Posts by jmch

Re: Did nobody spot a problem with this?

Oh, I didn't know that! Somehow I always thought that because the appliances use 120V that that's how much was available. Makes sense, to be able to get more power to devices that need it.

Still not sure what the OPs 'problem' was

Re: Motorway charging stations in Denmark

"pay-by-credit or debit-card or contactless (phone) is being mandated without the need for a subscription"

This should absolutely be imposed on all charging stations

Re: Did nobody spot a problem with this?

The 'full to empty' problem has been handled elsewhere :)

Regarding 'public level 2 chargers', not sure what problem you see. This is a US agency talking for a US audience. US homes are wired at 110-120V, so home chargers are level 1 chargers there. Level 2 chargers are 220-240V, which for European homes are home chargers, but for the US have to be commercial ones (hence public)

Re: Charger power rating

"So you'd need at least a 1kA incomer if you want to charge at this sort of rate at home and a huge amount of rewiring will be needed, primarily to the public infrastructure if everyone wants to."

Charging at home, cars would typically have a whole overnight, at least 8-10 hours, so 240V X 40A (<10 kW) would be quite enough, no home rewiring needed. On-street, or somewhere like a supermarket forecourt parking, cars could be left for a couple of hours, and in situations where it's more of a topping-up rather than a full charge. No need for super-fast charging, anything in the range of 20-50 kW is probably sufficient. Again, probably no rewiring needed to provide a handful of parking/charging spots. What I think will happen is a lot more 'local endpoints' will be using far larger parts of their total rated capacity than they currently do, and that will mean a lot of the upstream power infrastructure at the substation / distribution and generation level would need to be improved / upgraded to handle the increased loads.

The requirement for super-fast charging is for the type of motorway journey where you would want to fill up as quickly as possible and move on, so in this case they would probably need brand-new infrastructure that can handle far larger loads eg 250 kW at a single point X 20 vehicles charging at once is 5MW requirement. Although halving the charging times doesn't necessarily mean doubling the power requirements since if you could charge at 500kW for 10minutes rather than 250kW for 20, that would see greater rotation in charging bays, so maybe you would only need 12 rather than 20. A typical motorway petrol station has 12-16 pumps, plus usually another 2-4 for commercial vehicles, and is very rarely fully occupied.

My recent motorway stops in Denmark were of large charge stations that could accommodate around 20 cars charging at a time. Only 3 or 4 in use, but good to see they're planning ahead. Didn't get to see the power output, but they did have solar panel roofing so I guess also some sort of long-term storage batteries that can collect solar + smooth out the load.

In Germany I didn't particularly notice many at the petrol station stops (though they could be hidden away somewhere) but I did notice that many motorway rest stops (ie toilet + picnic table stops with no petrol station) had 2 or 3 places, so maybe the strategy there is to spread them around more. Seen a few 350kW ones there.

Generally speaking a lot more passenger travel happens during the day than at night so solar-heavy renewables could support the grid in this respect.

"...in the real world, actual real improvements are small and pretty much insignificant/tiny overall, due to chemistry and physics..."

The theoretical chemistry predicts battery capacities of well over 1kWh/kg, and current thinking is that producing real-life batteries of almost 1kWh/kg could be achievable. There's a lot of research money in this area, and capacities have been rising pretty quickly over the last 10-15 years - real-life (ie in commercially sold cars) density has increased from about 100 to 250 Wh/kg, which is approx 10% per year improvement. That is absolutely not small, insignificant or tiny.

I get that the article is more about charge times than energy density, but these have also been improving hand-in-hand with energy density.

In practical terms, I also get why the new emphasis is on charge time rather than energy density. For an EV anything above 250Wh/kg is a bonus, since 125 kW is a huge battery size and EVs are already perform fairly well with half-ton batteries. OTOH, being able to top up your 'tank' in 10 minutes would bring EVs almost totally on par with ICEs for convenience (as long as the charging infrastructure is there of course)

A quick Wiki on the subject* indicates this had a maximum velocity of "greater than Mach 4 / 3000 mph", so slower than desired here since the. target is Mach 5. It also seems that the desired end product is a smaller portable missile**, while the Zeus is huge and silo-launched.

*usual caveats on the accuracy but Wikipedia is usually fairly good with this sort of information

**one can make one's own conclusions about whether this is intended as an offensive or defensive weapon, but the US's concept of 'defense' seems to be 'if we're the boss of the world, no one will be able to attack us' rather than 'if anyone attacks us we are capable of defending ourselves'

Re: Not to mention the economical fallout

Not sure if the EU's system is 'better' or 'worse'.... both seem to be requiring an end to encryption and a complete state takeover of any and all communications they want to lay their hands on. The EU version delegates the 'directives' (basically something like a search warrant) to the member states, and frankly knowing the levels of authoritarianism raising it's head in some of the members, it's a scary proposal. For most of the other members, I would anyway not give them such powers however trustworthy and transparent they are. Any such legislation in the hands of governments of UK, Hungary, Malta, Poland etc would almost certainly be abused to target anything the government wanted using "think of the children" as a cover.

At the very least there seems to be the strong possibility that the EU version will get shot down by it's own courts. The UK (or at least it's current government) on the other hand is trying to exit any international judicial or regulatory framework that could stop it from doing some deeply troubling things.

On a more technical level, regarding "scan encrypted communications without unencrypting them", I seem to recall some computing framework being worked on where computers could process certain encrypted files in a certain way as to be able to provide the desired results without having access to the original encrypted data. IIRC it was a couple of orders of magnitude slower than the normal processing, and could only use very specific types of encryption, and do very specific types of calculation. Not sure if that is even theoretically extendible / useful.

Re: Not holding my breath

"That ridiculous scene in Toy Story 2 where the fat bloke gets in his car to cross the road?"

I've been there in real life when I visited my company's Florida office. 3-lane-each-way stroad* with the nearest zebra crossing half a km away. A cluster of office buildings on one side, and a shopping center + bunch of eateries on the other, with no way to go from one to the other except by car, or walking 1 km in order to reach a spot 50m away.

"Many cities in Europe (even many in the UK) are already approaching being 15 minute cities"

I lived and work a few years in Amsterdam (almost as big a city as you can get in Europe), and another few in Geneva (which is the size of most European small cities/large towns). In Amsterdam I wouldn't say it's a 15-min city, but you could get from the centre to the outskirts in all directions in about 15-20 min cycle or tram. From one outlying area to another outlying area on the other side of the city, a metro ride would take around 30-35 min. I didn't have a car, and it would have been useless to move around the city since traffic light timings favour trams/public transport and bicycles, then pedestrians, and cars last. There's zero time advantage to taking a car vs cycling or public transport.

In Geneva, 15-20 minutes bike ride can get you pretty much everywhere, and going anywhere by car involved spending 15 min driving around in circles looking for parking or paying extortionate fees for a garage. Electric bicycles help a lot.

Although I've worked in London (always using public transport to get around), I'm not familiar with driving there... maybe there really are a huge proportion of Londoners who regularly carry around more stuff than can be packed in a backpack, and really need the flexibility given by a car to the extent that they don't care about waiting in traffic and finding parking??? Or maybe many of the drivers could actually benefit from just taking the tube or getting an e-bike??

*look it up

You mean *professional* as in people whose job includes, in large part, emailing?? I would say that managerial and marketing types fit exactly into that category (far more so, even, than techies, who surely spend a lower %age of their time on email than management and marketing)

Re: Wrapping at column 78

It's actually mentioned on the linked article (although the article mentions 72), and my thought to that is: why would anyone do that rather than use an email client that sorted it out for you? (also, why 78 or why 72???)

Any quoted text that was wrapped at column X will now need to wrapped at column X-2 every time it was quoted because of the "> ", so it's a giant pain to do manually (also alluded to in the article). I guess it's a hangover from terminals with 'X' amount of columns, but surely one of the recommended mail clients can handle plain-text email with both line wrapping AND automatically inserting the "> "s in all the right places at render time. So what am I missing? (...he asked, fully expecting to be redirected to a 40-page thread explaining the intricacies of it all...)

Re: Is it left or right?

"childish binary form". I would upvote you for picking 7 examples where the vast majority are somewhere in the middle, with smaller and smaller minorities as you get towards the fringes.

Real pity that you also chose to include 1 example where 99%+ of the population do indeed conform to one of the binary choices (especially so for putting it as the first example). Take this example out and you comment is absolutely correct.

Re: Not really

"...shift to the right as you get older..."

'Right' and 'left' in politics is not so meaningful a term as it once was back in the 18th century (IIRC the terms derive from the seating in the first French parliament), when 'conservatives' were both socially and economically conservative and 'progressives' were both socially and economically progressive (in effect because back then wealth and social hierarchy were still very highly correlated). Nowadays one could be economically and socially conservative (US Republican, Tory), economically conservative and socially progressive (US Dems, Lib-Dems), economically and socially progressive (Labour), or economically progressive and socially conservative (Saudi and to a lesser extent China).

It makes sense that on aggregate, richer people want less tax and benefits (and older people are, on aggregate, richer) . It's also known that most people view their 'growing-up' years as some sort of golden age when things were better. Both these effects allow for more conservatism as one gets older. However, experience coming with age (which also builds compassion in non-sociopaths) would tend to limit how far to the right one could go without feeling bad about it. And selfish arseholes will be selfish arseholes.

Re: a politically neutral 'truth'

I would like to add, " so-called "left-wing bias"" is exactly "so-called". What is the actual case is that in the US there is no real left-wing party. The Democratic Party which passes for 'left' in the US supports privatised healthcare, a far lower level of taxation than any socialist country, and economic policies that anywhere else would be bang centrist. So it's not surprising that normal people with an apolitical (or more accurately, non-partisan) 'neutral' position will look lefty to the US even if it is not. (Also to a far lesser extent in the UK, particularly with 'New Labour' a while back).

Re: WTaF?

I don't see why battery power would be much of an issue. Most campsites you can get a power outlet, so you can run an extension straight to your tent if wanted...but...

People who ave an RV or caravan seem to have basically their whole house in there, so it's more like they have a summer house than 'go camping'... and if I'm camping I'm spending my time outdoors enjoying nature... yes, that's possible even if it's raining. As per the expression - there's no bad weather, only bad clothing / equipment. So I can't see the point is of having a TV in your tent, but well - to each their own!

Re: Risk tolerance

"we KNOW some drivers will evince the behaviour described in the previous paragraph, they will ill-advisedly rely too much on the automation, and accidents will happen"

The state-of the art advanced automation by non-Tesla brands include driver attention cameras and sensors, and will disengage if the driver fails to pay attention, or take hands off wheel for a couple of seconds. IIRC, Teslas don't have cameras that check for driver attentiveness (only steering wheel sensors), and allow drivers to take hands off wheel for 30 seconds before intervening, also allowing drivers to ignore warnings. Compared to the difficulty of real self-driving, these safety measures are trivial to implement. Could it be that Tesla doesn't implement them because users would quickly find out that the software isn't really an 'autopilot' or 'full self drive'??

"That money hasn't been created out of nothing, later to be destroyed. It has been borrowed from a depositor, later to be paid back. "

That is strictly true only if banks are bound to 100% reserve (i.e. they can only lend out as much money as they have in deposits). But in reality banks use fractional reserves, meaning they are allowed to lend out more money than they have deposited. How much exactly is determined by their central bank and/or regulator, but it can be as low as 10%, ie If I deposit £1,000 in a bank, the bank can lend out £10,000 based on that deposit. In that case the £9,000 difference has indeed been "created out of nothing".

The whole fractional reserve model is based on the (usually correct) assumption that not everybody will want to take their money out at the same time. Unfortunately "usually correct" is very different from "always correct" (which is also why governments set up deposit insurance schemes).

"because large numbers of mortgage holders were unable to pay the “Interest of the day”"

That's what happens when banks issue mortgages of 100% of assessed property value or even higher to people who they know can't afford to pay them back, and securitise them as low-risk when in fact they were very high-risk. What the previous poster said they do in Denmark at 80% of assessed property value means there is much less risk.

"There was far too much of this 2020 and the resulting inflation is now really hitting!"

Technically "inflation" means "increasing the money supply". Increased prices / cost of living is a result of inflation, to the extent that in popular language they are used interchangeably, but they are not exactly the same thing. Particularly cost of living increases can also be caused by other things. Specifically in the last year, cost of living has increased partly because of inflation (covid money-printing in 2020), partly because of covid supply-chain disruptions, and partly because of fuel/energy cost spikes at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion by Russia.

Increasing of interest rates has already curbed cost-of-living increases in the US, not quite yet in Europe particularly UK

"fiat currencies aren't actually backed by anything tangible"

They're backed by the "good faith" of the issuing government, implicitly backed by the tax revenues of that government, which is backstopped by the unstated-but-very-much-there possibility of the government using coercive force to collect taxes (ie pay taxes or go to jail). So yes, strictly speaking not tangible, and a country can't just issue an infinite amount of money - it can issue an amount that creditors feel is credibly within the possibilities of that country.

Re: Why do people call a small outpost a colony ?

You do it the way you start with any huge, perilous and mostly unknown venture, which is you start small and scale up - not only in size but also in ambition. First step, "survive between resupply runs", second and subsequent steps is resupply runs get less frequent as the colony becomes gradually more self-sufficient. First resupply runs might include food, water, air until self-sufficient, with supply runs changing to more specialised items as time goes on. As another poster mentioned, to be fully self-sufficient as a highly technological settlement might requires hundreds of thousands or a million plus colonists. It might be centuries before both the population and the technical capacity is built up for full self-sufficiency from Earth.

Then again, short of planet-wide nuclear war on Earth, I can't imagine any scenario where full self-sufficiency from Earth is desired let alone required. There's surely plenty of remote islands with small populations that are mostly self-sufficient in terms of food, water and shelter, and import only specialty items.

Re: Election Integrity

"The ones committing the violence in the name of politics is the far left."

Plenty of violent political extremists on both the far left and the far right. Saying the far left does it does not excuse the far right. Jan 6th was far right, and whether they smeared shit on the walls was irrelevant - they were there to intimidate or force legislators to overturn the result of a free and fair election. And in the context of current US politics, Mr Orange was right there instigating the crowds to violence. Saying 'oh I told them not to' because of one tweet, after having spent literally months spouting off about stolen election, ways to get back into power, shows of force..... In fact I'm not even sure anyone is surprised, since this is someone who publicly declared *before he even got elected in 2016* that he wouldn't necessarily respect an election result in which he lost.

Re: Election Integrity

" If the majority decide to elect a fascist government, well, that's the will of the people. "

Yes, BUT it is "the will of the people" for that political term, not forever. After they take up power, the fascist government still has to rule within the 'rules of the game' (limits set by the constitution), and once the political term is up, the fascist government still has to organise free and fair elections, and transfer power if they don't win. There's nothing unfair or undemocratic with excluding from the democratic process any party that is unwilling to conform to the basic rules of the democratic 'game'. That is why changing the rules of the game (constitutional amendment) requires more than a simple majority.

Re: This is the most problematic indictment for him, by far

Whatever happened 50+ years ago had nothing to do with pretty much anyone who is alive today. The indictments being referenced are for events that happened 2 years ago and with full involvement of the people accused. Whether they are guilty or not is for the courts to say, but if to make a point, you have to dig up an incident from before the vast majority of people alive today were of voting age, that probably means it's not very relevant to the discussion at hand.