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Showing posts from 2017

How Twitter (not a President) could start World War III

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I work in TV news, an industry that gets a lot of crap (much of it deserved) for ginning up fear to attract attention. And yet, we seemed to have mostly moved on after something that really is  worth being terrified about. This week we got a legitimately horrifying look at perhaps one of the dumber ways the world could end. Not with a bang, but with a... Well... This: Now: The president's personal twitter account @realDonaldTrump appears to be gone. Both on phone & desktop. #9news pic.twitter.com/XiqsLOXXl3 — Brandon Rittiman (@BrandonRittiman) November 2, 2017 In all, this lasted 11 minutes of our Thursday, briefly sparking all kinds of theories which varied depending on peoples' politics: "I bet the liberals who run Twitter are trying to censor him!" "Did he actually delete his account? Oh what a wonderful world it'll be now!" I wish it was one of those things. I really do. Because the truth-- at least as Twitter tells

Our EV costs 73% less to drive than our Jeep

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The per-mile cost of driving our two cars To the dismay of internet trolls, I chose to drive my new electric car instead of returning it to the dealership or smashing it for scrap metal. And guess what? It's a HELLUVA lot cheaper to drive than our other car: 72.8 percent cheaper, to be exact. RELATED: Haters be hatin' on my cheap new EV I'll do the math on this below so you can see my methodology and update a few more things I've learned driving this car for a month as well. We recently became the unlikely owners of a Nissan Leaf, thanks to a combination of private incentives and government tax credits in Colorado that slashed the effective pre-tax price of the car to $9,400 in our case. (The $10,000 Xcel customer incentive expires June 30.) Our electric bills RELATED: How to get a new EV for under $10,000 The first month's power bill is in: driving this car for my daily commute and around-town errands for the month raised our electric bill ab

Haters be hatin' on my cheap new electric car

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They say "never read the comments," but what fun is that? I recently bought a new Nissan Leaf, an all-electric car-- even though we set out to buy a used gas car. Me, having a sad, after realizing the trolls are right. I managed to get the new electric car for an effective pre-tax price of $9,474. That sounded a lot better than the used 2015 gas cars I was finding with 30,000+ miles on them for $10,000-$13,000. As I explained in the story I wrote for 9NEWS, we ended up with the new electric car instead because several incentives made it cheaper: we got a $10,000 discount for Xcel energy customers (only applies to the Leaf,) a $7,500 federal EV tax credit that we won't see until we file next year's return, and a $5,000 state of Colorado EV tax credit that dealers can now apply to the purchase price. A new Nissan Leaf. The story contained an entire section on reasons not to buy this car-- essentially that it's not practical for severe weather