Tesla Charging Costs

Steven Guccione

In Texas, electricity was cheaper but our power bills were much higher, especially in the summer.  In New Mexico, our house is a bit smaller and the weather milder, so our consumption is much lower.  I was curious how much it cost to charge an EV like ours (Tesla Model 3 with a 75 kWh battery).  It’s a little complicated because there are three tiers of rates with different summer and non-summer rates.

We have solar so it’s a different story for us but if we were using PNM power we would almost certainly be in the upper tier in the summer ($0.1994661/kWh) and the lower tier in the non-summer ($0.0896783/kWh).  So a fill-up from 0% to 100% would be:

Summer: ($0.1994661 x 75) = $14.96

Non-Summer: ($0.0896783 x 75) = $6.73

Or course gas prices fluctuate and have been high for some time.  But a similar vehicle with, say a 16 gallon tank would cost $64 at $4 a gallon.  Gas would have to be under $1 a gallon to compete with even the expensive summer charging.

I always thought this was a big advantage of EVs but you don’t hear about it much.  Plus there are no oil changes, radiator flushes, transmission fluid, spark plugs, etc to maintain.

The Private Companies Quietly Building a Police State

Steven Guccione

It’s good to see people pushing back on the likes of Flock Cameras.  But this is a much bigger issue.

Surveillance has been privatized.  Things only the FBI used to be able to do, and then only with a warrant, are done routinely, millions of times a day in the US by private companies. An entire industry has emerged to support these private surveillance networks, which are really built to serve law enforcement, at least for now.

Stricter personal data privacy laws, similar to what Europe has, would go a long way to solving the problem.  What we have in the US today is, sadly, a surveillance/ police state unlike anything in history.

The Private Companies Quietly Building a Police State

Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

Steven Guccione

A few days ago I watched the cryptocurrency documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.  It’s not a hard hitting expose or even very informative, in the sense that you won’t learn much about the history or technical details of, say, Bitcoin.  This threw me off at first.  But it is very watchable and even entertaining.

It’s really about the groups of people that rally around things like cryptocurrency and how they believe things that, well, maybe shouldn’t be believed.  It also seems the film was completed at a time when cryptocurrency was still in its relative infancy, not yet adopted by the mainstream.  If it doesn’t engage you, you may want to hang in there until the end. There is a “payoff” that (I think) is worth waiting for.

Everyone Is Lying to You for Money

Texas sued for failing to process more than 500,000 voter registrations

Steven Guccione

So now it’s half a million voters.  This is all a direct result of the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act.  Will this get fixed by the election?  Seems like a simple database update.  Or they could let people with unmatched addresses vote.  We will see if anything at all happens.  Everyone involved in this need to spend serious time in jail.

Texas sued for failing to process more than 500,000 voter registrations