Month: May 2018

Enlarge / A heroin addict at a rehab house. (credit: Getty | AFP)

If you caught John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight this past Sunday, you saw a lengthy segment detailing the atrocities of the rehabilitation industry. As Oliver pointed out, it’s largely an unregulated, unstandardized market rife with bad actors, scams, and bunkum that offers little help to patients desperate to recover from deadly addictions. With some charging tens of thousands of dollars for a month of treatment, rehab facilities often rely on therapies with little evidence of efficacy—such as horse petting—and report largely made-up percentages for their success rates.

Even experts in the field find themselves at a loss for how to identify effective, quality facilities. The result is that many patients pay large sums only to go on to struggle with or die from their condition. And these devastating consequences are only heightened by the country’s current epidemic of opioid addiction.

While Oliver gave a skillful overview of some of the rampant problems, an ongoing investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting picked out a particularly egregious case this week—Recovery Connections Community, a rehabilitation program outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

Enlarge (credit: Paul / Flickr)

Waiting for the price to come down before switching to a new technology sounds like a frugal decision. But when it comes to a country’s electrical grid, what saves you money now could actually cost you much more in the long run. That’s the central conclusion of a new study led by Imperial College London’s Clara Heuberger.

Almost every nation in the world (depending on how you categorize the United States’ erratic behavior) has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in pursuit of limiting global warming. A large component of that pledge is the conversion of electrical generation from fossil fuels to renewables. But there is a tension between the cheap and immediate availability of fossil fuels and the varied status of different renewable technologies.

Waiting for unicorns

It may make some economic sense to watch the price of solar continue its fall before installing. But there’s also the temptation to wait for what the researchers categorize as “unicorn technologies”—things like next-generation batteries for grid-scale storage, cheaper systems for capturing carbon dioxide from power plants, or even fusion. In other words, there’s a tendency to think that renewables aren’t worth pursuing too hard until some game-changing, cheap technology comes along that revolutionizes the grid.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is led by a deal on Samsung's Gear VR headset, which is down to $30 at Verizon. That's a big drop from its usual $100-130 price range.

This particular model won't fit the Galaxy Note 8—though the model that does is down to $50 itself—but it will work with most other flagship Galaxy phones from the past few years, this year's Galaxy S9 included. It doesn't support any non-Samsung phones, sadly, but for a mobile VR headset, the Oculus-powered Gear VR tends to have a stronger selection of apps than Google's competing Daydream View headset, and it comes with a motion controller for a little extra precision. Just don't expect it to be on the Oculus Go's level in terms of horsepower.

If you're not interested in VR, though, we also have deals on several gaming PCs, portable batteries, Sonos speakers, 4K TVs, monitors, and much more. Take a look for yourself below.

Enlarge / Elon Musk, Chairman, CEO, Tesla. (credit: Getty Images)

After announcing a $78,000 performance version of the Tesla Model 3 on Saturday night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk again took to Twitter over the weekend to say that it may be months more before customers will be able to buy a base-price Model 3. Thus far, all Model 3s delivered have been $49,000 models, according to The New York Times. On top of that, Consumer Reports released a review of the Model 3 that pointed out issues with its braking. Musk admitted the issues on Monday and said he believes they could be fixed with a firmware update.

On Sunday, the CEO tried to explain why people who want base-price Model 3s are still waiting. "With production, 1st you need to achieve target rate & then smooth out flow to achieve target cost. Shipping min cost Model 3 right away wd cause Tesla to lose money & die. Need 3 to 6 months after 5k/wk to ship $35k Tesla & live," Musk tweeted.

The $35,000 Model 3 has long been billed as a more affordable take on a luxury brand. The lower price would popularize electric vehicles (EVs) among more middle-class consumers, and promises of high-volume purchases have kept investors optimistic. Still, Tesla has struggled to push out significant numbers of Model 3s due to bottlenecks in the manufacturing process.