Gigantic Purple Slug

Very astute post.

I have a hybrid. The regen braking is pretty clever. I think it uses satnav to argument the braking, so it knows when you come up to a roundabout that you will need to slow and applies the regen more aggressively. To some degree it is possible to drive without brakes, with the regen occuring through the transmission. This is not without its problems though, in the respect that although the brake pads and disks get a lot less use from normal braking, what happens is they get a lot more rust from not being used. It remains to be seen on my car whether the lack of wear from not being used outbalances any issues due to rusting. Hope you got a good view of the eclipse. I have seen two, one in Europe and one in Idaho and they were both epic.

Once you go full bald then no one can tell how old you are. I know a guy who has been bald since he was about 40 and its hard to tell the difference now he is 60. Unfortunately I don't have either the head shape or the quality of skin to carry off the bald look or I would probably go for a #0 in a heatbeat.

I have quite a few pairs of side cutters for electronics fab, but they are great for cutting iron hard toenails, especially the big toenail which is virtually indestructible. I am at the stage with hair though where it is thinning. A decent hair dresser can make a fairly good job of it and it looks fine without having to go for a buzz cut, but I can't.

To be fair, probably a good 90% of the predictions on here are worthless. Notable exceptions on here are the interest rate predictor which because it is crowd sourced appears to work pretty well and the bitcoin proponents.

I think it is a throwback to a bygone age that people think of it as really expensive. It depends on how modern your house is a lot of the time. If it has good insulation and windows and you get something like an E7 tariff it can be cheap to run electrically because you hardly need any heat anyway. You also lose the cost of the boiler service and the whole setup is far less likely to break down. Plus you can control where the heat goes a lot better. Maybe look up the EPC for a rough idea of what the energy usage per year is.

What about the 0.1% of the population that drive 1000 miles a day though ? Surely the fact that the EV won't work for them renders the whole principle completely impractical. I came to the conclusion some time ago that there is an awful lot of VI around ICE. They aren't going to go quietly. Word on the street is that servicing volume is starting to drop precipitously. I expect similar issues with petrol station profitability and many marginal ones starting to close down in the near future.

Well by that logic I should buy a van because I need one about twice a year to move stuff.

A significant proportion of car trips are under 10 miles. Most people only need the extended range a few times a year. In that case you can either put up with the wait on the public charger, or horror of horrors even go for a hire car on those couple of occasions. What I don't get is people who make purchase decisions on stuff that they hardly ever do. Obviously if you are a salesperson doing high mileage on a regular basis then EVs may not be the optimum solution. But that doesn't make them codswallop, any more than a HGV is codswallop because it's not really very practical for going backwards and forwards to the local shops.

I would not get an electric car if I couldn't do home charging. You probably don't need me to tell you this though.

It's everyone else that is supposed to have that. Great post btw.

We need to re balance taxes from income to wealth.

Old enough to remember when shale was first coming in and discussed on the forum. It's a busted flush, developed on borrowed money, the EROI isn't high enough the US is a failing state etc etc etc all by the usual suspects who were completely clueless about the economics of unconventionals - either that or they just wanted to perpetuate the myth/their political agenda that the US was finished. Now 15 years down the line the US is the worlds largest producer, with massive unconventional reserves yet to be developed. The economics and techniques for unconventional extraction have improved hugely. This forum gets some things really right, but also a lot of things horribly wrong.

Whereas being born to the right parents so you actually get an inheritance isn't a lottery ? Inheritance tax is a strange one. The vast majority of people don't pay it and ought to be happy to be in a position where they would (as it would mean their inheritances were much larger), but for some reason they react highly negatively to it. Yet talk about giving the rich an income tax cut and people go beserk. One of life's mysteries I guess.

I think it is a good point about people not being so well off in the 60s, 70s and 80s at least. I think a lot of boomers were bought up with a frugal mindset during those post war years. Even though they might be rich now, ideals instilled in them when they are young means they will always feel poor and will always want and demand more money from society, despite now being considerably richer than other sections of society. Shaking off the experiences that people have as children is a really difficult process for many people. I know quite a few multi millionaire boomers who are extremely tight with their money because they have never been able to properly shake off the experiences of their childhoods. Even buying a bag of crisps is a teeth sucking exercise for them and an angry cry of "how much".