Okay, feeling too headachy -- and, more importantly, too fuzzy-brained -- to cope with this afternoon's errands. Gonna push everything that involves driving or walking to tomorrow, unless I feel better enough tonight to make a late grocery run. I think I can stretch the supplies in the house for another day or so.
So instead, while waiting for signs that headache-remedies and fuzzy-brain-amelioration are going to work or not work, some short (fuzzy-brain accessible) bits of previously procrastinated posts...
In a comment to a NY Times Blog post, "Preparing Cities for Electric Cars" [pointed out by sodyera], Jim T. wrote, "Electric cars will remain toys for rich people until major technical problems can be overcome. [...] I'm still waiting for the model T of EVs. Something which most people can afford which meets their needs."
That got me thinking about other technological advances that sounded revolutionary in glossy magazines but remained for a while merely toys of the rich, until the rich people had bought enough of them for economies of scale to kick in and early-adopter bugs to be ironed out. And what carries most of the successful advances to that tipping point? ...
... Military applications, or pornography. (Yes, really![1])
So, deliberately ignoring the first because it's less amusing, what we obviously need is for some way to tie buying electric cars to getting off!
(On a more serious note, the first exception I can think of to that rule about tech advances in consumer goods, would be the microwave oven. So it is possible to win on convenience alone, without porn, but I'm pretty sure widespread commercial use of small microwave ovens had a lot to do with that. So if fleet vehicles can be replaced with electrics first on cost-savings grounds, then maybe they can get to a widespread consumer adoption price point ... how's the attempt to do exactly that with natural-gas powered vehicles working out so far?)
Hmm. Instead of making this a huge compilation entry, I think I'll stop here for now and plan to just post as many separate pieces as I get around to. I'm feelin' foggy enough that going with my first plan would probably result in my stumbling over this, still unfinished, this time next week.
[1] Okay, more for communications technologies than for other stuff, but I'm really not kidding. High-spenders on porn were responsible for later more widespread commercial success of 8mm home movies, videocassete recorders, and, if I'm not mistaken, home broadband connections. All things that were invented and marketed with other applications in mind, but weren't able to really take off in the marketplace until enough of the folks who spend a bunch o' money on erotica noticed how they could be applied to that. I'm not sure to what extent the same holds true for still photography (it's not hard to find examples of photographic erotica from close to the dawn of photography), the phonograph, and the telephone, but perhaps some tech-historian will comment on those?