law was passed about "cost/benefit analysis". Before such a project, had to add up all the costs and all the benefits "to whomsoever they may accrue" and have the benefits bigger than the costs.

Presto. Bingo. Right away that little ratio killed off nearly all the Fed funded water resource projects.

For high speed trains? In the US, nearly all projects for public transportation of people lose buckets of money and would get a grade of flat F on any reasonable cost/benefit analysis. Indeed, in a course I took, the _optimal_ decision for the Baltimore subway, already built and ready to roll, was just to brick up the entrances and f'get about it because, even counting the capex as $0.00, the project failed cost/benefit just from the opex.

States and cities can fund high speed trains, but the Feds can't.

=== Summary

The OP is not about solar panels. Instead it's about something it never mentions -- carbon taxes.

Watch your wallet.

</comment><comment><USER51> Not fast enough!</comment>


Man Takes Space Photos With Balloon And Home Camera - <AUTHOR> http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-balloon-home-photos-space%2C0%2C5393976.story <comment><USER2> If it's that easy, it won't be long before we have pics of the first lolcat in space.</comment>


Google Removed "Don't Be Evil" from Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html <comment><AUTHOR> Archived Page with "Don't Be Evil": [https://web.archive.org/web/20180421105327/https://abc.xyz/i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180421105327/https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google- code-of-conduct.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Also interesting: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google+evil](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google+evil)</comment></comment>


Facebook's Hate-Speech Rules Collide with Indian Politics - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346 <comment><USER2> Same low standards as in the US</comment>


Wealth Levels, Wealth Inequality, and the Great Recession [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/pfeffer-danziger-schoeni_wealth-levels.pdf <comment><USER2> This study is misleading, because it uses 'household' wealth, instead of individual wealth, and may be incorrectly interpreted as showing a decline in the middle class, when it is really showing the results of changes in family structure over the past 50 years. This graph shows how this choice affects the results: [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3WZGpDibPM/Up3ZAPRtScI/AAAAAAAAJq...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3WZGpDibPM/Up3ZAPRtScI/AAAAAAAAJqE/5hWGdOBol_E/s1600/a-gini- ratio-us-households-families-individuals-1947-2012.png)

The following blog-posts go in to more detail:

[http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the- major-t...](http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-major-trends- in-us-income.html#.U6n7UfldUpV)

[http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the- widows-...](http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-widows- peak.html#.U6n7UvldUpV)

[http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-men- who...](http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-men-who-werent- there.html#.U6n7U_ldUpV)

<comment><USER3> Supporting 1 person on x income is harder than supporting two people on 2x income. Put simply, a couple does not need two stoves, and any shared trip is less expencive etc. There are a few edge cases at the individual level for things like end of life care and taxes, but the overall economic bennifits are huge.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, 1 person with x income pays less income tax than 2 people with 2x income.

<comment><USER5> The US has joint filing for married couples so that's not the case, whereas it would be in e.g. the UK.

<comment><USER6> It most certainly is the case in the US... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_penalty)

<comment><USER3> It's a generally around a 1/2 a % penalty which is swamped by other benefits.

AKA 2 incomes of $87,850 x2 = 175 700 vs extra 879$ in taxes.

At extreme incomes of say 20+M a year or below 18k it's actually far less than 1/2%.

However, there are huge benefits for SS for being a married couple even more so if there is a large income disparity, so on average if they plan ahead Marriage tends to lower taxes. On top of lower expenses which enable better tax avoidance mechanisms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Long story short:

The wealth of non rich Americans is almost entirely contained in their highly leveraged houses. If housing prices collapse, their wealth collapses.

In 2008, housing prices collapsed.

<comment><USER8> Not exactly. The 25th percentile's wealth was dropping even before the recession, which suggests some additional downward pressure, although I am not sure what that could be off the top of my head.

<comment><USER9> My suspicion is that it may be due to the inflation adjusted real wage effects, which hit the bottom 25th percentile the hardest, as that is generally their only source of income, and their resulting margin for wealth storage is so much closer. [1] Honestly, real wage income has been flat since about 1965, and for many has been going down since the great recession. [2] And if you only got high school or less, well, you're just boned. [3] (Note, take sources with a grain of salt, as they're 5 minute Google searches)

[1] [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aGE47oMJAQw/UhZtjjtKorI/AAAAAAAAJz...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-aGE47oMJAQw/UhZtjjtKorI/AAAAAAAAJz8/Ot1MeYCjnzo/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-08-22+at+4.27.44+PM.png)

[2] [http://www.pgpf.org/Chart- Archive/~/~/media/A130E85DDC064B81...](http://www.pgpf.org/Chart- Archive/~/~/media/A130E85DDC064B81A89A777E06C589C7.gif)

[3] [http://www.frbsf.org/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/1106bb.gif](http://www.frbsf.org/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/1106bb.gif)

<comment><USER7> That would explain only a slowing in the rate of wealth increase, not a decrease in wealth.

<comment><USER9> Not necessarily. Everybody has a burn rate for money, as a natural feature of living in a market economy where we do work for pay. At its minima, its the cost to meet Maslow's needs. In the worst version, if our pay goes below the absolute minima, then we'll likely be eating our wealth, looking for other support, going homeless, or dying.

Unfortunately, we also tend to be habit creatures, and our burn rate often stabilizes to our pay and our social class (keeping up with the Jones'). If our real wage starts to go down, then we often have trouble adapting, and keep burning as if we were still at the prior equilibrium (credit card debt, eating into savings, taking out loans).

This is made even worse when the source of real wage reduction is the subtle erosion of our buying power through inflation. We complain about how much things cost, but we still see our paychecks slightly increasing so it seems good, and the burn gets worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Project it back a few years, and I'd bet we're poorer on average as a country than we were when I was born. Man, 43% decline for the median? Ouch.

I also like that the mean wealth in America is 6x the median wealth.

Actually, I find the numbers for the 75th+ percentiles a bit surprising, as my mental model had them with significant uptick after about 2011 or so. Kind of a wealth transfer from the lower percentiles. Whereas, this research seems to show that while erosions were smaller for the top (due to their non-real estate growth), no demographic they researched showed overall wealth _growth_ from 2007 on. At best, they've gotten back to zero slope.

<comment><USER10> I saw a chart a few weeks back depicting this. Starting in the early 80's it started heading downward. I can't find it at the moment, but if I do, I'll post a link.

A lot of factors contribute but housing was one of the major factors. "Net worth" was/is tied directly to their home and the 2006/07 crash. With the government screwing with the markets and investors buying homes as rentals, we just might see another sharp decline shortly...

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-24/americas-most- impor...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-24/americas-most-important- housing-market-signals-red-alert-housing-bubble-watchers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I didn't read anything about how the increasing numbers of older Americans who are not working might have a significant bearing on the matter.

edit: What I'm saying is, America has a baby-boomer generation that is retiring in droves, more power to them but don't do a study at a major university sounding alarm bells unless an important factor like a massively retiring baby boomer generation is considered.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's a problem I have with the definition of "wealth".

My wife in I, who recently finished professional schools, earn (combined) in the top 5%. But because of our student debt, when I do a "wealth" calculator, I'm apparently literally at the bottom of the wealth chart - 0%. Leads me to question:

1\. Is College attendance increasing, or decreasing over time?

2\. Is price of College attendance increasing, or decreasing over time?

I suspect both increasing. Would that explain some (or most, or all?) of this phenomenon? Average or lower income individuals will mostly go from positive to negative to put themselves through school, while rich or upper class will not. Would be interested how much of the phenomena that would explain.

</comment><comment><USER13> The wikipedia article on Income inequality in the United States is surprisingly detailed and I highly recommend it if you have any interest on wealth. It's such a polarized topic that the comments almost immediately turn into inaccurate or out of context talking points.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER7> Income and wealth are quite different topics...

<comment><USER14> On that note:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The average American is not wealthy. The median net worth is $45K [1], which is below Japan, Canada, Australia and much of Western Europe.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class- we...](http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class- wealth/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> It's depressing how 1/4 households basically have no wealth at all.

<comment><USER7> If you take a minute to consider the demographics involved and the nature of wealth, it is neither depressing nor surprising nor even "bad".

Consider, for example, that many people have negative wealth.

<comment><USER17> Consider what factors, and in what way?

Also, whether or not something is depressing, surprising, or bad is entirely subjective. Something you do not consider surprising may in fact be surprising to another individual, so without knowing them it's sort of silly to say "it isn't surprising". If they say it is surprising, it means to them it was. If you do not think others should be surprised, it may be useful for you to explain what knowledge you have that prevented your being surprised.

<comment><USER7> To be wealthy means that one possesses sufficient wealth (stuff) to live comfortably even after they quite their job.

The bastardized term of "wealth" used here, however, refers simply to material possessions even when not in sufficient quantities to provide any passive lifestyle advantages; suddenly a paid off car worth $5,000 is "wealth." The estimated $30,000 in equity I possess on my $200,000 home is "wealth". It's all a bit frivolous.

By definition, the poor and middle classes don't possess true wealth. Their value is their human capital and time, which they exchange for money. Even the "working rich" \- doctors and lawyers - don't routinely possess "wealth" in the traditional sense of the term.

Then we compare the $30,000 equity I possess to actual wealth... such as the land under a shopping mall. What is the use in such an exercise?

NEWS FLASH: People who own really valuable stuff possess really valuable stuff. The rest of us don't. Let's write books about this and study the shocking phenomenon?

You simply can't compare actual wealth - such as the land under a shopping mall, which generates sufficient revenue for many people to live comfortably - to "wealth".

Now, demographically... Why would anyone be surprised that a significant portion of the population has zero wealth? Honestly I'm surprised it's only 25% who have zero. How much "wealth" should a university student have? How about someone who's been working for a few years? How about someone who's been retired for twenty years and expects to die within the next ten?

Middle class people gradually build up a small stock of "wealth" (we used to call this "savings") throughout their working careers. Then after retirement they gradually draw it down until they die.

So yes, it is not surprising that many people have zero or negative wealth.

<comment><USER10> "Middle class people gradually build up a small stock of "wealth"" That's part of the point. As the chart in this study shows, the middle class is not building anything. In fact, it's declining.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if a large cohort of middle class individuals have recently retired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Socialist Revolution is coming?</comment>


Defensive JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.javascriptjanuary.com/blog/defensive-javascript <comment><USER2> Well, I do for JS what I do for SQL. I just don't concatenate strings to create HTML code. No innerHTML, no nothing.

        let a = document.createElement('a');
        a.textContent = whateverText;
        a.href = whateverUrl; // XXX: check for schema

Done. You may need like one 60 line function to make this less verbose when dealing with many elements. And you can forget about XSS, mostly.

You can even disable innerHTML and friends if you want assurances:

        Object.defineProperty(HTMLElement.prototype, 'innerHTML', {value: '', writable: false});

<comment><USER3> Thanks, came in to say pretty much the same thing here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's quite a lot of words for saying: "don't trust user input".</comment>


Toyotas and Chevys Are Holding Up Better Than Most Luxury Brands - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/toyotas-and-chevys-are-holding-up-better-than-most-luxury-brands <comment><USER2> This article seems to be written using results from a J.D. Power report. J.D. Power's methodology is commonly known to be extremely flawed in that they weigh all "issues" equally. So an engine failure is the same severity as Bluetooth not connecting.

Furthermore, tiebreakers are broken in pretty nonsense ways, and many suspect it's by whoever pays the most. For example, they crowned Buick the most dependable brand, but by their own ratings, both Lexus and Porsche scored higher.

If you rank by only mechanical dependability by their own numbers, the ranking is as follows (alphabetical w/in tiers):

10: Lexus, Toyota

9: BMW, Buick, Chevrolet, Hyundai, Infiniti, Kia, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercedes, Nissan, Porsche

8: Audi, Ford, Honda, Jaguar, Mini, Subaru, Volkswagen, Volvo

7: Acura, Cadillac, Dodge, Fiat, GMC, Mitsubishi, Ram

5: Chrysler, Jeep, Land Rover.

So the old adage still holds true for mechanical reliability, Japanese > German/European > American/British.

Also, the luxury brand of an automaker falls pretty damn close to where the non-luxury brand lands: Lexus/Toyota, Buick/Chevy, Hyundai/Kia, Infiniti/Nissan, Audi/Volkswagen, Cadillac/GMC, Fiat/Dodge/Ram, Chrysler/Jeep. Which would make sense since they share mechanical parts, but not infotainment/luxury features. When infotainment/luxury features are factored into the dependability score, it leads to the conclusion the article is trying to draw.

<comment><USER3> But, you gotta understand that's for the first 3 years only and the consumer reports is only for the first 10 years.

Once you get beyond 10 years, any mechanic will tell you the European cars are absolute garbage. Especially BMW, Audi and Mercedes will self destruct at some point after 10 years. And those parts cost a heck of a lot more than non- luxury brands. Sometimes, they won't even sell you a part by its own piece so you have to buy the whole assembly for 1000$ even if all you need is a tiny part that's supposed to cost no more than 50$.

<comment><USER2> You're conflating cost of ownership with frequency of issues (reliability). The Germans don't break often, but when they do, it'll cost a bunch. American cars break continuously, but it's cheap and easy to fix.

<comment><USER4> Also, Americans and Germans have different definitions of "reliable".

Americans define "reliable" as "runs forever on zero maintenance". Germans define "reliable" as "runs forever as long as you stick to strict maintenance schedules".

<comment><USER5> I like the antifragile definition more. Go ahead and try to kill a 2008 Crown Vic. :)

<comment><USER6> Your car gets better the more you abuse it? Could be true if you replace broken parts with better ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As electric vehicles mature and increase their share of the consumer market, it will be interesting to see how these sorts of reliability measurements change to maintain relevance. Already today, a luxury EV is probably more mechanically reliable than a mass market ICE car.

Electric batteries and drivetrains have their differences in reliability for sure (IIUC, the 1st generation Nissan Leaf lacked a battery temp management system). However the difference between the reliability of EVs isn't likely to be that big since EVs are much simpler machines.

A lot of the complexity that provides the luxury ICE driving experience (smooth, quiet drivetrain, strong acceleration) comes for "free" in an EV, even in mass market models. With that complexity gone, there's much less to differentiate cars from a reliability perspective.

<comment><USER8> > _Already today, a luxury EV is probably more mechanically reliable than a > mass market ICE car._

Tesla is among the least reliable car brands at the moment:

[https://www.consumerreports.org/media-room/press- releases/20...](https://www.consumerreports.org/media-room/press- releases/2018/10/consumer_reports_annual_reliability_survey_tesla_and_other_domestic_brands_take_big_steps_backwards_in_rankings11/)

But I think that says more about the relative immaturity of Tesla's manufacturing than it does about EVs generally.

It will be interesting to see how Volkswagen's modular MEB electric car platform goes in the long term. The MEB platform designed to be used across multiple VW brands (VW, Audi, SEAT, and Skoda) and Volkswagen is interested in licensing it to other manufacturers so it will be widely used.

<comment><USER9> Had a Tesla Model S. Got rid of it, went back to Toyota. Dumped the reservation on a Model 3, too.

<comment><USER10> Would you care to expand on what pushed you to do that? Was it purely reliability, or were there other factors involved?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This comment seems wrong to me:

      There is no inherent reason why a more-expensive car should
      be better or worse in terms of reliability than a
      less-expensive car, so my guess is they'll track each other
      fairly closely going forward.

If the metric is per _car_ faults, then surely more features mean more opportunities for defects, given an equal attention to quality across all features?

<comment><USER12> I'd say that there are reasons that both higher and lower price vehicles should have fewer defects, but it's not clear which reasons would dominate. (And probably different factors dominate in different periods of car production).

High cost: more attention to detail, higher quality parts, more care with fit and finish, should yield fewer defects.

Low cost: simpler vehicle systems, fewer moving parts, fewer unproven features, mass production with consistent processes, should yield fewer defects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Still relevant: [https://www.theonion.com/toyota-recalls-1993-camry-due-to- fa...](https://www.theonion.com/toyota-recalls-1993-camry-due-to-fact-that- owners-reall-1819577805)

</comment><comment><USER14> Automotive EE here.

In the last 5-8 years there has been a DRAMATIC change in the way vehicles are tested and released. Everyone has become much more focused on electronic features - while at the same time almost everyone is completely outsourcing electronics design and firmware. Cars hit the lots with 10 new flashes waiting. When I started, it was a BIG DEAL if you had a lot held up somewhere in Detroit because of a pending flash.

I've worked with two of the big three, and right now, neither own their traction control, radio, trans, body, ignition, steering, etc controllers. Basically anything. Even engines are being outsourced. I don't just mean the module, but the code on it. One of the mfgs, their engineers can't even SEE radio code or anything much more than general documents. They used to have compiler access to most things, now it's extremely rare.

The mfgs wanted to outsource the development, and now when they need an adjustment to traction control it's a $50, 100, 250, 500,000 charge, BUT, they've also moved the responsibility to the mfgs like Bosch, ConTevis, etc.

Short version is everyone is playing the game to get hot new electronics in cars, to make them seem as advanced as phones - but the work is not being put in besides surface level customer view. I've found obvious glitches in zero mile vehicles this year, but none I can think of from 2000-2013

I would not purchase a 2019 anything right now. I'd allow for two-three years worth of flashes before considering a new car. And that doesn't mean you're "safe" with your old car. You think your 2001 Subaru Outback is going strong? Well, surprise, you're likely to fall victim to a different issue.

As to the article, yes, luxury cars are worse. Most people that don't realize you can't leave your touring Ferarri in the garage not hooked up to a trickle charger, or also picking on Ferarri that the LaFerarri when runs battery dead may require to be loaded on a truck and shipped to a dealer before it'll charge again, or that the new Range Rovers will attempt to void your battery and electronics warranty if they find a radar/laser detector hooked up because THAT is how finicky the electronics system is.

It's funny to me the amount of work that your average Toyota or Chevy vehicle gets relative to lux models that skirt by with less engineering and more features.

As to Cadillac and Lexus, those are just GM and Toyota, all the same things plus some. So fundamentally they're the same, but yes, add features add problem areas.

<comment><USER15> I completely despise the new consumer facing electronics in cars. Not because I find anything inherently wrong with electronics, but because I find the software/electronics in every car, in literally _every car_ made today, cheap or expensive, to be an epic disaster both from an industrial design, and security standpoint.

Sadly, I think "normal" cars will go extinct the way non-smartphones and non- smart TVs went extinct. It's impossible to buy a TV these days that is not infected with Internet of Shit.

Where's the 70 Series Toyota Land Cruiser of today? The 70 series is still being made, it's just not sold in developed countries. Why can't they just make it emission compliant and sell that car in the EU and US? That's the car I want!

<comment><USER16> > It's impossible to buy a TV these days that is not infected with Internet of > Shit.

It's possible, they are just called monitors or commercial displays; there's a significant premium for them at typical living room TV sizes compared to things marketed as "TVs", though.

<comment><USER15> Yes, the "dumb" version is much more expensive than the "smart" version.

But that is not all of it. Most monitors approximate (some better than others) sRGB, while TVs approximate (again some better than others) Rec. 709. Rec. 709 and sRGB share color primaries, so they have the same gamut, but Rec. 709 uses a different transfer function. If you use the (profiled) monitor with a computer that does color management, and use a color-managed video player, all is well, but if you use the monitor as a "TV", without a computers, there's no profiling and no color management, so the broadcast and movies will not appear colorimetrically correct.

But wait, now we have Rec. 2020. I don't know if Rec. 2020 TVs are common now, but they will become common soon enough. Computer monitors are very different than Rec. 2020, even wide gamut ones. You _MUST_ use color management to display Rec. 2020 on a computer monitor. Without a computer involved, computer monitors can't display Rec. 2020 properly.

But that is not the final story still. TVs can generally do both 23.976 fps, and 24 fps. Computer monitors very rarely can do this, generally reserved for expensive models designed for professional media creation.

So even if you pay the huge "dumb monitor tax", you still can't get the same result.

<comment><USER17> Buy a J5005 NUC and be done with it. There's your computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've always shied away from luxury brands because repairs are so expensive. Little things like a switch, or a seat lever, or even trying to replace the middle console lid because your kid scratched it up, is always more expensive when its a luxury brand. Just because it comes from BMW doesn't mean it should automatically be more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER19> I bought a plain, no turbo Volvo 940 for $1000 ten years ago. It's 25 years old now, and still is very reliable. Newer Volvos seem a lot more complex, and I can't help thinking that there's a lot more electronics and mechanisms that can break than in the old construction. Edit: ugh, I just realised I have become a grumpy old man.

<comment><USER20> Volvo is Chinese nowadays, the 940 you've bought is Swedish and no cost was spared in making it that reliable. That's _also_ why Volvo is Chinese nowadays.

<comment><USER21> By that logic Toyota should of been Chinese 20 years ago?

<comment><USER20> Toyota has always been very frugal while delivering quality, Volvo was not, so no. And I think you meant 'have' instead of 'of'.

See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way) , pay extra attention to section #2.

Volvo took a much more 'premium' route towards quality, starting with galvanized steel bodies and other such costly measures, as well as producing on less efficient lines than Toyota. Even so, their reputation until the Chinese take-over was excellent, since then the division is as far as I know profitable so maybe this is a happy medium between baked in quality and cost to produce. But it will never go back to the 'tank' status that their older line-up has, which in a way is good because the modern ones fare much better in the crash tests than the oldies, even against mid-range cars in head-on or side-on collisions.

On another note, given the history between the two countries I don't see the Japanese government ok'ing a take-over of one of their prime brands by the Chinese.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Japan_relations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Japan_relations)

<comment><USER22> [https://www.carcomplaints.com/Toyota/Corolla/2010/recalls/](https://www.carcomplaints.com/Toyota/Corolla/2010/recalls/)

I drive a 2010 Toyota Corolla :') - the philosophy sounds great but the implementation is poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A few words about J.D. Power:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKN5Wl4uTyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKN5Wl4uTyY)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think one thing to remember that people who buy a Toyota drive it like it's... a Toyota. Cars that are driven hard will break down faster than cars that aren't, and I'm guessing the average BMW is pushed harder than the average Toyota. My wife can put a hole in a pair of nice running shoes faster than I can even wear tread off of a junky pair. Use matters, not all miles are equal.

<comment><USER2> Doesn't explain the Porsche tie with Toyota unless you're suggesting Porsche drivers are more like Toyota drivers than BMW.

<comment><USER25> porsche builds their cars for track work, so even hard driving around town is light load for them (maybe not the macan).

Hard launches are among the toughest thing you can do to an ICE car. Most cars with launch control can do a few launches and then something overheats and the car refuses to do any more for a while. A car journalist tried to launch a PDK 911 until it failed. He got bored after 50 straight launches and stopped.

<comment><USER2> Well, boredom and to commemorate the 911's 50th birthday.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The people that buy luxury cars don't care. It'll be under warranty during this time and the dealer will offer a free loaner car while it is being repaired. Most of these cars are leased and the ones that aren't will likely be sold around the 3 year mark. There isn't much incentive for the manufacturers to make them reliable unlike with mass market cars.

<comment><USER27> This is true. But there is an important corollary: never buy a used luxury car that's in it's third phase of life (>120k mikes). Both the amount and the cost of repairs are significantly higher. But it's a sucker's deal where people can get a nice car for a while, but which will end up costing them way more than, say, a moderately used Toyota.

<comment><USER28> A good channel does exactly that for entertainment [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdEczn3MVkx_4PnMZ10MVFA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdEczn3MVkx_4PnMZ10MVFA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Luxury Brands" is a vague concept. Maserati, MB S Class, Cadillac Escalade, BMW 7 Series are all luxuru vehicles but aren't supposed to hold up well. They are expensive luxury toys, and cant be used as work horses like Lexuses or Acuras are.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't think the survey takes into account the differing expectations of the buyers of the different brands. Someone buying a Mercedes has different expectations than someone buying a Corola and this would strongly influence issue numbers.

<comment><USER31> Definitely true. I knew a guy who bought a BMW 5-series and was annoyed at a whistling sound that it made. When you pay $50k+ for a vehicle, you expect that it will perform at exacting standards.

Also, the fact that it's under warranty and the BMW dealership will give you a loaner makes you more likely to take it in for extended troubleshooting/repair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The title here, the title in the actual article, and the content of the article aren't telling the same story.

Here: "Toyotas and Chevys Are Holding Up Better Than Most Luxury Brands"

Article: "Toyotas and Chevys Are More Reliable Than BMW and Mercedes, J.D. Power Finds"

Article content (paraphrasing): "Lexus, Porsche top the list" "Most German manufacturers lag behind US"

So which is it? Bloomberg doesn't appear to be trying too hard here.

<comment><USER2> Bloomberg reporting can barely be called reporting. It's half-assed regurgitated content that's often inaccurate these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is always true, the mass produced thing is going to have manufacturing lines that are tuned. And Toyota or Chevy can't afford to have a recall on something they made 100k of . Bespoke luxury vehicles are nearly hand made, with all the errors that hand building entails.

Wear a timex, drive a toyota, compute with a thinkpad, listen to a yamaha and process with a cuisanart.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've driven a number of older Toyotas and (fingers crossed) that seems to be my experience.

</comment><comment><USER35> God bless my Mazda 3 2012.

I spent a total of $1200(wipers, tires, engine oil) in 100k miles and still gives me 39 mpg on highways.

Love the car. My next Car is going to be either Japanese or a Korean.

</comment><comment><USER36> Most people I know that have German usually have electronic/electrical issues. The actual drivetrains are good but the electrical systems have a lot of issues.

</comment><comment><USER37> Assessing "reliability" between brands is very hard (and a lost cause IMO) because there's tons of things that have a large effect but are hard to measure and quantify.

Reliability variation between models > reliability variation between brands. Generally speaking cheap disposable appliance cars are cheap and disposable. OEMs put much more effort into their flagship products and the products that define their brand image.

Owner demographics have a large effect on reliability over the kind of 5+yr timeline many commenters here seem to be talking in. The wealthier the owner the better the vehicle is treated (at a statistical level, we all know one or two rich guys who never change their oil). Rich people years vs poor people years is like highway miles vs city miles. As vehicles get older they get cheaper they move down the economic ladder which tends to complicate things a little. In states with road salt wealthier people are much more likely to keep their vehicles in garages or wash them regularly.

When it comes to vehicles >8yo (or whatever the oldest banks will write a loan for at present) you see on the road is not necessarily what's reliable or what's popular. The dealership auction system tends to siphon off vehicles over a certain age and/or under a certain value to the South American (from North America) and African/Middle Eastern (from Europe) markets. This means that vehicles owned by the demographics that tend to trade in regularly (wealthier on average) will not stick around as well as the vehicles owned by people who don't or who tend to buy/sell private party (less wealthy on average). So the old vehicle you see driving around are not necessarily a 1:1 representation of what was or wasn't reliable or what was or wasn't popular back in the year they were sold. Different demographics keep vehicles for different amounts of time. People tend to get new vehicles at life milestones younger people are moving up in the world commuting, starting families and this prompts them to change vehicle more often. Grandpa bought a 'Vic in '94 and has been driving it since.

Replacement cost greatly effects a how long a vehicle is kept in service. Replacing a compact SUV is cheap compared to a 1-ton truck so at any point in time the owner of the big truck is much more likely to fix any problem that comes up rather than go looking for a replacement. Look at the 90s Fords you still see around. Ford sold a TON of Explorers yet 1st and 2nd gen Explorers are a rarity on the roads compared to F-series.

Also, just because you never see a particular make/model where you live doesn't mean they don't exist in large numbers elsewhere.

There's probably a few things I'm forgetting but people would do well to keep in mind all the things that aren't being controlled for when they read about vehicle "reliability".

</comment><comment><USER38> Lexus came in #1 followed by Porsche but that didn't make for as good of a headline I guess.

</comment><comment><USER39> Isn't this well known? Toyotas have legendary reliability

<comment><USER40> But their truck frames are also legendary for rusting out -- a very expensive repair.

<comment><USER39> Are they anymore so than other cars driven where they salt the roads? I have not heard that.

<comment><USER41> Anecdotal experience (Long-time Land Cruiser owner in Western Norway where the SOP at first snow is to salt the heck out of it) suggests that Toyotas do rust like mad; I work hard all year keeping my Land Cruisers (a 1981 BJ42 and a 1998 KZJ95) reasonably rust-free. I have to treat them to lanolin twice a winter season.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> this is common knowledge among farmers here.

</comment><comment><USER43> A Cadillac is not just an expensive car, it is an expensive car to own. (Gas, repair bills, etc.)

If you are a W-2 worker you have to be at work at a certain time and you need a car that can start every morning so you can get to work on time.

Higher class people can afford multiple cars, take time off from work, take a cab, etc.

The Cadillac brand is appealing to many lower class Americans so you often see them in "bad" neighborhoods. Some would say the people there are not in a hurry to get anywhere.

<comment><USER44> Puzzled why you would mention this brand, as it's never mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER45> Perhaps because Cadillac is a brand by GM, the manufacturer who also makes Chevy. Cadillac is the luxury brand of GM which would compete with luxury brands.

<comment><USER44> Ditto for Infiniti (Nissan), Acura (Honda), and Audi (VW).

I realize none of those brands are useful for making unrelated demographic- based comments, however.

<comment><USER46> For the Volkswagen group, I would list Bentley, Lamborghini or Bugatti as their luxury offerings. Audi is more middle class and sold in large numbers, at least in Europe.

<comment><USER7> In the US, Audi, BMW and similar European brands are intentionally marketed as a mid to high luxury vehicles to preserve their brand mystique. None of these companies sell mass-market cars in the US in the same tier as mass-market cars by Toyota, GM, etc. Most of these brands do sell mass-market cars in Europe, though.

It's also worth noting that in the US, most families have had multiple cars due to the lack of alternative transit options, and so families of modest means buy lower cost vehicles as a result.

Only recently are multi-car households are seeing a big uptick in places like the UK [1], and in many developed urban areas of Europe, the car is used by families as a "weekend getaway" vehicle, not a daily commuter. When you only have to buy one car, you might be able to afford more luxury.

[1] [https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/912000/two-cars- ho...](https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/912000/two-cars-household- soar-LV-insurance-competition-holiday-commuting-family-trip)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why the NHS can't get its browser act together - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/22/internet-explorer-nhs-vulnerability

<comment><USER2> I think this article misses the point. If my medical records are insecure because of vulnerabilities in IE 6, they'd be insecure whichever browser was being used -- none of them are anywhere near secure enough to provide an acceptable guarantee for information of that sort. These systems shouldn't be designed in such a way that the security of the data depends on the lack of vulnerabilities in a web browser. (If indeed they are. The article provides no evidence that the NHS systems in question could be compromised via IE 6.)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find the right people in the organization? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a software where you can basically search through people's responsibilities and find the right person to talk to to get your day job done. This comes from a personal pain working at a medium-sized company so I wanted to see if there's any software to help me with that. <comment><USER2> The way it usually happens is by developing relationships over the years. Often, the right person is right due to capabilities rather than responsibility. What matters more is who gets the job done rather than who to blame for it not being done.

Which might imply building a software system to detail responsibilities or even just entering the data may often or even the disruption of notifying the responsible party may be less efficient than just doing the task oneself.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the comment! Yeah, I was hoping that it wasn't necessarily responsibilities but rather it would know who the most capable are based on some internal signals (slack messages/internal wiki/etc comments made related to the topic).</comment></comment>


The Link – a device that makes any speaker wireless - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thelink/the-link-a-device-that-makes-any-speaker-wireless

<comment><USER2> Provided that those speakers are already powered that is...</comment>


Ask HN: What tip or experience has most improved your writing? - <AUTHOR>

Re: "Please Learn to Write" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3982354 <comment><USER2> Back in my BBS days, I ran a continuing story board. Something funny where one could knock off a few paragraphs and have fun writing it. Playing in that medium probably helped me more than most. It wasn't just me writing, so sometimes it was a challenge to twist the plot against others to something I wanted. It taught me a lot of phrasing, typing, and general grammar.

Today blogging is good, you just need to get into writing more than posting funny pictures. :-D

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to chernevik (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3983651>) and MartinCron (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3983117>) for their takes on this question.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keep it concise, and remove unnecessary words ruthlessly.

</comment><comment><USER4> Public Speaking.

</comment><comment><USER5> Start writing as much as you can. Put it on paper. Read it. Get it read from friends. Start reading books, articles whatever. A good way to get better at writing is to write. Do not worry about grammar or mistakes at first. Start a blog may be.</comment>


Why Garbage Collection Is Not Necessary and Actually Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://mortoray.com/2011/03/30/why-garbage-collection-is-not-necessary-and-actually-harmful/ <comment><USER2> > Even a highly sophisticated, incremental, distributed collector must go > through all the objects.

It doesn't if GC is run thread-wise, threads communicate copying messages around, and these threads are very short-lived.</comment>


Libertarian ideology is the natural enemy of science - <AUTHOR> http://gu.com/p/4x46m

<comment><USER2> > Climate change illustrates this well, because despite overwhelming evidence > of anthropogenic influence,

It's less and less overwhelming based on what we have learnt over the past 2-3 years about the impact of the Sun on climate. But hey, when you start an article just to destroy the "libertarian ideology", you don't bother about facts.</comment>


Sea level rise will disproportionately hit U.S. this century, NOAA warns - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sea-level-rise-will-hit-the-us-this-century-noaa-warns/ <comment><USER2> Solar energy with battery storage provides 24/7 electricity for the most economical new power plants. By 2030, fossil plants will begin retiring as too expensive to operate.

Meanwhile, electric vehicles will replace ICE vehicles.

Regardless of the policies of the Trump administration, technology and economics will roll back CO2 emissions.</comment>


C preprocessor tricks, tips, and idioms (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pfultz2/Cloak/wiki/C-Preprocessor-tricks,-tips,-and-idioms <comment><USER2> I used to use all sorts of preprocessor tricks in my C code. I eventually made an effort to eliminated all preprocessor use in the code (except for #include, where there was no alternative).

The result was surprisingly pleasing. The code looked much nicer without all the #'s breaking up the indentation, and it made C look like a more modern language :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> There are lots of horrific weapons like this to ever torment the universe. e.g. [http://p99.gforge.inria.fr/p99-html/index.html](http://p99.gforge.inria.fr/p99-html/index.html)

<comment><USER4> I work in C all day every day. It's fine, I get by. And then I run into macros. Fucking macros.

Hey guess what REQUEST and REQUEST_FIXED_SIZE do here: [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/blob/master/dix/...](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/blob/master/dix/extension.c#L223) Did you guess "declares a new variable called 'stuff'" and "returns early", respectively?

Do you think dixAllocateObjectWithPrivates is a function here? [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/blob/master/dix/...](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/blob/master/dix/property.c#L274) Haha, think again! Macro.

Guess what fbGetPixmapBitsData does here: [https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/blob/master/fb/f...](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/blob/master/fb/fbpict.c#L291) Did you guess assign values to the latter 3 arguments, two of which aren't even passed by reference??

I'm picking on the xserver because it's my most memorable encounter with bad macros, but agh. Agh!

<comment><USER5> Where do you work that you get to work in C all day every day? I haven't been able to do that in over 25 years. Sometimes I miss those days. Then you see one of these stupid macros!

<comment><USER6> Come to automotive, you can program in c90 all the live long day</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GAlculator – Geometric Algebra Pocket Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://enkimute.github.io/ganja.js/examples/galculator.html <comment><USER2> The author of this is also behind the bivector community [https://bivector.net/](https://bivector.net/)

Join the discord [https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk](https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk).

Check out a demo [https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated- orbits](https://observablehq.com/@enkimute/animated-orbits)

<comment><USER3> Wow, this site is beautiful. Not something I often see around such topics. Actually, not something I often see in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought the item would be about this galculator:

[http://galculator.mnim.org/](http://galculator.mnim.org/)

<comment><USER5> Me too. This is my desktop calculator of choice.

<comment><USER6> Me too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Couldn't figure out how to do the right paren when trying to follow the first example. Selecting the left paren just adds another left. I only see a left paren on the keypad and not a right.

<comment><USER8> Might be a randering error. Its directly below the left paren and directly to the right of the equals for me.

<comment><USER7> Ah, thanks. Turns out I had to expand the height of my browser. Odd that the page doesn't scroll (I'm guessing it's meant for mobile as a first class citizen, while desktop is second).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's annoying that I can't use my keyboard and there doesn't appear to be a backspace? ...

<comment><USER10> Can't read most of the text because the calculator is on top of it.

Also, it's not a pocket calculator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1/0 = Inf1e1n1e1ty find/replace all bug or intentional joke?

</comment><comment><USER12> The vibration on keypress on mobile is annoying</comment>


PhotoScan by Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/photos/scan/ <comment><USER2> If someone from the Google Photos team drops by here, could we get an option or setting for taking more frames from a photo to get a higher resolution digital copy of the scanned photo?

</comment><comment><USER3> There's some discussion about it on the /r/analog subreddit, including a test scan, here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/analog/comments/5d4s2c/google_relea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/analog/comments/5d4s2c/google_releases_photoscan_an_app_to_scan_your/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, cool idea. Their demo of the glare removal looks nice... well I guess they wouldn't put up a bad example. But still, if it really does work that well, this seems awesome.

</comment><comment><USER5> We need more technical details here. Anybody familiar with this? This is so awesome. I've been putting off scanning my baby pictures. Perfect timing since most people go home for the holidays.

</comment><comment><USER6> The scary part: I scanned a 1978 picture of my 5-year-old self and Google recognized me.

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems that the effect of this APP depends heavily on the phone camera.</comment>


Should I learn Java or Python for web applications? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a CS Student and I am going to start a big project all alone. Here we are learning C/C++ as mainstream language. I would like to know should I learn Java (Play) or Python (Django) in order to start a complex web application where I have to use text/pdf parsing, multithreading programming as backend, and as frontend fast and fresh HTML5/JS interface? <comment><USER2> I'm a fan of Python/Django, myself. The ecosystem is great: Django REST Framework is great, Kombu/Celery is great and easy for task queues, and it's super easy to deploy to Heroku (all things considered).

Honestly, I haven't used Ruby on Rails, but I recently found a new job and RoR experience would have opened up more doors to me than even Python/Django, which is pretty popular. If you don't already have experience with Python/Django that would make execution a lot easier for you, then consider RoR.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. I have actually started with Django and I find it awesome. I can get things done in few hours and Python is rock solid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If performance does not matter, I would prefer Django. I tried to find more comfortable framework as Django, but, unfortunately, not found. If you plan to go big and fast grow, with more than 20 people, I would prefer to use compile safe and strong typed language. Play2? Read play's mailing list - there a lot of problems and limitations. But it's depends on your needs. If you are not a linux (or mac) geek (as I), take a look on C# and .net.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a former senior developer at Razorfish in Austin, I have only worked on 1, no that's not a typo, 1 Java project that wasn't an utter failure.

On the other hand, I've yet to work on a Django project that was delivered late or ran over budget and was easily 10x more maintainable.

I put my money on Python and Django in 2008, and haven't looked back.

<comment><USER3> I work on big insurance java project (initiated before 2003, 300 people in development, now more than 450 people). This is not a lot of little independent projects - it's ONE Project with more than 75 components! It's high quality software and we make crazy amount of user stories get every sprint out. Of course, we have errors, RTE's - we are all humans. I worked also for others companies and write PHP and Python/Django for years. Failure has nothing with language or framework or tools - it's always human fail. Sorry for my bad english.

<comment><USER4> I agree. A language or framework isn't a reason for failure, however, it's a pattern that I observed at Razorfish for a few years. Maybe the devs we had just weren't very good :)</comment></comment></comment>


Why not randomly test city populations to learn asymptomatic Covid rates? - <AUTHOR> It seems simple enough to test a few thousand healthy random residents of San Fransisco, Seattle, and New York to get a rough idea of the level of asymptomatic community Covid in the area. Why haven't random community Covid tests been carried out yet? <comment><USER2> It's happening in at least one location and maybe others. This is the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, from King County Public Health and Seattle Flu Study: [https://publichealthinsider.com/2020/03/23/introducing- scan-...](https://publichealthinsider.com/2020/03/23/introducing-scan-the- greater-seattle-coronavirus-assessment-network/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Mainly because that insight would be relatively irrelevant and can be extrapolated on tests that actually make sense I would guess. There's a shortage in test capacity right now, especially in those areas that are most affected. Why would one go out of their way to waste thousands on random people?

<comment><USER4> The reason for doing this is to better estimate the essential parameters of the disease (ease of spreading, distribution of symptoms, lethality rate)

We need those for capacity planning and for deciding when and how to ease restrictions. I think many of the richer countries already have decent enough estimates for capacity planning, and are in the process of widening testing to gather ideas about how to wind down restrictions (may take till the end of 2021, in some scenarios)

<comment><USER3> That seems beside the point OP was trying to make. They were suggesting random sampled tests in current hotspot areas where there's already a shortage in available tests. I'm not sure what benefit random sampling would give you over testing actual potential disease candidates through sensible contact tracing in these areas. That might get you data slightly biased towards a sensible worst case and you're free to use data from other areas for capacity planning to compensate until they ramp up test availability.</comment></comment></comment>