I found some data from an auto insurance association.
In US urban areas the average car is only driven 6000 miles a year. That's 115 miles a week. Someone in an urban city would only need to charge every two weeks. Friend has a Chevy Bolt in SF he parks on the street. He says it's not a problem.
I also repeat myself but I've measured how long it take to gas up a car on road trips. It's usually around 10-15 minutes. Oh sure actually filling the car is quick. But you have to drive to the gas station, fill the car, drive away from the gas station.
>But you have to drive to the gas station, fill the car, drive away from the gas station.
Costs you also pay driving to the EV charging station. 10-15 mins really? Maybe if you are taking a poop or buying a sandwich. Usually on road trips gas stations are immediately off the freeway or at major crossroads of state or county roads. You aren't really detouring to get to them.
Acquiring a lot of cheap land can still be expensive if it takes you a lot of time to process everything.
Plus the people selling it to you will simply play you off each other since you're publicly committed to buying it. Like with that train they're building.
A thought is that from 'their' perspective the potential loss of power and status on the tip top of things is to them existential. Consider a certain Senator being wheeled into the Senate to vote. Why even subject ones self to that. Because to step down is annihilation. There was another Senator in 2023 being wheeled around the same way.
So all of this is performative asserting power in order to punish anyone seen as a threat to the current system.
There's this idea in leftist thought, that in the end capital only ends up growing its relative power over labourers. Trump's policies, Climate Change, they all make everyone worse off in the absolute, but they end up giving capital more relative power over the rest of us.
> Ugliness has become a cultural norm in order to suit the modern economy.
I read someone's argument that the ugliness results in market failure. Because the ugly results in not only local opposition to building renewable it results in everyone in the area being opposed. And they then use the political process to block new construction.
What really bad is after a 100 years of this the construction industry no longer knows how to design attractive buildings. Starts with architecture where 2/3 of the architects are aesthetically blind. And the remaining 1/3 had it beaten out of the in school. Ends with manufactures that have long since stopped manufacturing pleasing materials for construction.
I actually think this is a big part of nimbyism. People know that whatever is built is going to make the neighborhood uglier because they have no faith in architecture, so they start opposing everything.
Because of Prop 103 California has reasonable insurance rates especially considering cost of living. California's laws and regulations are oriented around forcing people to have at least some coverage. I suspect that the laws annoy insurance companies because they conflict with MBAs craven impulses. But those impulses when not pushed back against eventually result in collapse.
Some aspects of Prop. 103 work. The definition of "good driver" as everyone who hasn't caused a fatality in the last 3 years is not one of those aspects.
Something people that bitch about the high cost of California vs Florida won't mention is how high auto and home owners insurance is in Florida. Florida is a high risk state with a lot of fraud.
The reforms that were passed a few years ago are actually working somewhat OK. I'm 3 miles from the beach on the coast and pay under $2k for private home owners insurance.
Yet at the same time federal government allowed home insurance to be non-actuarial (aka insolvent) for natural disasters like hurricanes. So essentially the rest of the country subsidise residents in disaster-prone areas. So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians.
It's true that the National Flood Insurance Program does this, but that's only for flooding (which, admittedly, is a big part of hurricane damage...). Flood coverage is however not a standard rider on homeowner's insurance policy products, and I'm also unsure whether it can ever be. I've only ever seen it offered as an additional policy product.
The concern over pricing below the actuarially fair value is well-placed[0], but I'd urge being precise.
A lot of this was self inflicted by Florida. Between their roofing coverage laws and their attorney fee laws, suing for new roofs was basically free, so everyone and their dog did it.
“Free” if you won, meaning the insurer should have covered but refused and forced the insured to litigate, and part of the remedy was reimbursement of reasonable attorney fees. So, in other words, insurer at fault. That fostered a lively market of attorneys willing to take cases on contingency.
Of course, all that is in the past with the GOP legislature’s big changes to the statutes and DeSantis’s appointment of pro-insurer judges throughout the state.
Now, when Hurricane Paco does tear your roof off; soaks and destroys all your homelab Hoppers; and your insurer denies what should be a no-brainer claim because … well, just because it can, you often have to come out of pocket to pay a lawyer for the lengthy litigation — at precisely the time that you are probably even more cash-strapped than usual.
“Nub City” is a nickname for Vernon, Florida where the residents ended up filing far more dismemberment insurance claims for amputated limbs than was statistically likely, the town of 500-800 people was the source of 2/3rds of the claims against the policies at one point. Insurance companies stopped writing dismemberment insurance policies in the area.
> Vernon gained infamy in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the improbably high percentage of residents who made insurance claims for lost limbs, leading to an investigation of whether residents of the city were intentionally dismembering themselves for the insurance money. These insurance claims from Vernon, with a population of 500 to 800, accounted for as many as 2/3 of claims nationally, but there was no way of proving that any particular amputation was deliberate.[9] This led to Vernon being referred to as "nub city" during this period. In 1980, Errol Morris attempted to make a documentary about this phenomenon, but after being threatened by city residents and physically attacked by one, he changed the focus of the film, resulting in the 1981 documentary film Vernon, Florida.
Considering that US houses usually either have a crawl space, basement, or are on a slab the lack of a drain is weird when you think about it. You would think wet locations would be required to have a drain.
I think a lot of European houses have floor drains in the bath, you can basically hose the bathroom down.
More on topic. Outside of the US R290 (propane) heat pumps are common. But illegal in the US because the refrigerant manufacturers control the code bodies. You can have a 20lb propane tank hanging off a BBQ which in normal operation is literally on fire. But you can't have an R290 monoblack cause it's too dangerous.
In US urban areas the average car is only driven 6000 miles a year. That's 115 miles a week. Someone in an urban city would only need to charge every two weeks. Friend has a Chevy Bolt in SF he parks on the street. He says it's not a problem.
I also repeat myself but I've measured how long it take to gas up a car on road trips. It's usually around 10-15 minutes. Oh sure actually filling the car is quick. But you have to drive to the gas station, fill the car, drive away from the gas station.
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