introducing the cotton battery

Quote: rxwine

All those years of poking and shaking those narrow ketchup bottles. Someone finally thought of making them with a wide opening and setting them continuously on their top, so gravity is always assisting. You just never know what someone will finally notice.

Heinz had a wide-mouth bottle back in the 1970s, when you still could not make a squeezable plastic bottle. It sold very poorly. The consumer wnated what the consumer knew.

My parents put the modern upside-down bottle downside up no matter how many times I try to explain it to them.

Quote: rxwine

The problem with the world today, is you are taking one side of it. Show me businesses not lobbying to turn regulations to their favor all the time. The public has just as much right to do so.

If it's looting, it's all of them looting. Don't forget to include yourself as you've probably voted for corporate invested politicians.

Few businesses do not try to lobby, this is true. When they do not then DC decides to shake them down, like they did to Microsoft in the late 1990s.

Just because we have a bunch of thieves doesn't mean we want more thieves. In PA Casinos were supposed to help "education" with the mafia-level 55% they give up on slots. Now liberals are running for governor by promising to tax the industry that is providing virtually all net new jobs in the state, gas drilling.

The tipping point is coming. When you have to give more and more of the money you produce to those who produce nothing yet keep asking for more the end cannot be far behind.

I think rx's point was whether the parking lot / charging station would pay PER use or by the amount used. I'd charge the amount used with the requisite markup of say, 200%. A Leaf requiring 23kWH would probably cost the provider about $3 at $.13/kwh, $4.60 at .20/kwh. Buy the infrastructure offering a one hour charge, make it a valet service and you could serve multiple cars all day rather than leaving one at a charging station all day. And charge .40/kwH for the parking spot and the additional parking charge. The cost of the DC charging station is $17K, and I imagine 2-3K/install. So at $5/profit per charge, the station pays for itself after 4,000 charges. If you buy two-three and offer the valet service, you could charge 8 - 10 of these in a working day and make back the investment in less than 2 years.

Currently, though, most public transit is offering the service for free. Even Casino Niagara has a free charging station on level 1 of the parking lot.

Quote: AZDuffman

The tipping point is coming. When you have to give more and more of the money you produce to those who produce nothing yet keep asking for more the end cannot be far behind.

From the Bill of Particulars section of the Declaration of Independence: He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

Someone once calculated the number of such Offices in relation to the Colonial population and compared it to the number of politicians in our current population.

Staggering.

We should re-write the history books to reflect that King George was being very generous to us.

Meanwhile, over in Israel, they've built an electric car that can travel over 1,000 miles without having to stop for a battery re-charge. The battery is made of aluminum (Alcoa's Canadian division is an investor in the company) and requires a fill-up of a few gallons of tap water once a month.

There's only one itsy bitsy problem: the battery isn't durable, it needs to be completely replaced every 3 or 4 months.

Quote: reno

There's only one itsy bitsy problem: the battery isn't durable, it needs to be completely replaced every 3 or 4 months.

That's obviously an engineering problem which will eihter be solved, or will be the death of the technology.

It happens. Prototypes are a distant glimpse of what a thing may be years or decades later. The Wright's Flier flew only a few meters and was wrecked by the end of the day. Today, well, look around.