My family did the same thing and we're never looking back. We grow most of our vegetables and herbs (aeroponics for leafy greens, herbs, and peppers + traditional gardening), with some supplementation from a local farm. All of our meat and dairy comes from local farms (whole cows / pigs). The grocery store almost feels weird now.
You will note that I said we were well enough off for that not to be the case. I run two companies at the moment, one of which was barely making any money during COVID (new company), and the other of which was heavily dependent on supply chains, so the pipeline was uncertain. Both are doing fantastically now. My savings guaranteed my entire family would be fine, regardless of income. That's the only reason we were able to flip the bird to my wife's vaccine mandate employer. If we were in a different position financially, you can bet I would lie through my teeth to the government and her employer to make sure my family was well off.
All I'm saying is that I wouldn't judge someone who had to make a hard decision for their family. You do whatever it takes. Convincing the government you have a huge schlong isn't going to stop tyranny, but making bullheaded ideological decisions at the expense of the people you vowed to protect sure will make you a complete scumbag.
My wife and I essentially did exactly what you're talking about. She almost lost her job, and we almost moved to Texas due to the fallout. Pretty difficult decision to make when you have to feed multiple children. If we were slightly less well off, the damage would have easily affected our young kids. I don't blame a single person who bought a vaccine card to make sure they could keep feeding their family. Shame on anyone who would let children go hungry just to make some symbolic statement to the government. The enemy wins in that scenario too.
I don't think you're understanding the point of what I'm saying. Petroleum is nearly impossible for you as an individual to source and store. Electricity is extremely easy. Clearly I'm not going to build a DIY system like that for mass consumption.
As far as starting my own power company, I don't really have the time or desire to run a third company at the moment. Dealing with all the entrenched government created monopolies in the energy sector sounds like a soul sucking trip to hell, so I'll stick to electrical engineering and software ventures.
I'm not interested in climate change either, and I didn't discount the battery pack at all. It's clearly the worst part about EV's, which is why I mentioned lithium batteries as their biggest downside. Fortunately, we have other battery technology available, so we can hopefully move away from it in the near future.
As far as electricity versus petroleum being very natural substances and good sources of stored energy, electricity wins again. Everything around you stores electricity. It occurs literally everywhere in nature. It's far more abundant and easily accessible than oil. For example, you can put a pipe into a stream, feed that into a turbine connected to a disk with four magnets on it, which sits next to another disk that has simple coils of wire on it. Water flows, which spins the turbines, with spins the magnets, which charge the coils, which create a constant discharge of electricity. I can build one of these easily in my garage, whereas petroleum is nearly impossible for me to extract from the earth and refine.
And as far energy storage goes, I can store electricity in pretty much any way that I want. For example, I could attach a heavy load to a chain, and then attach the load to an electric motor. Feeding my DIY hydro generator into the electric motor will lift the load. If the water stops flowing, then the weight of the load falling will produce electricity in the other direction (the electric motor slows the falling so that it has a constant energy output). I can make an efficient battery with some magnets, coiled wire, a chain, and a pulley. Good luck DIYing any backyard sourcing like that with petroleum (setting up the drilling alone would cost more than multiple lifetimes of EV batteries, and you have to be lucky enough to have a house on an oil deposit).
(Note: Clearly I'm not going to make a car battery this way. My point is simply that I don't need anything complicated to pull electricity out of the environment and store it. If governments denied access to gasoline, I could still drive my EV by charging it via simple methods like this.)
It is incredibly difficult to come up with a good argument for petroleum over electricity. I have practically infinite access to electricity all around me, whereas I need to rely on Citgo and Shell for petroleum. Not only that, the parts necessary to harness and store that electricity are extremely cheap and easy to source, so it has an incredible ability to decentralize access to energy.
This is honestly a pretty useless conversation. With your line of reasoning, you can argue that a pencil is more inefficient than a gas engine. The only way you can have a reasonable conversation about this is by comparing similar, quantifiable aspects of the two engines. You're just going to keep on adding nuance upon nuance because it perpetuates your argument indefinitely.
EV engines themself are currently more efficient than gas engines. That's a simple fact.
The energy transportation itself has about the same cost.
The energy production itself is way cheaper for electricity, because it doesn't involve sucking oil out of the earth (see: hydro / nuclear / etc...).
The energy storage is maybe better for gas, but only under the condition that it isn't contaminated with ethanol.
You make it sound like electric engines are some sort of scam, when they at least stand toe to toe if not better in almost every aspect to gas engines. If you want to argue that they are overhyped or oversold right now, that's fine -- I'd probably even agree with you--, but arguing that they're more inefficient is clearly wrong.
The biggest issue is that they are too expensive. A battery lasts about 100,000 mi, and it can't be recycled, so you have a perpetual cost due to a dependency on unrecyclable lithium. If we had a more efficient, recyclable storage that didn't depend on mining in countries that hate us, then it would hands down be the best solution for many people (in terms of cost and convenience).
I never said they were green. I said they were more efficient, powerful, and fun.
Given that natural gas has the same transportation cost, then you pretty much have to compare only the engine efficiency, which is substantially better in EV's.
If you're going to talk about battery sourcing and manufacturing, then you also have to talk about engine sourcing and manufacturing, which is a way more complicated process.
You have to also include the drilling, refining, pipeline maintenance, etc... all of those are ongoing costs that contribute to inefficiency of gas engines. I'm willing to bet that puts gas engines at under 10% efficiency.
Also, natural gas makes up about 25% of total electricity generation worldwide, so it would benefit from pipelines as well. Nuclear and hydro make up another 25% (zero transmission of heavy objects). Combined, those three make up about half of the global electricity production. That would make EV's at least a few times more efficient than even the most efficient gas engines (realistically we're talking about 3x less power consumption).
If you're going to do that type of analysis for EV's, you have to do the same thing for gasoline powered cars. You seem to be comparing engine efficiency in one case to the entire distribution pipeline efficiency in the other case. If you can give me that info, then at least we can compare apples to apples.
I still don't get the argument that they're doing this to restrict travel. All modern vehicles can be remotely shut down, so there's really zero difference there. As far as availability of energy, electricity is far more abundantly available and easier to access than oil. As far as I know, very few people can drill for oil and refine it, so they're heavily reliant on distribution. I've yet to see a good argument for how EV's will restrict travel more than it's already restricted.
Totally agree that subsidies for electric vehicles are ridiculous and need to be stopped ASAP. They should compete on their own merit. EV's are hilariously more efficient, powerful, and dare I say fun to drive than gas vehicles (for all the haters: I drive a rear wheel drive stick in New England. NOTHING is more fun than a 0ms acceleration lag), so it would be an easy sell.
If we could somehow stop relying on unrecyclable lithium batteries, it would be a fantastic piece of additional transportation technology available to consumers. As it is today, the cost of batteries is so ridiculous that it doesn't make much sense for anyone who drives more than a thousand miles a month.
BRB getting some popcorn.
No worries. I only thought that because the original post was pointing out the word "alleged" as the common denominator. Completely agree that the left uses the strategy all the time and we need to pretty much ignore it.
A DJT Jr that wants back in the TPP?
Thanks, but no. I'll take the actual DJT Jr any day of the week.
I don't think the doctor situation is the same. He's saying that out of the pool of lawyers, the absolute worst of those lawyers become state prosecutors, then those bottom of the barrel lawyers become judges. He's not saying that all lawyers would be bad judges, which would be the equivalent argument to your doctor argument.
I was pretty sad when I had to get rid of Carhartt after they fired their vaccinated employees. I really like some of their clothes. So is life.