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Upcoming events

Next week I'm off to the land mass to the west of me, visiting Dublin and Belfast for the World Science Fiction Convention, then the following weekend Belfast for Titancon, the EuroCon (European annual SF convention). This is not without complication: sensing vulnerability, my ancient and venerable washing machine picked this week to finally expire, forcing me to embark on a perilous quest for a replacement—not to mention a launderette with service wash facilities—during the Edinburgh Festival. (Which is why this update is late.)

(Note: this is not a solicitation for advice on whether a hand-powered mangle and hot tub combination is more environmentally sound than a Miele TwinDos automatic washer-drier, or the best way to dry my jeans in the toilet, or suchlike helpfulness. As I approach my 55th birthday I'm pretty sure I'm on top of these issues.)

Anyway, I'm on the program at both conventions, and I'm posting an abbreviated version of my schedule below the fold.

NOTE: Updates to the schedules for both conventions are best found via the Grenadine Event Guide mobile app (which both conventions are using for program updates—it's free to download).

I'll try to amend this page as changes/additions happen.

Worldcon schedule

  • Thursday 15th: Panel: Writing Robot & Non-human intelligence (1200-1250, Wicklow, Hall-1 (CCD)) (with Christopher Husberg, Martha Wells, Mika Koverola)

  • Thursday 15th: Panel: Wild Cards: Wild West Trivia (1400-1530, Liffey-B, (CCD)) (with George R. R. Martin, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Carrie Vaughn, Paul Cornell, Peadar Ó Guilín, Emma Newman)

  • Friday 16th: Signing (1530-1620, Signing space, Point Square Dublin)

  • Saturday 17th: Panel: Technology we can't believe we're still using (1300-1350, ECOCEM Room (CCD)) (with Alison Scott, Tom Merritt (Sword and Laser), Dave O'Neill)

  • Saturday 17th: Reading (content TBA) (1500-1520, ECOCEM Room (CCD))

  • Sunday 18th: Panel: the politics of horror (1200-1300, Wicklow Room-1 (CCD)) (with F. Brett Cox (Norwich University), Rosanne Rabinowitz, Cristina Alves)

  • Monday 19th: Panel: AIs and the female image (1030-1130, Odeon 1 Point Square Dublin)(with Madeline Ashby, Pat Cadigan, Dr V Anne Smith (University of St Andrews), Dr. Sara L. Uckelman (Durham University))

  • Monday 19th: 1300-1400: Kaffeeklatch (CCD Level 3 Foyer, requires sign-up in advance)

Eurocon schedule

  • Thursday 22nd: Panel: Cthulhu/Loki 2020 (1600-1700, Waterfront, Hilton Belfast) (with Misha, Renee Sieber, Petra, A Ming)

  • Thursday 22nd: Titancon literature night (1900-2200, Waterfront, Hilton Belfast)

  • Friday 23rd: Signing (1100-1200, Dealer's room)

816 Comments

1:

Typo alert: that's Carrie Vaughn with you on Thursday afternoon

I'm always wary about signing up for Kaffeeklatches: either I don't know the person/their work enough, or I know them too well, and it seems unfair on others for me to try to get a place. My solution to this in the past has been to wait until the signing up period is closing and then adding in if there are spaces at that point. There are some good writers who end up with almost empty klatches because nobody seems to know who they are: Gareth Powell suffered from this in the past, though I doubt this happens to him now.

On the third hand, I'm tempted to try signing up on Monday to see the other people who'll be there

2:

Huh! By a strange coincidence my Beko washing machine died on Monday and two chaps from John Lewis were here replacing it with a Bosch (ordered online) this morning. Now washing a load of towels. Hopefully going a little upmarket will get me a machine that lasts a bit longer than the last two (Beko, Hoover).

3:

I've been to exactly two kaffeeklatches:- 1) Jasper Fforde. We were chatting whilst he waited for the room to be free and actively invited me to join in. 2) Jim Burns. Long term fan of his, and there were still a few spaces...

4:

REALLY GOOD LUCK I had intended, as you know, to come to Dublin, but, in the end, couldn't afford it.

And that one: "Technology we can't believe we're still using" looks really interesting, especially given my background - do let us know about that - please, pretty please? Of course there is always the "It ain't broke, why do you want to fix it?" problem in this area ....

5:

Jim Burns is a sweet guy, though he does like teasing me about my near ancestor, the one who assassinated Spenser Perceval back in 1812.

We have a number of Burns pictures. Not an original painting, yet, but we do have one or two original pencils, and some impressive giclee canvases.

6:

The one that died on me is a Miele. It's probably repairable (at a price) but as it's about 15 years old (and was an end-of-life model at the time) I'm using this as an excuse to replace it with a shiny new top-of-the-line one with a bunch of bells and whistles and 30% lower detergent consumption (it weighs your load, then meters out the detergent from a cartridge in accordance with the type of fabric you told it you'd put in it—yes, you can use third party detergent, although you need to recalibrate it—it also has internet connectivity and a smartphone app if you really enjoy widening your threat surface and want to monitor energy and water consumption remotely). I guess I should call it the washing robot?

Miele washer-driers have a design life of 15 years, compared to cheap washer-driers which are built for 3-6 years (down from 5-7 a decade or two ago). So I'm applying the Sam Vimes' Boots principle.

(Note that Miele should be avoided for dishwashers and vacuum cleaners—they're only good at clothes washing machines! A category in which they dominate the launderette industry in Europe.)

7:

:-) So, should BoZo the Clown be worried? We might be prepared to offer you political asylum after IndyRef 2!...

I've got some Jim Burns prints too; I was one of the people who bought Spaceport Glasgow for example.

8:

"meters out the detergent"

wizardry!

9:

Washing amchines & are we STILL using this technology? Like my huge twin-tub, you mean? And the suspended ( ropes 2 pulleys & a fastening cleat on the wall ) kitchen-cieling airer-dryer rack ....

10:

One end of the house has pictures only by Burns on, and they're spreading elsewhere.

This is part of why Jim recognises us — it's only polite to know your regular customers. I have, somewhere, the TIFF file he made of Tertiary Node. I effectively commissioned him to do a giclee canvas print of that: because he had a guaranteed sale rather than having to do it on spec, he then had it properly scanned. It makes a good companion piece for Homuncularium, which he'd scanned and gicleed before.

11:

The main belt on our tumble dryer broke, and we decided to scrap it after I had taken it apart and found the problem. I don't know when Hotpoint stopped making that type of belt, because the machine was 35 years old; of course, we didn't use it all that much. I might have been able to jury-rig it with a modern one, but the bearings were also not what they once were.

Thanks for the hint about Miele - very timely.

12:

Well, those two aren't particularly my taste, but it would be a dull world if everyone liked the same stuff.

13:
(Note that Miele should be avoided for dishwashers and vacuum cleaners—they're only good at clothes washing machines! A category in which they dominate the launderette industry in Europe.)

That's a bit interesting; in the USA they're considered a top brand for vacuum cleaners and dishwashers. They're not as big for washing machines or dryers due to their smaller size (though famously Steve Jobs spent weeks researching washers and dryers ... and picked Miele).

I'm very curious about the TwinDos thing - I didn't realize you could use someone else's detergent in it.

14:

The old Miele washer-drier took a hammering: 3-5 loads per week, including drying (there's no suitable drying space in this top floor flat other than a tiny airing closet), for about 15 years. One caveat: you've got to read and follow the manual to the letter or Bad Things Happen. (We had one engineer call-out at 18 months because I'd missed an important weekly precautionary step and as a result burned out the heaing element: engineer pointed to the para describing it, replaced the part, and it was covered under warranty, but.)

Other Miele domestic appliances are broadly reputed to be shit, trading on their rep for washing machines, but as washing machines go, they're the Rolls Royce brand. Quiet, incredibly reliable if used correctly, very long lived … also eye-wateringly expensive, but you can't win 'em all, and I'd rather pay three times as much for a machine that runs three times as long than replace my washer-drier every 5 years.

15:

Vacuums I'd choose a Numatic International Henry, and yes they are available in North America.

16:

Many years ago I had the displeasure to be forced to use a Henry (in a business environment). Maybe it had been kicked around or badly maintained, but it sucked, and not in the vacuum-cleaner sense. Dyson, alas, make superior products … but I refuse to give their asshole owner any more money (hint: obnoxious entrepreneur who moved his entire business to Singapore, costing hundreds of UK jobs, because labour is cheaper and he pays less tax there, then bought himself a £50M penthouse while preaching that the UK would be better with a no-deal Brexit—in other words, sanctimonious hypocrite).

… Back to Henry: they're old-fashioned tow-along vacuums that require a disposable paper bag to trap the waste. Yes, if what you want is something that would have been instantly recognizable in the 1930s, this is the vacuum for you … and they're very rugged and repairable. But the modern bagless vacuums with high speed motors and motorized brush heads are vastly more efficient at vacuuming, weigh less, and the better models are just as modular and repairable (or rather, you can swap in spare parts easily and the parts are available for sale).

17:

(Note: this is not a solicitation for advice on whether a hand-powered mangle and hot tub combination is more environmentally sound than a Miele TwinDos automatic washer-drier, or the best way to dry my jeans in the toilet, or suchlike helpfulness. As I approach my 55th birthday I'm pretty sure I'm on top of these issues.)

Charlie, no! At least get a DosThree, but avoid the TwinWindows, you'll bluescreen with a soggy load of laundry every week....

18:

I must admit that I'm sort of mind-boggled at how ofter folks are talking about replacing a washer. My late wife bought a cheap one, and it was going fine (though I had to replace a belt) in '91. The one I have now was not new when I bought the house in '11, and I think I've replaced a belt - doesn't matter how old, there are parts places online.

Won't be at Worldcon. For one, I have my new SO, and so it would be a ton of money - on the order of $5k or more, esp. since we'd want to go around Ireland and the UK (visit places I didn't have time for in '14).

In addition, an announcement of my own: the Tuesday after next, my income drops by more than half... because that's my last day at work I'm retiring, and going onto social security.... More time to write, more time to try to keep up with my yard.

On the other hand, if any of you run into Morgan Hazlewood (nom de plume) at Worldcon... say 'hi' to my daughter for me.

19:

Canonmills Launderette is near-ish to you I think, if you're still seeking one.

20:

I have a pulley airer in my utility room. It's great - I got rid of my tumble dryer on the strength of it. I also dry in the garden (weather permitting) - got all bar a bath mat dry from 2 loads today... The bath mat should be fully dry by the morning - it's only slightly damp.

I think I miss the tumble dryer about once a year. The rest of the time I dry on the rack or on the towel rail.

21:

We had Dyson vacuum cleaners for many years but each model seemed to drop in quality and increase in price so we switched to Shark last time. I hope my new mid-range Bosch washing machine will last 8 to 10 years instead of the 3 to 5 of its cheaper predecessors. Washing machines are very much built down to a price nowadays with the result that they don't last. I know people with old machines of modest brands like Hotpoint that are more than ten years old. They will get a shock when they need to replace them. When shopping for my new machine I did see this with 9Kg load, 1600RPM spin, a NFC Android app, and other bells and whistles from a budget brand at a low price (I think it was £239 last week). So that doesn't seem likely to last a long time.

22:

Disagree; out departmental Henry would be due a 30 years long service award if it was a person.

23:

Oddly, that's where I went for a service wash this afternoon. (Got soaked to the skin, despite waterproofs! England is having a major grid black-out, Scotland just gets drenched ….)

24:

You have a utility room and a garden: congratulations, I live on the fourth floor in an apartment that predates indoor plumbing.

There were pulley-airers designed for tenement apartments—wooden frame below sash window, you winch the clothes out and crank them back in again if it rains—but not any more (UNESCO world heritage site, no unsightly TV dishes or clothes airers allowed).

That'd leave an indoor solution like a Pulley Maid, which would be great … except my kitchen has a false (lowered) ceiling, I'm not sure how securely it's suspended from the joists above it, and the precise location where I'd put the airer is currently occupied by a fluorescent tube (the main illumination for the kitchen). Cost of airer: £50. Cost of rebuilding and raising the kitchen ceiling, replacing the lighting tube and its wiring, and installing the airer …? I suspect it's cheaper to buy a new washer-drier, even taking into account the electricity bills.

25:

"Shark" vacuum? Maybe typo for Sharp?

And when my washer goes, I know I'm looking at $400-$500, because I want a front-loader. Less water, less insurgent, I mean, detergent (not like I use the "recommended amount" as it is, I always use less unless it'e really dirty.)

26:

I'm going to note just now that British (and European) domestic appliances aren't like American ones. They're built to fit a smaller standard kitchen unit (60cm high by 40cm wide), they run on 230vAC via a mains plug, gas-burning driers are unheard of outside industrial installations, and they're all front-loaders rather than top-loaders. So rather than a simple bottom impeller, they tend to be programmable and complicated with lots of soap/conditioner dispensers and stuff to. help them thoroughly wash a similar load of clothing in a much smaller drum volume.

27:

Wow, subject drift set in early for this post. Continuing drift - we had a decent pair of Bosch (separate washer and dryer) laundry machines issued to us in Germany. They were great! The main point of adaptation was going from a normal laundry load of about 10kg (US machines are MUCH larger) to a 7kg load. Although we'd been warned against condenser dryers, ours worked fine. Most US dryers are externally vented, essentially clothes toasters.

Coming up on two years back in the US, I'm still washing 7kg loads. I guess I need a more extensive wardrobe.

28: 23 - I'm not surprised; I'm at my Mum's right now and looked out the window about 16:30 BST, to see the patio about half an inch deep in rainwater. 24 - If you have a bath bath rather than just a shower, I got a nylon dipped steel wire frame clothes drier/airer from a real ironmonger. 25 - No. "Shark" is a real manufacturer of vacuum cleaners, who's main marketing idea is to actually give people machines in exchange for an honest review.
29:

Not a typo: SharkNinja is a maker of vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances. A coworker left to work for them a couple of years ago.

30:

Oh dear, I have 90 minutes from my flight's arrival at Dublin, to get to the start of the Writing Robot & Non-human intelligence panel...

31:

That might be doable, if you pack carry on and the relevant venue is on the DART.

32:

I do understand that, both from reading, and from the trip in '14 to the UK via Iceland. In the US, top-loaders are the std, and you pay extra for front load.

A friend, outside of Chicago, and in the apt I rented when I first moved here, both one-unit dryer above/washer below one unit. Not sure I could have washed the mattress pad for our waterbed in it....

If I was replacing the hot water heater, I'd consider an on-demand, as is common on your side of the Pond, but they're more expensive, too.

33:

Oh, unrelated to this (other than Worldcon), Charlie, after doing some reading, I've finally figured out how to deal with my novella: since it's an ensemble cast, third person limited. That lets me have a number of important scenes without a PoV character.

Now to continue on it this weekend, having gotten about a third of the way through the rewrite, and I may have to make minor changes....

34:

Further to which, is it just me or is the vaccuum cleaner the only really worthwhile thing Dyson have ever made? The other products of theirs that I've encountered seem to be an object lesson in why "innovative" and "unconventional" doesn't automatically mean "better".

35:

Ever used a Dyson Airblade? The fastest hand drier in the West (and the East too!)

36:

Whether bath drying racks are worth bothering with depends critically on the ventilation. There are plenty of bathrooms where clothes would grow black mould long before they dry, even if you never used the bath,

37:

Charlie, will it be possible (and appropriate) to find you at some pub in Dublin during the Worldcon? I had been at your Kaffeeklatch in Helsinki two years ago, and at your reading, still chant sometimes to myself "strong and stable government, ia! ia! Shub-Niggurath!"; it was wonderful experience.

38:

My current effort is at page 65 and so far has two points of view. But I'm happy with it.

On the subject of beginnings, it's not violent, though it hints strongly of someone's head exploding as their idea of reality reassembles itself. I'm very proud of the first line.

39:

Apologies, can’t help myself: Old Man Shoots At Clouds

Paws@35: Ever used a Dyson Airblade?

Aren’t those the dryers that supposedly spew germs all over? I’ve a Dyson vacuum, but it’s at least 10 years old, works well though emptying the canister is a bit messy.

40:

Given I live in market town Cambridgeshire in a house built to standard in the 1970s, having space for such things is understandable. Still not as big as my late mother's house, though.

We had the utility room put in after we moved in - there used to be a wooden back porch which you had to avoid various parts of the floor (it was rotting) which we had removed and replaced with brick. It's not very big; but big enough for a 0.7m pulley which takes a full load. I also have a heated towel rail instead of a radiator (similar to this https://www.bestheating.com/milano-eco-flat-chrome-heated-towel-rail-1600mm-x-400mm-55373?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_uHjyKz34wIVyIjVCh03PA4uEAYYASABEgKnzPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds) which takes small items. Coupled with the extractor fan, I have no problems with damp or mould.

We're turning up in Dublin this Monday and staying until the Friday after the con; it's our main holiday this year so we'll be doing some touring. Yes, we're bringing the car although I don't plan driving in Dublin (we'll be using our LEAP cards for that). 10 days outside Dublin was more-or-less the same as 6 days in Dublin and the bus stops right outside the hotel. I'm still chugging through the the timetable noting the usual London bus effect, so haven't finalised anything yet.

41:

Charlie, I will be at both conventions, which would be better for your signing?

Also are their any other sessions you thought were interesting at Worldcon? I'm looking at some of the other AI ones.

42:

Charlie @ 24 That is IT - A "Pulley Maid" is exactly what I have & use. I got round the wiring problem by installing two flourescent tubes direct-to-the cieling ( into joists, natch ) ... Problems solved. But then, I do all my own wiring.

@ 26 ... one of the reasons for me using a twin-tub ...

43:

Don't bet on Bosch any more - it's a sample of 1 of course but we've have nothing but mechanical trouble with our 3 year old washing machine, and the same aged tumble drier whilst mechanically reliable has major UX problems due to capacitive rather than mechanical buttons which means it only registers a button press 50% of the time. Trivial but frustrating out of all proportion. A look on Ao.com reviews for the model confirms it's a bit of a turkey,

Highly recommend Ao.com BTW they are like the Amazon of white goods, stupidly fast delivery, installation and great customer service imo.

I would concur on the design life comments as well our first Dyson lasted 10 years, the second 3, replaced with a Meile Vacuum on the advice of our cleaning company. First Bosch WM 10 years, the second is the one above. We have a 6 year old bosch dishwasher still going strong so hopefully that's before they (possibly) started messing with the design life, All anecdata of course!

44:

Of course once you've got your washing machine, there's the vexing question of where to put it...

45:

I had a Bosch dishwasher that died after about four years - the control panel went poof and tripped the breaker in our consumer unit. About two years later the recall letter from Bosch arrived offering free repair or refund of repair costs if already repaired. That was two years after we'd replaced it with a Beko dishwasher that simply wore out in about five years. Various little clips and other plastic parts in the drawers got fatigue and crumbled and snapped. I replaced a few of them with online spares at first but then the pump went and it seemed like a losing battle.

My new Bosch washing machine was well-reviewed and a "Which" best buy. One review site dismantled one and estimated a minimum life of 2500 cycles from the build quality which would last me ten years. But it does have those pesky capacitive buttons you refer to.

46:

In the UK most homes have the washing machine in the kitchen with the dryer and the dishwasher. Larger homes (starting around four bedrooms) are more likely to have a separate scullery for the washing machine and dryer (but not the dishwasher). Another issue of space is that although the standard UK appliance width is 60cm there is also a "slimline" standard of 45cm for dishwashers and 50cm for dryers where space is tight. I have to get 45cm dishwashers to fit in my kitchen.

47:

"(hint: obnoxious entrepreneur who moved his entire business to Singapore, costing hundreds of UK jobs, because labour is cheaper and he pays less tax there, then bought himself a £50M penthouse while preaching that the UK would be better with a no-deal Brexit—in other words, sanctimonious hypocrite)."

At the cost of starting a thread war, I think that your comment could be condensed down to 'Brexiter'.

48:

All else aside, being forced into unfamiliar washing arrangements, especially involving a laundrette whilst in the middle of other crazy busy just makes things a bit surreal. Especially when there’s a moment that you find yourself watching your underpants in the tumble drier and you find your self saying “Herr Dreier, we meet again”.

49:

As it happens I do have a bath (with shower) … but the bathroom is tiny: it was hived off the original kitchen, so there's no window and it's ventilated solely by a fan. Drying clothing in there would therefore be tedious and lead to condensation/damp, except during winter. (The towel rail is the dump radiator for the central heating so it runs constantly when the heating is on, so the bathroom gets intolerably hot if the door's shut for any length of time for about six months of the year. I'm talking sauna-level hot.)

If this sounds badly designed to you, join the club. (It's the downside of living in a remarkable building in the heart of a historic city.)

50:

is the vaccuum cleaner the only really worthwhile thing Dyson have ever made?

The ball-barrow looked like a good idea for folks with big gardens and/or soft soil. Otherwise, you're on the nail.

51:

Yes, I'll be doing a pub meet-up at some point. Not sure when or where yet (I have to shake down some stuff in my schedule that's not public—meetings with my literary agent and editors, private parties, etc).

I'm doing a kaffeeklatsch at the worldcon which might help.

52:

If you've got a choice I'd prefer to sign books in Belfast. (This is because my Dublin signing overlaps with another—non-public—event I'd like to rush off to, so a worldcon-length signing queue could be inconvenient.)

53:

I'm going to be charitable and say there are Brexiters who are misguided optimists, and Brexiters who are angry and want to Stick It To The Man (and have a very bad understanding of who The Man is).

But Dyson is one of the small cadre—like Jacob Rees Mogg and A*n Banks—who say one thing for public consumption but something totally different to their mates at the dinner parties where they toast each other for working out how to asset-strip the British economy.

(I'm unclear which category Tim Martin falls into, but I refuse to drink or eat in his pubs any more.)

54:

Charlie @ 52 Tim Martin is a Kiwi .... I THINK he's in the former cageory - as I know another ex-Kiwi who has almost identical opinions. ( Rants on about the fake free movement of labour in the EU & if that is the case, what's the point ... usually referring to Medical qualifications & transfer of expertise & skills ... )

55:

I've known other people with similar before. I'd suggest a Manrose extractor fan with a relative humidity sensor control. Accept NO substitutes, even if you don't want to try and dry clothes in the bathroom.

56:

I thought the ball barrow was invented for wee kiddies to truck sand about on the beach, long before that arsehole got in on it. And was itself nothing more than a plastic reimplementation of the ancient bog barrow that used a barrel. Much like centrifugal air/crud separators are a standard industrial part only here it's a much more ancient idea that he's decided to rip off and pretend it's his.

It appears that being an arsehole is a characteristic required of his employees also (at least, those that are above the level of being been an arsehole to). A meeting between Dyson representatives and a potential supplier of plastics to them, I am told, began with the Dyson guy saying "Forget everything you know about negotiating, you're dealing with Dyson now" - how the plastics guys managed to hear that without dissolving into helpless laughter on the spot is beyond me - and went on to try and fix up a supply of specially formulated purple glittery plastic on terms that meant Dyson could decide on a moment's notice that they didn't want it any more and leave the supplier holding a pile of useless crap that nobody else would ever want. One wonders how he ever manages to get any plastic at all.

57:

Chances are Hotpoint never made that belt in the first place, just chose a part in a standard industrial size. You could take it down to a belting/bearing factors and a chap in a brown coat could match it by size - that is if it didn't have the numbers encoding the size still on it - if it did, of course, it's easy. Same goes for machines from other manufacturers.

They pull the same trick with bearings too - fffffss can't get them from the washing machine parts shop, 6302? sure, how many do you want? from the bearing factor. Often this happens even with current models because they are trying to make you buy the whole drum and housing assembly instead of just changing its bearings.

The main reason to get belts and bearings from a washing machine parts shop is that if the manufacturers aren't playing silly buggers, it's often cheaper there. Otherwise, it's bearing factors all the way.

58:

"Many years ago I had the displeasure to be forced to use a Henry (in a business environment)."

Many years ago I was in a business environment that hired out, along with anything else that didn't need more than 2 people to put it in a van, Henrys. Also their industrial counterparts which are exactly the same thing with 2 motor/fan units and a dustbin-sized drum, and the carpet cleaner version which is a Henry head on a double size drum plus a detergent tank and squirty thing attachment. I found it quite amusing when something that I was used to thinking of as a thing that gets booted around on building sites started being plugged to the general public. I thought it was a good idea, since they beat the shit out of the usual domestic crap, and wished them well in taking over the market, but I also reckoned that they probably wouldn't, because far too many people buy vacuum cleaners principally for stupid reasons with it works being quite a long way down the list and not the primary item beside which all else pales into insignificance that it would be with a sensible order of priorities.

My involvement was, of course, fixing them when they went wrong. Only they didn't. Occasionally a motor would give up the ghost after too many years of inhaling a dilute mixture of air in brick dust all day every day, but apart from that it was just the usual chewed and run-over cables that afflict every electrical appliance. People would manage to put water through them sometimes and while it would pop the breaker on their generator, the vacuum cleaner would usually be fine once it had dried out.

Pretty much the only parameter that matters for a vacuum cleaner is how much volume of air it can shift. Henrys and their ilk do that well; the only reason for them underperforming is the filter needs cleaning, and the solution is equally obvious: take it outside and whack it a few times.

Unfortunately far too many people judge by other parameters which don't actually indicate anything useful. Like how much static depression it can pull when you put your hand over the end - largely meaningless, and conflicts with volume-shifting in optimisation, but easy to demonstrate; how big a number for motor power consumption is written on the outside - which indicates not how good it is as a vacuum cleaner, but how good it is as a smelly fan heater; and how effective it is at aligning the pile of the carpet - because most people get the vacuum cleaner out not because it needs doing, but because it's a particular, and usually ridiculously short, length of time since they last did it, so the realigned carpet pile is the only way you can tell anything's been done at all.

The Numatic design pattern, since it was created for industrial use, concentrates simply on functioning and ignores the marketing bullshit parameters. So a Henry is not outstandingly impressive on static depression - why bother when the most it needs to do is lift water a metre or so and is using entrainment rather than depression to do it. It doesn't have a 2000W power consumption because what is the fucking point when even the big-arse twin fan industrial versions don't need that much. And it doesn't bother trying to be good at aligning the carpet pile because a vacuum cleaner isn't the right tool for doing that in the first place.

59:

...and after that lot it's also about the only design that puts the bag before the fan; a major advantage in certain use cases like a lady in the house who has waist length hair.

60:

we got rid of the tumbledryer.. it was a machine for burning money... we either dry in the garden , or if its doing that 'sky-water' thing, spare bedroom with a dehumidifier.

61:

Depends on the drier. (A big part of my reason for sticking with Miele is that their drier stages are really efficient, as long as you don't overload them.)

62:

Charlie @ 24,

Have you tried pointing out that pulley-airers are part of the original architecture, and hence should be mandatory?

Also you might like to know that our LG washing machine has a "silent" motor which almost lives up to its name. Much quieter than anything else we have tried. However rather than politely beeping when it finishes it sings a triumphant little ditty in classic 8-bit audio. And then won't unlock the door for a few minutes afterwards.

63:

Doesn't follow; Listed Building status reflects the specification at time of Listing. I've seen Listed Buildings built ~1900CE that must have uPVC windows for example.

64:

paws4thot @ 15: Vacuums I'd choose a Numatic International Henry, and yes they are available in North America.

"Nothing sucks like a Hoover!"

65:

Correct. This building dates to roughly 1820 but was listed in roughly 1972. Electricity and a TV aerial on the roof are grandfathered in (but not a satellite dish).

66:

Re: LG melody. Next time it plays try singing along with “Your laundry is done now, Oh yes laundry is done now. Your laundry is done now, Isn’t that wonderful news!” You can never unhear it.

67:

Got to disagree with you there. Their vacuum cleaners aren't bad in my experience.

Personally I don't bother with tumble driers as I currently have a room that needs a dehumidifier running 24/7 anyway so I just stick a couple of clothes horses in it. The Miele washer is great though.

68:

Seeing as this has become a thread on domestic appliances. I highly recommend a dehumidifier for the bathroom, seeing as it's a flat with (presumably) fairly crap ventilation. You would be surprised at how damp and musty the place is (you won't notice it any more).

Only problem is that the decent manufacturer for them is Ebac, and the Dyson argument applies there too (less offshoring, but even more Brexity).

69:

Ebac are brexity? I take my last comment back!

70:

As it happens I do have a bath (with shower) … but the bathroom is tiny: it was hived off the original kitchen, so there's no window and it's ventilated solely by a fan. Drying clothing in there would therefore be tedious and lead to condensation/damp, except during winter. (The towel rail is the dump radiator for the central heating so it runs constantly when the heating is on, so the bathroom gets intolerably hot if the door's shut for any length of time for about six months of the year. I'm talking sauna-level hot.)

Have I ever mentioned my bathtub here?

My home is young relative to yours but also predates the modern fancy stuff like electricity and indoor plumbing. Early on a remodeling project extended the whole first floor about six feet back to add a pantry, enclosed porch, and what was probably originally a parlor closet. Later another more ambitious project added a spacious kitchen and indoor plumbing (and basement; they moved the house and once you've decided to do that pretty much anything else looks easy). This meant that the former outside wall was now an interior wall, complete with large sash window. A normal half bath is just off the kitchen but for some reason they decided not to put the bathtub in there; instead it went into the former parlor closet. Yes, the one with the window overlooking the kitchen.

By the time I came along the former parlor was the downstairs bedroom but the bathtub room was still there next to the kitchen, with a curtain in the window for reasons of social necessity. If you wanted to take a bath without disturbing whoever was in the bedroom, the process was to climb on top of the dishwasher and crawl through the window - a process suited to athletic twenty-somethings, let me tell you.

Did I mention the bathtub is directly under the window? Arguably that's good as it gives bathers a place to step. Some people do not want to balance on the rim of a claw-foot tub after their baths; they will have to bathe somewhere else.

It took us a few tries to get a shower that worked properly but now personal hygiene tasks are much less dramatic.

If this sounds badly designed to you, join the club.

Well there you go. It wasn't intelligently designed; it evolved naturally over time. grin

71:

Argh! Damnit, now I can't unread that...

Could've sworn I found a hidden way to turn off the tune, but now can't find it.

Mind you with the reliability of the machine I can't complain really.

72:

I believe not - it was not a plain belt, which I could get. It was in the shape of 3 Vs, longitudinally, and I failed to find a hit that matched that when I searched. It might have worked with a plain belt, but might not. And, again, whether bearings of the same size that were used 35 years are still available is unclear, so I was disinclined to put the considerable time into investigating.

73:

A ballbarrow might just possibly be useful for those who need one to roll over mud, but otherwise no. An ordinary, large wheelbarrow with a 16"x4" wheel works better.

74:

Oh? Your description sounds like exactly the sort of thing I was expecting - a bog standard polyvee belt (or "Poly V"), which is what nearly everything uses nowadays in place of the "traditional" single trapezoidal section V-belt familiar from its use in cars to drive mechanical cooling fans. They exist with any number of longitudinal ridges from 2 upward, with 3 or 4 being common for domestic-type ratings. Compared to the traditional style, the polyvee gives higher power transmission per belt, with lower frictional losses, greater flexibility, simpler and lighter pulley designs, a much smaller minimum pulley radius, the ability to bend in both directions (concave as well as convex), and the ability to drive loads off a concave bend. They are nigh universal in washing machines and tumble dryers, because the very small minimum pulley radius makes it possible to go straight from a compact, high-speed motor to the drum with only a single stage of gearing - they're something like 15:1 or 20:1, certainly in the range where a couple of mm mis-estimation of the size of the motor pulley makes a major difference to the ratio you come up with by eye - which would require at least two and probably three stages of gearing if you used old-style trapezoidal belts. As well as simplifying the gearing it means you can use a high-speed motor to drive it, ie. a small, light, cheap brushes-and-commutator type which can be easily speed-controlled with a dead simple phase-angle triac setup.

They have also pretty much completely taken over the auxiliary-drive function on car engines; while cooling fans are now electric, the alternator of course remains, plus engines now come with all sorts of other power-sapping crud like air conditioning compressors and power steering pumps even on boggo models. Using a polyvee belt with its ability to bend in both directions means you can drive several loads off a single belt while still maintaining decent wrap angles on the pulleys, so instead of a separate trapezoidal belt for each load you just have one great long polyvee belt snaking in and out of a maze of pulleys and tensioners like demented spaghetti.

I suspect it's the specific search term "polyvee" that you were missing; putting that single word into Bing for experiment brings up on the first page a mixture of industrial drive suppliers and... tumble dryer spares with recognisable industrial size numbers on! Internet search does fail badly when the thing you're looking for turns out to be universally known by a silly word to the extent that an everyday description of the same item and the silly word never occur together in a context comprehensible to a search engine spider.

Regarding the bearings, I'm nigh certain you worry overmuch! Bearing sizes are very standard and time-invariant. I have an idea that the normal range was "defined" pretty much de-facto by SKF in the 20s; it's pre-WW2, at least. Iron Curtain kit uses all the same sizes but omits from the range those bearing types that required better metallurgy than they had readily available - an example would be the MZ TS125 gearbox, which uses bog standard ball bearings in dead common sizes for three of the shaft ends, but on the fourth end, where there isn't enough room for the outer diameter of a ball bearing, it has to make do with a plain brass bushing (which fails), where Western and Japanese catalogues list a nice little needle roller in that size that would handle the speed and load beautifully.

75:

OK. But it still doesn't help. I don't get any hits for the length and kind I need, once I exclude pages that contain no explicit statement of what they are - they MAY be available, but life is too short to spend days searching for something that only just might fit, and quite probably ordering some that don't. Also, while doing both the initial and this search, I found several hits indicating that Hotpoint had made incompatible changes, and I got NO hits of any description for the actual model number even on a generic search (which is always bad news).

On the bearing issue: interesting, because my experience is very different - of course, it is for other types of equipment (mainly, but not entirely) cycles. And I was more reluctant because of the hassle involved in taking it apart and rebuilding it; my experience is that such things often have permanent fixings that need to be broken apart and jury-rigged back together.

In any case, it's now moot, because I junked it.

76:

On the general subject of roller and ball bearings:-

Cycle bearings I'm used to being ball bearing trapped between two cones.

More or less anything else has tended to be a taper roller cage, and if you can give the old one to a "bearing factor" they'll take finding an exact replacement as a challenge!

77:

Completely off topic, but:

Russia’s nuclear energy agency has said an explosion that caused radiation levels to spike in the Arkhangelsk region was caused by an accident during a test of an “isotope power source for a liquid-fuelled rocket engine”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/10/russian-nuclear-agency-confirms-role-in-rocket-test-explosion

Didn't I read that here?

https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

78:
"Nothing sucks like a Hoover!"

The actual line was "Nothing sucks like a VAX".

79:

'Fraid not. You're out of date :-) A large number nowadays are ball bearings made up into a unit like roller bearings.

80:

From the US, and won't be a Worldcon attendee:

Please vote against any future US Worldcon bids. If a US bid is the only one, vote NO CONVENTION.

I don't think I have to explain why.

Thank you.

81:

And? I once had an old bike with a dynohub that had a smashed cage. I took one of the balls to an old school parts factor who measured it and sold me a dozen new ball bearings. I took those home and rebuilt the race using the original cones and the new bearings packed in Molygrease. I sold the bike 5 years later with true-running wheels.

82:

I have had good dehumidifier performance from Meaco; the current unit has been working for several years and is still doing well.

83:

I find the same, and would add that I find bicycles to be effectively something of a law unto themselves when it comes to standard sizes, threads etc. Strictly speaking the sizes are standard, but they're standards and sections of standards that nobody else uses (it wouldn't surprise me too much if all your parts chap's customers for that size of ball turned out to be people needing them for bicycles, or possibly very old lawnmowers), and the practical result is that you really need two separate junk boxes for bicycle parts and parts for everything else, to save a lot of time wasted swearing over bits that look like they ought to fit but don't quite and never will.

84:

Ah, it looks as if you and I have different habituations to the amount of effort involved in certain specific tasks :) Chasing down parts equivalents and breaking consumer appliance manufacturers' obfuscations - and confounding their disinformation, which exists to a not insignificant degree - seems to be something I do quite a lot of as a matter of course, for all kinds of odd things, so I don't regard it as a major obstacle. Also, as do non-dismantleable fastenings, it tends to trigger my bloodymindedness reflex: the aim behind it is to try and get me to act according to their ideas of "correct" (lucrative) procedure, so my automatic reaction is they can get fucked.

85:

Sigh. I have rebuilt hub gears many times - yes, those cages and balls are easy to replace. But many (probably most) modern designs use sealed bearing units, like sealed roller bearings but using balls. On some fora I visit, I have seen people ask how to replace them and sometimes get told "That model used a unique size; you will have trouble."

And, no, I don't have a different habituation - I had a 35 year old tumbler dryer.

I knew the belt was broken, I was pretty certain the main bearings were, and had no idea how much else was about to expire. For example, at that date, the motor may well have had brushes - which can be a right bugger to replace, and quite often die only just before the commutator itself wears out. There wasn't any real electronics, but there was a black box, and working out its specification to replace is was another likely failure. Plus the second belt for the fan, which was probably about to die (being of a similar material and the same age), and the fan itself, the switches, door catch and so on. The prospect of having to fix one damn failure after another did not appeal, even ignoring the detail that it might well cost more than buying a new one.

86:

Looking at it that way, how would you define an "acceptable" country?

87:

the MZ TS125 gearbox, which uses bog standard ball bearings in dead common sizes for three of the shaft ends, but on the fourth end, where there isn't enough room for the outer diameter of a ball bearing, it has to make do with a plain brass bushing (which fails),

Probably phosphor-bronze rather than brass which is ductile and will deform under load. Bronze bushings are a lot stronger and not ductile under a side-load; I expect this was the output shaft which had the chain cog on it.

Western and Japanese catalogues list a nice little needle roller in that size that would handle the speed and load beautifully.

Needle rollers don't handle side-loads that well compared to full-sized rollers and well-designed ball bearings (double-row, for example). They are better at staying in spec than solid bushings but can disintegrate catastrophically and wreck things whereas a bushing will just get sloppy and leak oil if the seals give way due to the shaft slop. All that means is the bike engine gets a protective coating of gearbox oil to protect it from casing-eating winter salt and general crud and the wise rider will top up the oil levels more frequently than the book says.

The TZ and CZ bikes were made in Czechosolvakia, a country that is famous for competent and practical engineers -- see, for example, the Bren gun. The fact it's not up to Swiss horological engineering standards is a plus. No-one boasts about their Swiss motorbike engine after all.

[clip canned rant about Ducatis which demand Swiss engineering levels and Italian manufacturing processes]

88:

Para 4 - I've never owned an MZ, but find myself wondering whether this is a bush as you say, or a shell bearing as in "big end" or "main".

89:

Not very remarkable for a story, but at least it has you a good perspective on some of the "worst" technogenic marvels of our recent history (I imagine, nowadays it is more contained as we understand these things a little bit better). For the reference, I like to read this page (Real Life tab) as reference to any dangerous chemical activity.

Anyways, the point is, the explosion probably has been completely non-radioactive, as the radioactive background exposure was only brief. Modern detectors are very sensitive and can quite possibly detect just several atoms per liter of highly-radioactive substance, and rest assured, if any really "nuclear" would have exploded, it would have been on all the news since day one. They, OTOH, should be more concerned about millions of tons of radioactive water that is going to contaminate our planet for a lo-o-o-ong time. https://www.apnews.com/c0f1423e672b4887a9820e2d56224059

90:

I've done the reverse in well inside that time, though I've no idea how Irish immigration compares to Dublin Airport security for delay. The 747 bus will get you from the airport to the Point Square or CCD in ~35 minutes - it cheats and takes the Port Tunnel - and will let you off literally outside either venue.

(General tip for public transport-bound visitors to Dublin: if you're staying inside the city, hittheroad.ie is a trip-planning wonder.)

91:

OK, UK national, but I've done "doors open" through reclaim and customs, shuttle bus to station and DART to Dun Laoghaire in about an hour. If you've half an our to kill at the right time, it's worth stopping there to see the HSS dock and unload.

92:

Yes. The symptoms described were what you would get if there was a gas leak causing an explosion in a storeroom containing smoke alarms. But I like the explanation in #77 better :-)

93:

I did that once to Holland (through Schiphol, no less), leaving after the end of a working day, dumping my stuff in a hotel and meeting my wife at a pre-dinner reception in another hotel. Once.

Checking at Cambridge airport was 15 minutes (I can't remember if I took the bus or cycled there), you delivered and collected your luggage on the runway, there was no emigration and immigration was invisible (EU citizens only), etc.

That was a long time ago, the flight was excruciatingly cramped, but took only an hour on a two-propellor wave-hopper, and the service stopped not long afterwards.

94:

Sadly the HSS service is an ex-parrot. OTOH, Ulysses sails in just over 2 km from the Point...

95:

The symptoms described were what you would get if there was a gas leak causing an explosion in a storeroom containing smoke alarms. But I like the explanation in #77 better :-)

That was my response when I heard about the rocket explosion. "Has Charlie been chatting up Russians in bars again?" grin

96:

Minor correction. The wild cards talk is listed as 80mins finishing at 15:20. Time for huge crowds to swap site and go to my talk at 15:30!

97:

Yes, I would have expected phosphor bronze, but if it is it looks like no other phosphor bronze alloy I've ever seen; it looks exactly like brass and it apparently machines like brass too. I shall continue to figure it's brass unless I can subject one to analysis and find it isn't.

(also Paws @ 88) It's definitely not a shell bearing - there is no white metal (etc) lining, it's just the one material all the way through. It has a spiral groove which is intended to pull oil in to create a lubricating film, but it doesn't have the soft metal to "run in" and self-optimise the oil film formation in service like a shell bearing does.

It's not the output bearing - the output bearing is what gets in the way of using a pukka bearing. It's the bearing on the non-driven end of the input shaft, and it's next to the pinion for first gear. So most of the time the only load it's under is the trivial one of stopping the end of the shaft from wobbling, except when you're in first gear when it takes the second highest load of any of the four bearings. Its catastrophic failure mode is to grab on the end of the shaft, spin in its bore in the aluminium gearbox casing, chew the hole oval and ruin the casting.

The Western/Japanese needle roller in the appropriate size would be a bit closer to its ratings than I would like, but still comfortably within them. The East German bearing catalogues (MZ = Motorradwerk Zschopau, DDR; CZ is the Czech one) simply don't list anything in that size - the ranges look at first sight to be exactly the same as in Western catalogues, but they don't go down that small.

I agree it's not an application which is well matched to the capabilities and limitations of a needle roller, and you wouldn't use one there if you had room for anything bigger, but the capabilities of Western metallurgy are up to producing a needle roller that is able to cope anyway, whereas those of East Germany were not. (Though they were up to producing a needle roller for the small end bearing, which is a considerably better match for a needle roller.)

The TS250 gearbox avoids the problem simply by being bigger, so the shaft centres are widely enough spaced that there is room for ball races in all four positions.

I have something of a soft spot for Iron Curtain machinery, because it tends towards competent, simple, bullshit-free designs that can be fixed easily at the side of the road, for values of "easily" that include taking the entire bike completely to pieces using the provided toolkit that includes all the tools needed to do that and the owner's handbook that lists all the adjustment figures you need when putting it back together and is more of a workshop manual than a handbook. Which is exactly my idea of how stuff should be designed (and I agree entirely about Ducatis - two mates got rid of them because they were shit, in exactly the way you describe).

What lets it down is the metallurgy isn't up to scratch. (See also the BMW flat twin, which in Dnepr clone form burns and splits its exhaust valves.) It's a great shame they couldn't have imported some Japanese materials engineers.

98:

So I am now checked in for my flights to Dublin.

Did I say "flights" plural? Yes, I did. Assuming one does not ever ever ever fly Ryanair, it turns out the cheapest way for me to get there is to fly KLM via Amsterdam.

(I'm a KLM frequent flyer, so I get two checked bags for free, and I'm going for two weeks—Eurocon in Belfast as well, plus formal stuff for the Hugo awards. Flying Aer Lingus looks a lot cheaper until you realize they want EUR 80 per suitcase, and my wife's coming too.)

Yes, I considered driving: old and not terribly reliable car plus car ferry timetables meant it wouldn't be something I could count on unless I scheduled in an overnight stop along the way. Train and ferry would work, but the Belfast/Dublin trains are interrupted at present while they build a Brexit customs checkpoint, so it'd be train/boat/bus/train, which is a bit too much bother with suitcases in tow. Hence the 1000km dog-leg.

99:

Yes, well, as I said, this is an ensemble cast: a research starship, crew about 20 or so, 70 or so researchers. And as I want the reader to feel as though there are actually that many on board, not, like Trek Classic, where it seemed more like 30 people on board.

And the people I focus on are worth knowing (well, except for the one...)

100:

chuckle

I just read, a few minutes ago, the US Navy is going to move their bridge controls - helm, nav - back to manual, as opposed to the current, crash-creating touchscreen.

101:

Sorry, I heard "nothing sucks like a Hoover" before VAX was invented.

102:

the Belfast/Dublin trains are interrupted at present while they build a Brexit customs checkpoint

Charlie, I’ve looked for anything beyond the “official” reason for this closure, but am turning up a blank. Do you have a source for this, or is it informed conjecture?

103:
  • Even if the GOP goes down in flames (as it did, a good deal, last year)?
  • NEVER?
  • We invented cons (I was a member of PSFS, so take your Leeds and go away).
  • I am, in fact, on the DC in 21 bid committee.
  • Fuck you.

    104:

    Elderly Cynic @ 75: OK. But it still doesn't help. I don't get any hits for the length and kind I need, once I exclude pages that contain no explicit statement of what they are - they MAY be available, but life is too short to spend days searching for something that only just might fit, and quite probably ordering some that don't. Also, while doing both the initial and this search, I found several hits indicating that Hotpoint had made incompatible changes, and I got NO hits of any description for the actual model number even on a generic search (which is always bad news).

    On the bearing issue: interesting, because my experience is very different - of course, it is for other types of equipment (mainly, but not entirely) cycles. And I was more reluctant because of the hassle involved in taking it apart and rebuilding it; my experience is that such things often have permanent fixings that need to be broken apart and jury-rigged back together.

    In any case, it's now moot, because I junked it.

    Not sure what machine is being discussed here, but I always keep any user's manuals, owner's guides ... whatever literature comes with it for future reference. Even if it doesn't have a parts diagram/parts list, just having the exact model name/number will take you a long way towards finding parts somewhere down the road.

    105:

    Inference, but: the bus replacement between Newry and Belfast is running from the 27th of July to the 23rd of August. Normal track maintenance happens overnight or at weekends, something that shuts the main line down completely for a whole month suggests distinctly non-trivial work—platforms being rebuilt or moved, for example.

    106:

    John Hughes @ 78:

    "Nothing sucks like a Hoover!"

    The actual line was "Nothing sucks like a VAX".

    Was it? I don't insist on it.

    I just remember the line being used as an example of "Marketing Department" failure, because whoever came up with the line as an advertising slogan didn't consider the primary alternative use of the word "sucks"

    107:

    I don't know when Hotpoint stopped making that type of belt, because the machine was 35 years old; of course, we didn't use it all that much. I might have been able to jury-rig it with a modern one, but the bearings were also not what they once were.

    I don't know about your side of the smaller pond but in the US most belts and bearings for appliances are also available in auto parts stores. (Which might not exist over there they way they do here.) When any such thing breaks here I take it to a well stocked store and they match it to a standard auto part. Typically at 1/2 to 1/3 the price.

    Been through 2 belts and 3 bearing sets on my HVAC blower assembly that way in the last 30 years.

    108:

    The old Miele washer-drier took a hammering: 3-5 loads per week, including drying

    Interesting. When raising my kids (in the burbs) we might do 5 or more loads a DAY 3 or 4 days a week. Especially during sports seasons.

    Now that it's 1 1/2 people I typically do 3 or 4 loads a week. And if the colors would not ruin the whites and the jeans not tear up the shirts I could do only 1 or 2 loads.

    109:

    I also dry in the garden (weather permitting)

    Must be nice to live in an area with lower humidity and no "month of green pine tree pollen"[1] and sap from trees year round and ....

    I can understand why in some parts of the US "moms" "back in the day" demanded a tumble drying once the pricing got to where the masses could afford them. And would pinch pennies to make the purpose.

    Until you've lived through one of these it is hard to describe. Green clouds in the air. Puffs of fine green dust arising from your footsteps outside. And when it is over (and in the middle of it) you really need to get rid of it (and it IS on everything) as the later summer humidity will make it into this glue like stain that is really really hard to get off.

    110:

    that British (and European) domestic appliances aren't like American ones. They're built to fit a smaller standard kitchen unit ... and they're all front-loaders rather than top-loaders.

    We ARE gradually switching to front loaders. But for the previous 10 years the appliance makers used it as a way to push "premium" products. So while the prices for a top loader could run from $250 to $800 the front loaders tended to start at $600 if you could get by with no controls but a start stop switch. They ARE more mainstream now and the top loaders gradually taking over with reasonable prices for decent features.

    As to size, what I just bought for my daughter's house 2 years ago look like it could hold an EU model in the drum. When in another country for more than a few days I try and drop into a Media Mart and similar just to see how different the consumer markets are. At first glance they seem identical. If you browse a bit you can see all kinds of assumptions that are designed into models destined for different continents.

    111:

    About the Nenoksa unfortunate event, it did seem to involve Rosatom activities there. It's really hard to figure out just what those were, but the language used in official and semi-official pronouncements sounds like isotope batteries [note the plural] used in some way to support a jet/rocket engine.

    Google Translate does an adequate job with this.

    В Росатоме подтвердили взрыв «ядерной батарейки» в Архангельской области 12 августа [2019] 07:01 В Белом море произошёл взрыв во время испытаний испытания «нового специзделия». Как сообщается, инцидент произошел при работах, связанных с инженерно-техническим сопровождением изотопных источников питания на жидкостной двигательной установке. В «Росатоме», как пишет «Фонтанка», утверждают, что к аварии привёл взрыв радиоизотопного источника питания. «Это ядерная батарейка», – заявил представитель госкорпорации, отметив, что упомянутое слово «реактор» к катастрофе в Белом море отношения не имеет.

    Of course, official lies and obfuscation are not unknown, so caveat lector.

    112:

    Platform and track replacements, sez they. Lurgan'd be a weird place to put customs controls, though?

    113:

    I did see that on theregister.co.uk but leaving aside the the potential foolishness in installing a touchscreen for something that has to be grabbed on wildly pitching deck, the actual problem seems to be a UX fail - allowing separate throttle controls on separate screens with no indication that the screen is in single or twin throttle mode.

    114:

    After finding Lurgan, it's not even near the partition line?

    115:

    Useful to know - my hair isn’t that long, but it’s thick and wiry, so it clogs motorised brushes. My current machine is an older model Dyson; to upgrade will mean replacing all the attachments as the attachment point has changed design. I use what is called a pet hair brush which involves 2 small horizontally counter-rotating brushes which create hair balls which disappear up the tube. My main gripe with the current machine is the small size of the bin so I’m forever emptying it. The other problem with larger Dysons is the weight.

    I really want a cat-toy cleaner, but the afore-mentioned long hair issue puts paid to that; most reviews say you need to unclog the brush every couple of days which rather misses the point of a robot. The best brush de-clogger I ever found was a paper knife - a rectangular piece of plastic with a triangular cut-out in one short edge so one long edge was a triangular spike. This had a small blade at the apex of the cut-out.

    116:

    The Washington Post reports the incident was related to the testing of a nuclear-powered missile that Putin has been touting. Much more sure to come.

    117:

    The Washington Post reports the incident was related to the testing of a nuclear-powered missile that Putin has been touting.

    That's a possibility, but, really, just a guess at this point. The Russian statements so far don't point strongly to it, but there may be a certain amount of obfuscation going on.

    Much more sure to come.

    Let us hope.

    118:

    Oh yes; known points of a robot vacuum are not doing more housework than emptying the bag/cylinder and it being a cat toy/transport.

    119:

    Lurgan’s a weird place, full stop.

    (Sorry. Sorry. Had to be done.)

    120:

    Verified the source - it is "Fontanka", one of the most liberal media in St. Petersburg. https://www.fontanka.ru/2019/08/12/001/

    Quotes include:

    disaster scale sensational about the tragedy Physicists destroyed the position of the Ministry of Defense This is not something surprising - liberal hysteria and desperation, of course, is going to progress further over time, especially in the face of recent events.

    to EC @92 Wуll, apparently it wasn't just smoke detectors, but at least it is contained enough that the natural background was only 2 times higher than normal. Though to think that modern isotope source can literally explode is quite alarming - perhaps some liquid metal medium is involved?

    121:

    I know what I'd like to guess it was. can you say "Russian NERVA" boys and grlls?

    But it was probably just a fancy RTV.

    122:

    The crucial fact is that they seem to be able to test this gadget on the ground.

    That means that it is not just a ramjet.

    Obviously the idea is to switch to ram-jet mode once aloft, at speed and out of fuel, but the trouble has always been getting to that point, and in particular that speed.

    My guess is that they "cool" a small nuclear reactor with a rocket, turning it into a nuclear afterburner.

    (That would probably allow them to pick a rocket fuel suitable for long term storage/stability for the final weapon.)

    While experimenting a liquid fueled rocket is required: Solid fueled rockets are not variable.

    And no, it's not plutonium, it is a horror from both a metallurgical and nuclear standpoint and it has waay too low melting point, 600-700°C depending on alloy.

    Uranium melts at 1130°C that's still a bit on the low side for a rocket.

    Thorium melts at 1750°C, so that's probably the main component of the ThU mix they use.

    The nuclear fuel will almost by definition be clad in Zirconium, melting point 1850°C and doesn't eat neutrons.

    A good starting point for a fuel geometry can be seen in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P99C051arMo

    There are more suicidal possibilities, but I don't think the russians are that crazy.

    The interesting question is if the people they killed were the only ones who thought this was a really cool idea...

    123:

    @117: Severodvinsk is the site of major repair and construction facilities for the Russian Northern Fleet, and one of two declared sites for the loading of Russian SLBMs; it is also reportedly home of the world's largest shipyard. Given the memorial in the closed "atomic" city of Sarov, linking this incident to some sort of weapons test doesn't seem much of a leap.

    124:

    Other known points of robot vacuum cleaners are that they're dumb enough not to have a sensor and auto-off trigger to stop them running into feline or canine diarrhoea and spreading it everywhere.

    Basically the current models are extremely incompatible with pet ownership.

    125:

    My immediate thought is that it's something not dissimilar to the USA's Project PLUTO, aka the Vought SLAM, cancelled in the 1960s (although the guidance computer and terrain-following radar they developed for it was used in the Tomahawk cruise missile).

    126:

    Again, the Soviet designers had form for using air propulsion to augment rockets: the Gnom ICBM project (cancelled in 1965) was for an ICBM with a first stage that scavenged air in the early stages of flight for ramjet augmented thrust—showed great promise but was cancelled after the lead designer (who'd sponsored it) died of unrelated causes (there were other competing designs with the benefit of not being promoted by a dead guy).

    The Vought SLAM was ground launched using strap-on solid boosters to get it up to ramjet speed. A ground launch using liquid fuel through the reactor, switching to pure ramjet mode once up to speed, is more elegant but tricky …

    Again: IIRC the Tory series of reactors for SLAM were supposed to use HEU in a ceramic matrix. Plutonium would probably be viable, too, just not in metallic form—in an oxide or carbide or some other high melting point compound.

    127:

    Duh - I mean RTG.

    128:

    “More elegant by tricky”

    For values of “tricky” that include “significantly more likely to fail explosively and shower the launch site with burning, radioactive debris”, I see.

    129:

    Perhaps we'll get lucky and it will be a nuclear powered Ekranoplan instead?

    Or for bonus points a nuclear powered, ground effect cruise missile?

    130:

    Lurgan Definitely NOT "border controls" The main stations either side of the border are Dundalk & Newry - some distance away, to say the least, from Lurgan.

    131:

    The story I heard was that it was "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux", chosen because (a) it rhymes and (b) they knew very well what the alternative meaning of "sucks" was and thought they'd get more from the memorability factor than they'd lose by people taking it literally. Kind of like how Ridgid Tools play up the fnarr-fnarr factor in their name enough to give Finbarr Saunders a heart attack.

    VAX are local, and the obvious joke was always "11/780", or at least it was to me.

    132:

    The plate giving the model number was intact and, as I said above, a web search for it gave NO hits - none, zero, zilch, nihilum, de nada, nothing, etc.

    We might have the manual somewhere, but they have almost never included component specifications - at least not in the past 50 years or so. Any parts I used to fix it would have to have been based on guesswork because, while I could measure the belt, few of the web pages for such belts gave any measurements, and those that did gave different ones.

    133:

    "Thorium melts at 1750°C, so that's probably the main component of the ThU mix they use."

    Who says it's a Th/U mix? Thorium is not fissile. Putting it on a rocket is a waste of weight; it won't do anything. Thorium is useless until it isn't thorium any more but has been converted to uranium 233 in a breeder reactor.

    Its melting point is irrelevant, and zirconium would probably catch fire under the conditions; as Charlie says any high core temperature reactor is not going to use metallic fuel, but ceramic, with the fuel most likely as an oxide.

    It's not as if Russia hasn't looked at the idea before; they were playing with nuclear rockets in the Cold War about the same time as the Americans were playing with them, and came to pretty much the same conclusions.

    134:

    Or for bonus points a nuclear powered, ground effect cruise missile? Related, I'm still giggling about DJT's latest: it is the Russians who are dealing with a nuclear-powered-cruise-missile gap! (well, DJT can be interpreted that way but who knows, maybe he means that the US cruise missiles are invisible, or he is just lying.)

    The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2019
    Any concerns by authorities about radiation are probably more related to clandestine air sampling by e.g. the US. (Civilians are worried but that's another issue entirely.)

    Also, Am242 is an exotic fissionable, melting point similar to Uranium, much higher thermal cross section (like 9-10x) and more neutrons per fission[0]. e.g. the Russian device could be using a composite fuel of some sort. Outlier possibility. (If Am242 is involved, Am241 is also involved, strong alpha emitter(/carcinogen) if released.) [0] hard to make; Am241 separated from spent reactor fuel, irradiated with neutrons, and Am242 separated, if I'm reading correctly[1]. [1] The Smallest Thermal Nuclear Reactor (2005), for the basic physics (I'm trusting it because I don't know this part of physics); assume a spherical reactor of Am242 in water solution. :-)

    135:

    Interesting report, but it's not entirely clear what they're on about. They dismiss the interesting bit (the possibility of a critical mass of only 6.6g) in one sentence, and concentrate on this reactor which really is not that impressively small considering that the Manhattan project made a similarly-sized research reactor using an aqueous solution of 565g of uranium enriched to 14-15%.

    Again, though, it would not be useful to build a rocket propulsion motor using 242mAm as fuel. The limitation on size is how high you can crank up the power density before it melts itself, and it's inconveniently difficult not to hit that limit with plain boring uranium fuel.

    136:

    There are probably some good ways to drop a few hints about the size of the crew. If you want to send me a copy I'll see if I have any intelligent suggestions.

    137:

    Re: appliances - from experience US domestic appliances are even worse than US cars. We replaced a 22 y.o. Asko washer with a Miele a couple of years ago - same price fo4 a new Asko but better warranty for the Miele. For drying try the dehumidifier in the bathroom - turns the room into a giant dryer and helps dry out the walls too. Please wave Hi to the filkers at WorldCon for me. Haven’t been able to be there since 2014/London ☹️

    138:

    Am241 separated from spent reactor fuel, irradiated with neutrons, and Am242 separated

    The technology to do that doesn't exist -- if the Russians did have a process capable of isolating chemically similar isotopes with only a single integer difference in atomic mass in quantity then they'd be the richest country on the planet.

    Cascades of uranium centrifuges only work because U235 is significantly lighter than U238 and even then the "depleted" U238 residue usually has a significant amount of leftover U235 content. Conversely it's pretty much impossible to separate Pu239 from Pu240 and Pu241 derived from spent fuel using centrifuges.

    Every now and then someone puts out publicity feelers for laser isotope enrichment which might be able to separate out close-cousin isotopes but either it gets disappeared for security reasons or, more likely, it doesn't work as well as the Powerpoint slides suggest it theoretically should. The energy costs and low throughput of such an enrichment process are likely to be a showstopper anyway.

    My guess -- the missile being tested had an radioactive heater element, a similar idea as the BAOR's nuclear land-mine chickens[0], to prevent the rocket's electronics and actuators from freezing up in a really cold winter and when the rocket went kablooie so did the insufficiently-protected heater unit. Lunar landers like the Chinese Rabbit probe had similar isotopic heaters to try and keep the devices alive through a 2-week Lunar night.

    Candidates would probably be radioactive elements that can be chemically extracted from spent fuel rather than manufacturing something special like Pu-238. The Russians run fuel reprocessing lines, so maybe Cs-134 (half-life 2 years) and Cs-137 (half-life 30 years or so) both of which are abundantly available in fresh spent fuel. Strontium-90 (half life about 30 years too) is another candidate, the Soviets used it for static RTGs to power remote lighthouses and the like.

    [0] OK, the chicken thing might never have been implemented but it was officially given consideration.

    139:

    Project PLUTO, aka the Vought SLAM, cancelled in the 1960s (although the guidance computer and terrain-following radar they developed for it was used in the Tomahawk cruise missile).

    Maybe some of the concepts but computer code and hardware from the early 60s being useful in the mid to late 70s? Not really.

    And given that terrain following radar is mostly a computer problem I have similar feelings about that.

    140:

    because U235 is significantly lighter than U238

    Interesting use of the word "significantly".

    141:

    My guess -- the missile being tested had an radioactive heater element, a similar idea as the BAOR's nuclear land-mine chickens[0], to prevent the rocket's electronics and actuators from freezing up in a really cold winter and when the rocket went kablooie so did the insufficiently-protected heater unit.

    I'm kind of leaning in that general direction too, though of course the rocket in question might have been the much-discussed Burevestnik. In that case the reactor would not have gone critical or perhaps even just be there in dummy form.

    One thing that's noticeable is that the isotope supply sources are consistently described that way, and the plural is used. I.e., there were more than one of them.

    From Sarov.info

    https://www.sarov.info/main/2019/08/10/vo-vremya-ispytaniy-pogibli-sotrudniki.html Во время испытаний погибли сотрудники ВНИИЭФ 10 августа 2019 г. В ходе испытаний опытного образца изделия на военном полигоне в Архангельской области произошло возгорание экспериментальной двигательной установки. Для подтверждения технических характеристик проводились стендовые испытания двигателя с применением изотопных источников питания. Испытательный стенд располагался на морской платформе. В результате нештатной ситуации произошёл взрыв.

    One source of ambiguity here is the word "питание" which has a wide variety of meanings, but in technical contexts indeed often means "supply." But supply of what? It often is understood to mean electrical power, but could also mean heat or something else.

    But this is all very murky and the possibility of deliberate obfuscation and misdirection is not to be ignored, so who knows?

    142:

    The difference between U235 and U238 allows an engineering solution (centrifuges, gaseous diffusion etc.) to separate the two long-lived and hence naturally-occurring isotopes of uranium. Pu238 is synthesised via neutron bombardment of Neptunium-237 so it can be extracted from its predecessor chemically. Am-242, if it is produced by neutron capture from Am-241, a common isotope found in aged spent fuel would have to be extracted from its predecessor via an isotope separator, not a "simple" chemical process and with only one extra neutron that's a lot more difficult, not just three times more difficult than the uranium separation process.

    It's a bit like trying to build a car that can go at 300km/h compared to building one that can do 900 km/h. It's only three times faster after all...

    143:

    I presume Western agencies will have sampling aircraft sniffing around the vicinity looking for traces of whatever went boink! Short-lived fission products like I131 would indicate fission i.e. either a reactor leaked or a weapon exploded. Longer-lived radioactive materials, possibly a single isotope like Pu238 or Sr90 would indicate a isotopic thermal source which was badly damaged enough to leak after the explosion.

    The US War Department's GPS birds now do the job of the Vela nuclear explosion monitoring satellites of old. I figure they would have reported any substantial in-atmosphere unrequested fission surplus in the area of concern.

    144:

    Yes I know all of that. My point was calling aprox 1% heavier "significantly". But, yes, in atomic weights 1% can be a lot.

    My father retired as a production line manager in a gaseous diffusion plant. So my most of my raising was paid for by the 1% difference. But at only 1% in weight and less than that in size it required enormous efforts to separate via diffusion. Centrifuges are much better in so many ways. Size of the plant being one of them.

    145:

    to Allen Thomson @141 "Power source" is the term, and it is almost universality referred to electricity generation unit. In case of heat generation it would refer to as "energy source". I've listened to explanation from last Sunday, and the scientists hinted at least two things about the experiment. One, it is most likely a scientific work rather than practical test, quite possibly testing of equipment limit. Secondly, it happened offshore, quite possibly for security reasons associated with experimentation. And also if anyone noticed, nobody at all mentioned what was the nature of "propulsion system" in question - it could be a water turbine for all I know, it is just journalism, as usual, caught the wind of new "missile" trend and rode it to the logical conclusion.

    to Nojay @143 Not necessary possible, the area is about 300 km into the territory, mostly upwind and with very light air drift. Best results will be obtained by ground stations.

    146:

    Gag.

    Now, Austin I've always said is the allergy capitol of the US - about a 1/3rd of the population walks around for about three months sounding like they've got a cold: it's cedar fever season (actually, they're junipers).

    But from your description, I cannot help but remember the first winter after I moved to Austin. We were living in an immobile home in the exurbs of the city, in a "subdivision (a ranch that had so much trouble feeding the cattle that they subdivided and sold them off, first in two acre lots, then, while I was there, smaller lots, which pissed a lot of folks off, because they'd been promised the owner wouldn't do that). Anyway, we come home one night, as as we turn into the driveway, we see white clouds in front of us. We're freaking, is the immobile home burning?

    No. It was pollen. Never saw it that bad before or since....

    147:

    But I really liked the 11/780 I was on as a student, around 1983....

    148:

    About the Russian explosion... I had not considered anything, until someone here noted that you cannot test a ramjet engine on the ground (well, there is the one I devised, but never built a model of...).

    So, now it's become a tad more serious to me: suppose they only said it was missile, but is, instead, a true space engine, like NERVA. They called the dead heros, and people just working on a missile don't rate that, I'd think.

    If Russia could get a true spaceship up, no coming to ground, and then could fly it, or fly paying passengers/equipment to the Moon, or to Mars in three months... that would put them so far ahead of the US, or China, or India....

    149:

    Never saw it that bad before or since....

    This year was a bad one around here.

    https://abc11.com/weather/photographer-captures-pollenpocalypse-over-durham/5240051/

    The 2nd half has some interesting video of what happens in the rain.

    150:

    "someone here noted that you cannot test a ramjet engine on the ground"

    Uh? Sure you can, you just need to build a Sodding Big Fan (TM) to blow air at it. It gets kind of elaborate in order to provide the volume and speed of airflow required, but people have still built them, because it's still easier than tapping up Superman to chase after the thing with a screwdriver tweaking stuff.

    11/780 - Yeah, I liked it too. And I like the eponymous vacuum cleaner; it's essentially the same design as the Numatic/Henry pattern, with the same advantages, and I don't hold its filter's inability to cope with pigeon feather dust (it catches it, but you can't get it out again) against it too much, since the characteristics of that stuff are very different from normal domestic dust. I just find it amusing that the name of the device is a word I default to interpreting as the name of something completely different.

    151:

    Going back to washing machines again, and the other perennial beef that is the Internet Of Fucking Stupid Things That Have No Business Even Having A CPU In The First Place... I have been checking out the availability of brushless motors suitable for driving gyroscope rotors, and in the process I have discovered two things:

    1) Some washing machines and dryers these days are using brushless motors to drive drain pumps and fans and things.

    2) The controller ICs for driving brushless motors, even the basic ones that do nothing more than just make the thing go round, are outrageously elaborate. Oscillator driving a ring-of-three counter arrangement? Not on your life, some of these things have a fucking 32-bit ARM core in them. Indeed it seems next to impossible to get one that doesn't.

    Now I have not heard of someone suborning a washing machine drain pump motor driver over the internet, but I am sure that if someone hasn't done it it's only a matter of time until they do...

    152:

    David L @ 110:

    "that British (and European) domestic appliances aren't like American ones. They're built to fit a smaller standard kitchen unit ... and they're all front-loaders rather than top-loaders."

    We ARE gradually switching to front loaders. But for the previous 10 years the appliance makers used it as a way to push "premium" products. So while the prices for a top loader could run from $250 to $800 the front loaders tended to start at $600 if you could get by with no controls but a start stop switch. They ARE more mainstream now and the top loaders gradually taking over with reasonable prices for decent features.

    As to size, what I just bought for my daughter's house 2 years ago look like it could hold an EU model in the drum. When in another country for more than a few days I try and drop into a Media Mart and similar just to see how different the consumer markets are. At first glance they seem identical. If you browse a bit you can see all kinds of assumptions that are designed into models destined for different continents.

    I'll probably get a front loader if I ever buy another washing machine. My current washing machine is only 30 years old and so far the only repairs it has required is replacing one solenoid valve. It's high capacity, so I only have to do a few of loads per week (one cold wash, one warm wash, one hot wash - they all get cold rinse). Trouble is, all the newer appliances seem to want to be connected to the internet, and I just don't see any need for it.

    153:

    Not on your life, some of these things have a fucking 32-bit ARM core in them. Indeed it seems next to impossible to get one that doesn't.

    Those are apparently cheap enough that it's easy to put one in mostly everything. Also from the developer viewpoint, although things could probably be done on a 6502 or Z80 or something comparable, developing for a real computer is just so much nicer, when you can have a proper operating system, tools to debug, and all that.

    I got myself a toyish hand game console a couple of months ago. The fun thing with that is that it's open-source both in hardware and software, and I plan to program something with it. I was still amazed when I read the specs - the form factor is like a bulky Nintendo Gameboy, bu it's running a four-core ARM processor with a gigabyte of memory and an OpenGL ES graphical interface. It has a 320x240 display, some sound capabilities, and about ten buttons, so the computing power seems somewhat excessive. Still, a simple Raspberry Pi (which this basically is) doesn't cost that much, and having an even simpler computer in an appliance costs even less.

    154:

    I suspect that complaining about the "interwebnet of stuff" around here is preaching to the choir.

    For example, I don't get why people want their cars to have azure dentition!

    155:

    Long term what it should be about is power efficiency and predictive repairs.

    Whether or not it will work out this way, oh, well.

    Check out what sense.com is doing with DSP processing without such controls on motors.

    156:

    I HATE "interwebs"

    That being said, last year I found my favorite acronym of the year that a tech writer had published in her column in '17: the "Internet of Gratuitously Connected Insecure Things", IGCIT, which she pronounced "id-iot".

    Yes! I want to let theives know that I'm out for the evening, and folks in South Korea and China watch what we do in the bedroom, and for the 16 yr old to set my thermostat to 90F in the winter, and to 65F in the heatwave this summer....

    157:

    Yes, indeed, it is most bizarre that such an important point for people buying cars is whether or not the car has a facility which makes about as much sense as an externally-mounted ashtray with soap bubble blowing attachment. I can talk to my car just fine without any extra equipment. I don't need a phone, I'm sat in the thing. And I don't get an answer either way.

    158:

    Nice.

    FWIW, I only use "interwebnet" when I'm pretending to be rather less tech savvy than I actually am, or, ironically, of IGCIT.

    159:

    "Those are apparently cheap enough that it's easy to put one in mostly everything."

    So it appears, and in this application the heavy silicon is always going to be in the output drivers anyway. But what gets on my wick is that a variable frequency oscillator with three outputs 120° out of phase is so bleeding basic a thing that it doesn't need any kind of CPU at all, not an ARM, not a 6502, not a PIC, not nothing. I'm making one out of 4000 series logic just to make the point, but people did it with valves once upon a time.

    160:

    I sometimes get answers from mine; that's one of the good things about driving a car made before steering feel was engineered out,

    161:

    .But what gets on my wick is that a variable frequency oscillator with three outputs 120° out of phase is so bleeding basic a thing that it doesn't need any kind of CPU at all, not an ARM, not a 6502, not a PIC, not nothing.

    I am going to go out on a wild limb here and suggest that a single overpowered part makes for cheaper manufacturing than multiple simpler parts. I am thinking this mostly because of my considerations of the motivations of the people involved.

    162:

    Elderly Cynic @ 132: The plate giving the model number was intact and, as I said above, a web search for it gave NO hits - none, zero, zilch, nihilum, de nada, nothing, etc.

    We might have the manual somewhere, but they have almost never included component specifications - at least not in the past 50 years or so. Any parts I used to fix it would have to have been based on guesswork because, while I could measure the belt, few of the web pages for such belts gave any measurements, and those that did gave different ones.

    I haven't had to do an internet search for appliance parts that I remember.

    I have done it to get repair parts for an old lawnmower - 15+ years; I hit a rock and bent the blade. The new blades from Home Depot or Lowe's wouldn't fit. I managed to get another 3 years use out of it.

    I rebuilt a 33 year old (1980 model rebuilt in 2013) chipper/shredder where the original manufacturer went out of business in 2001. The rebuild was because one of the sealed shaft bearings had failed. It was a challenge because I didn't get the original manuals when I "inherited" the chipper some 20 years ago. With diligent searching, I found manuals from a 1983 version of the machine on the internet & from there was able to get original part numbers. With the original part numbers I was able to turn up suppliers who had N.O.S. parts (new chipper blade) and/or equivalent ... I couldn't find a N.O.S. RA100RRB bearing, but there is a modern Fafnir bearing with the same specifications that is ALMOST identical. It's just a smidgen wider & the shaft wouldn't fit inside the shell with the original shims in place. Works just fine without the shims.

    For appliances (washer, dryer & stoves) instead of searching for parts on the internet I go down to a local parts jobber (where the appliance servicemen get their parts from) and get them to look the parts up in their Manufacturer's Catalogs. The benefit of having the manual in that situation is it's got the model number printed on it, so I don't have to drag the appliance out from the wall to read data plate. When the parts jobber can no longer get the repair parts is when I replace appliances.

    163:

    paws4thot @ 154: I suspect that complaining about the "interwebnet of stuff" around here is preaching to the choir.

    For example, I don't get why people want their cars to have azure dentition!

    Since I don't even know what that is, I don't think I want it in my car. Google only turns up results having to do with Orthodontics.

    165:

    suggest that a single overpowered part makes for cheaper manufacturing than multiple simpler parts.

    That's the philosophy of the Raspberry PI. One model with everything (but simple parts) and one model with a bit less. You pick the response time of the unit to events by picking the disk drive yourself. SD card up to SATA. If it doesn't have the port you want it does have decent USB do get an adapter.

    Sure for almost any application of it you'll have some things built in you don't need but only having 2 models (maybe 3) of any generation sure does drive down the manufacturing cost.

    166:

    Turns out we're both wrong -- it was "Nothing sucks like Electrolux" in the 1960's, VAX (the vacuum cleaners) started using the slogan in 1986.

    167:

    Azure Dentition in cars ... Even worse is fucking Shat-Nav ... inherently dangerous, IMHO I'm told the current Driving Test has a compulsory "obey the Shat-Nav" section ... arrrgggh!

    168:

    Is sort of do and sort of don't agree about Prat-Nav. My sis recently made a trip that involved a 5.25 mile diversion (road closed closed due work on new bypass) the way she went, or I think about twice that distance off the usual road (probably slightly shorter but all 2-lane where my normal route is 60% dual carriageway) by its diversion.

    The real danger is "follow the prat nav", because that's how trucks start delivering bridges, or drivers dip their headlights in 3 feet of water...

    169:

    Look, if there HAD been anywhere accessible I could have gone to look at actual parts or talk to a Jobber With Clue, I would have done it. There isn't. I could order something with a part number for some OTHER model, a guessed-at component off the Web, or splice a length of rope into a loop (and, yes, I can short splice rope, and could once do long splicing).

    And, as I said, something else was probably going to fail shortly afterwards.

    170:

    Yes. I paid extra for a far with fewer electric gizmos (essentially only front windows and central locking) and no air conditioning - and what two components have failed more often than everything else put together, several times over? You got it in one.

    171:

    Your theory is far too plausible and unexciting to gain acceptance, so let's carry on with the nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft theory ....

    172:

    Even worse is fucking Shat-Nav ... inherently dangerous, IMHO

    Now you sound like the old guy yelling "get off my lawn".

    Stat Nav is great. If used properly. Ditto the radio. Seatbelts. And all other kinds of tech.

    Driving in new areas without paper maps is flat out great.

    Being an idiot with Stat Nav or any other tech is stupid. "Here's your sign".

    173:

    Ahem: the TERCOM guidance for SLAM was under development in the mid-60s, the era from which the Minuteman Guidance Computer hails—the same guidance computer that basically wasn’t obsoleted for decades because it did a simple job and did it effectively: there was no benefit to redesigning it. I suspect the SLAM guidance computer got reworked extensively before deployment in the GLCM, if only because weight savings were more important in a non-nuclear-powered missile, and they’re probably long obsolete today ... but the heritage is there: GLCM test flights began in the early to mid seventies, after all.

    174:

    Bluetooth for cars is easy and quite a good idea: why have an in-car music player/radio/CD system when you can just pair your phone and play your own music collection on whatever vehicle you’re in? Earlier iterations used USB cables or Apple’s iPod dock connector, but it turns out the design life of a cable interface to personal electronics is much shorter than the design life of a modern car. So bluetooth came in.

    (Bluetooth also allows you to use the car’s speakers and a suitable microphone for hands-free telephony, although allowing any speech comms while driving seems like a bad idea based on the safety statistics. But a lot of cars have a steering-wheel-mounted phone dialpad these days, for example.)

    175:

    Well, for one thing I don't have a "smart"phone... I do read car magazines, and muttering rotters (who do, or should) do this sort of thing for a living make getting a Haiwai or whatever to actually talk to a Thripps Thunderclap 27 seem like much harder work than you do.

    176:

    You are assuming that everything is going swimmingly. If you walk, ride or drive into an unfamiliar network of streets or roads, following the optimal route as decided by your your prat nav, and a critical section is blocked (for any reason), what do you do? With a map, you can look at it and choose a reasonable route round the blockage. With a prat nav, you are stuffed, because it will do its damnedest to redirect you back to the blockage. Oh, yes, such failures are rare (but not THAT rare), but the time/effort saving of a prat nav is small, and the cost of such a problem can be huge.

    Even if you choose to abandon your decision making to a prat nav, you need a map to deal with that case.

    The only circumstance when I would find a prat nav useful is when following a tricky route on my own, because modern roads are perpetrated to not allow you anywhere to stop and look at a map, blow your nose safely etc.

    177:

    "But a lot of cars have a steering-wheel-mounted phone dialpad these days, for example."

    Oh, God :-(

    178:

    Quick delurk.

    I own a 2018 vehicle with Bluetooth and making calls works as Charlie says, except there's no need for a keypad - the car has voice recognition activated by one button on the steering wheel. I just say the name of whoever I'm calling. Very easy and safe to make a call, as long as the number is already in my phone. This is a UK Ford Focus, not a high-end car at all, so I imagine this feature is pretty common now, or will be soon.

    Back to lurking!

    179:

    As has been known for a long time, and is now becoming accepted, much (perhaps even most) of the danger comes from the distraction of the conversation, not the actual dialling. That's the problem OGH referred to in #174.

    Quite a lot of the other features of modern cars, definitely including drivers' seatbelts and quite probably even entertainment centres and air conditioning, increase the danger to other, vulnerable road users like pedestrians, cyclists and horse riders. Which, in turn, is a major factor in the ill-health of the nation.

    180:

    David L @ 172 I have a FULL SETA of OS 1:50 000 maps & I use them when I'm going somewhere & I always check for changes ... I have a lot of 1:25 000 as well ... SEE ALSO EC @ 176.. I've been caught that way several times over the years - paper maps have got me out of it, every time

    Charlie @ 174 Bluetooth is a specialised form of Wi-Fi - yes? Presumably also ridiculously easy to hack, also yes?

    181:

    I've certainly seen that claimed. My personal experience is that talking on the phone feels no more distracting than talking with passengers. But I appreciate that is not solid statistical evidence, and would appreciate seeing some. I will look it up when I get a chance; I have to go pick someone up now.

    182:

    Either of my Sat nav's have maps. And fairly regularly they will tell me a route is blocked and route me around the blockage well before a map navigation would. This happens much more often than road blocked and sat nav does not know.

    Plus, if you've not used sat nav, via Google maps for public transportation, you are massively missing out.

    183:

    Yeah, sat nav is not a panacea, but it helps me a lot. For example, Google maps tells the user where the traffic jams are right now, so even if I don't know the places I can route (or let the nav route) around them.

    Of course one needs to be careful when using them, and I like paper maps, too, but especially the "always online" ones update better than the old map in my car. Here there was a big map company making the Helsinki area paper map, and I bought that a couple of times, but they stopped making them years ago, and now the one I have is quite out of date.

    184:

    I have a FULL SETA of OS 1:50 000 maps & I use them when I'm going somewhere & I always check for changes ... I have a lot of 1:25 000 as well ... I've been caught that way several times over the years - paper maps have got me out of it, every time

    Ah the advantages of living in a small country.

    Over the last 24 - 36 months I've driven in an area that if defined by a box about 3500 miles by 1500 miles. Plus add in our your side of the pond Ireland, Germany, Paris, and Spain. Ireland and Germany as the navigator and the other 2 walking. GPS on a smart device is great.

    Mostly after plane flights. I'm like the airlines who have switched from paper flight bags to iPads.

    185:

    airlines who have switched from paper flight bags to iPads

    How does that work? I didn't think an iPad was that good at holding sick! ;-)

    186:

    You are assuming that everything is going swimmingly. If you walk, ride or drive into an unfamiliar network of streets or roads, following the optimal route as decided by your your prat nav, and a critical section is blocked (for any reason), what do you do? With a map, you can look at it and choose a reasonable route round the blockage. With a prat nav, you are stuffed, because it will do its damnedest to redirect you back to the blockage.

    What part of Being an idiot with Stat Nav or any other tech is stupid. did you not read?

    I use Google Maps all the time on my phone to let me know about driving. And it's great about telling me what is stuff ahead so I can make decisions. And if needed pull over to figure things out.

    Stupid is blindly following things. And yes at times I get to ignore the "Please make a U-Turn as soon as possible".

    But there will always be "here's your sign" people.

    187:

    Jokes aside pilots for more and more airlines now get to abandon that 40 pound paper filled suitcase and carry and iPad or Android tablet with all the stuff in it. They love it. And it cuts down on medical issues from lugging around 40 pounds in addition to their clothes.

    My not to recently retired pilot friend said one thing they loved was the ability to zoom in on airport maps. With the old paper system when a question came up on a new to them airport the map scale didn't always give enough details. With the electronic versions they could see way more detail if needed.

    About a year ago I was sitting next to a pilot and we got to talking an I asked a question about the 787 winglets. He didn't know the answer so he pulled out his iPad and tried to find it. I was very impressed with the detailed level of information about each plane he was certified to fly. All kinds of diagrams about how things were bolted together. Not quite enough to assemble the plane but enough to know what anything you could touch was a part of.

    And on a side note I think some Boeing execs should be spending the rest of their life in prison for deciding "we'll just not tell folks about this as it will upset the accountants with the extra training the pilots will want"

    188:

    Much of the problem is that the difference is not consciously detectable. The coding/decoding, packetisation, and so on introduce delays into the speech transmission which are in just the right range for your brain's allocation of processing power to understanding the conversation to go through the roof without you noticing. (The same principle makes international remote controlled surgery impractical even with perfect equipment that introduces no extra delays itself - over a few thousand miles the speed of light delay gets big enough to do the surgeon's head in and the surgeon isn't adequately aware of it happening.) On top of that there is noise gating which removes a bunch of subconscious cues altogether. The consequence is that people will swear blind that it's no more distracting than talking to passengers* because their brains aren't capable of consciously registering the difference.

    Whatever volume of autism space I occupy carries the consequence that my brain does register the difference, and it's something of a pain in the arse. I'm not entirely happy with the processing load incurred even by face-to-face conversation. Boggo analogue landlines are worse. Modern noise-gated landlines are a lot worse, mobile phones are seriously difficult and hard work, and as for mobile phones at the same time as some other high-CPU activity like driving, fuck that to the wide.

    However, I'm not just commenting based on personal experience; I've seen references to pukka studies on the subject relating both to remote controlled surgery and to mobile phones in cars, but this was like 25 years ago and there's no chance of me digging them up now. I rather wish such results were more widely publicised, because people almost universally dismiss legal restrictions on mobile phone use in cars as stuffy reactionary technophobic ninnyhammering, and with nothing more than a 25-year-old memory as a counterargument it's kind of hard to get them to realise that there actually is justification for it (as opposed to simulating realisation for the purposes of conversation and then dropping all thought on the matter the instant the conversation is over).

    *(Come to that, "talking to passengers" is not necessarily a benign activity. Some people find me a very antisocial passenger, sending RST in response to any of their attempted conversational openings and never making any of my own: the reason is that these people insist on turning their head 90 degrees to the side whenever they open their mouths, instead of watching the road, and you absolutely can not get them to stop doing it without stopping them talking altogether.)

    189:

    "Ah the advantages of living in a small country."

    More like, the advantages of living in a country that has probably the best mapping service of anywhere in the world. I find it weird to hear non-British people going on about Google maps this and Google maps that because Google maps are fucking shite compared to the Ordnance Survey. I find it even weirder when British people do the same thing because they somehow haven't understood that we have the Ordnance Survey and just habitually go along with the embedded maps websites throw at them, which are invariably Google shit.

    I would love a complete set of OS 1:50000 paper maps (also 1:25000, also further complete sets from the 1963 and 1947 surveys and whatever the one before that was) if for no other reason than that I could pore over them for hours and hours, but it would be kind of expensive given that most of them would cover territory I'd never actually make it round to doing anything more exciting with than appearing on one edge of the map and driving along a main road until I go off the other side.

    Fortunately, though, they are readily available online - indeed, they are more readily available than Google maps. Google write probably the worst websites in the world, with no more actual HTML than the minimum necessary to get the browser to parse the document as HTML, and everything handled by idiotic megabytes of javascript that mixes functionality and evil in a rather less separable manner than uric acid and undigested food residue are mixed in a pigeon turd. The result is that all Google sites and embedded stuff get knocked out by various evil-blocking measures and require considerable individually-targeted effort writing my own javascript to replicate the functionality but not the evil before they will produce anything but a blank screen. And the only one I can actually be arsed to do that for is the search engine, and I only use that when I can't get a useful result off Bing.

    OS maps, however, are available from sensible and ordinary websites; I usually use streetmap.co.uk which has both 1:50000 and 1:25000 coverage, kept up-to-date to within a few months at least as far as road alterations are concerned, and on which my generic evil-blocking takes out all the ads while leaving the functionality functioning with no need to write any custom code at all. For the older surveys, the National Library of Scotland is digitising everything they can get their hands on, not only 1:50000 and 1:25000 (or their imperial equivalents) but larger scales as well; I think the smaller scales have been done for the whole of Great Britain by now and they are well advanced in getting the larger ones done. And the Ordnance Survey copyright lets you do all this stuff; since the surveys were publically funded in the first place the results are under terms that are about as near as you can get to "open" for something that got started long before anyone had come up with that term.

    190:

    I want to say 1936, but that may be the base grid rather than the survey itself. In which context, did you know that even the latest 1:50000 still use OSGB36 grid rather than OSGB70? I mean, the difference is 1 in 100000 in Northings but still...

    191:

    I've bought a few OL-series Ordnance Survey maps in recent years for walking purposes. They come with a code to download a digital version of the map to the device of your choice: I assume all printed OS maps have the same option.

    192:

    On the subject of SATNAV, hearing a voice tell me when to turn is a thousand times better than driving around with a map book in my lap and trying to read it while getting someplace.

    193:

    I have a mate who acquired a twatnav, which caused me to raise my eyebrows a bit when he told me (shared views on technological excess, etc). He says it is great for driving in strange cities where it's not obvious (because of poor road layout and/or because of traffic obscuring the markings) what lane you're supposed to be in at junctions. I guess I'll give him that; no map I've ever seen gives that information, and it's not that uncommon for lanes to be allocated to "go left/go right/go straight on" in an unexpected manner, or for the markings to be ambiguous or obscured.

    Still wouldn't have one myself, though. I find the time taken to switch focus - both mentally, and in terms of the shape of the lens in my eye - between the road and a thing on the dashboard is a few seconds in either direction, which is completely unacceptable, and I am absolutely shite at following voice directions even when I do have the option of "yer what? which one, that one? - oh, that one, right?" etc. But I usually cope adequately with the situation my mate cites using my own resources, and over larger distances I cope just fine either with memorised OS mapping or with no mapping at all - where "just fine" has been known to include someone leaving their twatnav switched off and having me direct them instead, or finding my way more successfully than someone who is looking at a paper map and does know how to read one. So it's both dangerous and rather pointless...

    194:

    If, and only if, it actually tells you "in 100 yards turn left" rather than once you're 15 miles down the wrong road telling you "at the next opportunity make a U turn". And if it doesn't say "in 100 yards turn right" as you approach a sign saying "left turn only".

    195:

    Well, I guess it makes sense, given the size of the discrepancy in relation to the scale and the fact that the 1:50000 series began life as an optical enlargement of one-inch mapping. There's probably still a fair old chunk of historical data embedded in current maps in relation to things that don't move - which includes the trig points themselves, of course :)

    196:

    Bets? ;-)

    I use a trig point as an accuracy test for GPS units, and the record for movement is a sink rate of 20m/s. The trig point is on a 300 feet high outcrop of Lewisian Gneiss. Either the GPS is reporting wrong, or the trig point is moving.

    197:

    It's a relatively new version, and it does mostly understand lanes, plus it gives both adequate warnings about turns, and it knows how to handle "immediate" turns (that is, it will say, "turn left, then immediately turn right.)

    Just like reading a map, you have to apply some intelligence to using it, but at least my head is up and watching the road, not down and trying to figure out what this pink line means.

    198:

    Yeah, cheap.... I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this here before, but when I moved down to be with my late wife, in the mid/late 80's, she had a washer. She told me she couldn't afford the extra $100 (yes, really) for one that had a load level dial, so everything used x amount of water.

    A few years later, we got a repair it yourself book on home stuff. I read the one on washers... and my eyeballs dropped out. So did hers, when I showed her.

    (This is US: all top-loaders).

    We unscrewed the top control panel... and sure enough, the washer had a water level control. It was cheaper for the manufacturer to make them all the same... and then charge the extra $100 to ->drill a hole and put a knob on the control<-. We drilled the hole, and used a screwdriver.

    199:

    Um, no.

    Back when I was in Chicago, 10 years ago, I'd occasionally try to look up a route on google maps... and it continually wanted to get me onto an Interstate. As in 10 mi south, get to the interchange take the other interstate back north going west.....

    They're a little better now, not insisting on the Interstates all the time. But... a lot of times, I know, from driving, that taking this route rather than their preferred is faster/shorter.

    My kids got me a Tomtom for the holidays. First time I went to visit Ellen, I'd gotten onto the wrong Baltimore beltway (had no Baltimore paper maps), so, pulled over, pulled it out, fired it up, and aimed it (that took a while). Told me to take an exit, then it was around and around, till if finally told me I'd arrived.

    Huh? I checked it, and for some reason unknown to me, it had CHANGED THE TARGET ADDRESS to a freight transfer house near the Port of Baltimore docks. Reset it, and at least it got me to where I could call her, and she could tell me how to get there.

    200:

    That would be a big, fucking NO, good buddy.

    And the reason is that a friend of mine, Clarke Wierde from GT used to work on car engineering, and says that the "entertainment" functions are supposed to be separate, but it's cheaper that THEY'RE CONNECTED TO THE CAN - the car control computer.

    The results is... you have read about proof-of-concept attacks by researchers, who've gotten control of the brakes on more than one car?

    And this, of course, is assuming that your mobile isn't already pwned....

    201:

    When I got my OEM radio/CD player replaced in '15, I had them explicitly NOT connect it to the damn control on the steering wheel - more than once, I'd been making a sharp turn, and suddenly the radio is loud, and on something different, vastly and dangerously distracting me.

    202:

    Ah, yes, "please make U-turn..."

    In Bethesda, I occasionally need to go across to Arlington, VA, when I was first seeing my now-ex, and wanted to take the shorter, non-DC-Beltway route. This is '10 - '12. The directions at one point in the directions, it said, and I kid you not, "make a right, make a u-turn, make a right"... presumably because, as it crossed the cross street, the street changed names.

    203:

    Damn. Back in the early/mid-nineties, I had a net-friend on usenet who said they were going to number my rants... then they never did. Would have been useful.

    Javascript. I don't know how many websites I've been to that YOU COULD DO IN STRAIGHT HTML, but noooo, gotta have javascript to create static pages dynamically, because they actually have NO idea how to write html.

    As my personal website reads, "This site will load faster than yours, because it is proudly written in vi", and is all html, period.

    204:

    You think that's bad? At the blackhat conf just gone there was someone who thinks they have cracked the CAN network isolation between the entertainment and telemetry buses on the 787. Only the actual level 1 control CAN to go.

    All thanks to Boeing leaving 737 max Dev code around on public facing repo's.

    Noticing a pattern with this?

    205:

    Right, I read about that.

    Some needs to hit people over the head with a cluex4, or maybe a cluex12, "Just because you can does NOT MEAN YOU SHOULD", and explain to them in four letter words of one syllable (or maybe two syllables) what KISS means.

    206:

    You aren't thinking. Yes, OF COURSE, you ignore it - but that's not a solution. If you don't know the area, you have the option of taking roads/streets at random, which can lead you back to where you started after an hour of exasperation - or heading right out to somewhere whose name you can remember, then to somewhere else on the other side whose name you can remember, and starting all over again, which can take even longer.

    207:

    I have a complete set, plus a complete street map, on a tablet that I use as a map reader when triking and sometimes when driving. I very, very rarely turn the GPS on when I am a maze of twisty little roads, all alike - or, when the relevant authority hasn't actually labeled any of the streets.

    208:

    More like, the advantages of living in a country that has probably the best mapping service of anywhere in the world. I find it weird to hear non-British people going on about Google maps this and Google maps that because Google maps are fucking shite compared to the Ordnance Survey.

    Uh https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/national-geospatial-program/topographic-maps

    I used to have some but they vanished in a move at some point. Or exist around here and I just don't know where they are.

    And while Google Maps (and other online ones) have their issues they fit in my pocket and get updated. Plus on roads with a moderate amount of traffic they indicate slow downs if you have cell service.

    209:

    10 years ago, I'd occasionally try to look up a route on google maps... and it continually wanted to get me onto an Interstate. As in 10 mi south, get to the interchange take the other interstate back north going west..... They're a little better now, not insisting on the Interstates all the time.

    Amazing that v10 is better than v0.1

    Hard to imagine.

    Currently the Google Maps on my phone allows me to turn on and off such things as toll roads, limited access, avoid traffic, etc... And yes v0.1 didn't have any of that.

    And one thing those paper maps don't do is allow me to look at a sat photo at times to get a feel for just what is ahead. A photo that was typically taken in the last year.

    And for when I'm headed for an area with little cell coverage I can define chunks of maps to cache until I don't want them anymore.

    Mobile mapping is not perfect. But to compare v0.1 with paper topo maps is crazy.

    210:

    You keep talking as if these various system are only TELLING YOU WHAT TO DO.

    I've not ever seen one of those. All of that I know of have a map on a display that you can zoom, scroll, whatever.

    Why do you keep acting as if this doesn't exist.

    And to be honest when I'm using GPS mapping systems I very rarely turn on the turn by turn voice. I like how Google puts up the lane to be in, distance to next decision, and what that is in large letters and I can mount that up where I can see it without eyes off the road. And if with someone hand the them "device".

    211:

    Let me edit that a little for you.

    I turn off the only non-visual directions I get from it, and play with a computer screen that I've mounted to create a blind spot whilst I'm also driving.

    212:

    Because (a) not all do and FAR more importantly, (b) it's a damn sight too small to get yourself out of the hole I describe. GPS walking devices have the same, and I tried using one for that purpose, which is why I have a tablet for that purpose. A tiny little screen with poor resolution doesn't show enough area in enough detail to plot a route that actually gets you anywhere useful.

    Yes, there are places with a relatively small number of roads in a relatively simple layout, but most of the UK is not like that.

    213:

    USGS maps are pretty good. A collection for the US in the same level of detail as your UK collection would take up a bit of space.

    214:

    The Australian government entity now called Geoscience Australia is pretty good too, but they too have long seen the writing on the wall that paper topo maps are dead and stopped printing them altogether around 10 years ago in favour of web based tools.

    215:

    I really like the voice directions from google, because I don't have to look at the map. But I have to sit down at an actual computer to pre-program the route because google assumes everyone drives a Smart car. Even a van is sometimes too big for the little tree-lined back streets that google likes to optimise me down. But that might be because I usually only drive when I move house.

    216:

    scary thing from New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/2213050-hackers-could-use-wi-fi-to-install-ransomware-on-dslr-cameras/

    Cameras that have wifi are likely vulnerable to drive-by attacks when the wifi is on. Canon have a firmware update.

    The article talks about ransomware but I suspect the people most willing to pay ransom will be those least willing to wait even an hour for delivery. To a lot of people "go online and fart about doing complex garbage for half an hour" is going to add to the cost enough to make "buy a new camera" the cheaper option, especially when you add the uncertainty of whether the camera will actually be unlocked at the end of it. It'll only take one or two stories about non-unlocking for the vast majority to treat it simply as bricking and bin their camera.

    217:

    Got an engineering-adjacent question about the "Skyfall"/Pluto type nuclear propulsion engines.

    This isn't about wargames, but about spaceflight. To naive little me, it looks like the problems with making one of these engines work are equivalent to the problems with making a fission or even a fusion rocket work: --The engine gets so hot that the choice of materials that won't melt (or vaporize) under the conditions are starkly limited. --You've still got to steer the thing, which means that you've got to use hydraulics, or something more exotic, under conditions where all the structures are on the verge of melting, thermal expansion is a huge headache, and keeping thermal gradients from decaying that allow the engine to not melt is a critical design issue, as is dealing with the structure buckling under the stress of supplying that much force. --Ideally, you want to keep this bastard daughter of Surtr producing at full output for a long time. And you want to be able to throttle it down, even turn it off, and fire it up again fairly easily.

    So...can this all be done, or are there hard physical constraints that bounce engineers off, mockingly?* Also, for the more faint of heart who aren't materials scientists, does having something equivalent to a working Skyfall engine actually preface, say, a manned Mars mission, if you can keep the crew from coming anywhere near this kind of engine, while keeping it running for years?

    I'm just trying to find a metallic silver heart in this great gloomy cloud of endangered dictators waving bigger and bigger weapons at each other.

    *A constraint like, for instance, the system's too hot even for precision-printed 3-D silicon carbide parts to keep things moving.

    218:

    I’m not sure how you think this works, but when I have used a windscreen mount for devices like that, it obscures a small section of the dashboard and bonnet (I think the correct translation USians might require here is “hood”). Sure it’s possible to create a blind spot, but lots of things provide such an opportunity.

    Many new cars today offer Apple CarPlay or the Android equivalent. This feature turns the car’s own touch screen, usually somewhere on the dashboard, into a docked version of the phone and provides access to the subset of features deemed reasonable to use driving, including Google Maps. I’ve enabled this in hire cars a couple of times, first impression is that it’s great in terms of bringing google maps into the dashboard, but less great if you need google maps and the phone at the same time. When we got a new car recently it was specifically without this feature, and I’m currently undecided about bothering with a windscreen mount. When I’m next driving somewhere unfamiliar that will probably change, it’s just too useful.

    Hands-free talking while driving: sure it might be a distraction, and sure it may be qualitatively different from other distractions, like someone in the passenger seat who won’t stop trying to draw your attention to incompatible cognitive tasks. But no-one is going to stop eating and driving, or a lot of other things that we can police but also come into the category of “just because we can...”. We need to accept that everyone is operating at some sort of deficit while they are driving, and just not do the stupid things that require twitch-reflection response speeds... like speeding, tailgating, undercompensating for conditions, etc.

    “I was driving” is still (just barely) a reasonable excuse for missing a call but the way it fits into life has changed and is changing further.

    219:

    I don't know about nuclear sources but the MBDA Meteor is a throttleable solid fuel ramjet (source MBDA, confirmed as open source using Wikipedia).

    The Eurosam Aster family have a facility called "pif-paf" which can literally make them move cross range whilst still heading down-range.

    So at least 2 of the technologies you want exist in principle if not with the energetics you're asking about.

    220:

    I'm going to say that you obviously believe that it works much better than it does.

    It's a disciplinary offence for someone driving on business at my company to make or take a call whilst the vehicle is moving.

    How much of a windshield is effectively occluded by a display is not just a function of the display, but also of how much extra attention it draws from everywhere else that should be in the driver's field of view, oh and it doesn't take that much to have completely occluded that toddler that just ran into the road, or even to just have you looking at the other side of the car at that moment. Can you live with yourself if you kill a child "because I was reading the sat nav"?

    Compensating for the conditions. How about driving at highway speeds on a course that WILL cause you to come into conflict with a driver doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

    I could go on and on and on and... but this is part of my day job and I'm supposed to be on holiday!

    221:

    The part that I use takes no more attention than the rest of the dash in a modern car. And no it does not create a blind spot when mounted where it is just another part of the dash instrumentation.

    Everyone.

    Staring at a GPS while driving is a great way to get into a wreak. Agreed. I don't do it. I wish no one did but some do.

    As to EC's commments. My screen is plenty big for figuring out where I am in general. If I need to stop and read details I do so. But I don't need a tablet. If EC does then it is great that he has one. Personally I work just fine walking or driving with my phone screen. But I don't "read" it while driving except the very large directions. And I examine the route before using it. And at times put in fake mid points just to get the route to go the way I want. Silly me.

    Not everyone has the exact same needs.

    222:

    Can you live with yourself if you kill a child "because I was reading the sat nav"?

    Now you're just stretching things.

    What about checking your speed when you see a speed limit sign?

    Or looking left (right in the UK) when you see a car coming out of a driveway and/or side road while they said child darts from between cars on the other side?

    223:

    The engine gets so hot that the choice of materials that won't melt (or vaporize) under the conditions are starkly limited. Yes, but with modern knowledge of chemistry and thermodynamics it is hardly a major problems. Even regular modern thermal power stations have to deal with superheated steam, not to talk about latest generation nuclear power. And Russia has quite a lot of experience with even more energy-dense reactors.

    I am not a big professional in nuclear physics, but to my knowledge, most problems come from nuclear transmutation itself. Under these circumstances, everything has to be calculated beforehand because it would be harder to measure and control isotope contents of the reactor. And moreover, these processes aren't 100% understood. So, like in 1986, something must have gone wrong, some theory was insufficient to clearly understand the consequences. Or, if you remember, Bikini atoll, which is most spectacular result of science gone wrong.

    Nuclear reactor has to be stable, controllable and safe for operations, but sometimes you just can't predict how it will behave. Then you embark on experimentation, and then you discover the limits of that model, which is especially, ahem, enlightening if it blows up into your face. Some miscalculation probably lead to surplus reactivity, which in turn resulted in a millisecond delay and it went overboard - which is what one of lead scientists was mentioning, btw (quite ambiguously so).

    I'm just trying to find a metallic silver heart in this great gloomy cloud of endangered dictators waving bigger and bigger weapons at each other. You have to find the brighter side of the things here - biggest "dictators" still have enough sense not to go on rampage to kill all the infidels. And, of course, what we know as progress is mostly a derivation of forms of competition, one of which, incidentally, is a war. After all, what Sun Tzu said, war isn't really about killing, it is about deception and hardly deception kills as many people as incompetence.

    At the end of 20th century quite a lot of people rally believed that the future is possible without confrontation, or that technology get us rid of war and suffering, but such naive notion only brings more problems around. We all have to get rid of these aimless dreams to prevent worst things from happening.

    224:

    Pigeon @ 189 Entirely so - but the number of people who don't get this is ... large.

    I ALSO Have acomplete set of the old 1" to the mile ( !:63 360 scale ) maps, which should tell you something.

    @ 195 NOT ANY MORE - the original 1: 50 000 of London was a disaster - I found something like 23 errors in about 12 minutes (!)

    225:

    I think we're coming from different frames of reference.

    In this case, I'm not concerned about nuclear power per se, because running a nuclear power plant that sits around being hot is, as you note, fairly well understood.

    The Skyfall problem is more akin to the engineering problem with the SR-71. For that plane, the problem wasn't precisely going fast, it was that going extremely fast out made the plane extremely hot, simply through friction. As a result, much of the plane's design was about dealing with the heat, so that it didn't fall apart at full speed.

    A nuclear ramjet, let alone a nuclear rocket or a fusion rocket (same as a ramjet, but the fuel is carried on board), has the same problem only worse. It's hotter, for one thing. That limits the materials to a handful of ceramics (like silicon carbide) and metals like titanium. Steel will fall apart under those temperatures. Additionally, if the machine isn't using fins to control its direction, then it has to vector the thrust. This means it has to take a meticulously shaped engine that's already on the verge of melting (meaning it's soft and also being pushed on hard by the force of its exhaust), and move parts of it around precisely, without the thing deforming and exploding. Even the actuators (whatever they are) are probably going to be close to melting, which means they're going to be soft and may deform rather than vectoring the thrust.

    Overall, getting an engine like this to run is a neat trick. I'm not making a jab at Russian technology, merely pointing out that this looks from the outside like a really hard technological problem. I'm hoping that others who know more about that end of engineering will chime in with their opinions on how doable it is.

    The upside is that if such an engine is feasible, especially if it can be run such an engine for days or months on end, then it's a really hot rocket motor. Which is a good thing, especially if the problem is interplanetary exploration and not planetary politics. That latter option makes me a bit happier about this technology being developed, and I do hope it never gets used in war.

    226:

    You know what? I’m taller than average and most smaller cars position the central rear view mirror in a location that at times entirely occludes car-sized objects at a location in my field of view that frequently contains one, travelling toward me with right of way. I long ago learned that I need to nod or duck my head, or otherwise occasionally peer around it.

    Obviously I’m sympathetic to your present concerns, because I already said up above that I’m not currently using windscreen mounts at all, but I think the trajectory of your argument here in general is wrong headed and some of the things you are saying are plain silly. The main one being that a correctly positioned mount occludes zero (zip, nada) field of view that is not already blocked by the dash itself, or the bonnet. Unless we’re talking about a flying toddler that is approaching slightly above bonnet level I guess. To be fair I would probably try to avoid hitting a bird, so in some ways that could be reasonable, it’s just context and the scale of the issue that is out of proportion.

    In terms of your company banning hands free calls while driving their fleet vehicles - good for them and for you. It does take away the element of individual decision and leave a “one rule for everyone” situation, and that is a good thing. It isn’t the same in the general case though, where hands free is perfectly legal if done within increasingly well defined parameters.

    We are not single-tasking machines. In general the trend with extra technology is to provide is with more information handling ability without reducing our ability to operate in the real world. I totally agree this leads to new and often not-at-all-amusing failure modes. But the path forward isn’t some sort of line in the sand based on our personal experience to date, rather a kind of balance. Which is the same as most things really.

    227:

    I'm presently (with permission and insurance) driving my Mum's Honda Jazz. My preferred driving position and its styling combine such that the bonnet line drops below the base line of the windshield, so the sat nav screen has to only cover the fascia, without also covering one or more of controls, instruments and ventilation outlets to meet your claim that it does not obscure vision. In this case, you'd have to mount it down by your knees!

    More generally, "you're being ridiculous" is not considered a valid answer to the implied question "I think this is a potential hazard you are introducing. How do you intend to mitigate it?" All you're doing is proving that you haven't actually considered the matter properly.

    228:

    I quite like the Jazz and agree that the angles involved would make it less practical to do what I was saying. In an old Camry, which is my use case, the windscreen mount would be positioned as close as possible to the right hand A pillar as low as possible. I can see the way the Jazz is designed with the little quarter window there any mount would occludes some view. On the other hand, every recent Jazz I have seen sports a large touchscreen in the centre of the dash, and I be stunned if this were not upgradable to CarPlay/Android auto.

    As it happens, it was getting a new small car that shifted my own habits. But that’s not a universal, and insisting it is one is silly. You are essentially rejecting my and David’s counter examples to your universal statement (which reflect our different situations) because they don’t apply in your specific situation, and that is what I mean is silly above. I apologise if, as seems to happen often, you are interpreting my statement as universal and see what you are doing as supplying a counter example. This seems like o be an artefact of the medium and happens a lot.

    229:

    Blind spots are not only a spatial phenomenon described by where one thing gets in front of another. There exist also time domain blind spots.

    230:

    One of my mates used to have a Camry, and I'd say it's the one (of the various makes, models and marks I've at least sat in and looked properly at) that is the exception, by feeling like you're driving around with a pool table in front of you. (examples - can't see metal work in front of windshield base, or below the base of any other window except the driver's door in a Citroen C5 mk1, engine cover subtends less vertical arc than a 5" satnav in a Skoda Octavia mk1 where again the driver's 2/3 of the fascia is mostly buttons, vents and instruments, Citroen Xantia (facelift) much as the Octy).

    Never driven anything new enough to have an infotainment device, and don't know that I'd care to because the buttons on it can effectively move when you change mode.

    231:

    I’m taller than average and most smaller cars position the central rear view mirror in a location that at times entirely occludes car-sized objects at a location in my field of view that frequently contains one, travelling toward me with right of way.

    Yes, this.

    I don't normally use a GPS navigation system, but I've got a full size CB radio atop my dash, center mounted, where it would no doubt make a blind spot for a short driver; for me it obscures only a bit of the hood.

    The rear view mirror? It hangs into my vision at one o'clock (in an American left-hand drive vehicle) and is indeed often where I want to be looking for other drivers or things beside the road.

    If the occasion comes up I'll want it remounted higher but that would only gain me a few centimeters.

    232:

    General note on visibility - Whether I agree with you or not, if you've posted on the subject you clearly are thinking about it, and that puts ahead of most people already.

    233:

    I don't know if someone else has responded, but I can't help myself.

    "following the optimal route as decided by your your prat nav, and a critical section is blocked (for any reason), what do you do?"

    Nothing. Because my sat nav gets real time traffic information and had already rooted me around the blockage. Everyone else who has one is constantly updating the actual speeds along that road, so it even routes me around congestion.

    If the blockage literally happens in front of me I can just randomly go down a side street and it recalculates the fastest route. I just ride 90 degrees to the old route until it takes me down a different road.

    I don't have to pull out maps, find my location by reading street signs in the dark while trying to keep them dry.

    234:

    Neither do I; my car has map lights.

    235:

    Im going to second that, i mean it sounds like hardly anyone else in this thread ever uses google maps!

    The big thing i find is not to try and second guess google its being continuously updated by millions of drivers. every time ive though "i know a better route than this" i've discovered temp roadworks, broken down bus blocking rd or other unknown to me delay

    236:

    Lots have responded, so I shouldn't have, I didn't add anything.

    However, while your car may have a map light, my motorcycle doesn't.

    On a trip I used to pick a map, fold it to the right part and put it in the clear pocket on top of my tank bag. Paper maps don't zoom, so I could see my road go into a town, 6 roads leave the town, but the streets within the town were just a circle labeled "nowheresville".

    At night it was memory or snatched glimpses under streetlights.

    I don't miss the past.

    237:

    And look in general I agree with your concerns. My point is that there aren’t absolute statements here that are universally true for everyone. But I also didn’t really address your totally valid query about mitigation (partly just distracted by the line-of-sight thing).

    User interface or user experience (aka “UX”) designers are starting to call this “cognitive load”, though when you look through the academic literature on that term (or “cognitive load theory”) this generally seems to have come from the world of training. This crowd would probably be happier with the studies of aircraft control systems and keeping the pilot engaged despite not actually having much to do (not something I’ve looked at myself and half remember this much detail after reading some pop-sci article maybe 25 years ago). The main emphasis seems to be on presenting information in a form that is aligned enough to the mental model of the situation the user must have (or at least likely has) constructed that its real use is to update the model, something that a brief glance will do nicely (and often better than a verbal direction). This is what we’re usually doing when we check the speed, for instance. The distractions that are really disruptive are the ones that make it harder to maintain the mental model (which is probably why conversations with someone who is not physically present are more distracting - someone who is there will at least partly share that mental model).

    Maps are really interesting. I grew up using maps, I got around mostly on foot and by public transport, and even as a kid carried a street directory around as sort of life equipment (yes having that on my phone now is a real boon). My mental model for my location, partly as a result, included a reference to absolute direction. That is I would think “that’s east, that’s west” rather than “that’s left, that’s right” if I happened to be facing south. People who do that are extremely good at dead reckoning to an extent that people who don’t seem to find spooky, but I’m sure that’s not an unusual experience in this group. Anyway this also means that the assumptions involved in the usual sort of satnav model don’t work well with an absolute perspective. That means changing the internal model to suit a more relative sense of position. But having done that, the information you get aligns pretty well. Not perfect and a work in progress, but also not as distracting as you might think, at least not in all circumstances.

    238:

    I like maps, too. Also, I'm going hiking in a couple of weeks, and I already bought a paper map of the area. I wouldn't trust an electronic device for that, though we will take with us a hand-held GPS device with the route points already set. A compass is of course a necessity, and in a bad situation it (or even using the sun to tell the compass directions) should be enough to get us back to the civilization. Google maps on a mobile phone? Ha. I don't plan to even turn on my phone more than once a day for a short time if we even get any reception.

    But when in an unfamiliar place I like the phone maps, too. Maps do get outdated - like last time we went to Stockholm, I found some map over ten years old and it wasn't that accurate anymore. Google maps served well the couple of times we needed that.

    When driving, I'm usually not alone, so there often are at least two people in the car, and then the other drives and the other reads the map, either a paper one or the one on some electronic device.

    239:

    I also like fantasy maps. I remember the time when our game-master got the RuneQuest module 'Griffin Island' (the 'Griffin mountain', but taken outside of Glorantha and made into an island), and made us adventure there - we got the prop map and immediately planned where our characters would go and see what's there.

    240:

    For a blockage in its database, yes, but I am talking about ones that aren't, which are VERY common once you are off the main arterial networks (and sometimes even then). Recent accidents, breakdowns at pinch points, minor roads or less-busy streets being closed and so on. It includes things like blocking a road without ANY warning due to gas and water leaks, subsidence, slipped loads etc. I have been in cars with people who were relying on prat navs when they hit one of them, and their universal reaction was "Help! What do I do now?"

    241:

    Car-drivers visual domain .... I have an "unfair" advantage - most car-driver's heads are about level with my waist, if Im standing on the pavement ... but in the Great Green Beast, my eye-level is evera centimetres higher than my "standing" level. I cam also see all 4 corners of the car, of course.

    242:

    Do you imagine their reaction would be any different if they had a paper map in the car?

    243:

    Well, in those terms I can understand and agree. That's also what I meant about not wanting touch-screen "infotainment" that redesigns the interface depending on whether it's being a pratnav, streaming service for pap muzik, controls for the climate control, output for a diagnostic code reader (and a single screen that does all these things to some extend does exist).

    Para 3 - I do the absolute direction thing too - If this is SSE, then right must be WSW...

    244:

    Well, that helps you, but does mean that the GGB blocks the view of anyone driving something smaller...

    245:

    What I do depends on where I am.

    Near home, BigFruit is usually about 20 minutes behind actual traffic. I usually use my phone for directions, because if there's a truly serious blockage, it's already in the system and I get routed around. Getting caught in one less than 20-30 minutes old is a problem, of course.

    In Hawai'i, especially on Oahu, it's a different story. BigFruit can't pronounce Hawaiian words (Kamehameha came out "Camelhaha"), and their bad joke of "slight left turn" (meaning its not 90 degrees, but some other number) got us lost more than once. Then there was a bad direction to a small, north shore town that sent us down a dirt road to someone's farm. After a spousal argument (my SO trusts the phone far more than I do) we got turned around via paper backup (I'm not entirely stupid) and drove back, only to notice that two other cars were following us. That farmer must get really annoyed.

    Ironically, the BigFruit street navigation around the Monterey Bay area is far worse than in SoCal. The irony is that Monterey is pretty close to BigFruit and Boggle headquarters, so you'd think they'd have all their goof-off destinations mapped precisely. Evidently not, and I'm not sure why.

    246:

    Never driven anything new enough to have an infotainment device, and don't know that I'd care to because the buttons on it can effectively move when you change mode.

    Three years ago I bought a new car. This was after a 5 year stint of driving 5 hours into the DC area and back 10+ times per year. Each time with a rental. So I got to try out a lot of cars. The new car replaced a Ford Explorer that I had been driving for 15+ years.

    Anyway, I had grown to hate the dash layout of the Explorer. And driving all those different rentals for long periods of time convinced me that most cars have a lousy dash layout and that would be one of the most important parts of my next car decision.

    I wound up with a Honda Civic with the high end trim package. (I was limiting my search to sedans under $35K and tried most every model out there.) The dash you see behind the wheel is fully electronic and can be set to show a set of things that are large, useful, easy to see day or night, and easy to glance at while driving. Center dash information / entertainment is similar. A big reason it works is that the soft buttons show up in the same place and are large enough to hit without concentration. (Toyota NOT). My only real gripe in terms of usability is the steering wheel buttons could be better but were quickly learned and much better than most other cars I tried.

    Now one time my rental was a GMC Jimmy (I think) small SUV and the center console controls were all silver buttons maybe 2cm square in this massive grid. That setup had to cause wreaks as drivers tried to turn on the AC or similar and got the theft alarm or something.

    247:

    The big thing i find is not to try and second guess google its being continuously updated by millions of drivers.

    Of course when you get to an area where the cell service is terrible then when you get off the main road to take a side road you find that the route is clear due to no cell service but is bumper to bumper traffic.

    US 1 near I-95 a bit south of DC. Oey Vey.

    EC. In general here you seem to be wanting to say that the idiots who get on the news for doing really stupid things with a GPS are normal. Well, there are more of them around than I like but normal? Nope. At least not in the US. Maybe the UK is different. :)

    248:

    I'm guessing a bit here, but I think that EC is arguing, correctly, that some people blindly trust that it will all be OK when their PratNav says "drive forwards down this slipway into the sea." Or "drive your 10' wide truck though that 8' wide gap; it'll be fine.".

    I've been lost and/or misdirected more times in 300 miles relying on a TomTom than I normally am in 100_000 miles using road signs, maps and local knowledge!

    249:

    What I "hear" him saying is that all PratNav usage is crap. I disagree.

    But I do feel that stand alone sat navs are way past their time. And never were all that good. Which includes those built into cars. (At least in the US.)

    Google/Apple/Bing (unless it has gone away) are all soooooo much better.

    My 2016 high end Civic GPS is great for use as a map. For directions, mediocre to porr. The thing it does best is tell my in 2cm tall letters what the next cross street is. Handy that.

    250:

    Nope, but they have a solution in their hands! What I have been saying from the start is that RELIANCE on prat navs is bad, which is what most of their users do. I gave one example of a failure mode, but there are many others that regularly cause their users to get jammed, to the great inconvenience of everyone in the vicinity. 25% hills and caravans/trailers are another simple example.

    And, as I pointed out in #176, even I would make use of one under some (rare) circumstances. But they are rare enough, and the cost of making a mistake using solely a map (which I do) low enough, that it isn't worth the expense, irritation and distraction.

    251:

    Just a thought, but perhaps this might be helpful to the discussion:

    • If you blindly trust a sat nav without understanding it's limitations, you will have a poor experience.

    • If you don't understand how to read a paper map, they won't help you.

    • If you can't use a sat nav (eyesight, etc), then they're not for you.

    • If a map is useless for whatever reason (weather, scale, date, etc), then don't use one.

    Perhaps (and I'm going waaaaaay out on a limb here!) these different tools may have different use case scenarios that may vary wildly person to person, and just possibly neither is superior or inferior in all circumstances?

    252:

    That's actually why I like the 17 physical buttons on the Chevy Bolt steering wheel. Every single one of them is a different shape in a different position. You can spin the wheel and toggle switches upside down and still do it right, without taking your eyes off the road. It's basically like a video game controller, and it's good design, although I expect if it ever breaks, I'm going to howl at the replacement cost.

    I much prefer this to the center console touch screen, where I have to look to use it.

    253:

    steering wheel. ... It's basically like a video game controller, and it's good design, although I expect if it ever breaks, I'm going to howl at the replacement cost.

    Ever read about the price of Indy/F1 cars steering wheels. 10 years ago it was around $10K. I think 4 to 5 times that now.

    https://www.mclaren.com/racing/2017/indy-500/steering-wheel-indy-f1-3188887/

    254:

    100% of the time, I LOOK AT THE MAP(S) before I ever get on the road. That way, when something goes wrong, I have ideas on how to go around them... like the time the Tomtom was insisting I got onto that street... which was in Port of Baltimore, across railroad tracks, and there was NO WAY that tank car was going to be moving that day....

    255:

    I have three simple answers.

  • You have the nuclear rocket engine at a distance from the habitat - a long way back, or off to the side (gee, who would have designed something like that, Mr. Roddenberry?)

  • Use magnetic control of the exhaust itself, which is ionized, and thus maneuverable.

  • Use some simple hypergols to change what you're aimed at, not move the engine in the ship.

  • 256:

    Yer alla buncha wimps. In my day, when we played D&D, the DM spent weeks designing a dungeon, and when they opened it for play, someone was designated as mapper, and had physical graph paper and pencils...

    And yeah, I guarantee that my dungeons were odder, and occasionally quirkier, than anything you buy. And, some monsters of my very own....

    257:

    Hey, if you're still driving into the DC area, let me know, and we can have dinner or something.

    Any chance of you making Capclave (capclave.org)?

    And I will have a lot more free time.

    Ok, folks, this is as good a time as any: I will have that extra time, because I gave notice last month, and my last regular full day at work is this coming Tuesday.

    When folks ask me where I'm going (as in to another job), my answer is "home". Yep, I'm retiring. More time to write, more time to keep up with the yard (bleah!), and my lady & I will do cons, and even non-con-related travel.

    And, with that, since I am no longer in a position to influence or be influenced - yeah, I've been over the top on ethics - I've mentioned that I've been working for 10 years (as of tomorrow) for a federal contractor, but haven't said where. My answer to that is, "...so I'm with the government, and I'm here to help you."

    Well, yes, I am: I've been at the NIH, so I really *did mean it.

    • The National Institutes of Health, the biggest and most advanced biomedical and bioscience research agency in the world (well, except for GOP budget cuts....)
    258:

    Yep, but that's not what they're doing with Skyfall, so far as I can tell. It appears they're planning on vectoring its thrust. Somehow. Thus, I am intrigued.

    259:

    And, if you are trying, for the first time, to drive from somewhere you've never been before to somewhere else you've never been before 140 miles away, in the dark?

    260:

    Slight difference; when using a pratnav, sometimes if you get it wrong, you die in real life!

    261:

    Yeah, but have you ever looked at the price of an Indy Car?

    Here's the Bolt's wheel: https://www.motortrend.com/cars/chevrolet/bolt-ev/2018/#izmo-2018-chevrolet-bolt-ev-lt-hatchback-steering-wheel

    Much more boring. But it works. Note that you can't see three of the buttons, because they're behind the wheel where your fingers hit them when you grip the wheel.

    262:

    Hey, if you're still driving into the DC area, let me know, and we can have dinner or something.

    Real inside the park conversation now.

    OK. That period is over. It was me dealing with my mother in law's town home in Laurel after we had to move her out. And the sisters not agreeing on how to best deal with it for 4 years. [eyeroll]

    I don't get back much now except as a tourist or on my way to somewhere else. But I will be there at the end of Sept for a funeral at Arlington.

    Ask Charlie to send me your email.

    263:

    Well, we had played D&D for a couple of years when we started playing RuneQuest, and I still have many, many sheets of graph paper filled to the brim with dungeon corridors, monster, traps, and treasure. It was fun getting the players to map those, and there were always some errors.

    We kind of got bored with that and started playing different games. Occasionally I break out D&D (nowadays 5e, skipped 3.X and 4, and Pathfinder) and run a nostalgic D&D dungeon romp, but mostly I enjoy different roleplaying games nowadays.

    (Yeah, I understand that the comment I replied to was a joke.)

    264:

    That's not generally a big problem but, as always, it's the exceptions that bite.

    To DavetheProc (#251): well, sort-of, but the big problem with prat navs is that they are designed for, used by and encourage the dumbest common denominator. A huge proportion of consumer electronics and Web interfaces is like that, and it sends me bananas. The result is that the users do not engage what they are pleased to call their brains, which is why the term 'prat nav' is justified.

    A secondary problem in the UK is that the sort of failure mode I described is not rare - and being directly connected to an equatorial satellite isn't really feasible, because of the amount of the road network where signals from those are inaccessible. GPS-style coverage would be feasible but, as far as I know, isn't available.

    Yeah, give me design control over a major multinational's prat nav facilities and I could fix all that, to a great extent. But the chances of that are ....

    265:

    In the case you replied to, there was a software engineer, an electronics and radar engineer, and a project manager... The software engineer used an application like Bing maps (can't remember actual name) and the PM had a TomTom. Neither software told us about one turning we needed until 15 miles after we missed it the TomTom did "at the...around".

    On the return trip it literally did "take the next right" as we approached a junction marked "left turn only": Not what you need when makeing off to catch an aeroplane!

    As for GPS, somewhere up-thread I report 300 feet of Lewisian Gneiss descending at 20m/s...

    266:

    Charlie, Enjoy Worldcon! I see Scalzi is there as well; perhaps he can drag you to the burrito restaurant he found in Dublin (who'da thunk it?).

    267:

    "burrito restaurant in Dublin" not surprised. OTOH Scalzi is USian. ;-)

    268:

    Moderators, please do send him my real email.

    269:

    I had a similar issue with GPS, and found out that the vertical accuracy is only about a tenth of the horizontal. There are ways to get good vertical accuracy out of ordinary GPS, but they are a hell of a faff and not possible on commodity hand-held devices.

    270:

    Yikes.

    I just checked polling and remain/leave has gone from 48/38 to 44/42 between February and May. God knows what it is now. In any event a new referendum is not a slam dunk either way.

    YouGov

    271:

    The further note on that is that Corbyn's waffling looks prescient and the People's Vote types should be careful what they wish for.

    272:

    Okay, official source actually confirmed that it was just a really big isotope power source that pretty much explosively depressurized.

    Визуально источник представляет собой коробку метр на метр, — рассказал «Известиям» главный редактор профильного портала Atomic-Energy.ru Павел Яковлев. — Радиоактивный элемент тщательно упакован в свинцовую защиту. Энергию вырабатывает делящийся элемент — слабый изотоп. Он выделяет тепло, оно преобразуется в электричество. Это надежные устройства, с ними никогда не возникало проблем. При разрушении они создают минимальное заражение в радиусе 30–40 метров, которое не представляет особой угрозы для окружающей среды.

    Nevertheless, great to observe news streams these days, filled with controversial, self-defeating and plain fake news messages, topped by spicy Chernobyl memes. I've spend some time studying them, so what do we know today:

    • that was a new missile
    • that missile is very dangerous
    • it threatens nuclear treaty
    • except the treaty is already dropped
    • it isn't actually a missile, it was engine
    • it wasn't actually new
    • it is probably a PR stunt
    • that missile technology is actually stolen from US
    • it is not superior at all
    • except it actually is
    • the accident threatens further development
    • and may actually never be deployed
    • there was a nuclear blast
    • the blast is smaller than Chernobyl
    • the government hides information and denies everything (duh)

    Well, this is not a full list, anyway, there's a lot of freelance experts in the world. Watching them argue about different topics is practically like observing a bunch of toddlers playing in a sandbox with a lot of toys. Some more "explosive" (in laughter) news include:

    Some agencies managed to confuse the word "blast" with different accident at ammunition storage. https://www.rt.com/news/466403-nuclear-explosion-russia-fake/

    The missile cannot exist! https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/08/14/i-dont-believe-a-missile-is-to-blame-for-russias-deadly-nuclear-explosion-a66849

    Watchdog ecologists - charge! https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-blast-crime/russian-nuclear-agency-committed-crime-by-holding-test-near-city-ecologist-idUSKCN1V5202

    273:

    The classic problem with trucks and satnavs is that the driver is using a bog-standard system rather than a more expensive version that allows you to enter the height (and sometimes length) of your vehicle before suggesting a route.

    Meanwhile, back at the washing machines... https://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk/help/buying-advice/washing-machine/4389-washing-machine-wash-performance

    274:

    The only part of "satnavs and trucks" that is not a solved problem (at least in principle) is getting truck drivers to acquire and correctly configure a "truck satnav".

    275:

    Looking at the map to have an idea of where you're going is very effective.

    Especially for me because my normal mode of transport (bike+train) uses roads very differently to how trucks or even cars do, so the same landscape appear very different. There's much less of it for motorists, for example, as there are a huge number of route options that are unavailable. Flip side is that places that are very available to motorists are often technically available to bicycles but suicidal in practice.

    Which means that when I do drive I am almost always driving in places that I haven't been before, even if I'm within 100m of where I live. Moving house was very much that, the bike ride to the rental place shared maybe 300m of an 8km trip with the return by truck.

    (happy retirement, BTW, I have been meaning to say)

    276:

    Oh ha ha. In Australia truck satnavs seem to have all the same problems as general satnavs with a few extra exciting twists. They're mostly designed for long-haul routing and I suspect they do that pretty well, but last-mile routing is still quite error-prone. The difference between "I can get my truck down this narrow street" and "I can't get my truck under this low bridge" is not well understood, and often google street view is from so low down that it doesn't give an accurate idea of vegetation (overhanging trees can be just as effective as bridges).

    It has been fun watching the apartment construction process on my way to work because the dump trucks have been slowly pruning the trees along the route. Or not so slowly in the case of one lovely spreading tree in the middle of a roundabout... it doesn't look like that any more. You can drive a 3.5m high truck underneath it now.

    277:

    GPS-style coverage would be feasible but, as far as I know, isn't available.

    OK. Now I'm lost. The US GPS system works almost up to the north and south poles. And maybe there. If you can "see" 4 sats you get coverage.

    Are you saying that GPS devices in the UK don't use the US system or something else that I've just totally missed?

    278:

    E were talking about bidirectional data rather than GPS. Viz, cellphones etc. Just having a GPS signal doesn't tell you anything about traffic density or delays.

    279:

    paws4thot @ 164: Bluetooth!!

    "Aim low boys! He's riding a Shetland Pony!"

    Duh. 8^) Thanks. That one went right over my head. Carry on.

    280:

    John Hughes @ 166: Turns out we're both wrong -- it was "Nothing sucks like Electrolux" in the 1960's, VAX (the vacuum cleaners) started using the slogan in 1986.

    Cool. Now I know. I wonder what they were thinking?

    281:

    paws4thot @ 168: Is sort of do and sort of don't agree about Prat-Nav. My sis recently made a trip that involved a 5.25 mile diversion (road closed closed due work on new bypass) the way she went, or I think about twice that distance off the usual road (probably slightly shorter but all 2-lane where my normal route is 60% dual carriageway) by its diversion.

    The real danger is "follow the prat nav", because that's how trucks start delivering bridges, or drivers dip their headlights in 3 feet of water...

    I just can't blindly follow the instructions from GPS. I don't care what the driver's test examiner says, if you don't know more than the system and can't anticipate where it's going to be WRONG, you're gonna' be in trouble.

    I wonder how many of these guys are following Sat-Nav.

    282:

    I'm thinking that your driving use case is different from mine.

    Postulate for your base case with paper maps...a directionally challenged individual with very limited persistent memory and not terribly great eyesight. And for whom, frankly, the processing required for driving is a bit overwhelming in its own right. And who is, for work, often required to travel to unfamiliar locations at odd hours. (Bearing in mind the number times this individual got lost in his hometown.). Also assume, that to cut down on parking, most locations avoid allowing for anywhere to stop. (Possibly US thing)

    Therefore, the workflow for paper maps looks something like this. 1. Write down landmarks. 2. Find directions on map. 3. Every 5-7 minutes, fish paper with landmarks from floor of car and squint at it while driving at speed. 4. Every 10-20 minutes, until first missed direction, fish directions from under seat and read them, all at speed. 5. After first missed direction, (and there will be at least one missed direction) unfold map, also at speed, and try to find location and revised route. Also, at speed.

    Bear in mind that the road is mostly obscured during all of these review procedures.

    Now, you could rationally argue that this is suicidally dangerous. Yes, yes, it is. You might try to argue that the individual should pull over and work out directions. By experiment, owing to the rather long distances between allowable stops, that procedure doesn't converge to a desired destination. Yes, I tried, a lot. Oddly, this individual's accident rate is lower than typical for an American.

    Now, I'd argue that the use of prat navs is significantly safer, at least for this prat. You can argue a bunch of low probability failure modes - but - when compared to driving down a freeway or commercial district at speed while reading a paper map and not looking at the road...the difference isn't small. Particularly since, by the time I stop after a wrong turn, there is often a fair bit of hiking just to find something on the map.

    Nowadays I mostly walk places - but the prat nav is still qualitatively better than I am. I rather envy those of you who don't get lost constantly. But...the prat nav actually eliminated a significant source of stress in my life and I'd put it in the top 10 of personally impactful technologies of the last century. (Hugs GPS). And, while I'm a bit of an outlier - I am far from alone.

    283:

    Thanks, found some articles (e.g. here) with that text, and google translate to English is, well, interesting. Better than it used to be though. There is another confirming argument being made, by this quy, Mystery explosion at Nenoksa test site: it’s probably not Burevestnik (August 15, 2019 Michael Kofman), who argues that because 5 intelligent specialists were killed, they did not expect any significant danger, which argues for well-understood power sources. (isotopic). This is consistent with the text that you linked. Let’s ask first order questions. Why did five leading researchers die? If it was a missile test why would they be near the missile? I know I’m always standing next to experimental missiles I’m testing, it’s the best way to see the explosion. If it was an experimental nuclear reactor, why were they standing next to it at the time of the mishap? I know I always stand next to experimental nuclear reactors I’m testing. Typically when people stand around things, it is because they don’t expect them to explode or massively irradiate them. If this is a likelihood, the researchers are usually quite far away from the device when it is being tested. VNIIEF stated they had spent a year preparing for this test, so probably they had thought about their own safety for some time.

    284:

    Also - a mild realization that I'd like to check - in terms of upcoming economic displacement - there has been an assertion that autonomous trucks are far off because city driving is much harder than highway. With highway basically there and city quite a ways off. (In particular, by comparison to that drunken idiot who collided a gasoline tanker into my friends family by driving ~125 mph on the wrong side of the road.)

    Anyways, exactly how bright would a capitalist have to be to set up parking lots next to major good nexi and just let drivers take over for the last couple of miles? I'd guess you could appreciably lower the number of hours required for truckers. That would quite measurably raise the unemployment rate and should happen within the next 5ish years.

    285:

    Para 1 - Such things have happened before; the 507th MC happen to be about the 3rd (counting blue on blue air attacks on ground units) since we tried to apply elvin safety to war. Not suggesting that satnav helped; just that it's not the unique factor you appear to suggest.

    Para 2 - Unless they're using a specialist and correctly configured for the vehicle truck sat nav, it won't make any real difference I'd say. It will say, "at the intersection, go straight ahead" and they will do so even though "the chickens are stacked to the 13 foot line, and the bridge is clearance to 11 foot nine" (the extra inch makes the rhyme work).

    Until the bus company got rid of the double deckers at one depot, there were similar incidents involving thankfully unloaded vehicles striking a 12'6" bridge rather than taking a short and well known local diversion near my Mum's house.

    286:

    Well, the reason a real nuclear expert is standing next to an experimental device when something goes horribly wrong is normally that they're trying to keep something from going horribly wrong, and either they succeeded (it could have been much worse) or they did not but died trying anyway. I have enormous respect for any engineer or tech who runs towards the problem to keep it from getting worse.

    The alternative explanation is that someone didn't know what they were doing, and it blew up on them.

    It could be both. I'm not sure all the reasons why Project Pluto was abandoned, but so far as I know, the prototype engine only ever burned for five minutes. Beyond that, so far as I know, is unexplored territory where all sorts of things might go wrong. One of the fundamental problems is that it's an air-cooled nuclear reactor, so if there's turbulence or something that slows the air down, things could get bad fairly quickly, since air holds less heat per volume than water does, and that heat has to go somewhere.

    287:

    "...the 17 physical buttons on the Chevy Bolt steering wheel... like a video game controller"

    Sounds awful...

    "you can't see three of the buttons, because they're behind the wheel where your fingers hit them when you grip the wheel."

    Sounds bloody awful... :)

    I don't think I've got 17 functions... let's see:

    Lights: off, side, head Wipers: off, fast, slow Indicator stalk: off, left, right, headlamp flash, headlamp dip/main toggle Heater fan: off, fast, slow Hazard lights: toggle Fog lights: toggle

    Yep... still only 16 even if there was a separate button for each function, instead of 6 switches. None of which are on the steering wheel, though the indicator stalk is on the steering column so the functions which are actually used often are ready to hand.

    288:

    Oops! Horn. And that is on the steering wheel. I just completely forgot about it because I never use it...

    289:

    Troutwaxer @ 192: On the subject of SATNAV, hearing a voice tell me when to turn is a thousand times better than driving around with a map book in my lap and trying to read it while getting someplace.

    Yeah, I never did that.

    I always found it easier to pull over somewhere - preferably the parking lot at McDonald's so I could get a cup of coffee while I consulted the maps (multiple) to figure out how to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. My service territory was slightly over 40,000 square miles; the "eastern" two thirds of North Carolina. Mostly connected by two-lane highways and frequently there was not a direct route even using those. Having a good map book of all the COUNTY roads in North Carolina helped.

    I'm pretty damn good with maps, but I don't like to be trying to read one at the same time I'm driving. The problem with the voice interface on the SatNav is it doesn't give you directions soon enough, and sometimes not clearly enough.

    Don't tell me "Turn right now." Does that mean "turn right now" or "turn right NOW...?

    Tell me "You should be in the right-hand lane to make a right turn at the upcoming traffic signal." ... and tell me just as soon as we pass through the preceding controlled intersection so I have time to get into the correct lane despite the assholes trying to block me out just for spite.

    Helpful Hint: In North America, if you're really having a problem finding an address, stop at a Fire Station and ask whoever is on duty how to find it. They HAVE to know where everything is and they have access to GIS systems not generally available to the public. Park on the side of the building so you don't block the trucks if they have to roll while you're in there.

    290:

    Sheesh, how unimaginative:

    The buttons on the Bolt are (behind the wheel on the left) regenerative brake paddle. Yes, it's a hand brake that's really useful, but it doesn't apply the disk or drum brakes.

    On the right: two buttons, up and down volume control for the radio.

    On the left below, two paddles that let you move the preset radio station up and down.

    The rest on the console, are five buttons for cruise control that I don't use, a button that heats the steering wheel (I rarely use it, but it's nice on a cold day, and along with the heated seats it saves energy on warming the cabin up), a button that turns on/off the lane tracker (beeps if you drift out of your lane, as the car has eight cameras on board), a button that answers the phone if it's plugged in, a button that hangs up or silences the phone if it's plugged in, and four arrows and an enter key to fiddle with the information displayed around the speedometer. Oh, and the horn. Then it's got the usual left and right levers, one doing turn signals and the other doing washer wiper, front and back.

    If you think about it, most of the buttons on the steering wheel are for fiddling with the setup, unless you're lucky enough to be in conditions where cruise control actually works, which is almost never in SoCal. Otherwise, the radio controls are pretty intuitive and the brake is really fun, to the point where my finger twitches for it on other cars.

    I'm actually not sure of the utility of cruise control. I suppose that if I was a serious hypermiler I'd use it, but generally I'm in stop and go traffic, so maintaining a constant speed is useless. That's the other nice thing about eCars. When you're stuck in a traffic jam, you're not burning gas, you're using less electricity, and the slower you go, the longer your range. For commuters, that's a real benefit.

    291:

    I just know I've got more functionality:-

    Lights: off, side, head Wipers: off, fast, slow, 5 delays on intermediate, flick. Screen wash, which will give a few sweeps of wipers automatically Indicator stalk: off, left, right, headlamp flash, headlamp dip/main toggle Heater fan: off, plus 8 different speeds Temperature: Low, 18 to 28 step 1 C, High Climate Control mode - Auto, economy, defrost and air recirculate Hazard lights: toggle Fog lights: toggle - rear fog toggle but only when front already selected.

    OK, so that's 46 functions I think, but the fan speed and air temp are controlled by 4 buttons, and the intermittent delay by one thumb-wheel on the wiper stalk so call it 26. They all stay where they are, and climate modes Auto and Defrost over-ride a manual fan speed setting.

    292:

    Heteromeles @ 252: That's actually why I like the 17 physical buttons on the Chevy Bolt steering wheel. Every single one of them is a different shape in a different position. You can spin the wheel and toggle switches upside down and still do it right, without taking your eyes off the road. It's basically like a video game controller, and it's good design, although I expect if it ever breaks, I'm going to howl at the replacement cost.

    On a slightly different note ... The AC in my Jeep died yesterday. I was 225 miles away from home on a 99°F (37°C) 90% humidity day. I've got a new little traveling companion buddy & he was miserable. But we survived & made it back home. I don't know how people survived here in the south before air conditioning. It's a $1,300 USD repair, but I've got rainy day savings EXACTLY in case of something like this. I should get it back on Saturday or Monday. Fortunately there's nowhere I need to be I can't get to on the bus or walking (or just say EFF IT, I'll stay home).

    This is my NEW car that was 14 years old when I bought it and is 16 years old now. Even with the repairs it's still cheaper than if I had to buy an actual new (quick internet search the closest 2019 model I can find is $36,000 - $600+ for 60 months).

    293:

    By your argument from para 6, since I left my car at home when I came to visit my Mum, I'm getting infinite gas mileage.

    294:

    whitroth @ 256: Yer alla buncha wimps. In my day, when we played D&D, the DM spent weeks designing a dungeon, and when they opened it for play, someone was designated as mapper, and had physical graph paper and pencils...

    And yeah, I guarantee that my dungeons were odder, and occasionally quirkier, than anything you buy. And, some monsters of my very own....

    I've been reading an on-line fantasy novel called "Worth the Candle" that's kind of Dungeons & Dragons based.

    https://archiveofourown.org/works/11478249/navigate

    I'm enjoying it, but I do find it helpful to keep a spreadsheet in addition to drawing a map as I go along.

    I never really got into Dungeons & Dragons or other role playing games. Never had the time or the social skills to find a group I could join.

    295:

    Bill Arnold @ 283: Thanks, found some articles (e.g. here) with that text, and google translate to English is, well, interesting. Better than it used to be though.
    There is another confirming argument being made, by this quy,
    Mystery explosion at Nenoksa test site: it’s probably not Burevestnik (August 15, 2019 Michael Kofman),who argues that because 5 intelligent specialists were killed, they did not expect any significant danger, which argues for well-understood power sources. (isotopic). This is consistent with the text that you linked.
    Let’s ask first order questions. Why did five leading researchers die? If it was a missile test why would they be near the missile? I know I’m always standing next to experimental missiles I’m testing, it’s the best way to see the explosion. If it was an experimental nuclear reactor, why were they standing next to it at the time of the mishap? I know I always stand next to experimental nuclear reactors I’m testing. Typically when people stand around things, it is because they don’t expect them to explode or massively irradiate them. If this is a likelihood, the researchers are usually quite far away from the device when it is being tested. VNIIEF stated they had spent a year preparing for this test, so probably they had thought about their own safety for some time.

    Piecing together from several different news reports ... I got the impression they test fired a missile of some sort from an off-shore platform and the missile ended up in the drink. The explosion occurred after they recovered the missile and were examining it to see what had gone wrong.

    I got the impression there was some kind of chemical explosion - perhaps fuel/oxidizer reacting with sea water - and that explosion damaged the isotope generator causing the radiation release.

    It's an accidental "dirty bomb", not a nuclear engine blowing up.

    296:

    I left my car at home when I came to visit my Mum, I'm getting infinite gas mileage.

    If its fossil fuelled it's actually suffering fuel evaporation (non-zero use) for zero distance covered (unless it's been stolen or towed) so you're getting zero miles per non-zero gallon.

    Mind you so is the electric... battery self-discharge plus the "standby" consumption of the electronics.

    297:

    Yeah, without AC, you've got to do the driving gloves and experiment with the ol' 470 AC (four windows down, 70 mph. That would be around 4110 in the saner parts of the world).

    298:

    I drive a diesel, the tank vent that fumes would escape through is about 0.125" diameter, oh yes and I'm one of these weird Scots people who describe 20C as"too hot", a bit like OGH with a stronger Scots accent!

    299:

    Pigeon / Heteromeles, etc Car controls Horn / Windscreen Wash ... wipe slow ... wipe fast .. one twitch Indicators / all of them ( i.e. hazard ) Lights / side / full / main-beam + fog + rear fog Fan / slow / fast / Rear-screen heater Oh yes ... hidden-in-plain-sight fuel cut-off Extra gear lever for "Lock the transmission" &/or Low Ratio & eaxtra switch for overdrive ( That's right I have THREE sets of gear ratios )

    JBS @ 289 Hadn't thought of the fire-station trick, though I've done that a couple of time at Police stations ... including the classic ocasion (MANY years ago) when I stopped in Basingstoke, because I was hoplessly lost - & the cops said - "Don't ask us, they change the layout every month & we can't keep up!" ... Directions to a small FC ground in Basingstoke for a visiting team & spectators included the word "roundabout" 27 times ......

    @ 297 Oops, forgot the Land-Rover patent Air-Con - the two flaps just under the top of the console on either side, that open to let fresh air straight in. If you open the rear slider-window(s) a little - to the first notch, you get a lovely cooling airflow.

    300:

    I've done the "Police station trick" too. Sometimes without the location in question being manned; I used a non-emergency land line that connected directly to a manned station.

    301:

    Yes, though I don't know how much is bidirectional. I carry a satellite telephone sometimes, and it is really quite tricky to get a connection. Even in the south of the UK mainland, 40 degrees above the horizon towards the south is often obstructed by buildings, trees and even hills - and that's 32 degrees in the north of the UK mainland. And Wifi connection in many places (often the same ones) is equally bad, too.

    GPS has similar problems, but less severe ones, and is really only inaccessible when you have too little open sky.

    302:

    Hadn't thought of the fire-station trick, though I've done that a couple of time at Police stations ...

    That reminds me of a situation which can now be avoided by prat-nav systems.

    Many years ago on a family trip my mother was having a lot of trouble finding the hotel she was trying to find in Niagara Falls, the city not the actual waterfall, and we spent a while circling around an unfamiliar urban area trying to match the map to observed local reality. Mom was never the best navigator but we kids though this was excessive. Finally, exasperated, she pulled over and unfolded the map to figure out where we were.

    I perceived signs suggesting this might not be the best place. One was right beside the car and said NO PARKING. The other was on the building next to us and said POLICE. Mom did not want to hear about this.

    In time she discovered the key fact that had eluded her: we were not in Niagara Falls, we were in Buffalo.

    Once we drove another twenty miles and arrived in the correct city finding the hotel was pretty straightforward. Mom got reminded of this more than once in later years.

    303:

    I had to check this, to realise that there actually is a place called "Niagara Falls", as well as one called "Niagara".

    304:

    I once rocked up to a police station in one of the larger towns up the Newell (Gilgandra or maybe Coonabarrabran), politely asking the way to the nearest petrol station. This was around midnight on an overnighter from Canberra to Brisbane. Had a rental car with a half-built rowboat wrapped in a tarp and tied to the roof, no roof racks but with a couple of pieces of old mattress foam in between the two strangely coupled modes of transport. Some stout sisal wrapped through the back windows, and strong poly line going to the towing rings forward and aft. Had driven through one thunderstorm already (at 110km/h) and went through two more that night. Was running on empty at that point (both me and the car), and probably lucky they didn’t arrest me just on general principles.

    305:

    I’m a fan of cruise control. It’s the same set of considerations I describe above, with an extra tangent. That foot-eye-speedometer feedback loop takes cycles, imposes cognitive load, is the simplest thing to automate, and once automated the simplest mental model to maintain. But you need the road to be open enough that you don’t have to adjust it that often. I can see the attraction of forward radar adaptive cruise, might even try it in a rental one of these days (it’s available as an option in the sort of thing we’re looking at to replace the old Camry). It seems like it would break the model again, but actually I suspect it just makes the model slightly more sophisticated.

    306:

    I fairly often encounter places that inform me "Do NOT program our address into the prat nav - go to this other location, and then follow the enclosed directions." In a couple of cases, they told me to not even use the same town or postcode (often used for programming them in the UK)! Obviously, ignorance of that causes the same trouble with a map.

    307:

    Using the "official town" (or postcode) to reach my actual place of work would cause similar issues, because the official postal address is actually on a different island to the places where the staff are.

    308:

    Ryanair would love that!

    309:

    I rock up at 16.15 today and all there is is a queue for Peter Beagle. Gotta be quick off the mark at Worldcon it seems! On the plus side, nice to see so many happy (dare I say rapturous?) nerds in one place.

    310:

    Paws@267: On a tangentially related note: In my six decades of travels, five in North America and one in Europe (plus Israel), I have noted some near-universal establishments: Irish pubs, Indian restaurants, and Chinese restaurants. Am I alone in this?

    Also, when did English and Irish pubs start serving nachos? And when are they going to be able to properly pronounce "nacho"?

    311:

    A begging reminder ... Saturday 17th: Panel: Technology we can't believe we're still using (1300-1350, ECOCEM Room (CCD)) (with Alison Scott, Tom Merritt (Sword and Laser), Dave O'Neill) Alison is a very near neighbour of mine ... it's a pity I couldn't make it to Dublin & I would LURVE to hear/see what technologies you are thinking of ... Hydraulic Power? Blacksmithing? Rope-making ( A very, very old art/craft/skill/technology ) ?? Brickmaking? ( And hand-pottery of course ) Any of the really old cooking methods & "tricks"?

    And, of course, those migh-have-beens, that are still around, but didn't quite "make it" The Stirling Engine from the first prominently-=known member of a remarkable engineering dynasty ...

    Please can we have a "report-back"?

    312:

    What makes you think that I know anything much about English pubs?

    Scottish ones started serving (Tex-)Mex dishes about 30 years ago.

    313:

    That was mainly a question for the crowd. Have not had the honor of visiting Scotland yet.

    314:

    "...the 17 physical buttons on the Chevy Bolt steering wheel... like a video game controller"

    Sounds awful...

    Don't knock it unless you're tried it. More than at a cursory level.

    I have a similar steering wheel. All of these buttons are done with my thumbs. A few are circles with a center button and a ring with up/down/left/right options.

    And to be honest I do them all with muscle memory and it is easier than touch typing which I've done for decades.

    And the turn signal stalk and wiper stalk are reachable with hands still on the wheel by extending my finget tips.

    Basically what H and I are saying is that after you spend a not too long amount of time you can control 95% to 99% of your car without taking your hands off the wheel or even looking at the controls. And with adaptive cruse control I get to pay way more attention to what is happening around the car than I used to do.

    And do a better job driving than we used to do operating those 3 on the column stick shifts. Going round a corner working the clutch, brake, gas, steering wheel and shift lever was a real trick. I don't miss such nonsense AT ALL.

    315:

    Para 7 - Big hint; you were trying to do too many things at once, and that's a criticism of your driving, not the controls.

    316:

    I just found out there is a petition being circulated in New York City, New York, USA to to rename the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets as "President Barack H. Obama Avenue".

    Where do I have to go to sign it?

    317:

    Must admit I've never really got on with three on the tree. But then practically nothing uses it over here; four on the floor (or more, these days) is pretty much universal apart from oddities like old Vauxhall Victors. And what with all those joints in between the lever and the selector rails, on the few occasions I have encountered it, it... let us say, hasn't exactly been in any condition to demonstrate any advantages it might have.

    With four on the floor, though, I find it quite natural to do heel-and-toe double-declutch gearchanges when the need arises, having learnt to drive on a car with no synchro on first (and the need often does arise, given the tendency of so many cars to wear out the synchro on second so it's a sod to get it to go in if you don't do the rev-matching yourself). Similarly to drive without using the clutch at all because the linkage snapped part way into the journey, or just because I happen to feel like it (especially on the bike, where the clutch barely makes any difference in the first place).

    Having said all that, though, conditions these days are such that I'm either sitting in top gear all the time or sitting in a traffic jam creeping, and the latter situation makes me very glad that I now have an automatic. (The good old classic Borg-Warner 35.)

    This is a distraction, though, since what I was intending to respond to was the point about electrical controls. I already can reach, by extending my fingers from the wheel, the one such control that I do need to use frequently - the indicator stalk. The other controls only need touching a couple of times per journey, if at all. (Occasional exception for the wipers when it can't make up its mind how hard to rain, but that switch is hardly any further from the wheel than a stalk would be and is eminently tweakable.)

    What really stands out for me in your listing of what the steering wheel buttons do is that in my car - current, previous, and any possible future one if the need for such should arise - those functions do not exist. Nor would it occur to me if I was driving someone else's car to consider whether they might exist. If the previous occupant had left them activated, so that when I first started the car they made a noise or flashed lights at me, then there might be a few minutes of frantic scrabbling trying to figure out how to turn the things off, but that's as far as my intentional interaction with them would go.

    Consequently the possibility of inadvertently activating them while driving because the car has the controls for them sprinkled around on something that I am used to being an inert surface, grabbable at any point and only having any effect when rotated in bulk, equates to a strong possibility of unexpectedly being blasted round the head with a wall of sound in the middle of some manoeuvre when I could particularly do without that, and to a near-certainty of being repeatedly pissed off by the same thing happening at less critical moments. And it's even worse if some of the controls are hidden round the back of the wheel where you can't see them - and, on top of that, so positioned that your fingers are likely to meet them without having to search. That arrangement is essentially a less-lethal equivalent of the broken glass I once glued round the inner edge of the wheelarch because I was fed up with coming out every morning to find that it had been bent out of shape the night before by drunkards on their way home from the pub up the road.

    If the car is going to include those functions, then I want the controls for them to be separate from the driving controls. I do not want them to be actually stuck on top of the driving controls so those controls end up having secondary, irrelevant, and unwanted functions that are easily inadvertently activated while trying to use the control for its primary purpose. It's not quite as bad as having a reactivity excursion test and a SCRAM shutdown as different functions of a single knob, but it's still an instance of the same class of problem.

    318:

    Agreed, yes, and I should have made it clearer that "too many things at once" is a function of how your abilities align with the kind of "things" in question. I can handle juggling the controls of a car, but I can't handle juggling balls to save my life - even one ball is "too many things" for me, but that doesn't mean that other people can't do it with several chainsaws with perfect ease and naturalness.

    Some of the "advanced driving" schools of thought get very worked up about their prescription of only using one control at a time - though others are equally vehement in condemning it as unnecessary, which leads to vi vs. emacs. I think it is fallacious to assume a blanket position of either polarity; whether it is appropriate or not depends on the situation. I find it is a useful technique when the car is a piece of shit and all the controls fight you, and in that situation it feels natural, but it feels unnatural and constrained when the controls are well designed and maintained, and therefore are responsive instead of pugnacious.

    319:

    Well, I'm used to being able to accelerate or brake, change gear (block or skip shift down when I'm about finished braking, single shift up) and steer, but note that at no time do I need more than one hand or foot for any given control due to PAS and synchromesh that does.

    320:

    "foot-eye-speedometer feedback loop"

    I don't have such a loop active except for brief periods where absolute speed is being compared externally with an evidentially-calibrated reference. At other times, "speed" is an internal variable derived principally from aggregating dθ/dt and dr/dt of appropriate reference points in the visual field, plus other inputs of lesser significance and/or enumerability. It is also a relative value, not an absolute; the reference value varies according to the conditions, being zero on a narrow country lane, but often around 70mph on a motorway, because the problems are very different - in the one case tracking static boundaries at close range, in the other tracking a large number of individual objects whose relative radial velocities may be positive or negative.

    321:

    Sounds like you'll enjoy this:-

    I was asked "Where is the speed limiter on this car?" and replied "You'll find it conveniently attached to your right ankle."

    322:

    Exactly. And I've driven stick (including a really cranky old Land Rover Guardian named Thelma).

    It's not necessarily the juggling act, it's that the primary driving I do is in heavy traffic, with a mix of everything from the terminally timid to the terminally testosterone poisoned to the terminally distracted to the terminally consciousness-altered to the terminally normal (who are, fortunately, the majority of the drivers). It's an unpredictable mix, and normally I have the radio off, never answer the phone, and pay attention to what's going on around me, because I learned to drive in 80s and 90s-era subcompact "convertibles." Even the speedometer doesn't enter my "control loop" as much as it probably should, since staying in the flow of traffic is more important than the number on the panel. Cruise control, when I use it, requires more monitoring, because I'm constantly prepared to drop out of it. That's not much better than not having it at all.

    In this situation, having the buttons I use most (brake, occasionally radio) on the wheel is quite handy. What's less handy is having to turn away to fiddle with the AC on the glass panel, where I have to look at which button my finger is touching. I liked my ancient Camry with its manual AC and fan, because I could operate them by touch as well.

    The rest of the wheel buttons I normally play with when the car's stopped.

    *"convertible" in the 80s sense, is a small, light weight car without air bags or crumple zones that converts into a coffin in a high speed accident. The only way to avoid activating this feature is to not get in an accident. Why do you call me paranoid?

    323:

    whitroth@257 said "my last regular full day at work is this coming Tuesday."

    Back when coworkers asked my plans for all the extra leisure time every day, I said 90 minutes more sleep, plus 90 additional minutes each for reading, video games, web browsing, biking and TV viewing. It adds up to 7 and a half hours, which mostly replaces the working day. The remaining half hour would allow me to work on my drinking problem, since I'd never had one and figured it was high time I did. That was 2005 and with hindsight I gotta say it was a close estimate, haven't regretted my decision yet. I did cut back on red wine though, from 4 oz. a day to 3 oz., still enough to help keep grease off my heart valves. I think.

    On that topic, Burger King now sells for five and a half bucks a plant based protein "Impossible Whopper". Coincidentally it was introduced the same week as the U.N. report on sustainable agriculture, advocating more plant protein in the world's diet, so as to replace animal products for the sake of climate mitigation. I tried one and would have testified under oath I ate a plain old whopper if I hadn't seen the wrapper. My wife tried a bite, frowned and spit it into a paper napkin, but I think she's just ideologically committed to meat protein as a concept. "High praise indeed" one might snark, but it's impressively hard to distinguish it from ground beef, certainly for a vat grown yeast product. Supposedly a bioengineered strain now makes protein close enough to hemoglobin for flavor and texture comparison satisfying most consumers. Beats the heck out of what I'd been expecting, which was more along the lines of Bacos brand soy protein bacon-y bits from the 1970s, served hot, damp and chewy.

    324:

    The thing about the absolute frame of reference, though, is that a radar measuring it independently can lead to an A$160 fine for “exceeding the speed limit by less than 6 km/h” (adjust units and figures to suit your context) and that’s something I generally prefer to avoid. Which means that while paying attention in the same way you describe one is also obliged to consider the risk posed by this absolute measure of average velocity and this creates the feedback loop I described.

    In general, other road users are also making all those judgements all the time and one implication is that to drive safely means to be predictable. One way to achieve that is to maintain a consistent speed, all else being equal. Experientially, other drivers who speed up and slow down all the time are just annoying (especially when they speed up to overtake you, pull in front when there’s just one lane and slow down). Being able to set one’s own speed to be constant is really helpful, then, as it takes away a whole class of errors, returning more ability to pay attention to relative angles, positions and passing speeds as appropriate.

    There are people who just won’t use cruise because they feel like it involves a loss of control. And I guess that’s fair enough, but it isn’t a universal.

    325:

    Meanwhile, in the UK you're most unlikely to be stopped and/or ticketed for less than 5mph/10% (whichever is greater) over the ruling speed limit.

    I still recall one trip about 24 years ago from Kent to Cosford (say 100 miles) where I was maintaining a near constant speed (+/- 1mph without cruise), and a car readily identified by the Wendyball supporters' scarves steamered out of the rear passenger doors both sides passed me or was passed by me about 6 times.

    326:

    Here it’s is now really unlikely to be stopped. There might be a telltale flash from the camera that clicks your plates, but otherwise the first you know is the infringement notice in the post. Used to be that under 10% or travelling away from the camera was regarded as contestable due to margins for error and technology. That’s not the case anymore.

    327:

    Ah, yes, I forgot you were in Australia... reports I've heard, and yours is another, all tend to reinforce the impression that the place consists in large part of roads through the middle of nowhere which are dead straight for miles and miles and completely empty as far as the eye can see, but nevertheless every bush along the whole length of the road is in fact a rabid speed cop in disguise. It kind of makes me think that someone ought to teach them how not to be seen.

    328:

    “Accelerate or brake”

    Me too, and I’ve never got used to the idea that people think of that heel-toe thing as part of normal driving. I see it as a gimmicky trick that is marginally useful to learn in case your handbrake doesn’t work. I can’t imagine a world where there’s some arbitrary prohibition against using the handbrake for hill starts.

    The last couple of times we’ve needed a rental car, the handbrake, after considerable searching, turned out to be a button. Noting Pigeon’s remarks about turning unwanted features off, the most annoying on-by-default feature was the one that stops the engine when the vehicle isn’t moving... luckily able to be disabled by pressing another button. I’m sure there would be a way to disable it by default, but that was buried too deep in menus to find in the time I spent with that car - I just had to remember to turn it off every time we got in. I’m sure I’d have got used to it over time, you just need to develop a different perception of the sort of gap you can accelerate out into or learn to take your foot off the brake a little early or something. Great in heavy traffic, in Melbourne in winter, but not clear what would happen with the aircon in Brisbane in summer (stuck in heavy traffic in 40+C is exactly when you want that to be working properly).

    329:

    Usually it’s either a fixed speed camera, or a dodgy Mercedes van parked on the footpath (or the verge) with a decal on the side that says “Every k over is a killer”. The fixed ones are predictable, the newish tunnel systems are full of them. The others seem to rotate, and they focus on particular places... places where it’s (sort of) safe to park a Mercedes van on the footpath!

    330:

    @257 Congratulations.

    @322 Really don't like cruise control. Only usable on the highway - off the highway you need a second set of reflexes. On the highway, just helps me be less occupied, which tends to result in unplanned napping.

    331:

    “More time to write, more time to keep up with the yard (bleah!), and my lady & I will do cons, and even non-con-related travel.”

    Congratulations! I suspect there is a trick to working out what it is that people end up missing from work and deciding whether it is something you would in fact miss. If it isn’t, you’re like me and there just isn’t enough time to do all the stuff you want to do, even without work being in the way. If it is, it’s working out what other stuff will give you that thing, whether it’s being around people with a shared sense of purpose or something. Plenty of things that provide that, and not needing to be paid to do them really opens up the field, lets you align it to one of the things you’d be doing anyway if you just had the time.

    If your travel plans include my part of the world, be sure to look me up!

    332:

    "heel and toe" (UK speak) is a race track technique.

    "Stop Start" only stops the engine in certain circumstances. It disables itself if the AC is running flat chat like Brisbane in Summer.

    333:

    "I can't imagine a world where there's some arbitrary prohibition against using the handbrake for hill starts."

    There are, though, plenty of cars with a genuinely valid MoT yet also with handbrakes that won't hold them on steep hills (which in some parts is every hill). The MoT regulations specify that the handbrake has to achieve a certain effectiveness, but it doesn't say that it has to be able to achieve it when operated by the owner of the car, and it's still a pass if it can only achieve it when hauled on by a huge greasy bloke built like a gorilla. And the specified figure is kind of low anyway to allow for the number of cars that have crap handbrakes even when new. So the car still counts as legally roadworthy even though the handbrake is largely useless.

    Then, as mentioned above, there are the many cars where the synchro on second gear has reconfigured itself into a device for preventing second gear from being engaged if you haven't done the rev-matching yourself. If, instead of heel-and-toeing, you brake first and then try and get second, you end up having to start braking much further back and then spending far too long coasting at 15-20mph while you fiddle about and pissing off all the people behind. Being able to combine the operations means you can still get the turn done neatly and smoothly in a reasonable amount of space/time just like normal. These cars still count as legally roadworthy because dodgy synchromesh isn't a test item at all; I think a car could theoretically pass the MoT with the gearbox missing entirely, although in practice they would probably fail it on the grounds of not being able to move it about.

    There is also the situation where the car is in perfect order but does not have synchro on first because it was made like that. Going down a hill which is steep enough to need first for engine braking means that it's also steep enough for the car to run away quite badly even in the second or two it takes to double-declutch into first if you don't keep your foot on the brake while doing it. I learnt to drive in such a car and spent a fair bit of time not on the public road practising stuff like this.

    Paws calls it a race track technique, which I guess is true, but I think of it more as a shit cars technique (having driven a not insignificant number of them) or an old cars technique (see previous para). I think we are both agreed that it is not necessary on the road in a reasonably modern car in good order.

    334:

    there just isn’t enough time to do all the stuff you want to do, even without work being in the way

    I have mentioned before being "unemployed" and struggling to find time to look for work once the money started running out...

    I am reminded of my mother's solution to bored children "you could do a load of washing, and while the machine is running mow the lawn then... hey, come back, I haven't finished".

    335:

    annoying (especially when they speed up to overtake you, pull in front when there’s just one lane and slow down

    Ah, the well-know "cannot tolerate being behind a cyclist" syndrome. Had one today, some middle-aged gimp in an urban assault vehicle couldn't take it any more and overtook me in a roundabout... a single lane roundabout with a tree in the middle. Sadly he decided that rather than hit the concrete he would swerve sideways and literally push me off the road. This being Australia, my reporting that to the police is unlikely to result in a ticket, and if one is issued it's 50/50 whether it would be me or the motorist that gets it.

    337:

    I had zoomed in to study the single lane exit and thought “well that’s probably okay, obviously the middle lane must turn right”, then zoomed back and found it was indeed marked that way. So it’s a single lane roundabout with an extra lane around the left for people going straight ahead (which you can’t do if you take the roundabout). Shitty thing to do to overtake a cyclist, or anyone, in the middle of it though. That could almost be the vehicle in question coming off in the street view photo (half expect to see your shadow holding the camera and waving a fist).

    338:

    That's not the gimp roundabout, that's just one that made me wonder what the designers were taking when they laid it out.

    I'm pretty sure this is the one. Note that it's not actually as wide as it looks, and I was towing a bike trailer. Gimp really did not have room for assault vehicle plus bicycle trailer without some serious wedging. Not just the decorative concrete flat bit, but the concrete barriers on each side were involved.

    https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.7268505,150.8634643,3a,60y,125.71h,71.5t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sCPcv8_ao_kl0P9N334nLag!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

    Still, the good news is that I have a half-decent bike route to the local encrustation of big box shops, and have made it home with mandarin and lemon trees plus a couple of blueberry plants. Sadly I got the location of the plant nursery wrong so bought plants from Bunnings. Also, the trees I have official permission from the landlord to plant (and that has been conveyed by them to the real estate agency!). I have installed plants with chicken-resistant fences much to the disgust of the chickens. Planting also revealed really shitty soil with no detectable worms and not much organic material. But also a layer of plastic about 10cm down, which makes me wonder about the mentality of whoever put it there. "Weed matting" before they laid instant lawn?

    Next step is to remove a 2.5m long fence and replace it with a gate so I can get a truckload of tree shavings from a local arbourist and start working on that "really shitty soil" problem. Might have to go back to Lakemba and steel the contents of the compost bin in order to get works and more organic material, as well as firm up my vege shop dumpster diving.

    339:

    Oh boy, that's worse than usual even for me.

    "Might have to go back to Lakemba and steal the contents of the compost bin to get worms and organic material".

    Sory.

    340: 336 and #338 - Those have me wondering about charging the roads "engineers" responsible with multiple acts of "causing or permitting driving without due consideration for other road users".
    341:

    Moz @ 335 Happens to me a LOT. There's a noitable minority of testosterone-loaded fuckwits who MUST pass any Land-Rover they see - or alternatively try to stop me overtaking, if I'm cruising up faster, behiond them ... Because all L-R's are "SLOW" aren't they? Well, not since about 1980 (ish) when they started fitting V8's to some & none after 1990. Bloody dangerous too - one wanker in a BMW nearly tipped himself right over the Armco on a M-way approch road with a TIGHT curve ( I was doing about the max one could with 4wd, approx 55-58 mph ) & he tried to overtake, got bad back-axle tramp ( I could see this ) and braked hard ... I bumbled on, was doing a staedy approx 68 on the M-way when he passed me about a mile-&-a-half down the road, doing, I would guess about 95. Other instances come to mind. Like this idiocy

    342:

    I’ve probably said this here before, I certainly have in other places. There are people who want to go faster and there are people who just want to go first. The former generally are no problem, because you let them overtake and then they are gone. The latter, however, just make things more dangerous all around.

    343:

    That's not the gimp roundabout, that's just one that made me wonder what the designers were taking when they laid it out.

    What do you think of this one? Spacious and with decent lanes, but with lots of trees and bushes in the large middle island so drivers can't see where they're going. It also has eight streets in and out, so drivers unfamiliar with the neighborhood are regularly launched in random directions. As a roundabout it doesn't get much comment; instead locals talk about the neighborhood as a whole, which is plotted at a 45 degree angle to the rest of the street grid.

    Though I've also gone through this one with only three feeders and only a few trees in the middle - but getting in the wrong lane sends you across a bridge where the next turnaround is [checks] 3.3km away.

    A roundabout with only one feeder is just a cul de sac. Recently I encountered a roundabout with two which is presumably a traffic calming feature.

    344:

    Those all look perfectly reasonable to me. Sure, at 100kph they would be challenging but {eyeroll}. I quite like roundabouts with trees, what I dislike are dickheads, both generally and specifically on the road. It's the being run off the road part of that gimp roundabout that made me unhappy, not the roundabout per se. Or having a GPS assume me that the route is suitable for trucks (low trucks, presumably)

    Although I would point out that not being able to get a full size moving truck in there is going to make things expensive for some people. Think moving long distance - you're going to pay people to come and get your stuff in small trucks, reload it into a big truck, then drive it the long distance. Or vice versa. Mind you those are all McMansions on small blocks, so they probably have SFA storage space and people will struggle to accumulate much stuff as a result. It's not an insurmountable obstacle, I know, but it does mean they either rent a storage unit or live like the hoarders they are.

    345:

    Well, the one I'd thinking SE Ladd Ave reminds me of is one locally known as "Sprowart's Folly" after the roads "engineer" who commanded it. The central island for it was about 8 feet high, before it was planted. That's right; trucks and buses couldn't see over it. Also the original feeders were tight; first gear tight if you were in a heavy, and yet cars could orbit the central island at 25 to 30 mph (1970s).

    346:

    Surely when you can't see over the roundabout you just go even more slowly? And at some point as the diameter expands it stops being a roundabout and becomes more of a perimeter road? I mean, we don't call the Australian Circumferential Highway a roundabout...

    347:

    The handbrake requirement used to be only 25%, too - I don't know if it still is - and there are plenty of slopes steeper than that.

    348:

    This is Scotland! :-| Plus you could see far enough to go quicker than a driver joining could accelerate.

    Now fire up Bing Maps (or similar), search out Alexandria, Scotland, and zoom in on the railway station. That road around it is a roundabout, about 600x400 feet.

    349:

    Those all look fine to me. I quite like what I assume is a US convention of marking roundabouts as one-way ring-roads rather than something special. I think the idea that roundabouts are somehow special is the source of a lot of the confusion about using them here.

    350:

    I see that! Looks pretty nifty. It also contains a pub, apparently.

    If you do the same with Indooroopilly, Queensland, Australia there’s a roundabout with a car dealership in the middle. For most of my life it was Ford, but apparently these days it’s Audi (I don’t go by there these days. It used to be that the shopping centre at Indooroopilly was a significant destination in its own right. But these days it is just too incredibly huge to contemplate. The car park is a twisty maze that takes an hour to escape, and the scale is simply out of proportion to anything most sane people could want).

    But if big roundabouts interest you, I suggest looking at Canberra, ACT. Australian Parliament House is, essentially, a roundabout but it’s not the only one on that scale.

    351:

    You're right about the pub, and the car park, and there are or were several businesses on the ground floor and back courts of the flats.

    And, at least if I'm looking at the right place in Brisbane (junction of 20 and 33?) yeah, that's a big roundabout and marked as such.

    APH, surrounded by Capital Circle and State Circle I see. With Parliament Drive, I make that 3 roads run round it!

    352:

    "But also a layer of plastic about 10cm down, which makes me wonder about the mentality of whoever put it there."

    Lucky you having to worry about the mentality of someone who buries mere plastic.

    At a similar depth in my garden I found a layer of lingerie in an advanced state of disintegration. It makes me somewhat unwilling to dig any deeper in case I unearth the layer of dead prostitutes.

    353:

    "The car park is a twisty maze that takes an hour to escape"

    I am increasingly convinced that these places are laid out by a little kid using one of those fuzzy felt sets of road shapes that you can use to make really complicated road networks for your toy cars. It's the only explanation I can think of that makes sense for layout practices like this:

    You're heading out of town along a main road. On your right, you pass a supermarket site, but there is no entrance. Having gone past the site, you turn right into a side road. 50m or so down that, you turn right again to get to the supermarket. The road you are on now goes right the way around the perimeter of the supermarket site, until you are nearly back at the main road. There are no turnings off it. When you get to the end, you turn right into the supermarket site proper. This "right" is closer to 180 degrees than 90. You then drive all the bloody way back around the supermarket site on a road parallel to the one you were just on but heading in the opposite direction, also with no turnings off it, until you are nearly back at the turning off the main road again. This finally brings you to the entrance to the actual car park. And the supermarket is right at the opposite end from the entrance, next to but not accessible from the 180-degree right turn bit, so now you have to traverse the entire width of the site a third time before you eventually get where you wanted to go.

    That description is of a specific example (Goldington Road Tesco in Bedford if anyone cares), but they bloody all try and follow the same principle: stupid layouts that send you bouncing round and round like a photon in a hohlraum and force you to travel several circumferences' worth of distance instead of one radius, which is exactly the sort of thing which is great fun to set up and play with if you're a little kid with toy cars and fuzzy felts, but a pure pain in the arse to deal with in reality.

    It's not only supermarkets that do this; it's any kind of facility open to the public that comprises a big building with a big car park. Pretty much the only sites that do not do this stupid thing are the ones where they could only just manage to acquire enough land for the actual facility plus car park and didn't have any spare room for idiocy, but in every case where that does not apply they seem to be under an absolute compulsion to devote at least 20% of the area of the site to useless roads that make you drive pointlessly back and forth for no reason.

    354:

    really shitty soil with no detectable worms and not much organic material. But also a layer of plastic about 10cm down

    Do you know the long term history of the site? In the UK it's fairly common on brown field sites because it's cheaper to put down a barrier and dump 'fresh' soil on top than it is to properly decontaminate a site. Plays havoc with drainage when done badly.

    The newish estate next along the road from me here in Cambridge is built on the old University athletics track, the athletics track was there because there's an anthrax burial pit under part of it. Most of the pit is (hoped to be?) under the telephone exchange but there are quite a few "Don't use a JCB here, no, really, don't" signs, and covenants against planting anything the needs more than a trivial root depth.

    355:

    Pigeon @ 317: Must admit I've never really got on with three on the tree. But then practically nothing uses it over here; four on the floor (or more, these days) is pretty much universal apart from oddities like old Vauxhall Victors. And what with all those joints in between the lever and the selector rails, on the few occasions I have encountered it, it... let us say, hasn't exactly been in any condition to demonstrate any advantages it might have.

    With four on the floor, though, I find it quite natural to do heel-and-toe double-declutch gearchanges when the need arises, having learnt to drive on a car with no synchro on first (and the need often does arise, given the tendency of so many cars to wear out the synchro on second so it's a sod to get it to go in if you don't do the rev-matching yourself). Similarly to drive without using the clutch at all because the linkage snapped part way into the journey, or just because I happen to feel like it (especially on the bike, where the clutch barely makes any difference in the first place).

    Having said all that, though, conditions these days are such that I'm either sitting in top gear all the time or sitting in a traffic jam creeping, and the latter situation makes me very glad that I now have an automatic. (The good old classic Borg-Warner 35.)

    I don't think you'll ever again see "three on the tree" manual transmissions offered again. The only place you'll ever encounter them is if you get a chance to drive a "classic" 50s American car. I don't know about UK/European cars. Every manual transmission car I've ever seen from over there had the gear-shift down on the floor; even those with bench type front seats.

    I have once encountered a vehicle with a "Four on the Tree", but only one time and that was a long, long time ago.

    I had my Jeep in the shop Thursday & Friday to have the Air Conditioning repaired and I had their "loaner" car for a couple of hours on Friday to take my little doggy to the vet. It's an automatic and I'm quite proud of myself that I didn't once left-foot the brake trying to engage the clutch. But it did take a fair bit of conscious thought to accomplish that.

    356:

    paws4thot @ 325: Meanwhile, in the UK you're most unlikely to be stopped and/or ticketed for less than 5mph/10% (whichever is greater) over the ruling speed limit.

    I still recall one trip about 24 years ago from Kent to Cosford (say 100 miles) where I was maintaining a near constant speed (+/- 1mph without cruise), and a car readily identified by the Wendyball supporters' scarves steamered out of the rear passenger doors both sides passed me or was passed by me about 6 times.

    I once had a North Carolina Highway Patrol officer tell me he never bothered to write speeding tickets for anyone who wasn't driving at least 10mph above the speed limit ... partly because judges wouldn't convict & didn't like the officers wasting their time and partly because "there are enough idiots out there going more than 10mph over that I can write all the tickets I want."

    Many times I'd be out on the Interstate with cruise set on +9 mph, and a trooper would just sail right past me. Probably the most satisfying feeling I ever get on the road is cruising at +9 mph and have some idiot come blasting past me and a little further down the road I see them stopped by that same trooper.

    Back when "Drive 55" was the national speed limit, I had an officer tell me they liked to get out on the Interstate and drive 5mph UNDER the speed limit just to see if anyone has the cajones to pass them (that's where cruise control REALLY comes in handy). I set it RIGHT ON the speed limit & let it do its thing.

    357:

    paws4thot @ 332: "heel and toe" (UK speak) is a race track technique.

    The defensive** driving instructor told me "Brake pads cost less than transmissions. Control your speed with the throttle & use the brakes when you must. Change gears to put the engine in its best RPM range for maximum performance."

    **"defensive" as in avoiding bad guys following you with evil intent ... it was free training offered by the U.S. Army. Never had to actually use any of it, but some parts influenced how I ran convoys in Iraq whenever it was my turn to do so. I've also noticed it has some overlap with techniques I've learned for driving to improve your gas mileage (control your speed with the throttle).

    358:

    _Moz_ @ 336: "italics"_Moz_ @ 336:

    https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.7238053,150.8453134,3a,60y,72.79h,79.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1syYdlex7qLa8B_Yv8MlM0Eg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

    That is a pretty EFFED-up roundabout. If you follow what the signs tell you to do, you're going to end going around it backwards.

    359:

    Similar stories with different literal values for the UK. And you'd better believe I am one of the people who will pass the police in this situation.

    360:

    Do you know the long term history of the site?

    It was farmed for about 20-40ky, then about 200 years ago started reverting back to scrubby grassland, then the scrub was burned off and houses built. For that entire time it's been floodplain/alluvial land, but it's also worth noting that the "rock" being eroded to make the alluvial soil is at best third hand (viz, it's sandstone that's been through at least one previous cycle of erosion, deposition and compaction).

    As far as I can tell there's never been any industrial development and the neighbours don't have the layer of plastic. I have sent soil samples off to be tested but that's via a soil mapping project at a university so it's not necessarily a quick process.

    361:

    Brake pads cost less than transmissions

    That's one of those "technically true but irrelevant" things. If you're the one paying, brake pads cost more than driving properly, and driving properly is a skill that can be learned. Worth noting that even automatic gearboxes in trucks use engine braking (albeit badly, as they do everything else except catering to dummies). In the commercial world engine braking costs less than brake pads, so owner-drivers do that. Employee drivers often do it because brakes fade but engine braking is forever. When you're going down a long hill there's just no reasonable way to fit brakes that will cope with the power that has to be dissipated (think metre-wide "jet engine intakes" complete with compressor blades blowing air across the drums, as used in the test labs where they make sure that the drums can do what they claim).

    For a military where every single bit of equipment has to be manufactured to be used and maintained by malicious idiots, then yes, brake pads cost less than transmissions. Burning out the brakes and crashing the truck is just something you do to maintain the acceptable casualty rate.

    362:

    stupid layouts that send you bouncing round and round like a photon in a hohlraum

    This is another reason to love my bicycle. Yesterday I navigated the maze of big box stores in a very direct way. Starting with "cross 6 lane road" by noting a large gap in traffic so I just rode to the centre island, then realised I wanted to be on the other side of the cross road so I rode to the island there, then crossed as a pedestrian when the light changed. Then rode down through a very gentle drainage ditch and up into the car park. I have no idea how cars get there, I just went straight from footpath to the entry I wanted. Which I parked kind of in, because there's no bicycle parking so I did the Sydney "stopped is parked" thing.

    https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.7177402,150.8435023,3a,75y,321.22h,87.16t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sFzKrxaGSmCRi9FjRJInsdg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

    Then down to the pet shop, which was one outbreak down the road, so for a motorist would be out to the main road, down a block, back in to a new maze. For me, ride down footpath/shared path next to road, see shop, push bike up embankment and into carpark, ride to automatic door, push bike into "mall" and park it outside pet shop.

    I mean, the sign says "welcome" and there's an arrow...

    https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.7205857,150.8441423,3a,75y,232.03h,94.63t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srvYFltwduXCTFA4InBzRZQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

    363:

    Same here, though it’ll be around 10km/h under the limit. There may well form a line of cars behind and even tailgating the cops, making it all the more imperative to pass them safely.

    364:

    It's a planning issue.

    Commercial park zones cannot have a single access point to a highway [i]that only give access to a single business[/i] (they can, but then you need to own all the commercial zone and it costs more, due to zoning). It's very expensive if you want to do it - even IKEA etc don't.

    There's also laws about traffic flow and speeds. i.e. You need to have X meters of road to transition from 50/60 mph highway > 30/20 mph commercial zone. This requires X meters of "run off". If land is a premium, you run a zig-zag silly U-turn.

    In highly priced zones this means you'll get mini-roundabouts (designed to curtail speed) and pointless wiggles (designed so that if the area actually becomes commercially viable you've space (that you own) to negotiate into the next fubar planning application) as "border".

    It's a WW1 - Vietnam tactic.

    They're not roads, they're wire to prevent any other competitor crunching you out if your Zone Class Commercial A/B/! gets interesting.

    IKEA are masters at it. Look up their designs from the 80's. Guy was a Neo-Nazi, but brilliant.

    Related, but different: Milton Keynes has more roundabouts than 81% of the entire USA continent. There's a very good theory that states that MK was designed (at that point in time) to basically force UK residents to learn to "round-a-bout".

    UK Citizens: can do roundabouts.

    USA Citizens: literally cannot.

    RU Citizens: can do them but only while drifting.

    FR Citizens: can do them, but FUCK NO THERE ARE NO LANES, ESPECIALLY IF THE ARCH DE TRI IS THERE.

    etc

    It was deliberate. "City of the Future" was an A grade soft nudge to get anyone from the Midlands - London to go there, learn how to round-a-bout and then spread.

    True Story. (Ballard).

    ~

    Anyhow.

    What's been interesting?

    Lots. The entire Epstein stuff is a major Snow-Job though. grep a little, it's real obvious panic.

    grep "crash so hard". Negative Bond Yields? weeeee.

    365:

    Also JBS - In the UK, cops patrol dual carriageway (out motorway is a sub-set of dual carriageway physically) under the speed limit because they want us to overtake them rather than form a block behind them.

    366:
    FR Citizens: can do them, [...]

    The old problem with roundabouts in France was that until quite recently* the traditional priorité à droite rule applied, so people entering the roundabout had priority over people leaving it. That changed in the 1990's but required a whole set of new road signage, road markings and confusion. All sorted now, but there were a few fun years.

    (* Based on my old-farts definition of "recently").

    Aside: damn but aren't you people are a bunch of car addicts.

    367:

    damn but aren't you people are a bunch of car addicts.

    There are some very vocal devotees of the temple of the motor gods, yes. But there's also EC and me who have not just bicycles, but weird bicycles. I've never owned a car (briefly owned a truck... a real truck, not a US "truck", otherwise known as a ute).

    Although you may also get pushback from certain people on the basis that a Landrover is not a car, or at least proper (very old) Landrovers are not cars. He makes up for it by being extra-dedicated to the cause.

    368:

    366 & 367 Err, no. I LURVE my old Land-Rover, but I actually use it very little - but when I need it - I really do need it. I do a much bigger mileage by rail than any other mode, & walk more frequently than any other mode. I also cycle.

    369:

    By way of mitigation, I’d add that Paws, Frank and a few others and I are addicted to quite small and/or electric cars. I cycle too, though will admit to contemplating adding an electric motor to my bicycle just in the interest of using it more. For me the cycle route to work is maybe 160% the distance of the car trip. In theory I could follow the same route, but in practice fuck no (and refer to the bloke Moz describes running him off the road). I’ve got decent, even enviable options for public transport too, but at this particular point in life they leave me enough more constrained to prefer to avoid that (though I have in fact used them a lot lately anyway). Privileged as all hell here really, just finding a way through it all that works for some values thereof.

    370:

    Yes and no. Road design affects all road users.

    I do drive a lot, but cycling to work in gale force winds (Beaufort Scale meaning of gale) is a stupid idea.

    371:

    No discussion of roundabouts can be complete without an obligatory mention of the one I took my driving test around.

    Swindon's Magic Roundabout - renamed by the locals by popular demand from whatever local dignatory it was originally named after.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)

    It's actually very easy to navigate if every user understood it's logic, more's the pity that most don't.

    372:

    It is a classic incompetence of Planners to assume that the only road users are people who use the farcility daily, followed only by the ones of producing farcilities that can be used safely only by ignoring the rules, and ones that can be used safely only if the road user is able to see all signs at all times. Roundabouts encourage both in them.

    'Magic roundabouts' are an obscenity - attempting to navigate an unfamiliar one surrounded by fast moving high-sided vehicles or in pouring rain is murder. Of course, some people keep their eyes glued to the prat nav (hearing is too slow and imprecise, and we can't all rely on it, anyway) with the failure modes THAT entails.

    So are many mini-roundabouts, especially the ones used to merge two lanes into one on the roundabout, merely by its existence.

    373:

    Before the Planners and so-called Cycle Campaign made the only useful routes from my house too dangerous for me to use any longer, I used to do more mileage on my bicycle than my car.

    374:

    Actually commercial vehicles (trucks and busses) don't engine brake. They have special devices call retarders that use hydraulics to dissipate most of the kinetic energy before brake pads start to work.

    On such big vehicles engine breaking would be too noisy, so it is forbidden.

    375:

    Well, if we're going that way, what about roundabouts with added traffic lights (in some cases when the junction was first built)?

    I think they're a tacit admission that a roundabout wasn't or isn't the correct traffic management solution for the junction in the first place.

    376:

    Meh. Selection effect. The people who, eg, really plan to stay in metros with decent public transit until self-driving cars are reasonably inexpensive are probably less likely to post into that particular discussion. My main interest in cars is still spending less time in them - not out of environmental concerns - just pure hatred. (And I've arranged my life so that I walk to work.)

    377:

    Damian @ 363: Same here, though it’ll be around 10km/h under the limit. There may well form a line of cars behind and even tailgating the cops, making it all the more imperative to pass them safely.

    I've never seen them do it anywhere except on a 4-lane highway like an Interstate, so the length of the line of cars behind the trooper isn't really a factor in whether you can safely pass.

    378:

    paws4thot @ 365: Also JBS - In the UK, cops patrol dual carriageway (out motorway is a sub-set of dual carriageway physically) under the speed limit because they want us to overtake them rather than form a block behind them.

    That doesn't really make a lot of sense, because most drivers instinctively react by slowing down to the same speed the Police Car is traveling, without ever looking at the speedometer. The majority of drivers will not overtake a police car out on the highway no matter how slow it's going.

    379:

    John Hughes @ 366: Aside: damn but aren't you people are a bunch of car addicts.

    Yeah, the same way some people are addicted to food, water & air. It's often a function of where you live or where you work or what you do for a living.

    Around here there are a lot of places I can't get to on foot - either too far away or there's no safe sidewalk to travel on. Plus, have you ever tried to take an electric guitar & amp on a bicycle (or a city bus)?

    Or for that matter - a camera, bag, tripod and lights? ... the necessary tools & spares for servicing fire alarms? or computers (two of the jobs I've done in my life).

    There's not even a single grocery store in this town I can get to without a car (see above: "either too far away or there's no safe sidewalk").

    380:

    Car addict? Guilty, used to cycle a lot, relationships, children, grandchildren and age cut that to nearly nil. The nail in the coffin is no safe bicycle parking at my employer, I remain unconvinced I would still have a bicycle at the end of my shift.

    381:

    Yup. I traded in a home that was walkable to most of what I needed to do for one that could hold serious solar panels, but we have to drive everywhere, or walk 1.5 miles to the nearest store (which we do on occasion). Hence the electric car.

    This is actually a non-trivial point. One of the many naive things coming out of the current Extinction Rebellion is the idea that it'll be easy to get cars out of cities, since cars have only been around for a century or so. Much as I want the ER to succeed, if they don't get clued in in a hurry, there's not much hope for them. Unfortunately for their optimism, there are millions of people living in sprawling cities that were designed around automobiles, and those cities are going to have to be radically rebuilt or abandoned when we lose cars. Got room for 19 million people from southern California to live somewhere without cars? If so, we'd better get to migrating ASAP.

    382:

    That problem does indeed arise. Their usual mitigation is to stick with the trucks - the general speed limit is 70mph but it's 56mph for trucks, enforced by a limiter, so you get lane 1 full of trucks doing exactly 56mph, and the outer lanes full of cars doing somewhere around 70. (Let us ignore for the moment those trucks whose limiter kicks in at 56.1mph sitting in lane 2 overtaking the trucks with limiters that act at 55.9mph with a 0.2mph speed differential.) Since "everyone knows" that trucks are always doing a lot slower than 70mph, the police reckon to sit in lane 1 pacing the trucks so that "everyone knows" that they too are doing a lot slower than 70mph and therefore you have buckets of margin to overtake them legally without being nicked merely for doing it. It mostly works, but you still do get people who are too dim to work it out or too nesh to overtake even if they do understand, and you also get more of these if there don't happen to be any trucks about to make the low speed of the police car obvious.

    383:

    True, and probably not actually helped any by people like me. IF I'm not in any hurry I'll normally sit following a truck because I'm not using much lane width that people who want to go faster could use to do so.

    384:

    I think they're evidence that the local council is controlled by people who hate cars and think that making driving a less pleasant experience is going to stop people using them. Of course what actually happens is you just get the same number of cars spending more time sitting in traffic jams burning fuel to no effect, because what the hell else are people going to do.

    When I was living in Bedford I saw several roundabouts and other junctions, which worked if not brilliantly at least well enough to keep things moving some of the time, converted into traffic-light-controlled junctions. The results were things like junctions that previously only generated significant queues in rush hour now generating them at all times bar the middle of the night, with a similar extension in the proportion of time those queues got big enough to reach all the way back to the preceding junction and lock that up too. At the same time, in the less busy outskirts of the town where fucking with junctions alone wouldn't do much to create jams, they did things like turning bus stops inside out: converting them from a layby where the bus could pull off the road out of the way to a kerb formation of the same dimensions but convex instead of concave, so it stuck right out into the road, and then put an island opposite it, such that when a bus stopped there it blocked the road completely and left no way to get past at all - which was a pretty reliable way of generating instant queues that would block the roundabout 25m before the bus stop every time a bus called. (Yes, I do know the official excuse for this kind of bus stop layout and I think it's transparent balls.)

    What all these types miss is that Bedford (or wherever) is not London. The principles behind these policies (note: not the same thing as the policies themselves) do apply in London at least to some extent, because of the unique conditions: the vastly greater size of the area of choked roads, and the (comparatively) extreme density of the public transport network. (Though even in London there are areas where the coverage isn't up to scratch.) In ordinary towns, with a radius of a couple of miles and a public transport provision that consists of a railway to the next town, the stick is too small to have any effect and the carrot nonexistent.

    People in general are not going to stop using cars unless alternative options both exist at all and are less shit. And since the alternative options all start off being inherently shit in some aspects by reason of their very nature, and are nearly always made considerably more shit by the way they are implemented ("eyewatering expense of fares compared to petrol" always applies even if nothing else does), driving has to become staggeringly shit before the alternatives become more attractive. Only in London does this happen naturally; anywhere else it is so far from being the case that attempts to replicate the conditions artificially are blatantly obvious for what they are, so political considerations limit the extent to which that can be done, and even without that it would still be pointless as there is absolutely never any attempt to provide alternative transport facilities of any kind, let alone ones good enough to be useful.

    This seems to be a particular consequence of a general human failing: enthusiasts for a particular cause tend to assume that everyone else would come to share their enthusiasm if only they tried it, limit their understanding of its negative aspects to those factors that they themselves find particularly irritating, and reflexively deny or belittle the importance or existence of those negative aspects which are significant to non-enthusiasts. An obvious example is health food enthusiasts who assume the only reason everyone else doesn't share their eating habits is because they've never tried it; it seems to be beyond them to understand that nearly everyone actually has tried it, many times, often under compulsion, and are therefore fully informed and able to decide for themselves that they do not want to eat it because they don't bloody like it. So we get dimwits like Jamie Oliver and his "healthy school meals" campaign, where schools that follow the programme have to institute draconian bounds surveillance first to stop kids going out to the chippy or the supermarket in lunch break and buying their own lunch in preference to the Oliverian provision, and then, if that proves effective, to stop the more indulgent parents passing more palatable food over the fence - and even this kind of evidence does not manage to paste it through the Oliverians' skulls that the kids simply do not like the stuff, and aren't going to, and all they're achieving is to make them hate it for other reasons as well as the taste.

    In the transport area, and without meaning any disrespect to EC et al, it's the cycling enthusiasts who seem to be one of the worst groups for this. I cite a long and unproductive argument I had with one such, who was afraid of traffic and was convinced that everyone would happily commute daily by bicycle between Blackburn and Preston if only there was a dedicated cycle path between the two. Er, no. I lived there one winter. From Blackburn to Preston is 20 miles (so call it at least 2.5 hours), it's usually at least two out of cold/raining/windy/snowy, and it's far from flat. Only a complete nutter is going to spend 5 hours a day battling over that route on a bicycle, path or no path. (Indeed the handful of nutters who do exist would avoid the path if there was one, complaining about broken glass.) This chap may have been particularly extreme, but it doesn't take very long arguing with any cycling fanatic to uncover a similar degree of detachment from reality lying behind nearly all their main arguments and rendering them worthless.

    385:

    On such big vehicles engine breaking would be too noisy, so it is forbidden.

    Oh, the joy of living in a small, densely populated country. Outside of minor roads in major cities engine braking is how trucks stop in Australia. Yes, it's loud. But not as loud as it used to be.

    You might be right in that wikipedia says engine braking the jargon term refers to something diesel can't do, and what diesel's do is actually compression braking, but that's one of those things that most people don't need to know or care about, so it's easier to say braking using the engine and move on.

    As for hydraulics, for that to work you'd need a big radiator somewhere to dissipate the heat. Lacking that I can only assume that trucks don't brake the way you describe. The only references I can see to hydraulic braking are to conventional hydraulically actuated brakes, but I'd love to see a link to the system you describe.

    386:

    I'll agree this and note the latest business of "you must leave 5' between a powered vehicle and a cyclist you are overtaking". Apparently neither of the other associated arguments that cyclists should not "filter" between traffic lanes, between the LH traffic lane and the kerb, or stop in passing places to allow powered traffic to overtake apply! Even though one of the 2 main principles of H&S is that you do not place yourself in danger.

    387:

    At one time I was a cycling nutter myself - but only on a personal level. I used to cycle absolutely everywhere within 10 miles or so radius, and transport anything I could lift on the luggage rack (25kg sacks of pigeon food, fridges, piles of old PCs higher than my head...). But I didn't think it odd that other people didn't do the same things.

    Also, it's circumstance-dependent. At the time I had normal lung function and lived in a place where there were no hills. Where I live now there is a significant hill involved in going anywhere, and I now get out of breath going up the stairs, so the bicycle no longer gets used. Instead I insist on some form of powered transport to go anywhere. These days most of my mileage is covered on my mobility scooter, but it's not something I talk about much because it's essentially the same as walking but with an electric motor, so it's as uninteresting as walking for discussion, and only people with similar mobility scooters are likely to be interested in the minor areas of difference.

    "The people who, eg, really plan to stay in metros with decent public transit until self-driving cars are reasonably inexpensive"

    That definitely isn't me! Assuming that by "metros" you mean "cities", the only one that qualifies is London, and while I find its urban infrastructure quite fascinating I consider it utter dogshit as a place to live. Nor do I consider self-driving cars to be any of practical, personally desirable, a useful solution to any problem relating to personal transport, or usable at all without a complete line-by-line audit and exorcism of every piece of code in the thing, given that their development is so influenced by those who see evil as a business model.

    More than that, I find them positively angering - well, to be more accurate, they will inevitably exist as a subset of electric cars, and I find electric cars positively angering. The reason is that they are never going to be "reasonably inexpensive". Because nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure. So nobody made sure to install a battery module exchange and charging facility at every petrol station before starting to make electric cars. The result is that we are now stuck with the shitty design pattern that builds into the car a single vital component that not only costs several grand, but continues to be worth several grand for static storage applications even when it's too tatered to be any use in a car. Therefore there will never be any such thing as a cheap, usable electric car: either it will be a useless shell with no battery in it, or it will be worth a packet for the battery even if every other part has had it.

    I've had this argument with people who have electric cars and have even bought and sold them and think this gives them grounds to deny its truth. This is because their definition of "reasonably inexpensive" includes "multiple recurring costs each of which individually are more than I've ever paid for an entire sodding car", and therefore it is their arguments whose truth I deny.

    And I can all too easily imagine it becoming unreasonably difficult to get hold of petrol on the grounds that "everyone uses electric cars now" for values of "everyone" that exclude everyone who can't bloody afford the things. This would mean that everywhere I want to go simply because I enjoy being there, plus many places that I only visit from necessity, become inaccessible. And that prospect really pisses me off.

    I freely admit to finding cars a subject which provokes me to verbosity, for various reasons. As regards driving them, I hit enough things (but never any people) in my days of youthful madness that I have since put some effort into finding out how to do it properly, and that covers a lot of stuff that is neither taught for the driving test nor readily learned purely from one's own experience, and which most people never are taught, so I do tend to nerd on about it. I also nerd on about the engineering side of them for the same reason that I do with washing machines and things - having taken lots of them apart and put them back together. And also, as above, I put considerable value on being able to get about the place without having to get other people to ferry me about in some form.

    388:

    One of the many naive things coming out of the current Extinction Rebellion is the idea that it'll be easy to get cars out of cities

    The point ER is trying to make, and the reason so many of us get so frustrated, is that you're looking at things backwards. The question is not "from what we have now, what's are some easy reductions in impact?". That's a question for the 1970's and 1980's. ER start from the explicit premise that the science is correct and we are facing ecosystem collapse. The question is therefore "given ecosystem collapse, what civilisation do we need to build in order that some of us survive?"

    In shipwreck terms, we're in the Titanic and we've seen the iceberg a mile away. You're saying "if we turn too hard people will spill their drinks" and ER is saying "head for the life rafts we're going to sink". Whining about spilled drinks, or even the quality of accommodation in the life rafts, is missing the point.

    389:

    Well, I have a simple test for self-driving vehicles. Are the project managers responsible for the teams developing the code prepared to put themselves, literally and physically, in front of a vehicle doing 50mph, pass criteria being that they are not injured and the vehicle does not crash itself or cause another one to do so by its evasion.

    390:

    Plus, have you ever tried to take an electric guitar & amp on a bicycle (or a city bus)? Or for that matter - a camera, bag, tripod and lights? ... the necessary tools & spares for servicing fire alarms? or computers (two of the jobs I've done in my life).

    You do know that I exist, don't you?

    I rode a megametre or so round Aotearoa carrying a pro camera setup (~100l/25kg) including a sizeable diffuser for my flash. I didn't carry a full tripod lighting rig because I didn't need one. I've carried subsets of that significantly bigger distances, and supersets of it round town on a fairly regular basis.

    Tools are trickier, but it's worth noting that the great majority of people don't have to commute with their tools and of the ones who currently seem to, many could find alternatives if the other option was not working. The classic example is construction, where 90% of the workers "need" a ute full of tools but the other 10% somehow scrape by with one truck+site office and a whole lot of ride sharing and public transport. It's almost as though taking their tools home every night is a comforting ritual rather than being essential. Not to mention that by definition those people are fit and active, so the usual whining about elderly and disabled people not being able to walk a kilometre can't apply.

    391:

    their definition of "reasonably inexpensive" includes "multiple recurring costs each of which individually are more than I've ever paid for an entire sodding car"

    Of course, because you force the rest of us to pay most of the cost of your sodding car. Just because you don't pay the price doesn't mean it's zero.

    392:

    Try "hydrodynamic braking" for a search term. It's been used in railway applications, although I've not heard of it being used for trucks.

    As for engine braking being "forbidden", I've not heard of anything with a diesel engine or a four-stroke petrol engine that has a freewheel, and it seems pretty impractical to forbid taking your foot off the throttle. What does get banned is the "jake brake", or compression brake, which is noisy, but is also a rather different kettle of fish.

    393:

    It’s probably a realistic expectation that if you leave your tools at a work site they will get nicked. Could be to do with how construction is contracted. If the construction company is one firm that employs people to work for it and provides the tools to do the work, then leaving everything at the site office. If the firm is a tiny one and all the workers are subcontractors who need to supply their own tools, then if you’re one of the subbies you need a ute full of tools and preferably a big dog to look after them when you’re on site. I imagine there is a full gamut of cultures in the middle, attached to reputations and your prospects of getting work.

    394:

    Bollocks. I pay little for cars because my definition of a desirable car is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike most other people's. So I get them when they are not all that far short of the point where the owner has to pay someone to take them away, and keep them possibly for years in a state of "roadworthy, and fine by my standards, but nigh valueless to anyone else".

    (I do the same with many technological items. For instance I don't buy microwave ovens in shops; I collect them out of other people's rubbish bins and swap parts until I get a functional transformer, diode, capacitor and magnetron in the same chassis. Non-essential functions like rotating tables, internal lights, low power modes, door interlocks etc. can go hang, and will be bypassed or ignored as appropriate.)

    What I'm complaining about is the prospect of there being no cars around except ones which have a single vital component of such a nature that they are always worth thousands to someone if they function at all, and only become nigh valueless to anyone else if that component has been removed, thereby making them valueless to me also.

    And by "multiple recurring costs" I mean things like the price charged by a garage to do a routine service, versus the cost of some oil and a filter to do it myself, or the insurance premiums charged for a car that could be sold for a lot of money versus those charged for a car that the insurance company will write off for a scratch on the paint. Plenty of people don't seem to see a problem with spending that sort of money. I think they're fucking idiots, but it's their choice: nobody is forcing them to spend it; alternatives are available. I on the other hand do not have a choice, and the alternatives are my only option. That's just fine, since they're the option I'd take if I did have a choice. But I do most strongly resent the prospect of that sole option disappearing because people who don't respond to every difficulty by throwing money at it are not worthy of consideration.

    It's not a question of me forcing other people to spend money - which is nonsense anyway - but of people who don't have any sodding money being forced to spend the same amount as people who do have money voluntarily piss up the wall or else accept immobility, because they are assumed not to exist. Which is the same thing that infuriates me about many other aspects of modern living: the assumption that everyone is rich. Like the numerous bill payment systems where it isn't enough simply to be able to get enough money together each month to pay the bill, instead you either have to have a lot more money sitting around at all times so that the payee can just grab a lump when they feel like it and it doesn't fuck you up, or else put up with the bills themselves being larger as a punishment for not having enough money for the trivial convenience of those with shit loads of it. Or the online ordering systems that grab a quid to see if it works on the assumption that they are grabbing from an unlimited pool so it won't make any difference, when in fact what they have just done is make sure that the main payment won't work because there is no longer enough money available.

    395:

    It's certainly a realistic expectation in England. You take your tools home in a van and at the very least park it with the load area doors up against a wall, or preferably take the tools indoors (and have a sticker "No tools left in this van overnight" or similar). Anything that has an engine or a motor and is light enough to be lifted over the wall by as many blokes as will fit round it or fewer will get nicked. This includes such things as sub-assemblies which become liftable once you have ripped them free of the larger assembly they are part of. It also includes the dog, unless they poison it instead.

    396:

    Ah, so the problems solved by the electric car are also solved by your zero-emission, zero-pollution car that you only use on private roads. Thus you're not imposing any costs on others except the minor usurption cost of having private land.

    Or perhaps you are simply unwilling to accept that pollution, road carnage and the inconvenience of those things are costs faced by others.

    397:

    if you leave your tools at a work site they will get nicked.

    That's definitely an issue, but it's also largely a solved problem. I say this having talked at some length to someone who owned a "mobile site office" made of coolstore panels and security was a significant consideration for him. One thing he did that was perhaps slightly counterintuitive was strongly encourage his subbies to store their tools in it overnight in order to weigh it down. But I also got introduced to him via stopping to take photos and having him come bustling over to me to demand that I not, because his assumption was that I was preparing to steal it.

    The "office" weighed about 3500kg in normal trim, well over 4500kg when loaded with site stuff, and was immobilised in several ways. Most obviously a concrete fence post between the dual wheels and running across the thing, chained to it at both ends with the chains running through holes on the wheel hubs. Viz, can't tow it with that thing installed. Plus a removable hitch and presumably electronic alarms and other things he may have declined to specify. There's a bunch of things I could do to make it hard to cut open and I suspect he was no less capable.

    So yeah, that and simple BFI stuff like "hire a security guard" work.

    I note that in the UK there's a bit of a trend for thieves to take stuff like engines out of common vehicles, generally in fairly destructive ways. So you come in on Monday and there's a nice row of work vans, each of which has the bonnet crowbared open, the hoses and wires cut, and then engine removed.

    Similar problem on building sites - people will steal the yet-to-be-installed or partly-installed kitchen, as well as obvious stuff like appliances and windows. I get the impression that people try very hard to install that stuff the day it arrives on site, but I still read occasional reports of a new build losing all the windows and doors plus random loose building materials (pallets of bricks, even)

    398:

    You take your tools home in a van and at the very least park it with the load area doors up against a wall, or preferably take the tools indoors

    An electrician in England who I watch on youtube has recently had a bit of experience with that. Multiple video episodes around securing the vans, dealing with shitty aftermarket locks then finally taking them to the professionals abut rundamentally he's trying to put locks on a thin tin can.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3TDlE_vZkg

    399:

    I know you're Australian, but you might want to watch a documentary on nickel mining in Canada, and check some of the nastier failure modes of lithium ion batteries before claiming that battery electric cars actually solve problems.

    400:

    What you're trying to argue has nothing to do with my point. My complaint is fundamentally about capitalism and its assumption that people who don't spend lots of money don't exist, in combination with the insistence of governments on making someone else pay for infrastructure and services the provision of which is a considerable part of what governments are bloody for in the first place and their happy acceptance of the shitty results which are the inevitable consequence of allowing such things to become the domain of profit-making enterprises. Other complaints in the same domain that people have posted on here include the consequences to the power grid of the spread of electric cars when the government won't pay for the required extra grid capacity, and the pollution caused by profit-making enterprises extracting exotic materials for the batteries and motors in ill-regulated third world countries. I and others have further complaints also in the same domain but concerning other subjects, such as medical services, the internet, electricity supply, rail transport, housing, etc, many of which have also been posted on here.

    Your position on the other hand appears to be that it's wrong for me to have freedom of movement unless I atone for my sins by handing over large sums of money to support the abovementioned irresponsible profit-makers (or to support other people's support of them); that my current mode of operation, which both by choice and by necessity involves giving them as little as possible, is somehow reprehensible because cars are a member of that enormous class of things which have bad points as well as good. My interpretation may be wide of the mark but even allowing for that it still makes no sense. If you support transitioning to electric cars, then logically you should support my position, as it is one of objection to the artificial exclusion of a large class of people from making that transition.

    401:

    I used to work in the industry. Our unit ended up like Fort Knox - steel panels over all the doors, steel prison bars in all the windows, and a fancy alarm with a dedicated line to the police station that was continuously monitored for integrity (and at least one lot did call the police on themselves by cutting it). We still lost engines over the fence off things that were too big to bring indoors at night. The construction industry provides a certain class of criminal with a target-rich environment, and it takes rather a lot to put them off - for instance, the copper wire they intend to steal having 25kV running through it and moving trains underneath is not necessarily adequate.

    402:

    In my opinion electric cars are one of the least awful solutions for people who literally cannot get round any other way. The trouble is that they're mostly used as a crutch by people whose disabilities are social rather than physical or mental, so it's difficult to see them as anything other than deeply problematic.

    Fossil fuelled cars, OTOH, are just a disaster. And sure, new technology in electric cars has its problems, but when you compare it to the giant rolling clusterfuck that is fossil cars it's a breath of fresh air. We're in "man bites dog" territory, where no-one bothers reporting silly little fossil problems because they're ubiquitous. They only become newsworthy when the death toll gets into the hundreds or thousands, or when the environmental toll is so blatant it's dramatically affecting hundreds or thousands.

    But every single death from an electric car is newsworthy for two unrelated reasons: first is novelty, since there are so few of them. When one of the 30,000 people murdered by motorists every year in the US alone dies to an electric vehicle that's a noticeable boost to the electric death toll. But second, and perhaps more important, the people who control the media are the same people who want to destroy the ecology we're part of, and making electric cars look bad is part of that. Those problems are newsworthy for the same reason as every other nihilist talking point is.

    I get that much of the damage is indirect and hard to attribute, but that doesn't mean it's not there. Claiming you're too stupid to avoid causing that damage is on you, not me, and it's you that needs to justify doing it. This isn't you individually murdering someone because they stand between you and some minor convenience, this is you being one of a million people who collectively kill a small crowd of people every year. I'm asking you to justify that.

    403:

    I'm not sure how you can solve that by taking the tools home every night. I know tradies, and one of them had his whole van stolen from inside a locked garage next to his house. He was pissed, because they smashed his front door, ransacked the house to get the keys, opened the garage and stole the van. No damage to the garage though...

    There's nothing you can do to stop those kind of high-value, easy-sale items. Asking construction workers not to buy stolen tools is a waste of time, and getting the general public to stop is so pointless I'm not sure anyone even bothers pretending any more.

    But saying "the obvious solution is to drive the tools home every night" is wrong as well as false economy.

    404:

    OK, first show that electric cars will directly kill fewer people per year. Then, and only then, you may have a point.

    405:

    Pigeon @ 384 London Brough of What the Fuck ( Oops, "Waltham Forest" ) have got that disease very badly, led by an uspeakable piece of local slime, called Loakes ( Cllr ) who hates all cars, no matter what. Their "mini-holland" scheme is SUPPOSED to make life better for cyclists - it doesn't - it's based on the "idea" that if you shit on the "Motorists" - almost all of whom are local residents - then life is automatically better for cyclists. As someone who still cycles, I can tell you that it ain't so ... But then Loakes has form as a wrecker -- he tried his best to get our two superb local museums closed.

    it's the cycling enthusiasts who seem to be one of the worst groups for this. Yeah, I've deliberately gone to several local meetings about "mini-holland" by cycle - and IMMEDIATELY was shouted down by the "Professional" cylcling brigade, because I'm apparently not a "proper" cyclist ( I don't wear lycra ) & I am evil because I also own a car ...

    @ 400 Yes, this, hence my decision, back in 2003 to get ONE car for the rst of my life, if at all possible & keep on running it ... ( And doing all the routine maintenace myself ) About to be fucked-over, of course by the stupid arrogant shit Khan.

    paws @ 389 😰

    @ 404 ONLY if they really do mandate having them make a noise whilst in motion, otherwise they really will, if not kill, certainly maim a lot of people.

    406:

    first show that electric cars will directly kill fewer people per year

    WTF? My point was that electric cars are likely to kill as many people directly. Almost the whole problem with electric cars is that they are nearly as bad as infernal combustion engine cars in that regard. Sure, direct tailpipe emissions are lower, so people won't be able to kill themselves by running a pipe from the exhaust, but everything else is there: the land and other resources for roads, the road toll (we pay in lives, but they're all toll roads), pollution from wear and tear (dust = fine particulates etc).

    If you're willing to count the wars for oil, and the associated petrochemical industry as significantly part of cars, then yup, those deaths are much, much less caused by electric cars. The number of deaths caused by petrol station fires and explosions is nearly zero for electric cars and almost entirely caused by fossil vehicles. Die in a fire... that's pretty direct.

    The difference is the the climate damage from electric cars at least has the potential to be near-zero, where fossil cars guarantee catastrophe.

    407:

    "The difference is the the climate damage from electric cars at least has the potential to be near-zero, where fossil cars guarantee catastrophe."

    That is NOT true, not even remotely. They will eliminate the carbon dioxide produced by burning fuel (and its production), but almost certainly require slightly more energy to make, require a factor of AT LEAST TWO upgrading of electic distribution and generation capabilities, definitely use components that are much harder to recycle and more damaging when not recycled perfectly, and increase road construction's and maintenance's impacts and their consequences, being heavier, redoubled in spades for lectric lorries/trucks. Also note that asphalt is petroleum-based, eventually produces carbon dioxide when it decomposes, and cement needs lots of energy.

    One of the reasons that I doubt they are going to help much is that the electric car fanatics make such claims - and they are self-evident bollocks, just as the claims for solar power in the UK are. What the truth is, I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were only marginally better.

    As I have posted before, the ONLY viable solutions involve a change to our approach to transport - and it's NOT as hard as is made out, not even in (yuck) Las Vegas. Los Angeles is hopeless, as it stands, but is hopeless for other reasons as well, so isn't a counter-argument.

    408:

    Make up your mind. You started with a figure for road traffic deaths; you posted it so don't even think of denying it!

    Now you're trying to conflate that with things like particulates (there is work that shows that, unless they use regenerative braking, an electric vehicle produces half the particulates of a hydrocarbon vehicle running on high sulphur fuel, and most HC for road vehicle use these days is desulphonated), and still theoretical deaths from climate change, and then trying to blame all climate change on HC vehicle emissions, despite EC's rebuttal at #407.

    409:

    For expense of electric cars, my understanding is that the motors are quite a bit simpler than for ICE cars - to the point that they will likely be cheaper at some point. That said, I generally didn't buy new...and the price difference is pretty big there.

    Now, forcing a transition to electric cars... Done rapidly - there is a big cost there as the whole used car market dies and people are forced to buy new. This is a problem of unfunded mandates - as they are popular but often deeply regressive - impacting people who simply can't afford to pay. Gradual introduction of a mandate might be fine.

    For self-driving cars, there is a societal test - which is just killing fewer people on average - noting that most people are stunningly inconsistent drivers. It is fine if they fail sometimes - just as long as they fail less than I do. There is also a personal test, perhaps - for that - they would just have to scare me less than my wife's driving. Please note that I am absent-minded and prone to falling asleep over distances greater than 30 miles continuous. (At one point, my father woke up upside down after being caught by a tree, having driven off a cliff - so - no - pay more attention is not the answer.). Even so, I don't let my wife drive with me in the car. She isn't exactly dangerous - unless you are a pedestrian or a parked car. Asking that the cars be perfect is silly. Society is perfectly fine with letting both me and my wife drive. On a personal note, I'd easily pay an extra 20ish k to lower the likely societal and personal costs of hitting pedestrians and parked cars. (I mean, insurance paid for the parked car and she was going slow enough to not hurt the pedestrian - so far...but you don't get lucky forever.) Basically, I'd rather neither of us ended up killing people through sheer incompetence.

    Regarding media, dunno - around here it seems more consistent with a mix of fossil fuel planted stories along with some market manipulation by people shorting Tesla. Probably more of the latter.

    Well...but...to some extent...cyclists and motorists are in contention. Locally, we finally added a decent bike lane - which cut streetside parking. Some of the motorists were quite discontented - the air turned blue. From losing half the parking on one street...

    Now - as electric cars spread - there will be issues - but I would class them as minor - no different from the sort of sewage plant related foul ups we have today. The grid will be updated when lights start going out - tardily the first few times - faster later. (Also, it might not be so bad - in the suburbs - simultaneous solar/battery installs may tend to mitigate. Same with station chargers.

    When you change the current capitalist system - particularly rejiggering housing and societal structure to put everything in walking distance and lowering the work week - then - well - cars won't be significant time savers. I don't foresee that transition actually happening and would tend to put it into the hair shirt brand of environmentalism which is unlikely to have sufficient impact to actually benefit the environment. If a plan involves putting direct costs on poor people to mitigate environmental damage - maybe you are basically a Republican. (Cough, California, cough, mandated solar panels, cough no tree cutting ordinances.)

    And yes, metro areas are dreadful - my one consolation is not needing to drive. It is a big consolation.

    410:

    Erwin @ 409 This is a problem of unfunded mandates - as they are popular but often deeply regressive - impacting people who simply can't afford to pay. Gradual introduction of a mandate might be fine. this is EXACTLY what areshole Kahn is proposing in London. Instead of allowing people to keep theor old cars & mandating that "new" (including secondhand) ones comply with new emission regulations - SENSIBLE He is going for past $DATE yuour car must be complaint & we will (efffectively) steal it if it isn't. Bastard

    411:

    My idea of using the coders' project managers as crash test dummies was to make sure the PMs' minds were concentrated on "the very best we can do" rather than "writing and testing down to a price". I'm not looking for perfection, just well done.

    412:

    You haven't been reading my posts carefully enough! Look at #373 for an example :-)

    England's Planners (I can't speak for Scotland) are given a policy by mandarins in Whitehall, often in secret, and one aspect is to be hostile to car-drivers. But the result is far, FAR worse for cyclists, because almost everything they perpetrate reduces the chances for the two groups to coexist safely on the roads, which causes agression against the innocent.

    And, yes, the so-called pro-cycling groups are deeply culpable; I started arguing against their idiocies over 30 years ago.

    In many (most?) locations, they are NOT dominated by the fanatical lycroids, but by the idiots who believe that being hostile to motorists increases safety favour cycling as an alternative to walking (though they rarely realise it). The result is the most ghastly psychle farcilities, which are often MORE dangerous than the road, especially to vulnerable cyclists, and almost invariably useless as a way of getting people to move from cars to bicycles. Inter alia, their capacity is a tiny fraction of the road.

    There are two consequences:

    There is an increasing number of assaults against cyclists on the road using cars as a weapon, because safe overtaking has been deliberately prevented and "they should be using the cycle path". That's why I was forced to give up commuting by bicycle, and using it for shopping.

    Before the gummint privatised and thus hid the data, the mean trip speed was 7.5 MPH and the mean distance trip 3 miles - because the distribution of the latter is highly skewed, the median speed was perhaps 6 MPH and the median trip distance was not much over 2 miles. That's a joke. 10 miles in flattish terrain isn't hard for anyone of working age in normal health, and used to be normal until the 1960s, though I agree that hilly terrain needs assistance.

    413:

    let us put numbers on this: 6500 km driven per capita per year in the UK, means 410 billion kilometers driven. Tesla lists 147.3 wh per km (and reports from users - regular users, not hyper-milers, back this up). so 60.5 twh. That is a nice chunk of electricity, but the current annual electricity production of the UK is 334, so it is a bit shy of a 20 % increase in power consumption. This leaves out trucking, I guess? So say 30%. Effectively all of which additional load can be incentivized to take place at night. This mostly just makes the day/night demand curve a whole lot flatter, the existing power lines should handle the distribution with no more than a need to beef up the occasional transformer.

    Uhm. Of course, now the entire generating system is asking for baseload close to current peak. Given the current composition of UK plant, that is a whole lot of natural gas imports. Might want to step up the reactor construction program. A lot.

    414:

    You might like to tell me where the ~£39_000 between the value of my present car and the sticker of a Tesla is coming from? How about why you believe that the present favourable tax position of EVs, which pay no vehicle duty or fuel duty on electricity will be maintained?

    415:

    Yes. The factor of at least two came from an analysis I did of the UK data, but including the conversion of domestic and commercial heating to electricity. And we would also need to do the same to our distribution capacity as our generation capacity.

    To paws4thot (#414): no, but other cars will be taxed more heavily. Eventually.

    416:

    Mostly, from the Volkswagen conglomerate. Tesla are noobs at auto construction, and also are aiming at pretty unconscionable margins per unit, but they have succeeded in getting some of the traditional automakers off their bums.

    Thus Tesla is going to get undercut. A lot. I used Teslas milage because that grounded things in reality, I am not actually expecting everyone to drive one!

    lets see: assuming you are an average driver, at 6500 km. 957 kwh used per year, at 15 pence kwh, 143 pounds in fuel costs / annum.

    If you are minimizing car costs, you are presumably currently driving.. a volkswagen polo, or something equivalent. 30 km/liter petrol. 277 pounds fuel cost/ year.

    Volkswagens cheapest planned offering is a polo-equivalent at 16000 pounds... Which is what they charge for the current gasoline version.

    So, basically, that is 134 pounds in the pocket of the cost-conscious driver. If you want a cheaper electric than that, you are going to have to wait until they hit the second hand market.

    417:

    I can't afford a new car at £16_000 either. The most I have ever actually spent on a car purchase is about half that.

    418:

    Before I start on cmts, Discon III, Worldcon 2021, Washington, DC.

    Let's see, get the contracts, organize committees (I'm going for half of con suite), organize people, shove the GOP out the door (damn, can't work on that as a 501(c)3) so Charlie and others can/will come....

    419:

    Cruise control, ABSOLUTELY.

    We go up to Baltimore at least once a month for BSFS. .75 hr on I-95 each way, plus 15 or so more in Baltimore. Go out of town, mostly to cons, yearly. Cost of train (what, the GOP fully fund Amtrak?), buses just eat too many hours.

    However, if the traffic's not crazed or too heavy, I always use cruise. Try this: my vehicle's a 2008 Honda Odyssey (large) minivan. It lists as 23mpg/highway new. When I drove it to Kansas City for Worldcon in '15, I almost always got 27mpg, and no, I'm not exaggerating. Once, on the plains of Indiana, I think, I got 28.

    And it's one less thing for me to worry about, so I can pay attention to the idiots, looking ahead of me, looking at my rearview mirror, looking at both side mirrors, and I don't have to watch the speedometer, but do watch the gas level.

    And if you're not watching all three mirrors, the speedometer if you're not using cruise, and ahead, then YOU ARE NOT A GOOD DRIVER. If your speed on the freeway varies in not-heavy traffic by more than 5mph, you're NOT A GOOD DRIVER.

    420:

    Don't talk to me about heat and humidity. Ellen and I were at the Philly Folk Festival this past weekend (not being willing to spend an order of magnitude more to do Dublin), and it was 90+,90+ all three days. For some reason, neither of us dealt with the heat as well as we did when we were, say, back in our 40s.

    Wonderful music, ending, Sunday eve, with us, like much of the audience, sitting in the rain... watching David Crosby and band.

    421:

    Same in the US. They can't effectively check your speed within 10%, so it's not worth it to them. Except around cities, where the speed limit is 55mph, and everyone except the should-not-be-driving-theres is doing 65-70, I normally do speed limit + 4. Been doing that since the, um, eighties, never got a speeding ticket, even in speed traps.

    As opposed to the ass last night, who passed us on the right, up behind a truck, then cut into the left lane in front of someone with about two car lengths between the left hand car and the back of the truck, and he sped off.

    Followed, less than a minute later, by a trooper with no linghts on. Passed them, shortly, with them on the side.

    Ah, once in a while, instant karma.

    422:

    Love to, but Oz is out. I'm not one of those with $1m in retirement.... We'd love to make Ireland and the UK someday, while we're both still mobile.

    423:

    I get really aggravated when some fool who has no business behind a wheel either sits on my shoulder, or has to cross a double yellow line to take the entire oncoming lane.... and this is when, if possible, I'm riding on the white line on the right.

    The ad campaigns they do occasionally is "give 'em three feet", and I'm happy with that, and that's what I aim for when I'm passing.

    424:

    I will BURY those, those OBSCENE UNDERGARMENTS!!!

    425:

    (g) Read a story back when I lived in Texas, about a Ranger driving 53.5. line of cars behind, somebody passed him at 55... and he stopped the guy, and told him he wondered if anyone would pass, and would the guy like the other half of a quart of ice cream the trooper had....

    I've no problems passing, though I'll do it exactly at the limit.

    The ones they really want, I want them to catch, trying to do 90 when the speed limit's 55 or 65, and the traffic's doing 53.5....

    426:

    Hydrodynamic? Trains? Nope, it's called "dynamic braking", or regenerative braking, and it feeds a charge back into the loco's batteries (they are hybrids, er, diesel-electric....

    427:

    “there is work that shows that, unless they use regenerative braking, an electric vehicle produces half the particulates of a hydrocarbon...” Almost all electric vehicles larger than a mobility scooter or assisted bike use regenerative braking, because range is a selling point and batteries are heavy and expensive.

    428:

    My personal experience is that talking on the phone feels no more distracting than talking with passengers.

    I saw a study that contradicted that. Bookmarked at home and I'm travelling, so no immediate cite (bug me next month is you like).

    Essentially, most passengers adjust their conversation to the driver's non-verbal cues and the surroundings — accepting pauses while the driver negotiates a tricky turn, for example. Those cues (and the ability to look out the window) are missing in a phone conversation, so the person at the other end tends to keep talking which distracts the driver.

    This isn't to say that all passengers are concerned with the driver. I once dated someone who got upset when I didn't look at her when she was talking (and I was driving in a snowstorm). (Good thing we broke up before I Darwinned!) Still, it apparently tends to be the case that talking with a passenger is less distracting than talking on a cell phone. (And talking using hands-free is apparently as risky as talking while holding the phone!)

    429:

    "first show that electric cars will directly kill fewer people per year" ... You started with a figure for road traffic deaths

    The only one I see is in this context: "the 30,000 people murdered by motorists every year in the US" and I went on to talk about the fraction of those deaths caused by drivers of electric cars. So I'm confused by why you're asking what you're asking.

    You wanted to know how electric cars could kill fewer people directly, I tried to answer. I don't understand the relevance of the question, it doesn't have anything to do with what I'm talking about, but hey, I'm trying to help. You wanna go off on some weird tangent, that's what this blog is all about.

    H is just plain wrong about electric cars, we have seen that before and we'll no doubt see it again. His whole argument is that electric cars can't be recycled, with a side order of them being heavier.

    As usual, he's technically right as things stand today. But he's right because recycling something that isn't available to recycle makes no sense. There's no infrastructure for recycling lithium batteries on the scale needed when second hand electric cars start wearing out en masse because that won't happen for a good few years yet, and when we get there I expect we will recycle, simply because the materials are valuable. Arguing that it can't happen because it hasn't happened is silly.

    The weight question is more a social one than a physics one. Yes, like for like a single electric car weighs more than a single fossil one. But the fossil one has an implicit heavy truck following it delivering fuel, where the electric one has a stationary grid. But right now fossil cars are fricken enormous for primarily (anti)social reasons. It seems likely to me that electric cars will be smaller and lighter because that's the trend we see in sane countries, and sanity has to spread or we'd doomed.

    H considers the grid requirement a huge problem. If he's right we're doomed, because surviving means a huge increase in use of electricity for everything. Until we can synthesise carbon neutral fossil fuel equivalents in significant quantities the only option we have for heating and mechanical power is electricity. If we start that transition by throwing up our hands and saying it can't be done we are committing to target one billion - fewer than a billion people alive in 2100, and very likely the end of technological civilisation. So... I have decided to think that massive grid expansion is not just possible, it's a good idea.

    430:

    and this is when, if possible, I'm riding on the white line on the right.

    I find that's a lot more dangerous than taking the lane. If I'm in the middle of the lane I get many fewer dangerous overtakes, and when they happen I have space to move over.

    Australia has a collection of insane laws relating to cycling, but a few handy ones. One of the fun ones in NSW is that the law requiring 1m clearance when overtaking a cyclist also says motorists can cross the double centre lines to do so (with the pointless caveat that it has to be safe, just like everything else motorists do, but obviously that's not practised or enforced). As you would expect barely anyone knows about the 1m rule despite an advertising campaign, and I don't think anyone knows about the "can cross no-overtaking markings" addendum. But since it's another "make legal what motorists already do" law, it has the desired effect... I think.

    431:

    That's another different thing... "Dynamic braking" comes in several different forms; here are some which I know to have been used on real machinery:

    • regenerative braking, what you're talking about (example of use: London Underground trains)
    • rheostatic braking, which is the same thing only you feed the energy into a great big electric fire instead of doing anything useful with it (Virgin Voyagers)
    • eddy current braking, a variant of the above where the generator rotor and the electric fire are the same lump of metal (car speedometer)
    • hydrodynamic braking, which is the good old paddles-in-a-tub-of-water dynamometer principle (APT)
    • air brakes on an aircraft, arguably a subset of hydrodynamic (Stuka)
    • compression braking (internal combustion variety), the "Jake brake" (trucks)
    • compression braking (compressed air variety), for vehicles powered by compressed air (duh), where you reverse the polarity of the neutron flow phase of the valve gear so the cylinders turn into a pump; also used in emergency on steam engines, particularly in the early days when they didn't have any ordinary brakes (compressed air locomotives, early steam)
    • compression braking (thermochemical variety), where you store the energy as heat of solution (caustic soda locomotives)
    • braking by pumping losses against a throttle and non-adiabatic compression losses, ie. what happens in a car when you take your foot off the gas (nearly all cars)

    And no doubt loads more that I haven't thought of... :)

    432:

    "this is you being one of a million people who collectively kill a small crowd of people every year. I'm asking you to justify that."

    s/a million/some billions/ and I personally have never killed or injured anyone; furthermore, as mentioned above, I have at least put more than the usual amount of effort into analysis of the art of driving and learning practices which improve my collision avoidance abilities.

    I could cite as "justification" the obvious point that there are large areas of the country inaccessible by public transport, and add that I can't walk any significant distance any more, but I do not in fact feel any need to concoct some personally specific justification, any more than I do for, say, having a grid power connection or buying supermarket food. That cars have bad points as well as good does not make them a unique or even rare item requiring specific justification; it merely puts them in the same class as just about everything. Societies the world over, of all flavours, condone car use because they are so bloody useful - a fact which cannot be denied consistently with any claim to a hold on reality. The few that don't are either on tiny islands or do it deliberately to limit people's freedom, to the dissatisfaction of the people so limited.

    To cobble together some personally-specific argument "justifying" my participation in an activity which the great mass of world opinion considers self-justifying by way of its good aspects greatly outweighing the bad ones would be a waste of mental effort that would produce no result other than one inherently spurious and consequently devoid of value, so I'm not going to do it.

    433:

    "I'm not sure how you can solve that by taking the tools home every night."

    It replaces one big glittering high-value target with a whole bunch of little low-value ones dispersed all over the place. So the thieves' effort/reward ratio goes through the floor and their level of exposure to arrest shoots up in proportion to the increase in the number of targets. No, it's not perfect, but it reduces the chances of your tools being stolen and makes the thieves more likely to get nicked, and the extra effort of loading/unloading the van at the home end isn't that great.

    434:

    Have I got my American road markings right - "double yellow line" is down the centre of the road, and "white line on the right" is right on the edge?

    If so, I thoroughly agree - riding down the painted line at the edge is an appropriate position for a low-speed vehicle and it noticeably reduces the rolling resistance; and people who sit on my arse instead of coming past really piss me off. A vehicle passing is only a hazard for a second or two, but a tailgater is a hazard the whole time they're there and I just want them to fuck off. Especially when they are so often so obviously barely in control of their car in the first place - typical examples being the tiny car with a pair of eyes peering through the gap between the top of the steering wheel and the dashboard, refusing to pass even though the preceding vehicle was a bus and it got through the same gap no problem, or the Chelsea tractor full of kids purchased on the basis that since it will hit something sooner or later, better get something that won't be the one to come off worse. (The same types that crawl through width restriction bollards at walking pace, even when preceded by a Transit van that went through without slowing at all.)

    If anything they're even worse with a mobility scooter than a bicycle. To be sure, unlike a bicycle, the scooter is permitted on the pavement instead... but the surface of the pavements round here is so bloody awful that it's often not really a very useful option.

    435:

    On one hand, I would be truly amused by imagining getting to leave some project managers in front of a rapid car...even if the code worked normally... Did I ever mention this one study? Electric shocks were applied when the subject got an answer wrong... The manager in charge volunteered to test the setup. 'Mysteriously' - he missed every single question.

    On the other hand, seriously, I have lots of nearest and dearest who frankly drive terribly. In my experience of company work, most of the real failures are not directly related to cost cutting - the twin spectres of incompetence and also poorly directed motivation are far more effective. Case in point, managers at one company got wind of layoffs - result - they've assumed the fetal position to maximize invisibility for the last 5 years - oddly - with no real new product introductions - sales fell...

    So, that sort of direct accountability just results in engineers being properly motivated to overdesign and never produce anything. I mean, why risk your life for a 10% raise?

    436:

    "...no more than a need to beef up the occasional transformer."

    Bit more than that. The transformers are not continuously rated. They rely on a period of light load at night to get rid of heat accumulated from the heavy load in the day. And too much night-time load is already becoming a problem even without every household sucking multiple kilowatts at night to charge electric cars.

    437:

    the electric car fanatics make such claims - and they are self-evident bollocks, just as the claims for solar power in the UK are.

    Your analysis is risible. The weight of batteries is a fatal flaw ??? Gee, electric cars are kind of known for not being sluggish.

    As for solar power, solar cells (like batteries) are riding a fairly fast technology curve: the Lazard analysis has US utility-scale PV $/kWh continuing to drop at 21%/year. You may live under a cloud, but I don't.

    438:

    Lots of people on here live under a cloud a lot of the time. Particularly, it seems, this year; we've had a couple of sunny spells this summer but overall so far it has been notable for the number of times I've had to put the lights on in the daytime because the clouds are blocking all the light. Also, there is the latitude, especially for Charlie and the rest of the hyperborean crew. Charlie has on numerous occasions posted the figures to demonstrate how useless solar power becomes that far from the equator.

    The problem with battery weight is not related to horizontal accelerations but vertical ones. Road damage goes up very rapidly with axle loading; how much is complicated but it's a fourth power law over at least a significant part of the range. It's a nasty combination with the already-existing tendency for modern cars to become inexorably more elephantine, because the heavier the chassis gets the heavier the battery it needs for the same range/performance.

    It hits trucks particularly badly because their range requirements are much greater and payload ratio is a matter of great concern. I wouldn't be surprised to see the haulage industry start lobbying for an increase in the maximum allowed vehicle weight for electric trucks so the extra weight of the batteries doesn't come off the payload - if they aren't at it already in anticipation. But the maximum weight is already past the practically desirable maximum, as the surfaces of the slow lanes of motorways bear witness.

    439:

    The other factor is organisational as I alluded above. My remarks were not so much about “thieves” gaining unauthorised access to the site to nick stuff, and more fellow contractors with authorised access “accidentally” taking stuff on a practically permanent basis. Then the idea that on most sites it isn’t your employer who has (or who refuses to take) responsibility for security - it’s your customer. Hence the reference to reputations. In practice most tradies are a separate self-contained small business, leaving your tools behind anywhere is probably career limiting.

    440:

    I can sort of see long haul trucks becoming unviable, because there will a point where rail and other fixed infrastructure (canals? huge pipes full of oil and circulating pumps? tethered dirigibles?) becoming relatively cheaper (again). Can’t see a replacement for “last mile” delivery without getting really Iain Banks, but range is less of an issue in that case.

    That’s assuming we have that long of course. Strong suspicion we go down too fast to adapt.

    441:

    Meh. I just did the numbers on what I drive per year, what that costs me in fuel, what my average daily commute distance is, checked out what second hand Nissan Leafs could do, worked out that their range is 30% more than my maximum daily commute, and bought one. Going to save me something like 4 thousand of my geographic local currency a year, which is around five tonnes of carbon dioxide (Wooo, cheap greenwash on my lifestyle). Running costs for it come in at around 15 to 20% of my overkill ICE vehicle, which gets relegated to the big trips where I need to shift a Longship or Camel train worth of kit, two or three times a year.

    442:

    Meanwhile .. Both the Guardian & the Indy are despairing of Cor Bin's wittering about Brexit. he wants a General Election ( WHich he won't win because he's a wanker ) rather than try & stop Brexit, because he's a leave nutter. ( Or words to that effect - see yesterday's Grauniad & today's Indy ) Varadkar has all-but-named BOZO as a liar (which he is, of course) & said "NO more negotiation - what don't you understand?" HOW do "we" get the majoprity in the HoC, who are against Brexit & certainly against a hard crash to co-operate ... 2 months & fractionally under 2 weeks to go isn't long....

    443:

    As you say about vehicle weight and road damage, but there are other problems it makes worse, too. One is that a heavy vehicle hitting a house often brings the house down, another is the extra harm when a victim's limbs are run over, and there are others. But the big one is the bridge problem; we have a LOT of bridges, most of which are a century or more old and many have already got load limits.

    444:

    Please learn to read more carefully and realise that at least some of us look at issues a bit more deeply than the polemic.

    Manufacture and recycling vary in difficulty, and have serious ecological costs of their own (often including carbon dioxide generation). Also, recycling is never 100% efficient (inter alia, some vehicles burn out or are irretrievable). Steel is not a serious ecological pollutant, nor is lithium, but lithium batteries often contain some fairly nasty elements. How serious are those issues?

    When I see a claim that all such issues will be solved once we all adopt the technology, without any analysis or costings supplied, my bullshit detector goes off loudly and continually, and I disregard the claims. As I said above, I don't know the answer and the corollary is that I don't believe you do, either.

    You are making the same error about weight as DonL - see Pigeon and myself (#438 and #443) for the real concerns. Your optimism about cars becoming lighter (in 'the west', at least) is contradicted by what I can find out about the plans, which seem to be reproducing the current juggernauts, upgraded to take the weight of 300+ mile batteries.

    As I have repeatedly said, over a VERY long time, the only solution involves a change of approach to transport. I have also posted how very small, light vehicles could be designed and built that would meet 90% of the UK's (and Europe's) current commuting and shopping requirements. But that is not what is being proposed by the "electric vehicles are the solution" brigade.

    445:

    Back in the 1980s my university lab partner was an electrician (retraining as an engineer). He'd previously worked at a potash mine. Every electrician there had their own personal tools. Which meant that using your tools to do side work on the weekend is OK, as you own the tools you'd be using (rather than borrowing your employers). Don't know if that's standard practice, but it might well be.

    446:

    QUOTE from today's "indie" The Labour leader appears to be gearing up for an election with a strategy aimed at convincing the country to focus on other things besides Brexit. I despair, I really do .....

    447:

    To first order - given that gasoline is a substantial fraction of total carbon generation and that our transportation network isn't going to change - electric vehicles with relatively long range are a necessary step towards reducing carbon generation.

    Now, you are welcome to argue either of those assertions, or that carbon generation can be dealt with in other ways, but they seem defensible.

    Then, the question becomes more one of implementation. Electric vehicles are heavier - and the scaling for road damage is about 4th power. But...even for semis - with current technology - the weight estimates I found (admittedly from electrek) indicate that they are probably commercially viable, possibly excluding cost. I guess that within a few years, they will probably be correct. For weight though, a nice solution would tie to mileage and mass - the cost per car is quite a bit less than the savings from not paying at the pump...that is just legislation. Minor issue.

    For cost, the cost of new electric vehicles is scaling appreciably more rapidly than the cost of new ICE vehicles and will likely end up a fair bit lower. Running costs are estimated to be lower - even considering battery pack replacements. (Well, unless electric costs like CA, but CA is an excellent place for solar cells...)

    For pollution, carbon is probably the main one. Over 10ish years, gas cars burn more than their weight in gas - and electric ones (assuming your mains are not mostly coal, which is mostly true) burn a lot less.

    The battery pollution thing seems to be mostly a non-issue.

    Now, I'd be fine with charging some sort of carbon tax - on one hand - it ends up being regressive - but - in theory - the revenues can be used to mitigate direct impacts. That would tend to gradually phase out ICE vehicles as they became nonviable. Having everyone plump for a 50k vehicle or stop driving isn't a good idea.

    448:

    Arcimoto is getting close to releasing what could be a nice electric tricycle, rated as motorcycle. As I don't have a motorcycle license and can't afford a new vehicle, I won't be getting one.

    449:

    That is almost certainly true about costs which, in our monetarist societies, are far more about scale than difficulty. But it's irrelevant to the ecological issues.

    Unfortunately, (a) road vehicles are still nowhere near the top carbon dioxide sources, (b) if our approach to transport doesn't change the other issues may well take its place, and (c) you STILL haven't shown that ANYONE has even properly estimated the ecological costs of electric vehicles' manufacture, maintenance and disposal.

    Also, I remember when the pollution from the plasticisers in plastic and micro-fibres caused by its decomposition were regarded as non-issues. It MAY be a non-issue in this case - but where's the damn evidence? And my experience, over more than half a century of observing government politics and big business's claims, is that the absence of evidence often hides something very nasty hidden under the carpet. It's assuredly NEVER evidence of absence.

    450:

    For trucks, the obvious solution is to just stick more wheels under them. The road damage is a function of weight per wheel - If an electric rig is heavier, you can simply give it more wheels. As a reduction-to-absurdity, you could build a truck cab with two steering in front of the rig, two steering at the back, two pair of fixed wheels in the center. It would be more maneuverable that way, too.

    451:

    6 axle articulated trucks are not uncommon in the UK (more axles are reasonably common in Scandinavia, Australia* and North America). You're only partially addressing the problem though, because you need to look at the mass on the heaviest loaded (usually drive) axle(s), which is typically ~10.5 tonnes each, rather than just say "44 tonnes gross divided by 6 axles is 7.333 tonnes each. Elebeetee!" Also, and don't ask me how I know this because a comprehensive answer will be very boring to anyone not in road haulage, a live unsteered and undriven axle typically weighs just over a tonne.

    • Some of the biggest, limited route, Aussie rigs run tractor, plus 5 semi-trailers, and can go up to 18 axles.
    452:

    Other, already existing, trucks include the "tridem". This has a steer axle under the cab (and engine), then at the back end, in the sort of spacing you're probably used to seeing on semi-trailers, a steering axle, the drive axle, and another steering axle.

    453:

    _Moz_ @ 385:

    "On such big vehicles engine breaking would be too noisy, so it is forbidden."

    Oh, the joy of living in a small, densely populated country. Outside of minor roads in major cities engine braking is how trucks stop in Australia. Yes, it's loud. But not as loud as it used to be. You might be right in that wikipedia says engine braking the jargon term refers to something diesel can't do, and what diesel's do is actually compression braking, but that's one of those things that most people don't need to know or care about, so it's easier to say braking using the engine and move on. As for hydraulics, for that to work you'd need a big radiator somewhere to dissipate the heat. Lacking that I can only assume that trucks don't brake the way you describe. The only references I can see to hydraulic braking are to conventional hydraulically actuated brakes, but I'd love to see a link to the system you describe.

    In the U.S. it's called Jake Braking (after the manufacturer, Jacobs Vehicle Systems). It's prohibited in many areas due to the noise it makes. Mostly where a highway is coming into a town or city, you'll see "No Jake Braking" (or equivalent) signs on the side of the highway where the speed limit is stepping down on the outskirts of town.

    To the best of my knowledge most large trucks in the U.S. rely on air brakes. A hydraulic mechanism compresses a brake shoe against a drum and requires air pressure to release it. The truck supplies that air pressure and when the brakes are applied by the driver what happens is a valve releases the air pressure allowing the hydraulic pressure to apply the brake. That's why you have those hoses going from the tractor unit to the trailer on a semi-trailer truck. In the absence of air pressure the brake is always engaged. Lose air pressure and the brakes are automagically applied. I think the tractor unit brakes are regular hydraulic brakes (with power assist) and the air brakes stop the trailer.

    On Army trucks, one of the last things you did when shutting down was drain the air tank (to get the moisture out so it wouldn't rust). Before starting, one of the PMCS (Preventive Maintenance Checks & Services) procedures was to check the drain valve on the air tanks was closed (otherwise the low air pressure warning would never go off & the brakes would not unlock). If you were going to tow a trailer, you had to make sure the air lines were properly connected and the shut off valve on the "glad hands" was open (and double check the drain valve on the trailer's air tank was closed). Otherwise, the trailer wouldn't roll ... and a 5-ton truck has enough power to drag a 2-½ ton trailer (which is definitely not good for the tires on the trailer and will probably get you a Non-Judicial Punishment {Article 15} so they can take the cost of replacing those tires out of your pay).

    454:

    Not quite; modern trucks use air (release) actuation on the wheel brakes on every axle.

    Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retarder_(mechanical_engineering) - In European parlance an eddy current brake is often known as a "Telma" after the leading supplier.

    455:

    And it doesn't help much for the bridge problem.

    456:

    "60cm high by 40cm wide":

    No. 85cm high (standard under-worktop height) by 60cm wide (by 60cm deep).

    Re vacuum cleaners: 20 years ago Miele made some really good ones. I still have and operate a "Miele Big Cat & Dog" from around 1999 or 2000, and I vacuum a lot (allergies, etc etc).

    457:

    DO NOT use an electric car - unless you are fully clued-up & even them it'll probably go belly-up on you. Oh dear.

    458:

    shrug

    I want them to pass. If they can't, without going fully into the oncoming lane, they shouldn't be behind a wheel.

    But about close... yeah, back around '76, I was riding my bike to work over a bridge. What could have been a right lane was completely full of yellow lines, meaning DO NOT DRIVE IN THIS LANE. One day, bunch of jerks in a car deliberately swerved into the yellow, and yelling and screaming at me "nyahhh" out the open windows.

    At the end of the bridge, there was a traffic light. A literal quarter block after that, there was a second one. They drove through the red light on the first, and hit the back of a car waiting at the second. All concerned jumped out.

    And I rode by, smiling, at instant car-ma.

    459:

    "road vehicles are still nowhere near the top carbon dioxide source"

    Last time I looked, transportation is about a third of the total, and road transportation is something like 85% of that, so that's maybe 27% of total carbon emissions. Do you have different numbers?

    460:

    10% raise? Huh? Sorry, I've never seen that in a long career. I don't think I've ever seen even 4%. Real raise? Get a new job.

    461:

    Yes. Try this (it wasn't the one I got that from, either):

    https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

    But your figures might be right, as the published ones are all over the shop, partly due to everybody estimating (measuring is too strong) different things.

    462:

    _Moz_ @ 390: Tools are trickier, but it's worth noting that the great majority of people don't have to commute with their tools and of the ones who currently seem to, many could find alternatives if the other option was not working. The classic example is construction, where 90% of the workers "need" a ute full of tools but the other 10% somehow scrape by with one truck+site office and a whole lot of ride sharing and public transport. It's almost as though taking their tools home every night is a comforting ritual rather than being essential. Not to mention that by definition those people are fit and active, so the usual whining about elderly and disabled people not being able to walk a kilometre can't apply.

    If it had been just the tools, I probably could have done the job riding a motorcycle. I had a 40,000 square mile territory to cover ... not exactly sure, I lost the spread sheet where I had noted down the locations of all the customers to a disk drive failure - it's a file I can reconstruct if I need to. The only file that's truly lost forever is the spread-sheet that I kept my blood sugar record on. I'll just have to start a new record.

    Everything else that was on that drive was either backed up or I have the data secured elsewhere, so I can reconstruct it OR of no great consequence if I lose it (e.g. all of my computer game files which can be reinstalled from Steam).

    But there's no way I could have done the job without a motor vehicle. The limits of my service territory gave me customers 166 miles NE, 134 miles SSE, 85 miles SW and 148 miles NW (and that's if I didn't have to shift over & help out in one of the adjacent service territories).

    I carried a van full of spare parts. My truck was 95% full of parts & 5% tools. And even at that, many times I wouldn't have the one part I needed on the truck. I'd show up, diagnose the problem, make a temporary work around and have the part I needed to do the job right shipped to the location overnight, go on to another call and be back in the morning to finish the job as soon as FedEx delivered.

    463:

    You're late to the game. About 10 years ago or so, truckers started screaming that the railroads were taking their freight.... Heh, heh.

    464:

    Over on fark, I became aware that a bunch of people have webcams pointed at their favorite bridges.

    There's a lot of videos of idiot truck drivers ignoring the max height of the bridge... and wedging the truck, or ripping off the roof.

    465:

    Appreciated your explanation to others how and why Westinghouse first got rich - it's Westinghouse safety air brakes that he invented for the railroads. Before then, brakes were utterly dangerous, with brakemen having to turn wheels from the tops of the cars, and a lot lost fingers, hands, feet, and lives.

    466:

    I have also posted how very small, light vehicles could be designed and built that would meet 90% of the UK's (and Europe's) current commuting and shopping requirements. But that is not what is being proposed by the "electric vehicles are the solution" brigade.

    Meet the e.GO. There is a good chance that this will be my next car, when the current one (a Peugeot 107 from 2006) meets its end of life.

    It almost meets my personal requirements for driving range. My parents live about 150 km away, and sometimes (about once or twice a year) the need arises to travel to them by car (normally I take the train). I'd like to be able to do that on one charge. The e.GO Life 60 has an advertised battery range of 145 km, which I'm afraid could leave me just short of reaching them.

    Anyway, my general rule for transportation is: cars are for medium length trips (5-50 km) in regions (or at times) where there's no good public transport. If your journey is 50-2000 km, that's what trains are for (exceptions: you have a heavy load to move or are handicapped in a way that makes it impossible for you to travel by train, but not by car).

    467:

    whitroth @ 419: Cruise control, ABSOLUTELY.

    When I was younger, before I discovered "Cruise control", I averaged a speeding ticket every two years. I got my first vehicle with cruise control in 1982. I have not had a speeding ticket since.

    And I've noticed my average mpg is higher (i.e. I use less gas) when I can use cruise control. Plus I get a lot less stress from all the idiots on the road.

    468:

    Pigeon @ 434: Have I got my American road markings right - "double yellow line" is down the centre of the road, and "white line on the right" is right on the edge?

    If so, I thoroughly agree - riding down the painted line at the edge is an appropriate position for a low-speed vehicle and it noticeably reduces the rolling resistance; and people who sit on my arse instead of coming past really piss me off. A vehicle passing is only a hazard for a second or two, but a tailgater is a hazard the whole time they're there and I just want them to fuck off.

    Yellow lines are generally** found on two lane roads (one lane of traffic in either direction). It indicates a "no passing" zone. If it's on your side of the center line, it means you're not allowed to pass. Frequently there is a combination of a broken yellow line & a solid yellow line so the clueless can figure out which direction of traffic is restricted from passing. Where both directions are allowed to pass, there's only a single broken yellow line down the center of the road.

    A double yellow line means "no passing" in either direction. If there's a yellow line on your side of the road, drivers are not legally allowed to pass you even if you're riding right up against the white line (which is there to help drivers at night to see where the edge of the pavement is).

    I never pass a cyclist unless I can get all the way over into the other lane doing so. And if that means I have to follow for miles & miles until I reach a place where I can safely pass, then so be it. My own safety is just as important to me as is the safety of cyclists I might encounter. I will be there right behind you until I think I can safely pass. Deal with it.

    ** In the U.S. we drive on the right, so a yellow line will be to the driver's left. Occasionally on divided highways there will be a yellow line on the left edge up against the median or breakdown lane if there is one on the left. Sometimes there will be a yellow line in between lanes to indicate that drivers should not change lanes there.

    469:

    "Miele Big Cat & Dog"

    This, I take it, is some kind of tiger/wolf/cyborg chimeric life form, which cleans the carpet by licking it with its rasp-like tongue, rids itself of the harvest by coughing up gigantic hairballs behind the sofa, and fuels itself by eating the people who come round to nick the tools out of your van.

    Where do I get one?

    470:

    No, I am talking about something a small fraction of that size, weight, speed and power consumption. Dammit, that monstrosity is wider and heavier than my current car!

    471:

    You'd drive me crazy, and make me angry, not passing. I'm explicitly doing my best to make room for you, and most folks will go over the double yellow, if they can do it safely.

    As I said, there's an on-and-off local campaign, "give em a yard".

    472:

    OK, so the American road marking system is more or less the same as the British one only laterally reversed and with yellow and white interchanged. Thanks.

    "I never pass a cyclist unless I can get all the way over into the other lane doing so. And if that means I have to follow for miles & miles... My own safety is just as important to me as is the safety of cyclists I might encounter"

    Such a tailgater is probably never going to get past me, because after that kind of distance they won't be able to see a thing for all the steam coming out of my ears...

    The tailgater's safety is not under threat. Bicycles are not horses (and don't get me started on those mad buggers); the chances of a collision between car and cyclist even damaging the car beyond a scratch on the paint, let alone injuring the driver, are negligibly small. They do, however, threaten the safety of the victim all the time they are there. They also make it impossible to dodge things like drains, potholes, and broken glass. Their behaviour is strong evidence that they are incompetent to drive and not in proper control of their vehicle in the first place, particularly since they have most likely seen several preceding vehicles get past without difficulty but are unable to follow the example themselves. They are also dangerously unpredictable: because the obstruction they are perceiving does not exist in reality, it is impossible to know when their imagination will decide it isn't there any more and they will suddenly come zooming past. The deduction is therefore that the safest course of action is to keep moving at exactly the same speed in exactly the same undeviating track until they have finally buggered off; pulling out to dodge things that may damage wheels/tyres is to be avoided in case they happen to choose that moment to finally pass, while pulling over and stopping is also to be avoided in case the dozy sod neither brakes nor passes.

    They are also creating potential dangers to the cyclist that will not manifest until they are safely out of sight of anything that might disturb them: they are causing a line of pissed-off traffic to accumulate behind them, a collection of drivers who when they finally are able to pick up speed again are likely to think "thank fuck for that" and charge off in relief faster than their concentration can recover from the tedium of the queue.

    Basically, it is a behaviour pattern of negative value, since the best it ever achieves is to piss a lot of people off.

    473:

    Yeah, but you've got the loading gauge for double-stack containers. We on the other hand are sometimes known as the only country that runs narrow gauge trains on standard gauge track. With our stunted loading gauge such useful practices as unhooking the tractor unit from the lorry trailer and shoving the trailer straight on board a rail wagon are not the trivialities they ought to be. So our railways tend to do well for things like bulk mineral haulage but pretty badly for anything else.

    See if we are going to undertake massive new construction along the Great Central corridor, then this is what it ought to be for: freight haulage, taking advantage of the need for new construction to do it big enough to get trucks on the back of trains, with the aim of both getting the trucks off the M1/M6 and the existing long distance freight off the WCML. Not pointless addition of a fourth passenger route to the three existing ones for the sake of shaving a trivial few minutes off a journey which is already rather faster than driving, at the expense of the quality of services to destinations in between and a square-law hike in energy consumption that brings the trains into the same category as aircraft and makes a nonsense of any claims of ecological soundness.

    474:

    You know Greg, that article is actually pretty positive about electric cars. It gives a poor review to the charging infrastructure and shows that if you wish to take long trips beyond the spec’d battery range you need to be careful and plan things. But how is that in any way surprising? It basically shows how someone went through those things pretty cluelessly, did many things sub-optimally and still got where they were going, albeit a bit late.

    475:

    Oh, Gordon Bennett... That's awful. The kind of journey that is a large part of the reason for my wanting a car in the first place, and that bloody thing is almost completely fucking useless for it.

    "There are a number of apps you need to download as an EV owner, as most charging points require mobile payment. I downloaded Ecotricity's 'Electric Highway', ChargePoint, ZapMap, PodPoint, Polar, Source London and Charge Your Car. Each required individual account set up, card details, other personal information and EV information."

    Oh for FUCK'S SAKE...

    So they are all going to be almost completely fucking useless for anything because by and large the only actually usable charging point is your own home.

    Make the bastard charging points take CASH you arseholes. Stop with this exclusionary crap already.

    ""Most of the charging stations don't work" a friend warns me a week before our trip."

    Probability of being able to find one drops another order of magnitude, assuming the two major uselessness factors are independent outcomes of shitty design.

    "The e-Golf comes with technology that analyses your previous journeys of the day and adjusts your battery range based on your style of driving, weather, traffic conditions and other factors. The results though appear to be inconsistent."

    Of course they are. They are with ordinary cars that try to do this "range remaining" nonsense as well. Their disconnection from reality is a standing joke... only without the ability to carry a spare can of petrol (or walk off and get one), it's not funny. Stop bothering with this "helpful" not-helpful (as ever) crap... the good old petrol gauge, or its coulomb-counting-with-battery-loss-fudge-factor electrical equivalent, is the best you'll get, because you don't have to try and work out how the car has mangled the raw data so you can reverse the transformation and find out what it actually means. It may not be perfect, but at least it doesn't do the Windows update time remaining thing on you.

    "You can have a 7kw charger installed at your home for about £1,000, and government grants are available."

    Or I could get a 32A CEE covered socket and some 4mm T&E and run a cable to one of the spare breakers on my panel, for a vastly lesser amount...

    But those sort of loads are going to cause problems. It's not unknown for people to put in an electric shower (10kW or so), with a separate breaker and its own feed from the meter, and find that the company side of the wiring, even though supposedly well within its rating, starts making funny smells. When people start using the electric shower while the car is on charge, wiring that previously didn't make funny smells will now start doing it.

    "This car costs £33,000"

    Shit on a stick.

    476:

    It is of note that their journey would have been a lot less hassle if they could have simply switched the flat battery for a fully charged one instead of piddling around putting partial charges into it in situ.

    477:

    Yeah, my gf mentioned that the other day. Ironically, she often calls me when she knows I'm in the car. Having said that, I don't have many phone conversations with other people, and very few of those when driving. My weekly call time when driving probably rarely totals more than 10 or 20 minutes, so it's a pretty small sample. Also, I'm usually on roads I know well - I would probably be less happy about being on the phone in an area I didn't know.

    I cannot speak for other drivers, but I try to make a caller aware if I need to concentrate more on my driving, and will ask them to shut up if necessary.

    478:

    Good to hear from you as always. real obvious panic. I'm seeing panic in various feeds, not just Epstein associated; interesting to watch. Game is being flushed, is the term you used in the past. (I like.)

    Negative Bond Yields? weeeee. This was amusing. NYTimes Trump administration stenographer has a slightly edgy piece:

    In Economic Warning Signals, Trump Sees Signs of a Conspiracy (Maggie Haberman, Aug. 18, 2019) He has said forces that do not want him to win have been overstating the damage his trade war has caused, according to people who have spoken with him. ... “There’s no evidence whatsoever that American consumers are bearing any of this,” Mr. Navarro said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” insisting, despite abundant data to the contrary, that “they’re not hurting anybody here.” ... Mr. Kudlow, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” said that the state of the economy under the Trump administration “is kind of a miracle, because we face severe monetary restraint from the Fed.”

    Ceasing trade war hostilities would be a start, and and so would using available soft levers to try to stop hard Brexit.

    479:

    It may depend - for the US - if you look at used energy (as opposed to power generated when not needed) - transportation is over 30% (wait but why). So, not small - particularly since nuclear or solar could substitute for the rest.

    For (b), I fear I don't understand.

    For (c), it depends on what you mean by proper. People have estimated pollution, energy costs for electric vehicle fabrication. The upshot was - about the same and trending better with time - mostly because battery recycling will be a thing. (Easy engine, but batteries required == same) They have done pilot studies for battery reuse and recycling. The economics aren't totally worked out (eg, 4+ competing methods), but much of the reason is that it looks like an easy problem with no immediate application. (Vehicle packs are expected to last 10+ years - and probably be reused for storage. Following that recycling is slightly harder than for other batteries, but there are fewer heavy metals - so a big meh.)

    Now - there will be problems. Eh. There are always problems. But - from a carbon generation perspective, with net lifecycle, electric vehicles appear likely to offer significant benefits and are likely to eventually be cheaper too, particularly with externalities taken into consideration.

    The big gotcha is battery pack replacement. It isn't that maintenance costs are high - they seem to be lower - just that the costs are really lumpy. Some sort of pay by the year extended warranty might work well for many people. Albeit, I dunno - drove Toyotas for a while - really only repaired them upon hitting something or, once, some sort of battery failure - and that was probably more than 2 decades. Paint fell off, but the engine was fine. Currently, I get the feeling that electrics tend to be vendor service and ice tends to be random mechanic - so there may be cost distortion.

    So, I do expect they'll eventually mostly take over. Managing the transition - eh - some people want faster change - I prefer kind of a measured adoption - which the current pricing enforces to some extent.

    @whitroth it depends. Work at a startup, 50% raises are sometimes achievable. They first one involved making the founder feel guilty about overworking the new hire. Now, work at an established company - less likely. One reason people completely slack off at large companies. Nicer for family life though.

    480:

    When I was younger, before I discovered "Cruise control", I averaged a speeding ticket every two years. I got my first vehicle with cruise control in 1982. I have not had a speeding ticket since. The easy constant speed using cruise control on highways with light traffic is good. I switched from a car (broken transmission) with cruise control to one without (low end Prius, used, hybrid for those not familiar) and am really bothered by the extra cognitive load that some describe above. It cuts into meditation time in particular. Drive-by-wire is a bit annoying too; the little shifts in mode (electric, electric + engine, regenerative braking) are noticeable. The insta-electric-torque makes it pretty good off the light though; between that and good simple reaction time, I'm usually 20 meters ahead of sports cars for a bit.

    481: 467 - That just makes me think you're a poor driver. I've never had a speeding ticket and am only rarely pinged by "you are speeding, slow down" sensors. The only "cruise control" I've ever had is conveniently attached to the end of my right leg. 475 - The "available range" mode in my Skoda's trip computer does OK; as OK as can be expected given that the lst half mile or so my commute to work is up a hill that demands peak torque or thereabouts in 3rd or 4th gear. 479 - I suppose I'll be the first to ask what technologies other than "plug the old pack into the grid as a battery" actually exist?
    482:

    Pigeon @ 472: Basically, it is a behaviour pattern of negative value, since the best it ever achieves is to piss a lot of people off.

    Basically, based on my prior experience, it has the positive value of keeping me from getting screwed over by some ass-hat looking for someone to sue. This is NOT hypothetical BTW.

    Additionally, I have been a some-time cyclist, and riding to the right, I have been brushed off the road (actually made physical contact) on more than one occasion by drivers trying to pass without moving over to the other lane. I have even been knocked down by a city bus while in a marked bicycle lane.

    Being knocked down and/or brushed aside (& run off the road) pisses me off. I ain't gonna be the asshole who does that to someone else. And I ain't gonna' get scammed by a swoop & squat either.

    483:

    paws4thot @ 481: #467 - That just makes me think you're a poor driver. I've never had a speeding ticket and am only rarely pinged by "you are speeding, slow down" sensors. The only "cruise control" I've ever had is conveniently attached to the end of my right leg.

    That's your opinion. I'd rather be a poor driver than a poor human being. I've driven over 2,000,000 miles and never had an "at fault" accident. I have been rear ended while stopped at traffic signals and I have been T-boned by a drunk running a stop sign and I have had someone try to pull an insurance scam against me. I consistently get gas mileage ABOVE EPA estimates for any vehicle I drive.

    I try to be courteous, considerate and professional (you can fill in the rest) when I'm behind the wheel.

    I drive defensively and anticipate what's happening down the road so that I'm always integrated with the flow of traffic, neither too fast, nor too slow. I slow down by taking my foot off the gas so I won't have to brake hard when I come to a traffic signal. I'm patient with pedestrians and I use my turn signals when I need to change lanes even though I know that's just an invitation for some jackass to try to cut me off. I seldom need to change lanes because I know where I'm going before I get in the car and how I'm going to get there. I'm always in the lane I need to be in to reach my destination.

    I'm smooth when I get behind the wheel; cool, calm & collected ... although it did take me about a year & a half after I got home from Iraq before I stopped reaching for a weapon every time some sheisskopf cut me off.

    484:

    the only solution involves a change of approach to transport.

    You and me agree very strongly on that, and we have both personally done pretty much all we can in that direction. I'm pretty sure we can both "dismount and lift your vehicle up the step" if required.

    I am somewhat on the side that says yep, cars are fucked and all of them have to go because they're one of those things where the other 99% give the rest a bad name. But I also agree that some people, just not anywhere near as many as currently do, will actually need to keep driving 1-10 ton vehicles to get their jobs done, and some of those will almost certainly be fossil powered (fire engines!). But once we get into the 90% plus range it really stops mattering, because the objectors can see that they personally are never going to get lights, sirens and an infernal combustion engine... therefore the whole idea is unacceptable and must be stopped at all costs.

    I'm with Calvin's dad - I hope gas goes up to ten bucks a gallon and that can't happen soon enough for me. Yeah, carbon taxes are regressive. So is climate change. You don't really think the billionaires are going to be queuing up with us peasants and handing over biometrics in exchange for food aid, do you?

    485:

    Pigeon @ 475 Precisely, every step of the way. Except that IIRC you cannot "swap out" the battery easily - can you? Basic design fault, IMHO. Someone correct me if I'm out-of-date.

    Braking, stopping & the metods for doing so ... I'm suprised no-one has mentioned a truly horrifying near-miss recently in Edinburgh, where the northbound Sleeper train driver, realsised somewhere about between Riccarton & Craiglockhart that he HAD NO BRAKES .... He radioed the signalling centre, who cleared a through line ... they rolled right through Waverley & Calton Tunnel & finally came to a stand in the vicinity of Craigentinny. Sounds, to me, like a modern replay of the Grantham smash of 1906. ( trains were added to -Grantham - or split - Carstairs - & the resetting of the brakes necessary was not done properly & a brake test showed nothing ... ) The eventual RAIB report is going to make fascinating & probably scary reading.

    [ Incidentally, the new service with CAF (Spanish) built coaches has been plagued with troubles & failures on the technical/mechanical side ... ]

    486:

    Someone clearly did not follow correct procedures in coupling and brake testing. The driver followed correct procedures for a brake failure and no-one was (seriously) hurt. Accordingly the correct thing to do seems to be to wait for the RAIB report rather than speculate. OK?

    What I can say is that splitting the northbound Glasgow and Edinburgh sleepers at Carstairs is routine practice (in the done every night sense), and that, whilst the Glasgow portion of the train keeps the loco it left Euston with, a separate loco will be coupled to the Edinburgh portion there.

    487:

    Well. For reuse/recycle - grid storage will be the reuse, assuming standardization issues are solvable enough. For recycle, one article had 4ish seemingly viable technologies - mostly different chemical extraction procedures with varying degrees of mechanical disassembly. Really does look quite solvable - not really solved until there are commercial facilities operating at scale - but there aren't enough packs at end of life yet.

    @484 Issue is that cars are actually probably optimal for rural regions and pretty good for suburban sprawl,. particularly with high moving expenses and relatively frequent job switches. Rethinking approaches to transport ends up requiring fairly large changes in infrastructure. Not going to happen. Now, city life, sure, cars are silly - but even there - uber-style services are occasionally required. (Rapid baby transport when, eg, there's a partially healed cut on your abdomen and no doctor within 50 blocks.) (No elevators to the local subway...)

    Now electric cars - getting one right now is a bit like buying an early, um, Roomba may be closest. Super expensive / luxury good with issues. I'm not a car person and may look at one in a decade. By then, charging stations will be worked out.

    @484 But, make something regressive enough and you get a democratic revolt - wherein people simply refuse to implement something. That said, a gradually implemented carbon tax - with the revenues concentrated on the lower 50th percentile doesn't seem obviously terrible. There are alternative technologies that are not too expensive - though we still underutilize and overregulate nuclear.

    488:

    (a) The USA is extreme in this respect, I agree, due to its automobile worship. It's a LOT less true in most other countries.

    (b) In the UK, we are talking about something like doubling our road maintenance costs, with a corresponding increase in our use of asphalt (petroleum based). We are also talking about rebuilding something like a few million bridges and major culverts (yes, really). And it is probable that the construction vehicles to do that will burn petroleum; if they use batteries, they make those problems worse. We are also talking about a FURTHER discouragement of walking, cycling and horse-riding, with the other consequences that implies (including increased car usage and demand for car parking, more medical expenditure etc.)

    And THIS is why I say we need a change of approach.

    (c) There may be some reasonable analyses; I have not seen them, and I have never seen a proponent point to them. My guess is that the costs are probably comparable, which I think is what you are saying. But, as always in engineering, and as I am right now writing in a lecture, it's the problems you don't expect that catch you out.

    489:

    In the UK, petrol has been over $10 a gallon (even a US gallon, until the recent drop in sterling) for some time :-)

    490: 483 - All "not being caught speeding" (or being a mobile chicane either) requires is sufficient speed awareness to be around up to typical local speed and below the 90th percentile speed. I don't think that's a sufficiently big ask to need automated assistance.

    That said, I do agree about defensive driving, and signaling lane changes (although I do use the 3-flash chop for these). I do not agree about "always being in the lane I need to be in to reach my destination" but I suspect that doing that is something that only happens in North America.

    "EPA estimates" - You do realise that people not from North America probably have no idea how realistic those are or aren't? I do know that the recently superceded "ECE 15" figures in Europe were hopelessly optimistic.

    487 Para 1 - In other words, you're still flying on blind hope and optimism about recycling electric cars. OTOH recycling hydrocarbon cars is a solved problem.

    Paras 2 to 4 and #484 also refers. I live in a rural area, and my normal use case involves the following major journey types:- 1) 11 miles each way commute. Now almost anything, probably even a Renault Twizzy can deliver that in calm weather, but I sometimes need to make that trip in a Beaufort Scale "strong gale", so something heavy and stable enough to not be blown all over the road is needed. 2) My place to my Mum's. 100 miles minimum, up to 240 miles depending on route. I think this would require a recharge en route even on the shortest route, and in daylight. This in turn demands that I stop somewhere with chargers rather than at my preferred coffee shops.

    491:

    Being in the lane I need to be to reach my destination - I do that usually if I know the correct lane. At least here in Finland it's somewhat hard occasionally to change lanes, so it's easier for me to just pick the one I need when I can and then just not change it.

    This creates also problems in places like leaving a bigger road and there are two exit lanes, one of which then joins the other one 100-200 metres later. Apparently this is done because then people can queue on both lanes and use the zipper merge at the end, but because mostly they are used as just one lane and annoying people drive by the queue on that lane and then try to push their way to the "correct" lane, they are mostly empty.

    I'm not sure if my driving style is common here. I drive too little, and mostly notice the drivers who seem to be weaving from one lane to another all the time, so not everybody tries to pick a lane and then stay on it.

    492:

    Being in the lane I need to be to reach my destination

    I try to be in the lane that will move the fastest, if I know the route. Knowing that the bus parks in the right lane for 5 minutes at Vic Park means I use the left lane until I'm past Pharmacy, and so forth.

    What I've noticed in the past couple of years is that Toronto traffic is now using merge lanes and paved shoulders as overtaking lanes — which was rare a decade ago. Whenever I'm on the 401 or 400* during rush hour I've seen people driving on the paved shoulder (which is illegal) to pass. I'm glad I watch so many Russian dash cam videos, because now when moving into an exit lane at the first (legal) opportunity I now really carefully check that no one is barrelling up the shoulder to cut in to the line of cars patiently exiting.

    Not certain why driving practices seem to be shifting. Could be immigration from countries where that is normal, followed by imitation, but that's just speculation.

    *Provincial highways with 100 km/h speed limits, but through Toronto so often parking lots at rush hour.

    493:

    “Yeah, carbon taxes are regressive. So is climate change.”

    I think carbon taxes are essential, but the time they needed implementing to stand a chance of making a difference is 30 years ago. My honest opinion is that we’re fucked and it’s too late for pretty much anything at this point. It goes way beyond obvious sources of carbon.

    We’re all part of the killing machine and we’re all complicit in it. Not equally complicit, sure. But none of us can honestly disown it. Sure there must exist people who can, persisting with difficulty here and there on earth, as MacDiarmid says, but they are few, remote and not connected with the operating premise of the machine (only, in many places, to its blades).

    We’re at a point where we are not sure the premises of even pretty direct and subsistence level ways of life are sustainable, environmentally or morally. Add that we’re born into our complicity, we have limited choice and the choices we do get appear at points in our lives that are often the least auspicious or appropriate. Sometimes it looks like the best we can do is to disconnect and go off grid, but that’s a massively privileged option that helps few if any, other than individuals involved, their domestic groups and their consciences (luxuries, as Sir Humphrey says to Bernard).

    I’m not sure what making a difference looks like, really, at this late stage in the game, but increments are important (even if forlorn). Hope is important anyway, and I guess there is that moral imperative to optimism I’ve talked about here recently. I take your point that to live in a way that, if everyone did it, would enact the change we need to make, even if no-one else actually does it, is the proper ethically informed and totally de-ontological and utilitarian synthesis of a moral imperative. But I don’t think that’s enough to achieve what we need to achieve and that’s why I think we’re fucked.

    494:

    A little further down that path and you start thinking the right wingnuts are right - what us greenies need to do is start getting seriously violent in an organised way.

    The premier of NSW has just been in the media ranting about violent protesters because they've been out there blocking traffic or something. Which is only slightly better than her "left wing" counterpart in Queensland who is making shit up about actual violence and trying to use that as an excuse to pass even more regressive legislation against protesters than already exists.

    If nothing else it makes the point very neatly that left-right is not a useful way of distinguishing between parties in this area. I suggest either green-brown or democratic-authoritarian. On the latter front Queenslanders are already asking "Joh? Is that you?" after the last time an authoritarian scumbag started crossing lines.

    Joh was born in NZ, and I'm sure it was about that time that a kiwi prime minister (also an authoritarian right wingnut) said that kiwis moving to Oz increased the average IQ of both countries. Possibly not the only thing that got better when that happened.

    495:

    Sometimes it looks like the best we can do is to disconnect and go off grid, but that’s a massively privileged option that helps few if any, other than individuals involved, their domestic groups and their consciences

    Even that helps only the individuals, and is not a solution for everybody. However, going really off grid is very difficult, or you're into hunting and gathering very easily. As I understand it, growing cereals enough to live off them, and something else to provide protein, vitamins, and such stuffs, is not easy. It's the problem our ancestors (and some of our contempraries in modern times) invented a lot of stuff to make easier, and now we need only a small portion of people in agriculture feeding us all.

    Going back to substinence farming is going to be tough. Also, here in Finland, the traditional problem was with land quality: it needs a lot of fertilizer, and in the old times I think there weren't enough animals to really provide the fertilizer. Nowadays, doing everything "by yourself" is going to be pretty hard, as I think most off grid people would like to have things like tractors, if they have to do their agriculture by themselves. That means being dependent on the global value chain anyway. Even making clothing takes a lot of time and is not that easy if you have to do everything by yourself.

    I like not to think that we are fucked, though. It's getting harder and harder not to do lately, though.

    496:

    And of course I left something out from the fertilizer: that means that growing cereals here means getting fertilizer from somewhere, and traditionally animals weren't quite enough. That's why we use artificial fertilizers today.

    There used to be slash-and-burn agriculture here, too. I think some people practiced that until the twentieth century. That's hardly sustainable with the amount of people we have now, and is, again, hard work.

    497:

    Now I'm curious: what is your current car? I was of the impression that I already drive one of the smallest models available (as I wrote, Peugeot 107), and the e.GO Life is a bit shorter, albeit a little wider and higher than that. It has a smaller wheelbase and a smaller turn radius. Yes, it's a good deal heavier (about one quarter), but I assume that is due to the weight of the battery and therefore practically unavoidable.

    I'm not looking for a fight here; I'm just curious about your definition of a small car, and why one of the smallest cars around seems like a monstrosity to you.

    498:

    A Skoda Fabia, with as few gizmos as I could manage. All right, the width difference is only millimetres and the weight only 10%, but it's there.

    The reason that I regard the e.GO as a monstrosity is in terms of, as far as I can see, its and possibly your claims that it is a solution to our current problems. What I said could be done would come in at about 100 Kg and 2.5m x 1.5m (at the low end), and would meet 90% of what people ACTUALLY require for commuting and shopping. Yes, there would need to be larger models for taking more than one adult and two small children or one large child, but no way am I talking about a monstrosity that weighs over a ton and reaches over 100 KPH.

    But, as I said, I am talking about a radically different approach - NOT just replacing our current petrol and diesel juggernauts with electric juggernauts.

    499:

    On second thoughts, the bottom end version would be somewhere below that in footprint - possibly even 2m x 1m.

    500:

    One of the many naive things coming out of the current Extinction Rebellion is the idea that it'll be easy to get cars out of cities. The point ER is trying to make, and the reason so many of us get so frustrated, is that you're looking at things backwards. The question is not "from what we have now, what's are some easy reductions in impact?". That's a question for the 1970's and 1980's. ER start from the explicit premise that the science is correct and we are facing ecosystem collapse. The question is therefore "given ecosystem collapse, what civilisation do we need to build in order that some of us survive?"

    Nope, you're making the same mistake. Back when I doing environmental science was an undergrad in the late 1980s, we were talking about global warming, and obviously nothing came of it. What I'm seeing now, from the Extinction Rebellion's own literature, is this notion that, if they stage a non-violent rebellion to gain control, then the solutions will come of themselves. One example (again from the Extinction Rebellion handbook) is the idea that cars have been influencing urban design for only a century, therefore it will be easy to rebuild cities to do away with cars. I think this is dangerously naive.

    Let's parse this out for southern California, which is effectively about a century old, and currently holds 19 million-odd people in a set of cities designed explicitly around cars, and designed explicitly so that the suburbs are many miles from work, and designed culturally so that, aside from menial jobs at malls, the best way to get a job within walking distance is to work from home.

    Now, let's get the cars out of southern California. Since the region is dependent on food trucked in from dozens to thousands of miles away, merely keeping a majority from starving is going to be tricky. You're also going to have to find billions, possibly a trillion, dollars in construction gear and supplies to rip up entire cities, mix the work places into the housing units, create a huge transportation infrastructure, repipe the water, gas, and sewer, and so forth. You're also going to have to rip up all the land titles of those 19 million-odd people and forcibly resettle them in places where they can be close to where they work, assuming they can work wherever you resettle them. I guess baby boomers and aging gen Xers get worked to death or killed out of hand, just to keep costs down, rather than letting them keep their homes in the 'burbs?

    At this point, the parallels between a naive "solve the problem" approach and Cambodia's Killing Fields become increasingly clear. Note that Cambodia only has 15 million people now, and had 8 million during the era of the Killing Fields, when two million (+/- 1 million), so we're talking about a social engineering experiment that's around three times larger (19 million live in LA County alone, and there's 3 million in San Diego County, and more in Orange and Riverside).

    The point here is that people have been aware of and analyzing the problems caused by climate change for decades. In some few cases, answers are easy and have been held back by corrupted politics. Getting rid of the corruption will allow those to be solved. Unfortunately, the corruption in other cases has literally baked the problems into urban design around fossil fuels, to the point where naive ideas about getting the cars out of southern California quickly involves something like Cultural Revolution-style brutality. And the Extinction Rebellion isn't organized to do this. And the problems with urban design involve billions of people globally, not just millions in one small place with too much cash and not enough vision.

    That's what I mean by naive. They can't run with just one plan, they need thousands of them. Moreover, they need to be pulling all the people who've been dealing with this shit onto their side as fast as possible, and so far, their attitude seems more to be "don't trust anyone over 30, especially if they're white and cisnormal male." Finally, if they're not planning on killing sprees through forced collectivization, then they need toget their heads around the true complexity of the problems ASAP and figure out the nonviolent transformative techniques that will work, and I'm seeing no sign of that either.

    And this sucks. Still, I'll be climate striking on September 20, just to see what happens.

    501:

    I really don’t want to rant on about Donnie’s latest expression of senility (really what else to call his ridiculousness about Greenland? I assume he thinks it’ll go down as The Great Trump Purchase—Believe Me). Or his anti-semitic dogwhistle, basically “Those stateless Jews are incapable of being loyal to our Glorious Homeland and should be gotten rid of”—okay, he’s not quite there, yet.

    Instead I’ll just leave another uncle brag: Here’s an article with trailers about my nephew’s upcoming film with Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver playing his parents. And Wallace Shawn, Inconceivable! He’s also in the current “After the Wedding”.

    Obviously, Mods feel free to delete if you feel like.

    Oh, and for something on-topic, I totally forgot to look for the livestream of the Hugo ceremony. Sorry to have missed Jeannette Ng’s acceptance in particular.

    502:

    Ah, there I do have to disagree - 1m width is not enough for stability. My mobility scooter is about two thirds of that width and is on the verge of being able to tip itself over by centrifugal force even at its maximum level-ground speed of 4mph. The limiter that keeps it to that speed doesn't work going down hills and it readily attains enough of a speed to make even very minor course deviations unviable (where "enough speed" is about a running pace). If it was fitted with a kiosk to keep the weather off the driver - which would be a necessity for a general-use vehicle - that would render it similarly unmanageable in any sort of wind. Scaling up to 1m width would of course help, but still not enough for speeds faster than a creep.

    The trouble is that humans have evolved with a preferred orientation that puts their C of G as high as possible. Which doesn't matter too much in conjunction with the active balancing system, but kind of buggers any attempt to make a narrow vehicle that relies on static geometry for stability. And they mostly object strongly both to orienting themselves for minimum C of G height other than for sleeping, and also, it appears, to vehicles with their own dynamic balancing system - going by the handful of existing vehicles which have three or four wheels but also a means for leaning into corners - I get the impression that while they do have some enthusiastic supporters, so does drinking your own piss, and the majority of people appear to find them a compromise which is worse than either of the points it's compromising between (as is so often the case).

    503:

    My trike is c. 0.9m wide, I ride in the same position as sitting in a low armchair with my feet up, I corner pretty hard, and there is no problem. Few people who try such things without holding a fixed prejudice against them, and without fairly severe physical disabilities, have any trouble. It's no lower or harder to get into or out of than some cars, after all! Mobility scooters are notoriously ill-engineered, and are a terrible counter-example. 1m is definitely feasible, though whether it would be a good design point is much less clear.

    Part of that is because quite a lot of people DO have fairly severe physical disabilities - which also means they can't handle most cars. However, whether that is better dealt with by provided vehicles more suited to their limitations, or changing the default low-end design, is a matter that would need careful consideration.

    505:

    No, you can't, and that's been the root of much of my criticism. It's also something that's come up before and only very unsatisfactory reasons have emerged for not doing it - mostly "they are not currently designed that way therefore it is impossible to design them any other way" (faugh), with a side order of failure of imagination as to how the removability would work (despite the established nature of the simple techniques required) and another of failure to distinguish between the squishy electrochemical bits and their mechanical support, plus the occasional "they tried it in [circumscribed area of the US] and it didn't catch on" - because it was done in a half-arsed way without bothering to install a usefully dense network of exchange points before introducing the cars, and its uselessly sparse network did not cover a big enough area in the first place, so of course it didn't catch on; this says nothing about its viability if it was actually done properly.

    The reason, of course, is that nobody actually gives a shit about introducing electric cars for their environmental advantages (ignoring for the moment the debate over whether they really have any). They are only doing it for the money, as much and as quickly as possible, so they much prefer to not bother with any infrastructure at all, and instead rely on spare capacity in existing infrastructure which was designed for different purposes, which isn't really suitable, and which someone else will be effectively blackmailed into eventually upgrading after increasing numbers of electric cars have eaten all the spare capacity and problems have appeared in consequence.

    Built-in batteries also make sure that not only do people have to give the car manufacturers more money to begin with, they also have to keep on doing it, whereas if batteries were a swappable item like propane cylinders for forklifts, the battery-related payments would all go either to the actual battery manufacturers or to the equivalent of Calor Gas, and the car manufacturers would have no opportunity to grab chunks as it went past.

    Basically, it's the usual kind of shitty result you always get when things are viewed as means to get money out of people instead of as means to do whatever they're actually for.

    As for that Scottish brakelessness incident, I too will be interested to see what the RAIB make of it. I must say I thought they had introduced technology to knock that ancient problem on the head with the Class 91s. Obviously I was wrong. It would be a much better reason for modern trains being stuffed with electrogubbins than infuriating scrolling displays that flash and move continuously and won't give you any peace, endless repeated automatic announcements ditto, and toilet doors that power themselves inexorably to the fully open position while you're half way through having a piss regardless of your frantic hammering on the "close" button.

    506:

    Oh, sure, Triumph Spitfires for instance :) but what I'm getting at is that most people do have a fixed prejudice (I'm not sure that's the right description, but they have some psychological configuration that has the same external effect) against that kind of seating position. It was, after all, one of the main criticisms of the Sinclair C5 - despite that being less extreme and despite the photos that demonstrated that the driver's head was at the same height as that of the driver of a Mini; and Spitfires, Caterhams, "Italian ape" cars and the like are often criticised for it even by their own drivers. It seems to me that it is something people tolerate if the vehicle offers some sufficient compensating advantage, but not many people actually choose cars because of it (some do, of course); whereas people definitely do choose cars for having seating positions and entry/exit procedures which are less like that than even an ordinary car, which is why there are quite a number of small, high, upright, boxy, Lego-ish designs around these days.

    So I'm basically taking it for granted that any small personal vehicle will have a seating position more like a Daihatsu Lego than a Triumph Spitfire, because that's what most people will want and it'll put them off if it does not have it. For the same reason I'm taking fully enclosed bodywork for granted, at least in countries where the weather makes that the norm for cars at the moment.

    There's also the problem with what happens to your legs in a frontal collision, and the undesirability and perceived likelihood of having them broken and trapped in the crushed structure of the vehicle. There seems to me to be a fair possibility of runaway weight gain designing a structure to avert such an outcome (whether it's actually necessary or not).

    "Carlets" of some kind or another are something I've had thoughts about on and off for years, and I always end up thinking that while there aren't inherently any significant technical problems, there are major difficulties coming up with something that people aren't just going to laugh at/be afraid of, take the piss out of and refuse to have anything to do with. The technical problems that do arise are consequences of the compromises forced on the design by dealing with those difficulties. The disappointing conclusion I always arrive at is that by the time you have dealt with all that, the carlet has ended up so little different from an ordinary car that it's not worth the bother.

    507:

    Para the last. - Agreed. Additional note that the automated announce has been named "Sonya" on Scotrail, because she has a voice that getS ON YA nerves.

    508:

    Eh. Electric cars are "The present, but with electricity instead of gasoline". Lets try and envisage some consequences of high-electric civilizations that are not just that, shall we?

    The whole e-scooter thing makes me realize we perhaps underestimate the importance of fun in these things. https://xkcd.com/2188/

    ... So what is the completely ridiculous, taking things to its ultimate conclusion of reducing machine weight and maximizing user enjoyment?

    Well, Electric Roller Skates, of course. Modern motorcycle armor (And what motorcyclists are wearing is armor) allow you to take a tumble going pretty darn fast and get back up with no more than brusing, most of the time. A brisk round of research into meta materials to take that as far as it will go, and the future of commuting looks an unreasonable amount like Alita, Battle Angel.

    ... For extra, special, double hilarity, this might also be a way to side step the whole gun control debate. Yup. You can have a rifle. Everyone wears bulletproof (Because that falls out of crash-proof) gear all the darn time anyway.

    509:

    How about the unholy mashup between the Segway and the unicycle? Similar things have been a science fiction staple since the 1950s.

    Or, conceivably, you could build a large solenoid with a foot attached to the rod inside, a good set of smart gyros, a saddle with straps and good shock absorption, and some controls, and call it a hopper... I'd put the batteries in the foot to get the center of gravity lower, but that might not be sufficiently sporting.

    The current hilarity is the proliferation of mountain electric bikes that blur the boundary between mountain bikes and dirt bike motorcycles. Now the old-school mountain bikers are complaining about the dudes with the ebikes invading their turf, getting onto trails they have no business being on because they didn't peddle there under their own muscle power. They sound just like the hikers complaining about the mountain bikes.

    510:

    Indeed; modern motorcycling gear is sometimes called armour, and often consists of Kevlar plates inside a leather garment.

    511:

    As I said, I am thinking radically. No, I am NOT talking about introducing a new design into the existing system and expecting people to convert to it. Think of me as a fellow traveller of Extinction Rebellion.

    512:

    Robert Prior @ 492: What I've noticed in the past couple of years is that Toronto traffic is now using merge lanes and paved shoulders as overtaking lanes — which was rare a decade ago. Whenever I'm on the 401 or 400* during rush hour I've seen people driving on the paved shoulder (which is illegal) to pass. I'm glad I watch so many Russian dash cam videos, because now when moving into an exit lane at the first (legal) opportunity I now really carefully check that no one is barrelling up the shoulder to cut in to the line of cars patiently exiting.

    That IS illegal around here and if the cops catch you doing it, you're going to get a ticket for reckless driving and there's a good chance you'll have your license suspended. It's also very likely you'll see your insurance premiums go through the stratosphere. The penalty for reckless driving is just a baby step less severe than that for drunk driving (DWI).

    But the cops can't be everywhere so there are still idiots who will try it. But sooner or later they get caught and have to pay the price.

    Not certain why driving practices seem to be shifting. Could be immigration from countries where that is normal, followed by imitation, but that's just speculation.

    I blame Reaganomics for glamorizing greed. There's too many arrogant, selfish assholes in the world and when they get behind the wheel they treat traffic laws and other drivers the same way they treat everything else.

    "I got mine, so fuck the rest of you cock-suckers; get the fuck out of my way! MAGA"

    I also link it with Trump's white power Neo-fascist "base".

    513:

    their attitude seems more to be "don't trust anyone over 30, especially if they're white and cisnormal male

    Maybe where you are, but if you look at XR UK you'll note that their public face is about 80% middle aged white men. In Sydney it's not quite that but it's close, still over 50%.

    Partly that's an artefact of "public face", because the media, especially the outrage media, just love themselves some MAWM (and anyone else starts at -100 points). To be effective they really need that "serious" face, regardless of who is actually running things. OTOH, there are lots of middled aged folk who have been fighting this fight for decades and have a lot of useful experience. I'm finding the young uns are both welcoming and keen to pick my brains (in very detailed ways which can be exhausting, but they're also fairly respectful simply because I do actually walk the walk). That may be because I'm not going in there to tell them how to do it properly, I'm going in to help. I dunno, but it's my experience. OTOH, I have that experience a lot so maybe it's just me. YMMV?

    I'm kinda resisting right now actually putting my face out there, despite having both training and experience with outrage media. There's video floating round of me "giving good radio" with a shock jock, specifically talking about a bunch of anarchists disrupting traffic ... 'hi, I'm from Critical Mass and I'm here to help' :) The good news is that media training isn't hard, and we're having some success quite deliberately putting the younger, female-er, less whiter people out the front. By we I mean they, because I'm not in a position to influence that, I just go along and try to look helpful.

    514:

    Also, one thing that pisses me right the fuck off with XR Sydney is that the public organising is almost entirely on facebook. To find out how to help you first have to have a facebook account. Grrr!

    515:

    “Boing!”, said Zebedee and all that.

    I note that in Queensland (and I’m sure most of the developed world has some similar restriction) you can add an electric motor up to 250W to a bicycle, above that and it will be treated as a motorcycle and to go on the road must meet Australian Design Standards for motorcycles and be registered. I see “street legal” kits at one popular online store (based in the Gold Coast) that provide all the parts, including the pedal sensor (because a hand throttle is not allowed for a motor above 200W). However the same place sells kits up to 1.5kW for use on “private property”, including “centre drive” which turns the chain rings rather than a wheel directly, so you have access to all the reduction and overdrive gears the bike already has.

    These things, as I understand it, would definitely not be allowed in National Parks, but mountain bikes are, and I can see a lot of confusion occurring. There is an infrequent but steady stream of news stories involving someone being killed on one of the fire trails in one of the local parks, riding into a tree or off a cliff or something. I can see it getting weirder and more savage.

    516:

    In terms of your company banning hands free calls while driving their fleet vehicles - good for them and for you.

    Rule of unintended side-effects: people will answer their phone under certain circumstances (say, late and trying to pick up kids / expecting important call). If your ban involves removing any hands-free setup; then people will revert to hand-held telephony "because it's just this once", and be more dangerous as a result. I think it's better/safer to address it through education and training, to minimise ALARP.

    Anyway, no-one has mentioned head-up displays (still a high-end thing, but then my beloved drives a Morningside Tractor). Absolutely brilliant in terms of reducing cognitive load; speed, speed limit, key directions are expressed in clear infographics, floating just below the eyeline, and it's not distracting. Strong recommend if you can find/afford it...

    Unfortunately, her Audi (sorry, he says, awaiting all of the obvious "Audi driver" jokes) has IMHO the old Soviet approach of UI design: take your controls, turn your back on the control panel, throw them all over your shoulder, bolt them on where they land. I find it rather unintuitive to drive my beloved's wagon (not that I often do, she rather enjoys driving it, and I'm relegated to navigator - which lets me get on with my reading)

    I far prefer controlling my little 1.4l Volvo hatchback, that can seat the kids and carry all the crap they need (schoolbags, sports bags, occasional snare drums), and on which I pay no annual duty (because it generates less than 100g CO2/km). The controls are intuitive, common, and fall easily to hand - love it.

    517:

    Yeah, bicycle power assist laws are pretty consistent outside the US because it makes manufacturing/importing easier. But since it's also very easy to make those kits in whatever power you like there's a lot of less-legal options. It's hard to police because waddayagunnado, put a dyno in every cop car?

    The flip side though is that there's no real slot between "full size motor vehicle" and "bicycle" in the legislation in many countries. The EU is leading the way with their 1kW quad laws, but elsewhere there's about 200kg of mandatory safety equipment in a motor vehicle with useful cargo capacity. That really makes life hard to for the "load carrying bicycle with power assist" market. Luckily we are getting the Japanese 'little car' class electric vans, and for some reason those are road legal in Oz/NZ (they don't have great safety equipment, and IIRC an 80kph top speed).

    Now that I'm getting old enough for my muscles to waste away I'd really like power assist on my quad bike, but it's not really possible to do it both usefully and legally. 250W wouldn't make enough difference to justify the cost, but I'm slowly working my way round to a motor in each front wheel that is designed for high torque at low speed and tops out at about 20kph. The cost will be non-trivial, but I'm hoping I can get a big flat 72V battery mounted under the load platform so I get an hour or more of full power... and I want 500+ watts continuous. The thing weighs 40kg now, with motor it'll be over 50kg, but it also carries 120kg and tows another 150kg in the trailer. That's when I use it - my other bikes will carry 50kg or so in whatever form factor, the quad is strictly for bigger loads.

    On that note, the local sand'n'soil dealer just refused to fill my bicycle trailer with bulk soil. They would sell me plastic bags of soil, but not bulk. Which defeats the point of going the extra distance to visit them rather than the big box shop. In other places I've had much more positive reactions, right up to the guy who insisted on using the big digger to fill my little bins (the 3 cubic metre bucket would hold the quad and trailer... but he filled both very neatly and did not bury me). That whole yard just about pissed themselves laughing, and I got what I wanted as well.

    518:

    EC @498 & 499, I'm curious by how much the Arcimoto I linked to in 448 exceeds your specs.

    519: 513 - I also hang out at work, and on car enthusiastic sites.There, the general view of so called "XR UK" is that they may have a point but their methods are wrong, largely because they are causing more pollution by their actions than if they didn't act, for instance stopping electric trains naturally leads to more people making journeys by personal HC transport (includes taxis) because electric mass transport is now unavailable to them. 516 - Can't comment on Audis (and their often self-entitled Audiot owners) controls, but do have personal accounts to justify the Audiot tag. 517 para 4 - A lot of big digger drivers will view delivering part buckets neatly and with an appropriate mass as a personal challenge to just how good they are with their machines: there literally are competitions with manufacturer support in doing this sort of stuff; other challenges might literally include opening a beer by popping a crown cork with the bucket and not cracking the bottle in the process.
    520:

    The point is to disrupt and thus cause political change. Talking about direct emissions from their activities is on a par with tone policing. Don't forget the annual berating of the IPCC when people fly to their international meetings, and the stunt with the racing yacht that Greta has done specifically in response to this sort of commentary. There is literally nothing anyone can do without facing that kind of nit-picking bullshit, and it's almost always done as a distraction from the need for revolutionary change.

    Which you folk here have also done admirably well at.

    Until we see the other 90% of voters willing to actually vote for survival I don't think any form of disruption is unreasonable.

    521:

    Well, my point was that XR UK are actually creating logically found resistance to their actions by those very actions. Were they to block London's surface streets by supergluing themselves to buses instead...

    As for Greta's stunt, I heard her pre-departure interviews, and found myself wondering how she proposes to achieve actual change by stunting about on a boat with a plastic hull, composite mast and nylon rig and sails? There is at least one suitably sized recreation Scots birlinn, and they're made from wood with a hemp and canvas rig.

    522:

    JBS @ 512 There's too many arrogant, selfish assholes in the world and when they get behind the wheel they treat traffic laws and other drivers the same way they treat everything else. I have a cure for that & when I drive, I drive around in it .... Some moron tried the "I'll just cut out into this empty lane without looking" on me last year - did not end well for them, oh dear.

    Moz @ 517 the local sand'n'soil dealer just refused to fill my bicycle trailer with bulk soil. Oh dear, this nannying is getting commoner, isn't it? I know someone, very well, who has to ake antihistamines in the summer ... went to pharmacy for "Pirition" - & asked for a bucket (effectively) of them ... "No, they make you dizzy, we'll sell you 20" She: "I've been taking them for nearly 40 years & they have no effect on my balance or vision" Shop: "They make you dizzy, we'll only sell you 20" She: "Stuff you!" - dumps rest of purchases, walks out without paying, goes home & orders bucket of Piriton on-line. Quote from her: "And people wonder why the High Street is dying & on-line sales are doing well"

    Paws @ 519 This. for instance stopping electric trains naturally leads to more people making journeys by personal HC transport (includes taxis) because electric mass transport is now unavailable to them. Yup, about as intelligent & useful as all the other fake greenies, agitating against nuclear power ...

    & @ 521 Yes - why didn't she simply get on a cargo ship? Yes, diesel, but amazingly fuel-efficient & low-energywhen you do the actual sums ... which is why the 2-3000 tonne barges across Netherlands / Germany / Poland (etc) do so well .....

    523:

    I'm getting a very, very nasty feeling about this ... Is it deliberate, so that DT is removed for insanity, early in 2020 & Pence gets elected? Pence is actually madder & considerably more dangerous than DT, but APPEARS "sane" to far more people, who have not been paying attention. Pence really would go for Gilead.

    524:

    By over a factor of ten in power, weight, gimmickry and ecological impact.

    525:

    From road costs per vehicle - sure - a bit more work - but that just corresponds to electrics needing to pay somewhat higher road fees - and road fees are a small part of vehicle costs. Insofar as electrics are cars but electric - I don't see a further discouraging - just the same sort of unhealthy lifestyle.

    Try Google scholar -> the future of Automotive lithium ion battery recycling - charting a sustainable course. Fairly readable. Now, the work clearly hasn't been done - but people have looked into it. Production costs are better understood - naturally - as cars are being produced but not recycled yet.

    @505 I am hoping that a lot of this is just early adoption days - I'd guess that electric cars are currently in iPhone 2 territory. (Still kind of a pain). Wait 10-20 years and a lot of the links will be worked out. At the moment, there seems to be a continual change in battery design anyways - probably mostly for manufacturability.

    @520 Best wishes - but skeptical both about goal and effectiveness of approach. Every governing system runs on blood. I'd distinguish climate change from ecological collapse. Climate change is a fundamentally global problem - and will be mostly driven by China and India, maybe South America. Sadly, y'aint seen nothing yet. For ecological collapse, maybe activism could theoretically be helpful - but having encountered homeowners associations - people are perfectly willing to kill each other over paint colors - let alone some sort of societal transformation that forces them to live closer to people they feel undesirable. Even if you had an absolute majority - it doesn't seem doable. With a minority rebellion - they literally kill you before moving to Richmond. (And, CA is relatively integrated compared to NY) Maybe just a us thing. Probably not. Albeit, I find South Korea somewhat promising. There is a tendency towards urban living based on pure disdain for the hicks outside of Seoul that may be ecologically friendly. There doesn't seem to be the same sort of suburban sprawl. (Albeit, wifety never bothered taking me to the countryside.) I wonder if it could be replicated. Not a particularly progressive approach - tied into class differences.

    Even for the local issues - while I'd prefer a different societal organization - doing anything quickly would require a fairly bloody revolution. I'd tend to describe myself as collateral damage in that revolution. So, um, not a fan. I'd tend to peg the climate crisis as actually urgent around the time people actually deregulate nuclear and start tinkering with geoengineering. Right now - sounds more like the other end of conservatism - this new stuff is dangerous and we need to go back to wearing furs and oh wait too many people for that? Well, time for population decline. You laugh - but I had an acquaintance with exactly those views. He was an able biologist - so it worried me just a bit.

    526:

    Road fees are, but road costs are much higher, because they are paid for in many different ways (including the railways, utilities companies, landowners and more). As far as I know, we don't even know what they are in the UK, any more than we know the number of road bridges and major culverts. And it's not just highways that is hit by extra weight, but private and temporary roads, as well as agriculture and construction.

    And, yes, you are right about the lifestyle. The ONLY thing that changing to electric cars as currently being developed will do is to reduce the atmospheric pollution in cities significantly.

    527:

    To pick just one piece of the article Greg linked to in 523, Trump has threatened to end birthright citizenship before. However, it is granted in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution so using an executive order to end it will not work.

    I'm sure this was pointed out to him previously and, to the extent he remains same, he knows this and has reasons for saying he'll do it - political campaigning, outraging progressives so they are reacting rather than coming up with their own strategies, distracting people from something else, etc.

    528:

    Ada @ 527 SO? Getting rid of the 14th Amendment ( I had to look up which one it was ... ) is a primary goal of many on the "conservative" i.e. Fascist US right. Them pesky niggers & wimmin can get back where they belong ... shudder.

    529:

    Greg Tingey @ 523: I'm getting a very, very nasty feeling about this ...
    Is it deliberate, so that DT is removed for insanity, early in 2020 & Pence gets elected?
    Pence is actually madder & considerably more dangerous than DT, but APPEARS "sane" to far more people, who have not been paying attention.
    Pence really would go for Gilead.

    If there's any kind of conspiracy or plot among the upper echelons of the Republican Party to replace Trump with Pence in 2020, Trump doesn't know anything about it. If he did, he'd already be denouncing them as traitors or worse.

    I think there's even a chance Trump will dump Pence in 2020, although I have no idea who he'd choose to replace Pence. Michael Flynn was Pence's man more than he was Trump's, and you can bet your bottom Euro, Trump hasn't forgiven, nor forgotten ... and even if Flynn was Trump's choice, Trump is still going to need a scapegoat of some sort, and Pence fits the bill.

    Trump's erratic behavior is just more evidence (if any was needed) that Trump is a dangerously delusional narcissistic sociopath who SHOULD be locked away somewhere where he can't do any more harm to himself and/or others. But none of the cowards in the top ranks of the GOP or in the administration is going to admit that publicly, especially not Mike Pence, lest Trump go all RED QUEEN on 'em

    530:

    it will be easy to rebuild cities to do away with cars

    My grandfather remembered London without cars from his childhood. When as a child I complained about cars and air pollution he told me that automobiles made London a much cleaner place. My young mind hadn't grasped that horses aren't pollution-free, and that having heaps of "road apples" means not only smells but also more disease etc.

    531:

    Ada @ 527: To pick just one piece of the article Greg linked to in 523, Trump has threatened to end birthright citizenship before. However, it is granted in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution so using an executive order to end it will not work.

    I'm sure this was pointed out to him previously and, to the extent he remains same, he knows this and has reasons for saying he'll do it - political campaigning, outraging progressives so they are reacting rather than coming up with their own strategies, distracting people from something else, etc.

    I wouldn't be too sure he can't get away with it. Often the Constitution and Amendments mean whatever the Supreme Court decides they mean. This wouldn't be the first time (nor likely the last) the Supreme Court as decided the Constitution means exactly the opposite of the obvious meaning of the words ... and I'm not even including all the crap that goes on around what the 2nd Amendment says & what the words actually mean (and does it matter where the commas are located and are they even located where Congress put them when they wrote the original proposed draft amendment?).

    532:

    I'm from Critical Mass and I'm here to help

    I remember when the Massholes shut down the the Ironworkers Bridge in Vancouver rush hour by sitting down and holding a smoke-in. An excellent way to convince people that cycling is a viable means of transport: sit down the the middle of a very busy bridge and smoke pot.

    In Toronto they are bloody dangerous to pedestrians. Want to cross the street at a green light? Not for the next few minutes… until the spandex-clad enforcers deign to let you. Because while bicycles are traffic, clearly pedestrians aren't.

    533:

    shakes head Great, what we in model railroading call things like On3 (running std. std. gauge railcars on 3' tracks).

    On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, they don't just shove 'em on in the US - that was what they started doing in the fifties, but for a long time, they use shipping containers, and a crane to double stack 'em.

    534:

    Sorry, never worked at a startup. I'd guess the number of startups << # of programmers. The closest I've been in was when I worked for Ameritech, a Baby Bell, in '95-'97, which was effectively a start-up division. And the year after I started, my manager and director had to fight to get me a rating of 4 on a 1-5 scale, because corporate said "everyone's a 3". IIRC, it might have been a 4% raise.

    535:

    Could a city core use something like the Heathrow people movers ? (ie fiberglass-covered golf carts)

    536:

    Oh, I see - they've started acting like US drivers. Once in a while, as the merge lane is going away, I've been known to move just enough into it to prevent that queue-jumping shit.

    Have I mentioned what my son and I came up with 20 years ago? It's a rocket launcher for the front of the vehicle that shoots a wedge-shaped charge. That way, it doesn't just take out the idiot in front of you, but also clears the way for you, i instead of having to go around the wreckage. It also has the advantage that, splitting the car in front, one half takes out the jerk who sees the opening, and wants to cut in front of you.

    537:

    Until we see the other 90% of voters willing to actually vote for survival I don't think any form of disruption is unreasonable.

    It's the problem of what happens when the dog catches the delivery truck, or more pointedly, the problem of what happened when the Egyptian activists won their Arab Spring fight in Egypt.

    What's the goal?

    In Egypt, their goal was democracy, because they wrongly believed that having a democratic system would insure a better life. What happened was that the strongest party (Muslim Brotherhood) took over, sidelined the activists, then the military took over, sidelined the Brotherhood, and it's worse than when they started.

    The military and some of the better nonviolent activists call this "getting to goose egg," the goose egg being military-speak for the circle around the target. The Egyptian Arab Springers chose the wrong Goose Egg and suffered dearly for it.

    ER seems to think that shutting down business as usual is all that's needed to get us to work on climate change. I doubt it. They need to get the thousands of alternative systems designed and ready to deploy so that, for example, the US doesn't turn into both the world's biggest offshore financial center as well as the world's biggest fracker and polluter, all because the billionaires were better organized and bought off the people who'd originally pledged to do away with the fossil fuel industry. For example.

    Were I in ER UK right now and any good at politics, I'd be trying to pull the ER to help the Greens corkscrew their crania out of their recta, and get them in turn to have a viable alternative to Brexit, and to find ways to pull a couple more people off the Tories, to collapse the Johnson administration and stop the corporate takeover of the UK (which will make getting the ER agenda that much harder, absent a miracle or some good political jujitsu). Then I'd work with the EU ER crowd to figure out what to do in Brussels to get them serious about climate change, and so forth. Goose egg, in this case, is having a stable global population, especially stable populations in high-polluting states, and a steep path towards decarbonization, with the governance supporting it more negotiable in a nonviolent sense.

    Supergluing oneself to the Parliament building is a minor tactic in support of this goal, but without concrete goals and a strategy leading towards them, it's a exercise in wombat-ing.

    538:

    Excerpt:

    COPENHAGEN (The Borowitz Report)—After rebuffing Donald J. Trump’s hypothetical proposal to purchase Greenland, the government of Denmark has announced that it would be interested in buying the United States instead.

    https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/denmark-offers-to-buy-us

    Please! Please! Then you'd have to rename the EU to something like the North Atlantic Union, and we'd be under EU rules....

    539:

    Yes. The doc who first suggested, in the press, that he might be breaking down is now saying that events have proved him right.

    And he can't just do it - trying to change the Constitution is a HUGE deal. Note that the Equal Rights Amendment, from the seventies, is still sitting there, seven or so states short of becoming law.

    How is the Constitution amended? Article V of the Constitution prescribes how an amendment can become a part of the Constitution. While there are two ways, only one has ever been used. All 27 Amendments have been ratified after two-thirds of the House and Senate approve of the proposal and send it to the states for a vote. Then, three-fourths of the states must affirm the proposed Amendment.

    The other method of passing an amendment requires a Constitutional Convention to be called by two-thirds of the legislatures of the States. That Convention can propose as many amendments as it deems necessary. Those amendments must be approved by three-fourths of the states.

    540:

    The thing is, Pence has no base, other than extreme funnymentalist evangelical self-proclaimed "Christians".

    All of the top tier of Dems running beat Trumpolini. Pence, between his weird version of Christianity, and his support of the Orange One, would go down in flames.

    I suspect the less irrational of the wealthy and the GOP know it's all going down, so that's why the looting is so public - they're grabbing everything they can, and moving it out of the US.

    541:

    Oh, a final, unrelated note: as of 17:30 this past Tuesday, when I walked out of work... I'm retired. It's very strange, still on and off thinking about work, and then realize I don't need to (well, other than the few days I'll be going in, part time, next month).

    542:

    Heteromeles @ 537 ER seems to think RIGHT THERE is your actual problem ... "ER" are not thinking AT ALL, they are emoting. like dog-vomit, all over everything & everybody. And their actions are at a minimum, 100% counterproductive, because they can't be fucked to engage what few brain cells they do have. The overlap with "occupy" is large, too, what a suprise!

    543:

    whitroth @ 540 In which case is getting DT declared mentally unfit & incompetent ( In the technical sense - we KNOW he's incompetent ) & replacing him, automatically with Pence a winning move for the D's ... or it better to leave things crash & sweep them all out in 2020?

    544:

    You are making the same error about weight as DonL

    No, we aren't making an error. You've argued that road damage (or more broadly, social costs) are non-linear in the vehicle weight. Pigeon said it was "a fourth power law". From which I conclude that passenger cars are, in aggregate, irrelevant compared to the other sources of damage. On highways, semis with their 10-ton axles should fully dominate. Smaller roads will have their damage dominated by buses, vans, and smaller trucks. (Aside from being heavy, they tend to carry loads.) Non-linearity does this, and you are the one who argued for it.

    Think like a geologist. It dawned on them, around 1950, that river basins did NOT have a shape predictable from their annual flow, or from their annual spring flood either. Rather, the shape was the cumulative result of many "100 year events" (or in some interesting cases, post-glacial events), and the annual flow wasn't even noise in the calculation. I suspect that passenger car weight is irrelevant in the same way.

    But just to be safe, we should get rid of the BMW 3 Series, since they weigh as much as Teslas do. I'm sure you agree.

    545:

    Don, I think you may be talking slightly at cross-purposes with EC here. I think he is referring to the KE stored in a moving vehicle, which, simplifying to Newtonian dynamics, is E = 0.5mV^2, at least in the post you replied to.

    The fourth power law in question referring to road damage (and I've never seen a full statement of this, just English quotations so I don't know any other terms) is that road damage done is proportional to the 4th power of the axle loading of the vehicle.

    So lets consider a Tesla Model S and a typical 2 axle tractor with a 3 axle trailer (a very normal European spec). The Tesla weighs 2 tonnes, split 50/50 (possibly not 100% accurate, but makes the sums easy), so we have an axle loading of 1 tonne: 1^4 = 1. The truck will probably have a drive axle loading of 10 tonnes (again simplifying so we can all check this in our heads); 10^4 = 10_000. So the truck does as much road damage as ten thousand cars.

    546:

    I can't even get that far, because the website is deliberately designed not to work. Its code goes to great lengths to ensure that the browser's own, native attempts to display the content come to naught. It then attempts to reimplement the (reliable, dependable) native browser functionality, that it has just disabled for no fucking reason at all, in its own code. And fails, of course.

    It does not exactly generate confidence that the vehicle itself is in any way competently designed when not only can't they make something as simple as a website that works, but the reason they fail to make it work is the starkly mindbuggering utter stupidity of an approach that begins by deliberately fucking up the facilities it needs to make it work.

    I did manage to wrench it into displaying a picture of the thing, which is enough to see that it's the usual shitty compromise between a car and a smaller thing, neither one thing nor the other, with the bad points of both and the good points of neither. Very like that BMW motorcycle with a roof and a seatbelt, which everyone apart from the inevitable tiny handful of enthusiasts considers to suck for just those reasons, only without the cornering stability. In fact it looks bloody lethal in that respect.

    So even though your criteria and mine are very different, it seems to fail just as badly to meet either set :)

    At least as far as gimmickry is concerned electric cars are less of a problem than petrol ones...

    My reasoning behind this somewhat odd-looking statement? There are essentially no cars in current production, regardless of power source, in which the electrical system is acceptable in its standard form. It is stuffed with computers and evilware and things that uncontrollably connect to the internet and snitch boxes that record decontextualised information which can then be extracted by third parties and used to attack you while you have no hope of defending yourself because the context is all missing and in any case you can bloody well do without the hassle even if you were guaranteed to win. It includes functions whose sole and entire purpose is to be a complete wanker, so that for instance you can't effect repairs by swapping the dud part for a good one off another car because it won't work unless you pay a shaman a few hundred quid to speak the secret magic words over it. It is quite explicitly deliberately designed to mix safety- and operationally-critical functions with insecurely-implemented trivial crap in order to save a few pennies, and it does it so bloody badly that in addition to the security chasm you get essential functions being cabbaged by some trivial failure of some useless function that you would otherwise quite likely never even know existed and certainly would never be arsed to fix. All the information required for effective fault finding is deliberately withheld, and systems designed so that in the event of a failure the whole thing shuts down so you can't measure anything anyway. Etc, etc, etc...

    Sanitising this utter fucking mess, especially with the amount of deliberate bastardry it incorporates, is well beyond practical, so the solution that remains is to rip the whole bloody lot out and start again from scratch. Since all the important auxiliary functions of a car electrical system (lights, wipers etc) boil down to "a switch in series with a load, hung between positive and earth", the great majority of such a project is, while tedious, also utterly trivial intellectually, and it is my preferred method for dealing even with vehicles which do have an electrical system designed like that in the first place but which age, corrosion, crumbling insulation and a squadron of monkeys armed with Scotchlok connectors have rendered an impenetrable mess of dysfunctionality.

    The difficult part is the control over the operation of the power unit. And while the hardware side of a fuel injection system is easy, and calibrating it well enough that the engine runs nicely over its operating range is bearable, calibrating it to meet the emission standards required by the MoT is not (apart from anything else, the calibration is not the same as calibration for most efficient running, and there is no simple relationship that can be used to derive fudge factors to convert the "efficiency" map to an "MoT emissions" one). For an electric car, though, the problem is merely one of making a PWM inverter, which is also easy, and that's where it stops.

    (Sooner or later I'm going to end up doing this even for my mobility scooter, because in standard condition adjusting it so it doesn't go out of control descending hills is a software operation, and I can't even find out what the hardware details of the interface are, let alone the protocols and commands.)

    547:

    I had the same problem with Greenpeace, which I joined in a fit of youthful enthusiasm, then allowed my membership to lapse a few years later after it had become too obvious that too much of their activity was lacking in rational basis, and that they were only heading further down that path, with at least one of "realising it" and "giving a shit" missing, and "doing something about it" inconceivable.

    I have a mate who I have a vague idea was somewhat attracted by ER at a time when I'd barely heard anything about them. I'll have to ask him about it because I can imagine he might have been caught the same way and if he was he wouldn't just passively disengage, he'd give them both barrels in the form of a detailed and scrupulously rational dissection of their failings and then describe at length his disappointment and disgust with the inevitably useless response he got.

    548:

    I've never seen a full statement of it either; I encountered the bald "fourth power" description too long ago to remember, and since then it has become fairly obvious that there is something more to it than that, although figuring out exactly what is next to impossible because of the amount of self-justifying bullshit that swamps any reliable data. Hence my original post qualifying it as "complicated, but fourth power over at least a significant part of the range" (or similar; quoting myself from memory).

    One possible piece of evidence of complication is the way some trucks can lift one axle off the road altogether when they are running unloaded. "Possible", because it may be that they do this purely to save wear on that axle's tyres; but I have heard also that they get a cut in road tax for doing this, which if true would indicate that some factor other than straight axle loading has become significant in this range of size/weight. Scrubbing on corners from having three unsteered axles in a row is one such possible factor that springs to mind.

    549:

    Website seems to work fine for me, at least to the point where I've discovered that a "Arcimoto Evergreen" weighs 1800lb, and a Morgan 3 wheeler a little under 1200lb (both manufacturer figures). Neither seems to come with the full weather kit that would be essential where I live.

    550:

    Cheers; I've just plain never seen any full statement of the law linking axle weight to road damage.

    I have seen various explanations of lifting undriven axles, but they all boil down to reducing tyre, brake and bearing wear on the lifted axle(s) (I've seen as many as 3 lifting axles on artics) and hence also reducing fuel consumption, whilst maintaining load on the drive axle when un or part loaded, and hence maintaining traction, so nothing to do with road damage other than stopping bogies scrubbing sideways over the road at high steering lock angles.

    551:

    My question is always: are you helping solve the problem, or are you making the problem worse?

    Politics does not consist of unilaterally declaring a goal and working towards it in a straight line, unless your politics is "one person kills everyone else". It's very easy for abstract arguments on the internet to consist of "if I ruled the world I would do X, therefore anything else is stupid garbage that must be opposed". You don't rule the world, and at least to start with you don't have any allies.

    So, how does one person effect global change? Allies. Compromises. Accepting that people vary, and attacking your allies over minor differences is counterproductive. To put that another way, diversity is strength. Other people want different things, want to get there in different ways, and see the problem in different ways. That's what makes social interaction different from masturbation.

    There are a whole lot of things I personally would not do, and things that I think are somewhat counterproductive. Most of those things I don't actually do, and some things I argue against in the appropriate fora. But running round in public screaming "The People's Front of Judea are heretics who must be opposed at all costs" is exactly the wrong thing to do.

    I oppose global heating, so do Greenpeace, ER, The Greens and so on. Why would I fight them when there is a whole range of groups actively working to destroy society that I could oppose instead? I oppose them and work to their neutralisation.

    552:

    One group that I do speak out against are the puritans. There are far too many "allies" who spend all their time and energy seeking out people on "my side" who are insufficiently pure, then trying to destroy those people or at the very least get the group to spend time and energy dealing with their puritan fixations. That is incredibly destructive to any movement. Those people would be far more useful working within the enemy groups to ensure that, for example, there are no pro-coal people in the pro-car lobby.

    Note that I have been exposed to cointelpro actions, sometimes serious ones, and I still don't think it's worth the organisational cost to try to prevent that even if it is possible. Trying to have a public event that anyone can join except bad actors is impossible. The UK "police baby" scandal and the ongoing police spying in Aotearoa show just how impossible detecting that stuff is.

    If I was to do grossly illegal things, or at least things that might land me in prison, I would be very, very careful about who I told and who I accepted help from. Insofar as it's relevant, I try to respect others doing similar things. If I help them I do it very quietly, as untraceably as possible, and with no strings attached. Note that in Australia "grossly illegal" covers virtually any form of political protest (for example blocking traffic is the terrorist crime of "interfering with critical infrastructure". I kid you not). Our government generally defines "trying to change the system" as terrorism, I think because treason is seen as old-fashioned and irrelevant.

    But 90% of my activism is positive. I help people I think are doing useful things, I go along to meetings and public events, I try to encourage people I meet to become better people.

    553:

    You have looked at the materials from the Albert Einstein institution, correct? And you've read Blueprint for Revolution? That's where I'm coming from. Please don't mistake having a goal for the methods for getting there. Having a goal is how you determine what methods you need to get there, which involves inverse sequence planning (basically, working your way back from your goal to where you are at present). This is standard stuff for nonviolent strategic planning.

    If you're saying that you don't want to deal with goals because that sounds too straight line, but you're going to use any method available, because you need to go forward...where are you going? How are you going to figure out if you're getting there, or even getting anywhere?

    There's all sorts of mistakes that can derail a campaign: --Occupy named themselves after their one technique. They tried to apply it to all goals, and nothing much happened. --The Egyptian rebels made getting a democratic election their goal, and they got there. Unfortunately, they had no plan in place for winning that election, and their opponents won. --The Tianmen Square protestors arguably pushed too far. This is debatable, but some suggest that if they had declared victory and disbanded when the original protestors were getting worn out, then the overly enthusiastic people who replaced them wouldn't have been hit by the crackdown and real change would have happened. --The Syrian nonviolent opposition never got organized, because they couldn't get past their differences between local labor activists and western-trained elites. As a result, they were brushed aside by violent groups, with the resulting and ongoing bloodbath.

    Do I need to continue? Campaigning without thought, because a method works at the moment, is pretty much a guarantee of failure. Having an achievable goal is one of the essential parts of a successful movement, be that goal a free India (Gandhi), equal rights for black people (King), or a democratic government (Serbia, East Timor, and many others). I'm all for decarbonizing civilization and using nonviolent techniques to get there, because I think they're the only ones that will work. But there have got to be plans to get there from here, or civilization will break in the process, and the few survivors will live sustainable lives by default.

    554:

    That all makes sense, ta.

    The fourth power thing originates from the TRL, so it is at least basically respectable, although the necessary qualifications of the statement have fallen off on its journey from there to here.

    The Morgan 3-wheeler does at least stand a chance of remaining upright if you rig a roof on it; the Arcimoto would probably manage that for about half a second after you put side screens on it - assuming you didn't kite away trying to fetch them to it in the first place. (My immediate thought about your descending gneiss was that the GPS unit had been blown off the edge of the gneiss 2 seconds before you queried it, and was then blown back up into position again before anyone physically checked on it...)

    A Morris Minor, from memory, is about 750kg, so call it 1500lb - nicely in between the two, with weather protection built in and greater stability than either.

    555:

    No, I'm saying that I'm not in a position to dictate the methods others use, so I support more or less anyone who shares my goal(s).

    I'm also saying that just because my goals are not identical to another's, or their methods are not exactly the ones I think they should use, is not enough to make me spend time opposing them.

    Where I do oppose allies it's because I think their actions are dramatically or irrevocably counterproductive, not because I see them being criticised or because I have minor reservations about some of the detail. Just because I wouldn't fly to the UK and glue myself to a train doesn't mean I'm willing to oppose people in the UK who glue themselves to trains. I'd rather focus my enmity on people who are demonstrably trying to make the situation worse... and there are so very many of those people to choose from.

    556:

    I'm afraid you're still not getting it. PLEASE check those links and do a lot of reading. This is about not wasting your energy and time, both of which are finite and valuable.

    557:

    Also, I'd still question the goals. If, for instance, they involve eliminating cars in the earlyish part of this century - my evaluation is that there is no nonviolent opportunity barring deus ex machina such as a sudden fad for smart electric roller skates.

    Not a bad idea - make me God-King for a terribly extended day and it'll happen. You might not like all of the changes...

    But... nonviolent change does not work when the majority's interests are significantly impacted. It can work when a minority's interests are impacted. It can work when a majority simply stops bothering others as much. But...at some point...if every activist simply started blocking roads to force people to move out of the suburbs...and were actually effective. People would drive over them before changing their ways.

    So, I'd guess that - if that sort of thing is a primary goal - your activism may be good as a hobby, but seems unlikely to be of use. It'd be nice to focus in more productive ways. I may be wrong - or misunderstanding you - and may be too blunt. On the other hand, I was a lot less blunt with the co-worker trying to build a perpetual motion machine and he wasted a lot of time. I mean, you have better chances than that project. Somewhat.

    Although a related thing - if you were mostly fully occupied (kidlings, job, life(sigh)) but felt some impulse towards making a positive difference. (Other than the wee hours - wherein baby watching is primary.). What would you do?

    There is little need to oppose people in the same path - I'd agree. (Unless they stray from ineffective to seriously counterproductive.). I get the feeling that some posters are under the impression that you intend to aid in the formation of a movement to enact really quite sweeping societal changes. (British leaving India was a remarkable success and also several qualitative steps easier than, eg, getting rid of cars.). They're a bit concerned that that does not seem well thought out.

    558:

    David Spratt runs through the 'billion survivors' argument: http://www.climatecodered.org/2019/08/at-4c-of-warming-would-billion-people.html

    One thing that annoys me, and I do write letters to people about, is that there's not enough mention of the importance of voting. We can change the government, at least those of us in democratic countries, and that's an important step. Yes, there are legal restrictions and consequences to advocating for a particular party in many cases, but just say "vote for the environment" or whatever other platitude keeps the lawyers away.

    It's almost impossible in the US because of their strict two party system, and in the UK there is Brexit, but at the same time the UK has a couple of anti-brexit, anti-catastrophe parties...

    559:

    whitroth @ 539: Yes. The doc who first suggested, in the press, that he might be breaking down is now saying that events have proved him right.

    And he can't just do it - trying to change the Constitution is a HUGE deal. Note that the Equal Rights Amendment, from the seventies, is still sitting there, seven or so states short of becoming law.

    How is the Constitution amended?
    Article V of the Constitution prescribes how an amendment can become a part of the Constitution. While there are two ways, only one has ever been used. All 27 Amendments have been ratified after two-thirds of the House and Senate approve of the proposal and send it to the states for a vote. Then, three-fourths of the states must affirm the proposed Amendment.

    The other method of passing an amendment requires a Constitutional Convention to be called by two-thirds of the legislatures of the States. That Convention can propose as many amendments as it deems necessary. Those amendments must be approved by three-fourths of the states.

    The Equal Rights Amendment is a dead letter. The language of the amendment itself included a "sunset" provision; a deadline by which the amendment had to be ratified in order to take effect. They didn't get enough ratifications within the deadline, so it can't be ratified. Any further ratification that took place now would be NULL.

    There is, however, a third possibility that has to be considered with regards to a Trumpolini "Executive Order" limiting birthright citizenship. Such an executive order would be Constitutional IF the Supreme Court says it is Constitutional. It's a sort of Constitutional "back-door" that grew out of Marbury v. Madison, which has been accepted as a fundamental Constitutional doctrine since 1803.

    Keep in mind that Separate but Equal and Jim Crow were lawful under the 14th Amendment UNTIL the Supreme Court ruled that they were not. And what the Supreme Court "giveth with one hand, they can taketh away with the other".

    I think it's a losing bet to predict that some future hijacked Supreme Court packed with Federalist Society stooges won't rule that way. Trump, bad as he is, ain't the looniest of the tunes coming out of the GOP now-a-days. If anything he's a dilettante when it comes to usurping the rights of people who who don't kow-tow to the fascist ideology that today passes for "conservative" thought.

    560:

    H, you and me disagree on whether non-violence is a viable answer to the current problems. I respect your assumption that I am profoundly ignorant of the theory and practice of nonviolence but I'm not going to argue it.

    What I know is that the campaigns I've been directly involved in that were successful were generally also violent. Mostly violent in the eyes of the PTB, and at the hands of the PTB, but nonetheless strayed outside many people's definition of nonviolent. There's a whole heap I quibble about with those arguments, but that's kind of irrelevant since I'm not the one applying the labels. None of those campaigns were free of carping from the sidelines and stupid comments from puritan "allies".

    What I do know from experience is that I am really, really good at the mechanical side of change campaigns. You want to put people up tripods, I can make tripods and teach you how to use them. You want lock-ons, I can make lock-ons that are safe and effective. You want helicopter parts distributed over a wide area, I can adjust the helicopter to do that and likely can also get access to the helicopter if you can point out where it is. That sort of stuff is simple to me, even if it's not simple to you.

    What I suck at, and this is from experience, is going to meetings, persuading people to follow my ideas, and generally coming up with sensible campaign ideas in the first place. I am really, really shit at designing persuasion campaigns of any description. I can't persuade green activists to do the simple obvious things, let alone persuade "I'd rather die than give up my car" that actually, that's not the choice they're being offered but if they insist it could be (remember Cohen the Barbarian). Being nice to morons is really hard and it wears me out really fast.

    So when it comes to strategies and people management, I prefer to sit down the back and shut up if I have to be present at all. That generally results in outcomes closer to what I'd like than getting involved in the decision making process.

    561:

    Agreed; the 4th power law in question originates from an respectable source in the TRRL, but no-one has ever felt the need to state it in full (OK, the TRRL will have a report with it in full, but without knowing which one...)

    Well, as originally designed in the 1930s, there were "family versions" of the Morgan 3 wheeler, although the hood for them is described in prose by such terms as "looking like a balloon spinnaker rigged backward", which is not promising...

    The Arcimoto actually uses optional half-height doors (not illustrated in lots of its own publicity), which will give it marginally more weather protection than a Morgan if and only if the wind is due head on.

    Ref the GPS :-) I was actually standing right next to it, and positively know that it was firmly sat on top of the trig point. The comment about the reported sink rate was intended to show that GPS are not unerringly accurate, but are subject to intelligent interpretation. The point about the use of a trig point is to check the GPS' calibration against a convenient source surveyed in by a competent 3rd party in the shape of OSGB.

    Wikipedia quote a Morris 1000 at 1708lb, but that should be taken as nominal. They also correctly report available bodies as 2 and 4 door saloon (US sedan), 2 door 4 seat convertible, and 2 passenger door estate (US station wagon), and engines offered as starting with 918cc side valve, and during production changing to 803cc, 948cc and finally 1198cc versions of the A-series engine. Whatever, we have have an entirely functional and stable 4-wheel 4-seat closed car weighing less than a 3-wheel 2 seat machine with no worthwhile weather protection. I'll stop at this point rather than discuss the range of technically easy and fairly common modifications that have been done in search of speed and cruising refinement.

    562:

    Greg Tingey @ 543: whitroth @ 540
    In which case is getting DT declared mentally unfit & incompetent ( In the technical sense - we KNOW he's incompetent ) & replacing him, automatically with Pence a winning move for the D's ... or it better to leave things crash & sweep them all out in 2020?

    You're thinking about the 25th Amendment which is intended for a situation where the President is incapacitated in the conventional sense; i.e. in an ICU with a massive heart attack or stroked out & in a coma ... a situation where the President is unable to object to being set aside. It has been invoked when Reagan was shot, although they didn't get the proper FORMAL notifications until long after the fact, although Bush Junior did formally invoke it in favor of Darth Cheney when he had to have hemorrhoid surgery ... and then several hours later formally un-invoked it after the anesthesia wore off.

    It's UNWORKABLE for removing a President who's completely deranged & delusional like Trump, who could nevertheless contest a 25th Amendment action if one were brought against him.

    Impeachment takes only a simple majority in the House, and the trial in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority to convict & remove the President.

    A contested 25th Amendment case against Trump would require two-thirds majorities in BOTH the House & Senate ... and they must vote within 21 days on whether "the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office" ... or not.

    The impediments are intentional, so it can't be used as a discount means of getting rid of President who can't (for whatever reason) be convicted & removed by an impeachment trial in the Senate. Plus, even if they were successful using the 25th Amendment, Trump would still be eligible to run for re-election.

    563:

    They're a bit concerned that that does not seem well thought out.

    I find it hard to respond to that because to me you're asking "produce a detailed plan that explains how everything in society works and specifically how I will fit in" and that's not just a huge waste of time, it's an authoritarian nightmare. Perhaps consider me a techno-utopian. I am confident that if asked we can solve all the fiddly problems. But right now it's not so much that we're not being asked, we're being told to stop offering solutions to things that aren't problems. And also criticised when those solutions aren't complete.

    We are going to experience revolutionary change and the question is what sort of change.

    As with the idea that brexit consists of the brave UK shedding its allies and striding boldly alone onto the world stage to reclaim it's rightful role as the world leader, the idea that we can simply keep doing what we're doing now, but harder, to stop global heating is garbage. Currently most people want to slaughter billions of others so they can defer the revolution for as long as possible, and somehow imagine that they or their children will be part of the tiny elite at the top of the resulting pyramidal society.

    The alternative is to fight, now, hard, for a better society. What I do as one tiny minion at the bottom of the pile is unlikely to have the sort of dramatic effect implied by "tell me how your plan will affect me" questions. What I want is for you to choose life. Vote, work, fight, for a world where climate change is a solved problem.

    What I do, if it's any help to you questioning what you should do, is donate and volunteer for political parties; write letters, sign petitions, submit on legislation, in an effort to get politicians to do the right or least-wrong thing; I join groups campaigning for those things, giving time and money and where I can, ideas; then last and also probably least important, I try to minimise my personal contribution to various problems. The latter is easiest, but it's also an attractive nuisance and actively misleading. We cannot fix or even meaningfully mitigate climate catastrophe through individual change. As I've said before, even an actual zero-impact lifestyle is completely negated by voting to burn it all down. Arguably voting Green and continuing to live as most do is a much better choice.

    564:

    paws4thot @ 550: Cheers; I've just plain never seen any full statement of the law linking axle weight to road damage.

    I have seen various explanations of lifting undriven axles, but they all boil down to reducing tyre, brake and bearing wear on the lifted axle(s) (I've seen as many as 3 lifting axles on artics) and hence also reducing fuel consumption, whilst maintaining load on the drive axle when un or part loaded, and hence maintaining traction, so nothing to do with road damage other than stopping bogies scrubbing sideways over the road at high steering lock angles.

    I don't think it's the axle weight itself, but the weight of the vehicle in relationship to the surface area of the tire's "footprint". Those "lifting axles" allow a truck to reduce it's "footprint" when it's unloaded or only lightly loaded (reducing drag & fuel consumption), while spreading out the weight onto a larger "footprint" when the truck is fully loaded.

    Putting more tire surface in contact with the road when the truck is heavily loaded reduces the loading per square inch or square centimeter and that's the loading that causes excessive road wear. The loading per square unit of measure is reduced when the "lifting axles" are down and the wheels are in contact with the surface.

    565:

    Well, thank you for summarising several posts I already made. ;-) And indeed, for re-writing the one you quoted to prove that someone else understood it.

    566:

    _Moz_ @ 552: If I was to do grossly illegal things, or at least things that might land me in prison, I would be very, very careful about who I told and who I accepted help from. Insofar as it's relevant, I try to respect others doing similar things. If I help them I do it very quietly, as untraceably as possible, and with no strings attached. Note that in Australia "grossly illegal" covers virtually any form of political protest (for example blocking traffic is the terrorist crime of "interfering with critical infrastructure". I kid you not). Our government generally defines "trying to change the system" as terrorism, I think because treason is seen as old-fashioned and irrelevant.

    Time for one of my periodic on-line reminders of how things REALLY work. Adjust as necessary to account for differences in the laws where you live, but in essence:

    IF at some time you should gather with like minded friends to plan how you might exercise your First Amendment "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances", there's almost always going to be some idiot who wants you to blow something up or kill someone so you can "send a message TO THE MAN". DON'T LISTEN TO HIM. In fact get as far away from him as you can. Don't invite him to any more of your meetings ... He's the FBI's informant/agent provocateur planted in your group, and he's going to get you in trouble. Report him to the local police as a terrorist as soon as possible.
    567:

    paws4thot @ 565: Well, thank you for summarising several posts I already made. ;-) And indeed, for re-writing the one you quoted to prove that someone else understood it.

    Whatever. You're welcome.

    568:

    The basic reason to focus on nonviolence is that according to the research, nonviolent campaigns are about twice as successful in achieving their outcomes than are violent campaigns(52%-26%, IIRC). The major reason is because almost everyone can get involved in a nonviolent campaign, whereas the use of violence severely limits the number of potential campaigners at the outset.

    That's why I focus on nonviolence: it's more effective. That I fully agree with the ER on.

    Thing is, if there's no organizing and no strategy, it's not going to work, any more than a military campaign without an overall strategy will succeed. The need for good planning is identical between successful campaigns, and that's where hitting the books is important. Even if you're not leading the campaign, knowing what you're about when someone else is running things is really important. Even more useful, knowing what should be going on lets you spot the wasted efforts and stay clear, and help out the people who need it.

    569:

    there's almost always going to be some idiot who wants you to blow something up or kill someone

    In less violent countries the cops can't be that blatant without everyone laughing at them. Or lecturing them at length, which is almost as good. We suffer far more from people turning up to public events, committing crimes, then running out through police lines and disappearing. They don't actually care that it's obvious, they care about the headlines.

    The nasty stuff is more covert, but often not much more covert. Things like someone "leaking" details of where protest camps are so that a pub full of angry bogans can "go down there and beat the shit out of those stupid fuckers" (to quote an actual uniformed police officer).

    But as in the US, and as I linked above, the full farce of the violent arms of the state is brought to bear on us anyway, regardless of how peaceful we are. FFS, Quakers are treated as terrorists... they are literally the little olkd lady wing of the anti-war movement.

    570:

    Moz @ 552 I get the impression ( probably exaggerated, of course ) that ALL OF FUCKING Greenpeace & ER are bloody "Puritans" - they actively WANT a return to medieval living conditions. Their opposition to nuclear power or anything remotely useful indicates this. That & the meme I emcountered with "occupy" ... "THIS time, the revolution will be different" No, it bloody won't, you will simply get another Robespierre / Stalin / Khomeini & piles of skulls. And it's not that they can't learn, it's that they won't ....

    Paws @ 561 The Moggie Traveller was an exceptionally practical vehicle ... trouble is good secondhand ones are much too expensive.

    Meanwhile, a simple googling for 4th power law gives you... THIS and also ... This, too Interesting, no?

    571:

    Meanwhile... Quantum Information transfer much improved with interesting possibilities

    572:

    Well, "Cyclicious" is, not entirely unexpectedly, just another pro-cycling, "we shouldn't pay road maintenance because we don't cause track damage" blog. Not all damage to sealed surfaces is a result of vehicle pressure guys! If you want a dedicated lane in a "hot state", you should pay for it because of things like heating and cooling damage.

    TRRL. Basically the "4th power rule" is a worst case rule of thumb and a vast over-simplification of the calculations actually used. Even then, I could still see factors apparently neglected in their present analysis, such as suspension type.

    573:

    This is an instance of the negative behaviour I described above, where we allow all sorts of nuance in our own views, but attribute a one dimensional caricature to everyone we disagree with. I’m pretty sure we all do it, some are just more self-aware than others. But we’re pretty much yelling at clouds with this comment anyway so I guess it’s a bit moot.

    574:

    Not really. From a practical point of view, this is just same old, same old but with brass knobs on. From what I can see, the units still have to be physically transported, can be used only once, and cannot transmit information (only 'randomness').

    575:

    I found a fullish description once. Like all such rules, it was a (poor) best fit to limited data, and was recommended only as a guideline. It was also unclear whether it applied to smooth or rough roads (the damage mechanisms are different). And a lot of surface damage is caused by extreme cornering and braking, as one can see in many places.

    To respond to DonL's misunderstandings (#544), LGVs, and buses usually do the most damage, individually, but there are many roads that have dozens (sometimes hundreds) of lighter vehicles for every one of those, plus huge numbers of of roads and bridges where there are stringent weight limits. Also, many of the OTHER problems relating to weight are not as dominated by the heaviest vehicles.

    This has the consequences:

    Cars may be less important, but are NOT irrelevant.

    Converting cars to electric, but leaving goods vehicles and buses running diesel will help exactly how?

    576:

    See Damian (#573) for an explanation of your outburst. That is said in Cambridge, too, and is partially true, but my limited surveying is that pedestrian negligence causes many times more serious injuries to cyclists than the other way round. But it doesn't get published or considered.

    The cause is the appalling policies of the past century, mostly against the wishes of cyclists, but the so-called pro-cycling organisations have signed up to the insanity in the past could of decades. It's soluble, but means reversing direction, and would take significant effort and time.

    577:

    It's not my evaluation for Europe, though might be for the USA and Australia. I could do it without even establishing an authoritarian state - as far as ordinary people are concerned. But it WOULD need martial law powers over the bureaucrats, multinationals, petrolhead pressure groups and so on.

    I can see only one chance of that happening, though, and it's not pretty.

    578:

    Even more useful, knowing what should be going on lets you spot the wasted efforts and stay clear, and help out the people who need it.

    I think that most people simply have no idea how much work goes into just keeping things working at all for any random assortment of “things” that people take for granted occur in their society and makes life possible for them in the way they are used to living it. This lack of appreciation for complexity (or nuance, if I’m going to sound like I am harping this point I may as well make it as clear as I can) leads to the assumption that people absorbed in it don’t know what they are doing, don’t work enough hard or both, and can easily be replaced. Coming from a perspective of strong belief in some a priori neo-rationalist model for how the world works that does not refer to an empirical ground point of measuring actual outcomes for given policy inputs leads to an even more simplistic way of understanding, and while you can say that’s what neo-liberalism is, we tend to hand wave over whole complex systems and say that is the problem, whereas there will be thousands of people working hard to keep the wheels turning anyway because the consequences of not doing so suck.

    I suppose what I’m saying in relation to this them about activism and strategy, is that understanding what needs to change in the first place is not even vaguely easy. Sure it’s easy to express outcomes, and some existing systems are just unambiguously negative, so this isn’t a universal rule. But few people outside each domain-specific area really understand what works and doesn’t work for each specialist domain. So the aggregate of them all is almost unknowable. People drift into a sort of “kill them all and let God sort them out” mode, which is profoundly unhelpful (especially when applied literally, as has occurred numerous times). Hence incremental change being superior in so many aspects of life (let’s see if we can have administrative entity X modify their policy Y to be more inclusive of situation Z and take it into appropriate account, for instance).

    There are problems. Doing it one piece at a time is far too slow for the situation we currently face (we need to hit zero emissions and probably realistically negative emissions by 2050 if humanity has any hope of even surviving longer term, and that may even be far too late). Powerful interests can overwhelm local action (by way of evidence I offer... well pretty much everything. But Queensland and coal is a pretty pertinent example).

    So I guess what I am getting at is that for activism to be worth anything, worth the effort or worth the overall cost the challenge is to target action around achievable change at points where that change is meaningful. Really talk of modes of activism is talk of tactics, whereas a roadmap of strategic objectives is a rare thing to see (not totally unknown) and the step beyond into the overarching logistic and social capacity to support the campaign, while occasionally attended to, is seldom really considered deeply. Diverse, inchoate and largely consensus-driven modes of decision making increase the challenge, because then the strategic thinking must first be applied to getting the group to agree in the first place, and small focused change is never going to be a great rallying cry.

    It would be flippant to add that this is another reason why I think we’re fucked, but probably also realistic. I’m more a fan of Ford Prefect’s words on this topic in Life, the Universe and Everything.

    579:

    Goshdurnit, foiled by iOS Chrome applying unwanted “smart” quotes again. The link behind words above should be:

    https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/79081-we-re-not-obsessed-by-anything-you-see-insisted-ford

    580:

    Greg has recently (late 22nd or today) posted the latest TRRL report on the subject (management summary "it's really complicated, no, more complicated than that"), but the fourth power of axle weight law does come into it. So it honestly is the case that one truck or bus with a 10 tonne axle is like 10_000 Tesla Model S going down the same road in terms of compression damage.

    582:

    This time arrived a bit earlier than I expected (if only by a couple of years), but finally it's coming. Now you can literally become banned by Google, fur quite transparent reasons to boot. https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/maintaining-integrity-our-platforms/ Most of news channels, OFC, hurried to claim it is all China's fault, but apparently the corp itself manages to take middle ground with unspecified statements about "bad actors".

    One can't really expect them not to take sides, eventually, but, you see, this is a battle of attrition. Eventually, even the giants like this will have to yeld and therefor will be torn to shreds by anyone interested in their own ideas more that in status quo. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/08/21/mozilla-takes-action-to-protect-users-in-kazakhstan/ Quote: "Kazakhstan’s HTTPS interception is currently only happening in a fraction of the country"

    This is the consequences of having your infrastructure owned by outside actors - you will not even be able to determine the difference between false flag attack, provocation, corruption or deliberate intervention into internal affairs. This is the world where it happens on the regular basis.

    583:

    Yeah, just came by to say (because of Charlie’s tweet about it): So the guy who blackmailed his older, gay brother out of his share of the family fortune, and bankrolled the Tea Party, etc. is dead. Ain’t that a shame. Nope.

    And WRT his tweet about Monsanto, Here’s a little about one of their dumping grounds; guess where my mother went to Basic Training in the mid 70s, and now shares many health problems with other that went there.

    584:

    Oh yeah, meant to add that I’m counting down to the BS hagiographies to start coming out.

    585:

    I think we agree. The problem (hopefully it's a challenge, not a systemic feature) is that people are already implementing these grand, simplistic strategies.

    One example from California is the idea of getting all green waste out of landfills, and composting (or at least mulching it) to put it on soil to get carbon back in the soil. This is, basically, a good idea. What could go wrong?

    Here's a list of problems: --For all its water issues, California is a big agricultural state. It's got six fairly bad ag pests and pathogens, and about a third of the counties in the state have at least one quarantine to stop the spread of these pests. --New pests arrive every month, although fortunately most turn out to be trivial. Still, there are over 100 water molds (relatives of the Irish Potato Blight and Sudden Oak Death) being spread through nurseries in California. There are insects like the polyphagous shothole borers, and so on. These can all be spread by improperly treated greenwaste. So can the seeds of some weeds (like cheeseweed) whose seeds can survive hot composting. --California has green trashcans for greenwaste. Ignoring the minority of idiots who put their trash in these bins, the real problem is that these bins normally get the stuff home gardeners like me can't compost at home, like all the weed seeds, the diseased plant material, and so forth. It's not an even stream, it's problem-enriched. --Cal Food and Ag (CDFA) has a good quarantine system, but it's small and scaled to dealing with quarantines on farm wastes. They're totally unprepared to handle all greenwaste. They're also not in charge of that waste. That's Cal Recycle's job. --Most counties are too small to afford a countywide greenwaste composting operation, because those buggers take up a lot of land and occasionally cause fires. As a result, a relatively few huge composting operations are being set up. Greenwaste is going to be bulk hauled to these facilities, left to sit until processed, then shipped out to where it's needed across California.

    I've called this the pathogen superhighway that will take down California agriculture if we're not careful. To its partial credit, Cal Recycle at least gets that there's a problem, but it's not clear that they're capable of dealing with it yet.

    Local activists are mostly only starting to realize there's a problem. Mostly they just want to pressure the government into zero waste and let the bureaucrats work out the details. They mostly don't realize that they need to engage on getting the quarantine system beefed up, educate their neighbors about greenwaste sanitation, and so forth.

    There's a lot that can be done here on a local (tactical) level, through education, sanitation, and activism to make sure bits of the system get properly funded. Unfortunately, most of the environmental community is stuck on campaigning for the "zero waste" slogan, and not increasing the sophistication of their involvement to finish the job of diverting greenwaste and using as much of it as possible for carbon sequestration.

    Again, this is one example. Engage enough people at the proper level, and this particular problem becomes manageable. That's where we need to be on all of them, from electrifying transit to building solar and energy storage infrastructure to demilitarizing the planet and doing real wealth redistribution. We've certainly got enough people to do the work, but the organizing isn't happening fast enough.

    586:

    Yeah, Charles Koch is definitely in my thoughts and prayers at the moment. So are Trump, Putin, and Bolsonaro. Heck, I'm even praying about the NRA...

    587:

    I re-read this, and it occurred to me that "zero waste" requires, for example:- 1) banning the sale of print publications, because paper can't be recycled indefinitely or readily composted. 2) banning toilet paper because it is use once and throw away through the brown water system. 3) installing private (not overlooked sense) facilities for everyone to "wash themself" after going #2, in every private residence and public restroom. This also requires additional staff to keep the newly installed washing facilities clean...

    588:

    Converting cars to electric, but leaving goods vehicles and buses running diesel will help exactly how?

    Good Lord, did you actually think that someone, somewhere was proposing that?

    "The U.S. Has a Fleet of 300 Electric Buses. China Has 421,000" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-shift-to-electric-bus-it-s-china-ahead-of-u-s-421-000-to-300

    Governments, aren't they wonderful.

    589:

    JamesPadraicR @ 583: Yeah, just came by to say (because of Charlie’s tweet about it): So the guy who blackmailed his older, gay brother out of his share of the family fortune, and bankrolled the Tea Party, etc. is dead. Ain’t that a shame. Nope.

    Which "older, gay brother" might that be? There's nothing about it in Wikipedia.

    590:

    That’d be Fred Jr., of course it’s all just a rumor, and not like he ended up poor. Just one article that comes up googling: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/koch-brothers-blackmailed-their-allegedly-gay-brother/

    591:

    Heteromeles @ 586: Yeah, Charles Koch is definitely in my thoughts and prayers at the moment. So are Trump, Putin, and Bolsonaro. Heck, I'm even praying about the NRA...

    Well, if hiring a Houngan to put a hex on them counts as "thoughts and prayers" (Vodou being a recognized religion after all), I am too.

    592:

    Thank you! PDF saved...

    Agree too about the shocking prices of Moggies these days... a few grand just to have confidence that the pile of bits you get for the money isn't missing anything, never mind an actual complete car. How things have changed...

    593:

    for activism to be worth anything, worth the effort or worth the overall cost the challenge is to target action around achievable change at points where that change is meaningful.

    Which is where "please vote against the climate catastrophe" comes in. And a big part of ER is simply trying to convey to people that "this is important. Please focus". Which TBH seems to be working.

    I've also worked out that a better response to "but how will X work" is to say "to the same level of detail, how does that work now". For the few experts who are asking only about their exact field of expertise that's probably easy, but you can also say "and how much does it contribute to climate change" and filter out another 99% or so.

    Also, engineers are notoriously vulnerable to "anything I don't understand is easy", and "I'm an expert at X, therefore I can do Y" but those are much broader human characteristics (most engineers are aware that managers of engineers work that way, although they might argue with a manager claiming expertise in anything at all).

    594:

    BMW M5 1945 kg (fuel extra about 90 kg) Tesla Model 3 1611 kg fully fuelled

    BMW X6 2100-2340 kg (fuel extra about 100 kg) Tesla Model X 2300-2500 kg fully fuelled

    595:

    "Except that IIRC you cannot "swap out" the battery easily - can you? Basic design fault, IMHO. Someone correct me if I'm out-of-date."

    The Tesla Model S was designed to swap batteries more than twice as fast as filling a petrol car. They rolled out a couple of swap stations, at a time when they had about 8 supercharger stations, so about a quarter of their stations. Literally no one used it twice. A few people used it once to try it out, then after the initial excitement millions of dollars worth of equipment and half an acre of prime realestate went unused for months.

    Then after a car ran over some debris (a trailer hitch) and punctured a battery they decided to put a skid plate under the cars and that was the end of that.

    There's a successful battery swap for scooters and small motorcycles in Asia.

    596:

    Which TBH seems to be working.

    I really hope so.

    Here’s a blog post on this topic by my current favourite politician, Jonathan Sri, a local government councillor representing the Gabba ward and the only Green on Brisbane City Council (I’m not 100% clear on the equivalences, but I think a ward is similar to a borough in the UK). Jonathan’s ward contains Brisbane’s famously lefty West End. Recent redistributing has made him pretty much undefeatable by council election, since it’s taken a mostly-Labor-or-LNP-voting area and moved it to an adjacent ward that itself probably won’t be winnable for the Greens now (we’re going to try anyway). Jonathan has been a major target of the local Murdoch press lately since he lets ER use his ward offices for meetings and training.

    597:

    "And they mostly object strongly both to orienting themselves for minimum C of G height other than for sleeping"

    So much so that it never occurs that there's any other possibility. Concorde had multiple tonnes of whacky engineering so that the pilots were spared having to lie down and look through a window in the floor for takeoff and landing. Most bizarre.

    598:

    "The reason, of course, is that nobody actually gives a shit about introducing electric cars for their environmental advantages (ignoring for the moment the debate over whether they really have any). They are only doing it for the money, as much and as quickly as possible, so they much prefer to not bother with any infrastructure at all, and instead rely on spare capacity in existing infrastructure which was designed for different purposes, which isn't really suitable, and which someone else will be effectively blackmailed into eventually upgrading after increasing numbers of electric cars have eaten all the spare capacity and problems have appeared in consequence."

    That's just patently false. There's one guy who's doing it entirely for the environmental benefits. Musk. He had plenty of money, and starting a car company is a proven effective way of losing all of it. He publicly rated his chance of not losing everything as quite low. He's put in the infrastructure, in huge quantity, and paid for the grid upgrades required from his own pocket.

    All the other car companies fit your description.

    599: 595 - I'd not heard the trailer hitch bit before. What I had heard (from EV vested interests) summarises as "but the battery's not mine. What if mine gets replaced with a duff one here?" 596 - Yes and no. A UK borough may or may not be roughly equivalent to a ward. Boroughs are historic geographical areas, so ignoring the the obvious national inconsistency the Gabba might be called a borough in the UK. So are Old Trafford and Headingley.

    But so is the "Borough of Kensington and Chelsea" in London. This borough contains about 100 wards, all returning a borough councilor. Wards are purely electoral subdivisions of the UK, who's boundaries are decided by the Boundary Commissions (independent bodies within the electoral system who's sole duties are deciding the subdivisions of the UK for elections at various levels). So a ward may or may not be equivalent to a borough; there's no hard and fast rule either way on this.

    597 - Not really true. The British and Germans had, by the time Concorde was being developed, already done a body of research on the subject, the easiest to find example being the Gloster Meteor F8 prone pilot, and concluded that the disadvantages of the prone position outweighed the advantages even in a fighter aircraft. The closest Concorde has come to being a fighter is OGH's fictitious 666 Squadron RAF in the Laundryverse.
    600:

    "@ 521 Yes - why didn't she simply get on a cargo ship"

    Have you ever made a serious attempt at crossing an ocean by cargo? Generally you need to book a year or more in advance and a 1st class air ticket is usually much cheaper. http://www.freightercruises.com/voyages.php#anchor_menue

    601:

    Moz @ 593 I note that fascist thug Bolsanaro has ( publicly, at least ) suddenly backpedalled on burning down the Amzn Forest, because otherwise, he would lose a trade deal ... He will, of course, try to cheat his way out of that ... but the world-public realisation that 20% of the planet's Oxygen comes from there is a slight incentive, maybe?

    Gasdive @ 600 Maybe .. There's also the problem of "support" staff ( I assume there will be one or two? ) & how is she getting back. [ "Support staff" includes the yacht crew - will the same group of people simply sail back, or not? ]

    602:

    “What if mine gets replaced with a duff one here?"

    That makes sense. Get the same thought process with “swap’n’go” LPG bottles, because if you have one that’s just certified you don’t want to swap it for one that expires in a year. If it’s the most expensive component of the vehicle, you want to get the most possible life from it, this isn’t an irrational perspective. The way to make it take off is to arrange it so that you always get a battery that’s good for a couple of years, even if you drive in with one that’s almost (or has in fact) expired (the “swap’n’go” propane bottles pretty much have to work this way). It would be a thing to take a whole lot of the fear about having to replace batteries out of owning an electric car, really worth pursuing if you could make the economics of running a batter-swap station (and in fact a chain thereof) work out positive.

    603:

    Just to celebrate a little topicality of domain, the Guardian Quiz today has question 8: “Leeds dock is home to what national museum?” I knew the answer, but only because...

    604:

    No, it is NOT centre of gravity height - it is torso and head orientation. Very few people have any difficulty sitting even on the floor or in a sports car - getting down and up (or in and out) is more of a problem! This is a purely prejudicial problem - and one of the prerequisites for ANY transport solution is that we would have to break through many ingrained prejudices.

    There is a separate problem when pedalling at high intensities to do with hip angle, because we have been upright bipeds for 3 milllion years, but it doesn't cause a problem at low intensities (or when not pedalling at all).

    605:

    Yes. It always was a non-starter, unless Tesla had merely rented the batteries, and guaranteed them itself. That system has worked in the past in other contexts.

    In the sort of urban runabout I have been describing, you could swap the batteries at home or work, yourself, for extended use in the day (even though each trip would be limited to under 50/100 miles). And, by putting suitable carriages on trains, you could put it on those for long distances. Think Eurostar, but a higher density.

    606:

    "Support staff" includes the yacht crew

    There's a whole lot of complexity here, but it's unreasonable to count her use of the yacht as the entire cost, more reasonable to count only the marginal cost. It's not as though the yacht exists primarily to supply her with transport, or that it would have zero impact (and zero crew) if she wasn't on it. IMO it's possibly even reasonable to say it would still be out sailing if she wasn't on it, because those racing yachts often alternate between training and maintenance/rebuilding pretty continuously, at least during the sailing season (whatever that means for the exact boat and owner).

    But the reason I call it a stunt is that it's hard to do the numbers such that her spending three weeks travelling each direction has less impact than her spending those six weeks doing whatever she normally does on land. Food on boats is expensive, and the other supplies likewise. Big passenger planes are ridiculously efficient in terms of resources per passenger-meter. This is also why passenger ships are dubious, feeding and caring for the passengers is expensive (and cruise ships especially are travelling ecological disaster areas, and not just because most passengers fly to and from the ship).

    607:

    I have always thought Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands could usefully be compulsory in school, but it’s easy to see why it isn’t: it’s really source material for at least three different classes (Geography/Navigation, History and English) and not really all that very good for the one for which it might be considered (English). English teachers traditionally did have to teach everything else too so it’s not that long a shot, but we’re in a world where real estate agents and bankers look down on teachers, so really nothing surprises me or could make me any more appalled than I already am on this topic.

    Anyway, small boat sailing is a thing and it’s far from the least democratic and accessible thing people take an interest in. It’s a huge deal in the UK with a lot of natural sailing grounds, and as you might imagine it’s pretty big in Sweden and especially Stockholm, which is surrounded by tiny islands (and thousands of holiday cabins) in a calm and tideless sea. While an Atlantic crossing is serious stuff, packing up a small yacht for a trip on that scale isn’t hugely different to packing up the station wagon for a trip of a thousand kms or so (it’s just the latter is pretty fast if you plan to drive right through).

    Anyway, far from a “stunt”, sailing across is a pretty obvious thing to do if you want to do it with zero emissions. Another word for “stunt” is “demonstration”, as in “showing how things can be done”. But for the most part when I’ve seen people making public statements that are critical of Greta Thunberg, they have always revealed far more about themselves and added nothing useful. Same thing applies here to be honest.

    608:

    sports car - getting down and up (or in and out) is more of a problem!

    That's almost entirely a trade-off between lower is faster and more stable, higher is easier to get in and out of. But there are trikes that are easier to get out of than you might expect, and I suspect that if you were really keen you could get a folding lever that lay flat along the boom and flipped up to vertical-ish to use as a handle to get in and out. But really, once the seat is about 40 or 50cm off the ground most people don't seem to have much trouble.

    I'm watching the four wheelers with interest right now, there are a few different options and they solve the "one big luggage area" problem quite well. But at the cost of mechanical complexity, except that seems to have be fairly standardised now so it's more reasonable to buy one. I suspect that four wheels will make people happier than three, just because three wheel cars have such a bad rep.

    609:

    “unreasonable to count her use of the yacht as the entire cost, more reasonable to count only the marginal cost”

    Especially when they were comparing it to a cargo ship or a passenger jet (I mean... FFS if making your argument consistent really costs that much, is it a good argument that you would stand by in public in person in the first place?)

    610:

    is it a good argument?

    Is that a rhetorical question?

    611:

    Yes, sort of. But while replying to your post, that tangent is really addressed at the various comments you’re replying to. Apologies if that is not clear. I think that people are arguing that it isn’t carbon neutral to build a high-tech sailing yacht, while only counting marginal cost for using a cargo ship or a jet airliner, as you say as though the boat had been built especially for this trip.

    612:

    Some of them make such helping handles and, in the mental model I had, I would ensure that the frame that holds the front fairing was also usable as handles. The big advantage of a 30cm high seat is that you can get a stable vehicle with an upright seating position that is under 1m wide, which is the wheelchair width. As I said, some people would need a higher one, but many fewer than is usually claimed.

    Four wheels is a lot more stable, and the problem is primarily legislative, not engineering; that is something that would have to change.

    613:

    Going back to the Nyonoksa incident, there's this:

    https://www.norsar.no/in-focus/incidents-reported-in-north-russia-article1815-863.html Incidents reported in North-Russia NORSAR’s analysis of seismic and infrasound data confirm two separate events of explosive nature near Archangel in North-Russia. The first event was registered on the 8th of August at 06:00 UTC (local time 09:00). Infrasound signals registered in Bardufoss (Troms, Norway) indicates that the second event took place approximately two hours later. [snip] The analysis proves that the verification regime of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) is useful in monitoring and confirming other man-made and natural events. The Norwegian station has not registered any increase in radioactive material. Russian stations report communication difficulties and has not provided us with any further data.
    614:

    Pigeon @ 592: Thank you! PDF saved...

    Agree too about the shocking prices of Moggies these days... a few grand just to have confidence that the pile of bits you get for the money isn't missing anything, never mind an actual complete car. How things have changed...

    Why is that? I know that for the MGB (and several other Little British Cars) all the tooling was saved when they were taken out of production. Went to an organization called British Motor Heritage.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Motor_Heritage

    http://www.bmh-ltd.com/

    For the MGB, you can even buy a complete body shell. All you need is the running gear from a donor car ... and if you don't have a donor car, you can buy all the parts needed to replace the running gear as well.

    http://www.bmh-ltd.com/bodyshells.htm

    http://www.victoriabritish.com/mg/

    http://www.the-roadster-factory.com/indexmain.php

    https://mossmotors.com/mgb

    615: 609 and #611 - I'm saying that the carbon cost per hour of running a racing yacht with a carbon fibre mast, nylon or polypropylene sails, and nylon rope rigging is not 0, as she appears to believe. That sort of rig tends to need replaced at least once per year. 608 and #612 - I'm OK with 3 wheelers having 2 front wheels on IFS, because they tend to be stable; less so with ones that have 2 rear wheels on a beam axle because, even ignoring Clonkson stunts, there's a body of evidence that they suffer from inside rear wheel lift when cornering.
    616:

    Greg Tingey @ 601: Moz @ 593
    I note that fascist thug Bolsanaro has ( publicly, at least ) suddenly backpedalled on burning down the Amzn Forest, because otherwise, he would lose a trade deal ...
    He will, of course, try to cheat his way out of that ... but the world-public realisation that 20% of the planet's Oxygen comes from there is a slight incentive, maybe?

    Cool!

    I've got a new justification for not cutting the damn grass. I'm providing a backup for the planetary oxygen supply, in case the Amazon Rain-forest burns down. [insert smiley face here]

    617:

    I'm saying that the carbon cost per hour of running a racing yacht with a carbon fibre mast, nylon or polypropylene sails, and nylon rope rigging is not 0, as she appears to believe.

    Oh FFS, you are being a flaming asshole.

    Relative to flying it's close enough to zero to get lost in the noise. Also, got a cite where she says it's zero?

    618:

    Dunno. For a fair distance (ie, not really familiarizing myself with exactly what she did for the trip) - it really does look like a stunt.

    I'd tend to characterize something as a stunt if it demonstrates a technology that, even after development, has such a large selection of preferable alternatives that its application is miniscule.

    The yacht she used sounds like it fits into that category. I could build a car using platinum-based hydrogen storage and drive it across the country. It would be a stunt. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe we're heading back to the age of sail. But, heck, maybe asteroid miner whatis is going to drop so much platinum that my platinum car is viable. (no, not even then, btw)

    619:

    This is wrong. Apex forests are, in terms of oxygen and carbon mostly closed systems. The rainforest actually more so than temperate forests - A temperate forest creates very deep loam beneath itself, which ties up some carbon each year until it reaches maximum depth. The rainforest creates very shallow soil, so it does not even do that.

    Thus burning it down releases the carbon that is currently locked up in it, but it does not change the oxygen or carbon cycle. The rainforest consumes the oxygen it produces.

    What it would do is fuck up the water cycle across the entire continent. Because forests create rain. The rain forest most of all. Not a good plan.

    620:

    Erwin @ 618 Only if you uses Flettner Rotors as sails, I think?

    TJ @ 619 So, where would the water (rain) go instead, I wonder?

    621:

    At a very crude guess, mostly Away. A square kilometer of rainforest represents enormous evaporation, which is why it rains there all the time. Replace it with grassland and cows, and most of that water will run off, ultimately to the sea, and suddenly the entire area is a whole lot dryer. How much dryer? "?!??" We do not have good enough models to tell, I dont think, and certainly, Bolsano did not ask anyone to run those models..

    622:

    Note that you can make a forest into a carbon sink. Its called "Sustainable logging". But in a state of nature, it is not.

    623:

    I saw her pre-departure news interview. And give me a cite where I said that making nylon rope generates more carbon per passenger km than flying. Yow can't.

    624:

    Um Thanks. I hope that's honest confusion, and not an attempt at trolling. In the assumption that you're confused, allow me to use a bit of my education at extreme and boring length.

    First off, one of the first laws of plant physiology is Leibig's Law of the Minimum, which is that the nutrient in shortest supply limits growth. There are 17 regular plant nutrients (CHOPKINSCaFeMgMoMnCuZnBNiCl). Go short on one of them, say nitrogen, and growth grinds to a halt, even if everything else is abundantly available.

    The problem with the Amazon rainforests is that many of them are on old soils, where the readily available nutrients have been leached out. The available nutrients are mostly in the biomass or the atmosphere. Burn that biomass and wash away the ashes, and the trees mostly don't regrow, because, again, the soils lack a supply. Nitrogen is also a problem because most of it gets blown back into the air during burns and has to be refixed before it becomes available to the plants again.

    That's problem one. Burn it down and wash away the ashes, and the forest doesn't come back until new nutrients show up. If the ashes stay on site, well and good, but you've still got to get the nitrogen back in or it becomes the limiting nutrient

    --This is where your bizarre notions of sustainable logging as carbon sink founder. Trees only grow if there are nutrients to grow them. Admittedly the carbon offset idiots like to plant trees, but that's for accounting purposes, not due to anything about the actual tree growth. They'd get better sequestration by keeping the bigger trees around because they sequester more carbon as a function of size and allometric scaling, but since the carbon offsetters didn't plant those trees, they're reluctant to claim the credits. They'd rather bulldoze the forest and replant it so the accounting looks clean. Stupid, no?

    --Now let's turn to the oxygen emissions problem. Plants make more oxygen during photosynthesis than they use during respiration, so they let the surplus go to the atmosphere. Get rid of the trees, and there's less CO2 being taken up. Most of the O2 globally comes from marine phytoplankton, but I'll bet you haven't noticed that this has been taking a hit too. Long story short, things will get worse.

    --And no, forests aren't closed oxygen and carbon loops, because the gases diffuse too fast through the atmosphere to make that work. This is why it's possible to track global [CO2] in the atmosphere from one observatory in Mauna Kea, and why you can keep your home or car air conditioned without suffocating, simply due to oxygen diffusion through the cracks.

    Anyway, living tissue scales proportionally to the biomass (because all cells respire), while photosynthesis scales only to the surface area (because the cells have to be illuminated to photosynthesize). There's no way to grow photosynthesis and respiration in synch with each other so that there's a closed oxygen/carbon loop. In reality, plants are extremely good at photosynthesizing, so even though surface area is less than volume, they actually produce a surplus of oxygen, lucky for us. But they can't match supply and demand, because those don't scale equally in any plant. Plants solve the problem by overproducing O2 and not worrying about the rest of it.

    --What else did you get weird: Oh yeah, the water cycle. Plants have open circulatory systems: water flows in the roots and out the stomata in the leaves and stems. The reason for this is that the water coming up from the roots also carries dissolved mineral nutrients. The plants have to get rid of surplus water, so they vent it, incidentally doing some really cool other stuff involving getting rid of heat from those busily photosynthesizing leaves, which would overheat otherwise. This process of moving water through the plants and into the air is called transpiration.

    Rain forests transpire a lot, because water is not limiting to growth (as in a desert) nor is sunlight. Nutrients are limiting, and getting the nutrients to where the plant is photosynthesizing demands moving a lot of water. There's so much hot water dumped into the atmosphere that when it rises and expands to the point where it condenses, you get huge clouds and then rain as the surplus water nucleates and precipitates out of the air. Get rid of the trees, and you've got...a desert once the water's run off, because nothing is putting the water into the atmosphere to make clouds, at least until you get to an ocean. You want a rainforest, you need to plant a lot of plants, especially trees.

    Hope that helps.

    625:

    You are looking at it too detailed - An apex - as opposed to a new - rainforest is not accumulating biomass, therefore it is not storing carbon, or because that is the same thing on net generating oxygen.

    For every plant which is photosynthesizing, there is a fungi colony or ant swarm breaking down (dead) trees and respiring to do that.

    The oxygen we breathe is in balance with the oxygen from the crops we grow. It has to be, because otherwise the mass balances do not work.

    Any oxygen lost to non-organic chemistry (.. or to fossil fuel combustion. Every gram of carbon we burn is two grams and change of free oxygen less in the atmosphere.) can only be replenished by biological systems which are leaking biomass out of the active biosphere, which rainforests are very, very good at not doing. Hence the thin soil.

    626:

    I'm referring specifically to Critical Mass, not all cyclists.

    I'm not impressed with the Toronto and Vancouver branches of the movement. The Toronto branch is perfectly OK with physically preventing pedestrians from crossing the street when they (pedestrians) have a green light, for example. I've talked to members who are proud of disrupting highway traffic while simultaneously denying they are responsible because they were only blocking the (above capacity rush hour route) for 20 minutes, so the resulting hours of traffic snarls aren't their fault. (Took a friend of mine 5 hours to make a 1 hour drive that night.)

    627:

    I never claimed you said that. Also, the atmospheric CO2 costs of the boat and rigging are only the leakage from the manufacturing, not the carbon that winds up in the boat and rigging. So really, really tiny.

    Holiday sailboats already exist. If carbon costs get real they will look like a much better deal than they do now.

    Long term, we need to stop travelling so much.

    Snarking at Greta is pretty much self disclosing, as has been mentioned earlier.

    628:

    You are looking at it too detailed - An apex - as opposed to a new - rainforest is not accumulating biomass, therefore it is not storing carbon, or because that is the same thing on net generating oxygen.

    Yeah, wrong assumption to start with: "An apex" doesn't exist, because rain forests aren't static. There are disturbances on all scales that regenerate. So strike that assumption.

    Second assumption is also wrong. Rainforests accumulate biomass all the time. Basically, a tree is a big skeleton of CHO and very little else (aka wood) with a very thin skin of living tissue (cambium and leaves), generally armored by still more dead CHO (the bark). As I noted above, plants are really good at photosynthesis, so having a surplus of carbon is easy most of the time. Stashing it is also easy if you can grow wood, and wood, being dead, does all sorts of useful things like act as dumb pipes for water movement, support tissue, and the like.

    And wood accumulates. This is the whole part where you demonstrate that you don't understand how allometry works, but that's okay. It's hard to think about shells growing on the outside of cylinders (pir^h) and how much carbon they can sequester even in a tiny growth increments.

    So yeah...

    You're also assuming there's a perfect match between what's produced and what's consumed. Obviously this is bogus, or trees would be like plankton, where they're very rare, and consumed almost as soon as they reproduce. Obviously this isn't the case, because more than 90% of the biomass in the forest is plants, and most of the plant biomass is dead wood. It's nothing like in balance.

    And your oxygen statement? I think you're assuming that oxygen comes out of the soil (it's a breakdown product of water, so you're correct only to the point where water's in the pores of the soil, not part of the minerals that are so depleted), and I quite hope you're not assuming that soil nutrients like phosphorus or iron are transmuted into oxygen, because it just doesn't work that way.

    Ecology is all about the complicated details, just like life is.

    629:

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/23/environmental-hypocrisy-climate-crisis-green-politics

    Ever since Al Gore first launched his climate crusade, the sight of any given public figure making the case for action, anywhere other than in their own home, has frequently been met with the following genre of response: if you care so much, how come you took a plane? If you didn’t take a plane, how much did the alternative cost? How much steel does a train use these days, anyway? Wouldn’t it be cheaper, ergo greener, not to go anywhere?...

    And FWIW, whining about the carbon content of the ropes on the yacht is missing such a big chunk of the picture that it's just not credible. "rope used per kilometre travelled" really seems like someone is taking the piss.

    630:

    I think it would be interesting and useful if people criticising attempts to reduce global heating made their basic position clearer. Are you in favour of global heating and thus opposed to any measure, no matter how trivial, that might reduce it? Or are you opposed to global heating but somewhat skeptical of a particular approach - if so it would be persuasive if you spent some time pointing out measures you do support, figures you approve of, and perhaps even some of the things that you do yourself.

    People in the latter group who never approve of anything or do anything run a very real risk of being confused for people in the former group.

    631:

    “the carbon cost per hour of running a racing yacht with a carbon fibre mast, nylon or polypropylene sails, and nylon rope rigging is not 0”

    Sure, though nylon would not be used in rigging (the trade names for the popular fibres these days are dyneema and spectra... the latter appears to have displaced steel cable for standing rigging). Nylon and poly are not UV fast and, outside out-and-out racing, are only used for things that are not up in the sun all day.

    “That sort of rig tends to need replaced at least once per year.“

    Well the sails on my little dinghy are upwards 25 years old, and that’s the newer set. My mast is timber, but if it were carbon fibre (and I’m occasionally tempted to make carbon fibre parts, though probably not the mast... maybe the Gunther yard though) I would not even consider replacing it in a timeframe like that (another 25 years maybe).

    Again though we’re talking about overall operating costs, while what we should be talking about are marginal costs. Would we count the entire carbon footprint to keep a plan operating for a year? Then why would we count the footprint to keep a composite yacht operations? It’s the “FFS” I allude to above, it isn’t a consistent application. Take your point though, it’s not zero, but what is?

    It’s interesting talking about electric cars and yachting again in the same thread. One serious development that has in fact occurred in recent years and has become mature, albeit hard to find at the low end of the market where I live, technology is the application of regenerative motor/dynamo usage to sailing yachts. Like most situations where the load is driven by the external force, you can bring props up to a speed that matches boat speed under sail without “spending” power, and then back them off a little yielding positive power input from the motor. Antarctic whale research (that is the real thing, not the version that yields whale meat) seems to have moved primarily to multihull implementations of this sort of thing in the 10-20 metre scale. Smaller vessels are more amenable to not spooking the whales anyway and being largely self-contained is a big plus.

    632: 630 and #631 - OK, I'll answer, given that you've both presented in a reasonable manner and discusses rather than personally attacked.

    Firstly, I am in favour of "low-carbonisation": what I am not in favour of is setting yourself up as a "zero carbon poster child" and then making inaccurate grandstanding statements on national media. They will be used by your enemies!

    My comments on the carbon cost of running a racing yacht were based on the operating budget of friends who have an inshore racing catamaran using an all-plastics rig . Someplace back upthread I did say that a Scots birlinn could have been used, and that is all natural, even the hull, and truly zero carbon unless you burn life-expired ropes and sails. Apparently someone who finds my views offensive chose to ignore that point in favour of a personal attack though.

    Interesting about the new (to me) application of the dynalto.

    633:

    "but the battery's not mine. What if mine gets replaced with a duff one here?"

    There are contexts where this problem doesn't exist. Most notably, with fleet vehicles. If a taxi company or parcel delivery company has its own maintenance depot(s), then both battery packs have the same owner, and their maintenance logs are in the same database.

    Similarly, a flight school tends to have several identical trainer airplanes, and the school could swap batteries between training flights. Flights are typically an hour or so long, so turnaround has to be rapid relative to that.

    With full-size electric buses, personally I'm more in favour of them getting multiple fast-charges during a given day. I argue that the bus has space for a supercapacitor. (They aren't dense.) Just build selected bus stops to have an overhead rig that drops down and makes contact when a bus arrives. Idle for a few minutes, and away. Surely this could be cheaper than putting those overhead wires all the way along every possible bus route.

    634:

    Thanks for the response.

    The thing about carbon boats and rigging is that racing boats are a very particular use case. It's not uncommon for those boats to be binned after 100-500 days on the water, because if they're built for that they can be lighter and thus faster. At the extreme are the foiling cats where it takes a team of hundreds to keep one on the water and it's unlikely a given boat will last more than one race season. So looking at those boats is very definitely saying "if we really tried, how wasteful could we make this". In many cases they're advertising vehicles "team Oracle usa" {cough}, and as such are entirely wasteful from conception to exhaustion.

    But at the same time, it's entirely likely that Greta's trip is only adding a tiny marginal cost to such a ridiculous vehicle while enhancing its advertising value.

    But when you drop down a level to "I'm a tourist, on a boat" which is perhaps better than racing, those people for the most part run carbon rigging for the insurable life which is typically 5 to 7 years, and they run the mast likewise but that should go 10-15 years. An awful lot of cruising boats still run stainless rigging and aluminium masts though.

    We're starting to see as-built all electric yachts, and that's a big step. Cruisers, especially "floating apartment" cruisers (90% marina time, 10% sailing to a different marina time), usually have small solar arrays and big generators which they run almost 24/7, because that's what keeps their air conditioner going. But even some cruising boats, normally catamarans, and now shipping with 5+ kW of PV, lithium batteries, and no generator (generally "all electric" refers to the propulsion motor, there are such boats that also have 20kW+ diesel generators).

    The "Rigging Doctor" Youtube channel has a genuinely all-electric DIY conversion as well as DIY carbon standing rigging (the latter is where the name comes from). Sailing Uma and "Learning the Lines" both have DIY electric propulsion and no generator, and those three are all monohulls. But for an extra $200k euro or so you can get a Fountain-Pajot 45 footer with the extra solar package and no generator (if that add-on scares you don't look at the total price for the boat).

    635:

    I agree with almost your entire post, but since when is "Food on boats is expensive"?

    Unexciting, frequently, especially when the fresh supplies run out, but it's pretty much standard food, albeit designed for 5-10wks so generally tinned or preserved. Food is pretty much the only thing associated with boats that isn't expensive. A sailing yacht itself needs around 20% of the purchase price each year in maintenance. Anything engine powered is worse, they go up to 30-40% depending on how much of a gin palace it is.

    @Damian

    technology is the application of regenerative motor/dynamo usage to sailing yachts

    That sort of thing has been around for decades, though getting a decent power output other than "keeping a few car batteries charged" would be a new innovation. Growing up around cruising yachts, quite a few of the keelers had a combo of solar panel and dynamo with small prop that can fold or feather. The bigger ones barely noticed the drag, though in a little boat where you mostly only do 4-7 knots it is pretty pronounced. Most yachts nowadays though have a small wind turbine on the stern to do the same job without the fouling issues.

    636:

    since when is "Food on boats is expensive"?

    It's almost all preserved which makes it more resource-expensive than fresh food, and far too much of the rest is air-freighted. Partly this is because it's being consumed by rich people, though, so it's possible that they just eat at the same cost point on land as well. But for minions like me it's often a big step up the cost curve.

    There are quite a few yachties at the other end of the spectrum, living off the ocean for protein and harvesting stuff themselves (especially coconuts) and buying local food otherwise. I watch them on youtube though, the limited exposure to in-person yachting I have now tends to be unreasonably rich people's hobbies.

    637:

    I can agree your paragraphs 1 and 2 with a proviso; Greta is literally the one who was interviewed on national news and said "I'm travelling on this (racing) yacht because the trip will be zero carbon." (personal memory of her actual words.) Now, yes it's generating some sort of publicity beyond the initial report, but what I've seen is all discussions like this one about "is a racing yacht actually zero carbon?" rather than "what can we do and how?"

    638:

    I think the recent developments come from electric and hybrid cars and their regenerative braking. The sort of thing you describe is like an extra prop made for the purpose that folds down, same as a wind vane in principle really. What I am talking about is the main drive motor for the vessel is electric and (feathering or not) takes out power as drag and turns it into electricity. I think that in principal such a prop, while sure it is a potential fouling hazard, doesn’t really require feathering because turning it to match boat speed doesn’t really take power.

    So the advantages are in scale, because it’s a big enough dynamo to use in reverse to drive the boat, and simplicity, because it’s less and less fiddle gear to find a place for and to keep working. Then in terms of power, my thought is that it favours the smaller boat with a larger rig, or a rig it can’t really get the most out of due to hull speed limits. That extra power that is wasted because it just gets absorbed by wave-making resistance as you try to go faster? Well you still can’t go faster, but you can use that power to keep your fridge going. Hence the whole thing suiting multihulls better, because adding power to the rig doesn’t have the same hard dependency on ballast and keel depth for righting moment.

    639:

    My quote was from actual people regarding the Tesla Model S, battery swap stations and batteries. Battery swaps make more sense in your other use cases, but I can't think of anyone who makes vehicles for them.

    For myself, even if I had a suitable car my use case would require battery swaps maybe 2 or 4 times per year.

    640:

    rather than "what can we do and how?"

    At the risk of being repetitious, here are a few of the more recent things I've said in this thread that might be relevant to your question:

    Which is where "please vote against the climate catastrophe" comes in

    What I want is for you to choose life. Vote, work, fight, for a world where climate change is a solved problem.

    I even made a prioritised list:

    What I do, if it's any help to you questioning what you should do, is donate and volunteer for political parties; write letters, sign petitions, submit on legislation, in an effort to get politicians to do the right or least-wrong thing; I join groups campaigning for those things, giving time and money and where I can, ideas; then last and also probably least important, I try to minimise my personal contribution to various problems. The latter is easiest, but it's also an attractive nuisance and actively misleading. We cannot fix or even meaningfully mitigate climate catastrophe through individual change. As I've said before, even an actual zero-impact lifestyle is completely negated by voting to burn it all down. Arguably voting Green and continuing to live as most do is a much better choice.

    Is there something more I should be doing? Or Damien, or Heteromeles, or a couple of others.

    641:

    @620 Wow. Learned new and cool here. Thanks.

    @625 In a closed, equilibriated system - this might be true. The articles I've seen indicate that rainforests are net carbon sinks in practice - until you start killing them. Albeit, net carbon sequestration is a fraction of carbon sequestration. So, almost qualitatively correct.

    @moz Well. In so far as I've thought about it enough to have a possibly reasonable prioritization - for global heating - (not a fan, btw, rather favor musk's thought that it is a stupid experiment to run)

    So, biggest carbon sources are power plants and deforestation. (Sort of...there is also kind of the planetary respiratory cycle.). For human stuff, transportation is a rounding error - for car crazy countries - a large rounding error - but still not primary. So electric cars are mostly secondary.

    Am highly skeptical of attempts to change human behavior on a large scale. Am also highly skeptical of timescale relevance of most attempts to change developed infrastructure (viz cars, sadly)

    For power plants, decreasing the costs of solar and storage and increasing the costs of carbon generation through a carbon tax. And, yes, this'll take time. Also, only useful in countries with sunlight. (Admittedly, as a dreadful USian, I do have this probably unfounded vision of the UK as a dreadful gray place under continual gray fog.). Cost reduction probably most important because large masses of poor people are expected to increase energy use. Carbon tax is more applicable to developed countries to encourage technology development.

    For countries without sunlight, tend to prioritize reducing nuclear costs, if necessary by confinement of antinuclear protestors to reeducation camps. (Not really serious) (Not totally kidding) More seriously - regulatory impediments are probably > 3x, based on variation of cost per country. Why greater? Very hard to approve new plant designs. For some, hydro is enough, not generally true AFAIK.

    Longer term, am hoping beamed power is feasible.

    For deforestation, probably most sensible method is to bribe less developed nations on a results-oriented basis to not burn down the rainforests. Albeit, am aware that side effects would probably be evil. (Amounts to paying dictators to murder indigenous farmers.). Would like better approach. Not good with people, so dunno.

    For planetary respiration - do favor mucking about with it. To some extent. The algae thing appears likely to sequester at least some carbon while increasing global fish sticks - which makes for cheap food and maybe some biodiversity, or at least increased biomass. For forests, wonder about sustainable logging plus fertilizer. Seems potentially commercially supportable and trucking out and 'storing' bales of carbon while increasing local nutrients might help. Not so sure it would help much. Yes, side effects are probable - but still may be net positive. Roads bad for other things tho.

    Lastly, decreasing human population helps. Do not favor engineered viruses. Probably most humane is decrease of birthrate - most effective appears to be decrease in poverty through free trade and supply of contraception.

    Energy efficiency is cute, but mostly a rounding error. (I do round off 15-25%)

    May be incorrect. But overall, if poor, would burn coal to keep children warm. Perfectly willing to let rich blokes pay to keep planet a bit cooler. So, doubting usefulness of more expensive power to places with high poverty rates. Albeit, current solar costs (plus feasibility of microgeneration in places with bad infrastructure) give some hope.

    Am somewhat fatalistic about changing aggregate human behavior.

    Also, wonder - one consequence of solar is probably overgeneration, possibly seasonal, of power. So, is there a decent way to turn useless power into carbon? I mean, the us already has a ton of wasted coal power.

    @baby ...you were sleeping so well...sobs.

    642:

    Well, I specifically asked the question, even if in the rhetorical context of "I think the eco shield maiden has actually been derailing rather than publicising her own cause". Just look at the time spent on "is a racing yacht carbon neutral?" relative to "what can I do?"

    Answering your specifics, for reasons I have to live in a location where any food that is bought rather than grown by me will have some hundreds of miles of travel to get to me. I do vote for a party which has committed to and actively started on achieving a net zero carbon economy.

    I do not have a significant garden, so I concentrate on high value cash crops for what I grow.

    643:

    Also, silly, but so much prefer global heating to climate change. Easier to measure, fewer false positives, easier to communicate to uninformed but rational. (Yay you) (am perhaps tired)

    644:

    Insolation (total spectrum solar radiation) has similarities to sunlight in hours of availability. It is not the same thing though: witness my friends at 55:50N, who can run their entire house except for heating on insolation panels on an overcast day in early January, and even sell a surplus to the National Grid.

    OK, this will apply for between 7 and 12 hours per day (hours of light, allowing for fixed azimuth array), but insolation panels are not as useless as is sometimes suggested.

    645:

    Permit me to be a little skeptical. At normal efficiencies and at that latitude, delivering 1 KW at noon on an average day requires 20 square metres and throws a 60+ square metre shadow. Not being able to (say) use any major household equipment except in the middle of a moderately bright day is quite a handicap; admittedly, batteries resolve that, but increase the financial and environmental costs considerably.

    That area is just about feasible for many large detached houses in rural and suburban areas, but not all of even those have an open view to the south, and it's completely hopeless for almost all of the UK's housing stock.

    Also, the reason that such things were cost-effective was the massive subsidies; one of the good things Cameron did was stop them, but older installations are still benefitting from grandfather clauses. While solar power IN THE UK is claimed to be environmentally beneficial, I have seen assertions to the contrary and no good analysis of the true situation. Lastly, "everything except heating" is more-or-less environmentally irrelevant in the UK.

    646:

    Everything you say is correct, as far as it goes. There are details I won't address for their anonymity, but a 45deg roof pitch helps with the right ascension issue, I've seen the feed-in meter moving with electric cooker and music on, and why would a power company pay people money for something it didn't get?

    Also houses can be effectively empty during Winter daylight because people have work to go to.

    647:

    Some places had gross "feed-in" tarrifs for a while, where you got paid a subsidy for every Wh the panels produced, including the ones you self-consumed. In NSW for a while some people were getting ~50c/kWh back when panels cost $10/W... but being government it took them a while to realise that panel costs were dropping fast so a few lucky folk paid off their panels in 2-3 years.

    648:

    Yeah. Queensland elected a conservative state government in 2011 and they quickly moved to ensure the most you could get credit for from your own inputs to the grid (solar or whatever) were equivalent to or less than the cheapest bulk supply price a power station might expect to earn. Sure, existing feed-in tariffs were grandfathered in so if you happened to have a few thousand available for installing panels previously you’re probably still getting the higher rate. Since Labor came back in a landslide they have gone gentle on coal and its entitlement to print money. Ho hum, business as usual and all that.

    649:

    Greta is literally the one who was interviewed on national news and said "I'm travelling on this (racing) yacht because the trip will be zero carbon."

    She's also a teenager, an age not noted for carefully thinking through all implications of every statement before speaking.

    I know someone who apparently believes that every climate researcher and campaigner should immediately 'walk the walk' by ceasing to produce any form of carbon emission. I can't work out if they're serious or if this is just a convenient way to shut up the campaigners (because going totally carbon-neutral means you can't effectively research or campaign).

    650:

    Well I think flettner rotors are sort of cool but a bit gimmicky really. We’ve been talking about how computer-controlled, mechanically automated square rigging (or rather the evolved equivalent thereof) would be competitive for cargo shipping since the 80s or so (there’s a particular thriller writer called Geoffrey Jenkins from SA). In theory it’s totally plausible, container ships run routes that are not that different to trade winds, the difference is that coal and then oil to turn screws was cheaper than the labour to run sails; if you take away the labour it’s all margin. In practice the canal systems really require independent propulsion. The only implementation of the amazing automation I’m aware of is as a billionaire’s superyacht. Just as gimmicky, but with some extra fun robotics challenges, therefore interesting!

    No-one really knows what the future holds for worldwide freight arrangements. Rail across all continents could obviate bulk shipping and “all” it would take would be tunnel and bridge complexes across the Bering Strait, the Torres Strait and onward across Sumatra and Java to Singapore, across the Bosphorus and even from Tierra del Fuego to Antarctica. Heck, just to harp back to previous discussions here, definitely across the Straits of Gibraltar too. Volumes could be a challenge and I’m pretty sure I recall some other previous discussions about that too. Better just handwave at tethered dirigibles again, someone might bite...

    651:

    Well, if you start at #637 and read the intervening posts to your #649, you'll see that I think her effect in this case has been to derail discussion of useful measures more than to publicise the problem as she intended.

    652:

    My only source is a long out of print UK weekly, "Speed and Power", but working Flettner vessels were built in the 1930s; what has been lacking is the motivation to develop the system for useful production.

    653:

    Labour for square-rigged cargo vessels was less of a burden than you might think. 18th century warships were heavily overmanned to cover the guns, rapid changes of rigging when manoeuvering in a battle, combat losses etc. but the last class of commercial sail-powered clippers like the Cutty Sark ran of a small crew or maybe twenty or thirty. In one case after a strike and walkout by the original crew the Cutty Sark completed a transit from Australia to the UK with only a handful of apprentices and local tradesmen on board. Once the rigs were set they tended to be left unchanged for long periods as the clippers generally ran before the prevailing winds rather than tacking repeatedly.

    What killed the clippers was predictability plus an inability to use the Suez canal and later the Panama canal without tugs. More advanced steamships could keep plodding from port to port in a nearly straight line while the clippers searched for favourable winds over a larger area of ocean and also being forced to sail around the Capes with the encounters with bad weather that entailed.

    As for the Flettner rotors they add complexity and a very large moment of inertia above the ship's centre of gravity. Modern cargo vessels like container ships and car transporters are of the "floating brick" school of Naval design to maximise capacity with minimum hull dimensions, including keels. Adding a few hundred tonnes of capsizing sideload to such hull designs topside is generally a bad idea.

    654:

    Erwin @ 641 For Carbon-free power plants - go NUCLEAR RIGHT NOW. You may have to kill a few fake greenies to get there, unforunately. if necessary by confinement of antinuclear protestors to reeducation camps. That's a better idea. decreasing human population helps That's EASY: Women's education + Hang all the priests!

    Paws @ 644 Somewhere N of Newcastle & S of Edinburgh, obviously ... where?

    655:

    Yep, Eric Newby sailed on Moshulu with a total complement of 28, from the UK to Australia and back, 85-90 days each way. But the sailing ships were barely economic even then, nowadays they'd be dead in the water. The big container ships or the modern bulk carriers are extremely efficient due to their vast size and capacity, even though they are horrifically polluting due to their fuel. I just shipped my effects back home, one container was 44 days on the water from Southampton to Auckland, that's more than double the speed of the barque.

    656:

    She's a teenager on the spectrum. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if she was manipulated/pushed into the yacht trip. Someone (maybe a reporter) says the usual about climate campaigners flying. Someone else offers the yacht and says it has no carbon emissions, so she takes them up on the offer.

    Doesn't even need a conspiracy to explain it — just an inexperienced girl making logical choices without thinking them through from 20 different angles first as to how people might twist what she says/does.

    Someone upstream called her a poster child, and that's not a bad description of her role. She's smart and determined, but not an expert, and people treating her like one are setting her up for a fall from grace.

    657:

    Ahh, found a good writeup of the probable systems you're talking about here.

    Drag from a fixed prop is around half a knot, whereas a traditional folding prop is effectively non-existent. Chucking the gearbox in neutral should reduce that a fair bit, but you're still towing a bucket. They don't seem to do folding designs for efficiency reasons.

    Looks like all electric is still a fairly niche use case, mostly because the range is shockingly bad for now - I've had plenty of cases where we've needed to motor a yacht for hours because the weather is against us, whereas these do a couple of hours at most, generally enough for getting in and out of harbours.

    But the hybrid idea with a small diesel generator providing power to an electric drivechain when the batteries run down seems pretty solid for development. Especially since the deck wind turbine can feed into the same system presumably, and it can power the onboard systems if you prefer, including water heating. And being able to quietly leave anchor is a very nice plus - diesels are noisy things. I suspect it's a pain to retrofit though just from a ballast and balance POV if nothing else. Not to mention getting engines out of yachts is often ... challenging. But new builds? Definitely.

    658:

    "Someone upthread called her a 'poster child'." - That may have been me, but my point is, and always was, that, as a result her actual actions and statements are liable to very close scrutiny by climate change deniers who would use them against us all.

    Let's not discuss my actual campaigns etc, but I've been politically active and aware for more than twice as long as she's been alive.

    659:

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 619: This is wrong. Apex forests are, in terms of oxygen and carbon mostly closed systems. The rainforest actually more so than temperate forests - A temperate forest creates very deep loam beneath itself, which ties up some carbon each year until it reaches maximum depth. The rainforest creates very shallow soil, so it does not even do that.

    Thus burning it down releases the carbon that is currently locked up in it, but it does not change the oxygen or carbon cycle. The rainforest consumes the oxygen it produces.

    What it would do is fuck up the water cycle across the entire continent. Because forests create rain. The rain forest most of all. Not a good plan.

    I wonder what would happen if you cut down 1% of the Amazon rain forest every year and just left it there in place to decay? If you did that for a hundred years, would it build up as loam underneath the rain forest?

    660:

    gasdive @ 600: Have you ever made a serious attempt at crossing an ocean by cargo? Generally you need to book a year or more in advance and a 1st class air ticket is usually much cheaper.

    How do you arrive at this conclusion? The booking site you link to states costs of about US$ 100-130 per person and day depending on cabin size. It also gives the travel time from various European ports to New York as around 9 days. That computes to roundabout $1000 for a ticket. How is a 1st class air ticket usually much cheaper than that? Why would anybody even consider flying economy class if 1st class tickets from Europe to USA were much cheaper than $1000 (which for me would works out to $600-700). Are 1st class air tickets really this ridiculously cheap? What I'm seeing is prices of about $8000 for a round trip, which theoretically makes $4000 for one way. That's not much cheaper than $1000. Thus I'm confused by your statement.

    661:

    Well, I literally just looked up prices for a single LHR - JFK and got "Economy" GB£1581, "Premium Economy" £1924, "Business" £6638 with a choice of departure times tomorrow. Nothing calling itself "first class" offered.

    662:

    You can engineer high-carbon soils in Brazil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta and if Brazil wants more agriculture that is what they should be doing, to the already cultivated lands, not just burning forest, because without such careful engineering, cleared rainforest is in fact pretty darn useless for farming in any but the extremely short term.

    663:

    In general, it depends. The thing about most forests is that their growth to a mature old-growth state happens over longer than human time scales. You get a mix of species that have their own niches, some of which depend on the others to provide, eg, shade. You get species that respond to fire differently, and fire of different temperatures differently. You get species that can’t grown anywhere but in the lower story of a mature rainforest, and if you remove the forest they are not coming back.

    We’re always tempted to think that complex systems are reducible, like Thevenin’s theorem to simple equivalents and will behave in understandable ways depending on a small number of inputs and outputs. That isn’t the general case and probably isn’t even the usual case. We have had luck when we take individual species out of their context and treat them as special to maximise certain properties we like. But the same way of thinking doesn’t work at all when you look at the complex system that makes up that context.

    664:

    Is there something more I should be doing?

    Those are the obvious things to do. In general, I think "walking the walk" is worth doing, for a bunch of reasons: --It makes you sound like less of an idiot when you advocate for decarbonization, because you actually have some idea what you're talking about. While this may confuse people who would rather play buzzword bingo with your string of meaningless sound bites, it seems to work better with those who are willing to listen. --It shows you how hard it is to do, and where the less obvious bottlenecks are. In my case, my family is a huge drag on trying to get to zero-carbon emissions, followed by my personal bad habits (I'm not even vegetarian and I still fly, among many other things). It's telling both how many people support decarbonization AND think it's perfectly okay to fly to the other side of the world for a week of vacation, AND how many of these folk who are deeply hurt and upset when you point out the contradiction in their thinking. But that's where the struggle is, right there.
    --It increases the market for decarbonized lifestyles. Yes, the market is part of the problem, but getting the next economy to scale up does, at some level, require consumers to buy in. One reason I insisted that we buy a Bolt when it came out was to increase the market for electric cars. It's way too expensive for most people to buy, but one of my hopes is that by making eCars popular, prices will come down.

    Finally, I'd say study nonviolence, both the white hat (Gandhi, Sharp, and company) and the black hat (propaganda, bribery, legal maneuvers, and cybercrime). It's where a lot of the conflicts are right now, and you're caught up in it whether you like it or not. Knowledge does give you a bit of power and self-defense. There's also a fair amount of innovation, not just in what is done nonviolently, but even more in the countermeasures the authorities develop to defeat nonviolence. Making yourself useful in these things involves staying informed

    665:

    No, not at all. My figures were for a solar panel array that was oriented at right angles to the insolation. A 45 degree angle is significantly worse.

    666:

    The context there was "no-one has mentioned actually doing anything", not "how can I reduce my impact". Your points are good, but sadly don't bear on "how can I make the my posts here more memorable".

    You keep talking about nonviolence, and I keep writing then deleting replies. But the short answer is that I've been practising NVDA for going on 40 years and teaching aspects of the more challenging parts for about 20. There's a world of difference between nonviolence as a strategy and refusal to defend yourself against violence in prison (as one example).

    667:

    I totally agree, and it's nice to be preaching to the choir. I'm quite sure you know more about NVDA than I do, since I just started when things turned orange in Washington.

    The thing to remember is the audience for all these inane comments. We've got people who read this who also think that logical analysis supports the notion that there are too many people, therefore there are too many of THEM compared to US, therefore, a civil war/genocide/ethnic cleansing is inevitable, therefore violence is inevitable, therefore they should prepare for it.

    It's a GIGO logic with more holes than an aerogel, but unfortunately it can be compelling. Worse, we've got better access to high capacity rifle magazines than we do to quality education and cheap psychological counseling, at least where I live (and yes, I'm aware I'd have to drive four hours to Nevada or Arizona, if I wanted to avoid California's gun laws. The point still holds.)

    I used to resemble that particular brand of stupidity, especially back when I was a young and angry, an avid SF reader who didn't know much about politics. Since I'm now a bit older if not wiser, I keep proselytizing for NVDA, not just to be polite and nice, not just because it seems to be more effective, but also because having this website become enmeshed in a criminal investigation due to something stupid someone said would be extremely uncool.

    668:

    Worse, we've got better access to high capacity rifle magazines than we do to quality education and cheap psychological counseling...

    One thing I do point out to the more brutal population reduction enthusiasts is that even such notable fans as Hitler and Pol Pot realised that shooting people is a woefully inefficient way to reduce a population. One muppet with a gun would be doing well to kill even 500 people, when the "necessary" reduction is several orders of magnitude bigger than that. It's also not very environmentally friendly, as I'm sure many people would be keen to point out.

    Even the most ardent fans of global cleansing with fire accept that it will be famine and drowning rather than war that does most of the work. Hence the winding up of border protection to keep "them" away from "us" rather than going over "there". Going over there will only be necessary if the food exports stop (remember that Ireland was a net exporter of food during the Potato Famine). I expect the farms of poor countries will do likewise in order to keep paying the interest on their foreign debts (the threat of being replaced by a more responsible dictator focuses the mind).

    669:

    I dunno, non-violence is a whole bundle of stuff than changes and evolves over time, both tactically and strategically. Ye dusty olde tomes of antiquity are often more useful as historical documents than actual guides, especially when it comes to known defects in their approaches. Your new-but-life-experienced approach is more likely to come up with a new and useful idea than my old and cynical view. It also amuses me that some of the more paranoid ramblings coming from people like me have apparently had the effect of much leadership becoming a cross between spokescouncil and cell models in many cases*. And it continues to amuse me that anarchist principles are so strong in groups that explicitly deny using them (for good reasons!). Or maybe I'm just back-projecting my experience onto a new and original model :)

    As far as the audience goes, I try to avoid writing anything too obviously silly, but I'm also well out of the circles of people actually doing the more challenging stuff, and I don't expect anyone reading this blog to take anything I say as gospel (as the writing goes 'this is general advice and you should pay a professional for specific advice relevant to your exact situation').

    • also common to revolutions, where the public groups are 'infiltrated' by semi-public cell members allowing quiet coordination.
    670:

    Oh for. This is me, and this is my head hurting.

    Stop sounding like the Khemer Rogue.

    People will take that shit one hundred percent seriously, and they should, because it is rhetoric which has lead to literal piles of skulls before.

    The current status quo will kill billions. The Fucking Agrarian Nutters Greens path will also kill billions. Also, most of the biosphere. People do not starve gracefully. They eat the fucking world first.

    The only paths worth debating are the ones which at least offer the option of not having gigacides or reducing 99% of the population to the status of medieval serfs. That is just basic Ethics, and also basic politics.

    Thus, I advocate for nuclear energy programs scaled to the size of the problem. And for engineering high carbon soils, because that will let us concentrate food production on less but more productive square kilometers, and robotic farm machinery. And closed loop manufacturing. And massive rail networks.

    If you want to save the world, you have to have a vision of a future world worth actually living in, or what is the damn point?

    On a most practical level, I think I just spotted a very cheap way to reduce the carbon emissions of europe by. Uhm. About a percent? https://energyvault.com/ These guys talk about how they are going to make renewables more viable. They are wrong about that, since their capital expediture is still too darn high for that, but.. Most of the reactors in France run at reduced capacity at night. Shifting that to daytime use (and selling it out of the country, mostly, let us be real) is.. well, the marginal costs to edf of running those plants full bore all the time instead of in load following mode should, as I understand it actually be negative, so....

    671:

    Thus, I advocate for nuclear energy programs scaled to the size of the problem. And for engineering high carbon soils, because that will let us concentrate food production on less but more productive square kilometers, and robotic farm machinery. And closed loop manufacturing. And massive rail networks.

    There's also the thing of eating less meat - beef is the worst, but even poultry and pork use more energy to convert their food into meat than just eating that food directly.

    Yes, yes, you can feed pork with scraps, but it's not how it goes in most places nowadays, and especially not mass-produced meat. Just eating they soy that goes into feeding animals, instead of eating the animals would reduce the land needed for agriculture quite a bit, and also greenhouse emissions.

    I know that this is a hard problem, as eating meat seems to be in many places a signal of prosperity. It's also a big business, so it's difficult to dismantle.

    672:

    Moz @ 668 Remember that, much more recently, with this time absolutely zero excuse, during the famine in the 1980's, Ethiopia was also exporting food!

    TJ @ 670 Thus, I advocate for nuclear energy programs scaled to the size of the problem. WHAT do you do with the "Fucking Agrarian Nutters Greens" then? Because they will do almost anythiong tpo stop ensuring our surviuval, won't they?

    MK @ 671 THAT is another form of Puritanism, I'm afraid. Though, although an entusiastic Omnivore, my actual meat consuption is fairly low, because I'm fussy about the quality of my food- supplies.

    673:

    In the UK we still get occasional tabloid stories promoting the idea that global heating will be good as "every day will be a beach day". Worse, i encounter real people parroting them.

    The fact that the beach will probably be 10 miles closer and everyone will be too busy starving to buy ice cream appears to be lost on them.

    674:

    Eh. For the US, if envelope math is correct, and assuming the US is worst case, perhaps 6000 lbs greenhouse gases per capita (if only eating beef, so conservative estimate). For US, average about 23 metric tons greenhouse gases per person - so meat eating is rounding error, smaller than efficiency improvements. Perhaps ethical arguments or local climate damage arguments are more compelling.

    @670 While this was true for an extended period, the continual cost scaling of solar may indicate that it has a role to play. But yah, if you start with modern lifestyle completely unsustainable, there are literally billions of people who just stopped listening.

    675:

    There is a few factors here - Renewable advocacy has been used as an argument for fifty years to not transition to a nuclear grid. For all fifty years, this was vapor-ware, pure and simple. This sets the bar for the evidence I would need to accept an argument that "It will work now" Very, very high.

    Secondly, I have actual math that says it is still entirely a mirage. Or more specifically, a stalking horse for natural gas.

    Storage is just too damn expensive for intermittent power to be workable. On a scale relevant to the grid, batteries are largely completely irrelevant - cant reasonably source enough lithium for this. Kinetic energy storage can scale up far enough, but even very elegant solutions, like the energy vault I linked, have costs comfortably north of 100 euro per kwh of capacity.

    Now, if you hook a vault up to a reactor, and use it to timeshift night surplus capacity forward to daytime peaks, that kind of expense is livable, because of the very high duty cycle. - The storage you build will get charged and discharged on a daily basis.

    A renewable grid needs storage to cover far larger time periods than "The kettles are all on" and it will not have nearly as predictable or rapid a duty cycle as that. Which drives the costs straight into the stratosphere. At 100 euros kwh, storage to provide one day equivalent storage for a gigawatt of generation will cost 24 x 100 x 1000000 or 2.4 billion. Finland estimated that an actually low carbon solar and wind grid needed nine days of storage (and significant overbuild of generation) See the problem? Interconnecting larger areas is surprisingly unhelpful with this. A fully interconnected US would still need a full two days of storage. And a 100 euros is a very, very optimistic price point.

    676:

    ...so meat eating is rounding error, smaller than efficiency improvements. Perhaps ethical arguments or local climate damage arguments are more compelling.

    Yes, this. There are valid ethical arguments to be made in favor of eating less meat, in the sense that they're both internally self consistent and don't contradict objective reality. The 'food per acre' argument is based on the false simplification that all acres are interchangeable.

    677:

    SS @ 676 Yes, this, but with a slight correction - it should read ( I think ):

    "The 'food per acre' argument is based on the false simplification deliberate lie that all acres are interchangeable." Yes, it's a deliberate lie, put about by tow overlapping groups: the new hairshirt Puritans & the "vegan zealots" ( Do please note the quotes there, though! ) You CANNOT raise edible "vegetable" crops of any sort at all on most sheepgrazing lands, like, say the Lake district hills or the seashore, or similar cattle-grazing marginal land patches, or for that matter, perfectly good & ecologically valuable forest, where you can let pigs roam for forage, either.

    678:

    paws4thot @ 661: Well, I literally just looked up prices for a single LHR - JFK and got "Economy" GB£1581, "Premium Economy" £1924, "Business" £6638 with a choice of departure times tomorrow. Nothing calling itself "first class" offered.

    I'm pretty sure what the airlines used to call "first class" is now "Business" class. It's almost certainly a tax dodge of some sort. "First class" connotes a degree of luxury that the IRS might question on a tax audit, while "Business" class ...

    679:

    There's also the thing of eating less meat - beef is the worst, but even poultry and pork use more energy to convert their food into meat than just eating that food directly.

    I'd not thrive on a diet of moss, sedge grasses and gorse which is all a lot of Scottish hill sheep get to eat for most of the year. Ploughing a 45 degree hillside of shale rock topped with five centimetres of depauperate soil to plant kale or other human-edible veggies is going to be tricky and probably unproductive in the long run. Step and repeat for a lot of grazing lands around the world -- the Siberian steppes, the northern parts of Finland, the American desert prairies etc. which produce human-edible food at the land cost of a couple of hectares per animal. That land is otherwise useless for food production.

    680:
    "I wonder what would happen if you cut down 1% of the Amazon rain forest every year and just left it there in place to decay? If you did that for a hundred years, would it build up as loam underneath the rain forest?"

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 662: You can engineer high-carbon soils in Brazil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta and if Brazil wants more agriculture that is what they should be doing, to the already cultivated lands, not just burning forest, because without such careful engineering, cleared rainforest is in fact pretty darn useless for farming in any but the extremely short term.

    Damian @ 663: In general, it depends. The thing about most forests is that their growth to a mature old-growth state happens over longer than human time scales. You get a mix of species that have their own niches, some of which depend on the others to provide, eg, shade. You get species that respond to fire differently, and fire of different temperatures differently. You get species that can’t grown anywhere but in the lower story of a mature rainforest, and if you remove the forest they are not coming back.

    We’re always tempted to think that complex systems are reducible, like Thevenin’s theorem to simple equivalents and will behave in understandable ways depending on a small number of inputs and outputs. That isn’t the general case and probably isn’t even the usual case. We have had luck when we take individual species out of their context and treat them as special to maximise certain properties we like. But the same way of thinking doesn’t work at all when you look at the complex system that makes up that context.

    I wasn't thinking about clearing the rain forest for agriculture (at least not within my lifetime), just taking 1 out of 100 trees each year and cutting them down and letting them rot in place (maybe chop them up into smaller chunks so they'd rot faster.

    What would that do to the soil under the rain forest if it was kept up for a hundred years. How old are the the trees in a mature old growth rain forest? Maybe 1 in 100 is too many. How about 1 in 1000. A government might be able to mount a project that lasts a thousand years. I'm wondering how the rain forest would change?

    How is the soil under the Amazon rain forest different than the soil under other rain forests? I know there's one in the Pacific Northwest that's not a tropical rain forest.

    I was thinking about a story I read. Earth had "Terra-formed" other planets for colonization, but all the colonies ultimately failed because the "Terra-forming" period was too short, dozens of years, when the earth evolved over billions of years. Spoiler: They finally figured out they could go back in time using worm holes to violate causality & do their "Terra-forming" over billions of years and they all lived happily thereafter.

    But it got me wondering just what can you do to engineer a more habitable world?

    681:

    The rainforest is home to really aggressive scavengers. Any dead trees literally get eaten in very short order. If you want to sequester the carbon, you would have to haul the wood out and use it. Problem: while such selective logging is a well established and sustainable practice, it requires.. uhm, rather better respect for rules and regs than Brazil currently possesses. Assholes would do clear-cutting and fake the paperwork.

    Temperate forests accumulate deep soils largely because of the annual leaf fall, which is just not a thing in tropical woods.

    682:

    Erwin @ 674: @670 While this was true for an extended period, the continual cost scaling of solar may indicate that it has a role to play. But yah, if you start with modern lifestyle completely unsustainable, there are literally billions of people who just stopped listening.

    I know at least one of the also-ran Democratic candidates for President is running on a platform that the Climate Change boat has already sailed; that it was already too late when the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. His "plan" is to stop making it worse as best we can & to start figuring out what we're going to have to do to survive the coming catastrophe.

    Given our modern political climate, I think he's probably right about it being too late. I don't know about the survival part. WHO is going to survive? ... and at what cost to the rest of the world.

    683:

    Looks like barely across the threshold, so probably about as loud as lightning strike, on first glance.

    Today's news - Roshydromet, which is national weather forecast system and a federal service, published an official statement about radiological conditions during and after the incident. http://www.meteorf.ru/product/infomaterials/91/19679/

    The radionuclide composition of samples taken in Severodvinsk showed the presence of short-lived technogenic radionuclides 91Sr (T1 / 2 = 9.3 h), 139Ba (T½ = 83 min), 140Ba (T½ = 12.8 days) and its daughter radionuclide 140La (T½ = 40h), the decay products of which are inert radioactive gases (IRG).

    684:

    If you want to save the world, you have to have a vision of a future world worth actually living in, or what is the damn point?

    We actually agree on quite a lot, but...well, some people regard continuing to live as the damn point. Some of them died in the ICE camps on the US border, too, struggling to keep living.

    More relevant to us, since we're relatively comfortable, is the NIMBY* issue, which I've dealt with a lot since I get mistaken for a NIMBY quite a bit.

    The usual argument I get caught up in goes something like: NIMBY group: "we worked hard for our (quality of life issue), and we want to keep it. Don't make us change it." Other side (developer, construction union): "We want a job so that we can feed our families. That's more important, old white people."

    I'm in there arguing the silly point that native species need space to continue existing. That's generally regarded as a NIMBY issue, though it isn't. It's fighting the sixth mass extinction.

    So much of the climate change debate seems to die on NIMBY issues, people who want to keep eating meat every day, keep flying to vacation spots, keep driving their gas cars, keep importing stuff they don't really need from overseas. Arguing that life isn't worth living without all these "essentials "scuttles quite a few of these climate adaptation discussions. Trouble is, they're all going to go away within a matter of decades regardless. And that's a problem.

    *NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard.

    685:

    Okay, more education time: You're right, that durable carbon in the rainforest only exists in the trunks of living trees, so you've got a layer of trees 30-50 meters tall covering a large area, and it regenerates rapidly. That's your carbon sequestration, and it's actually no different than what the carbon offset crew propose in temperate areas.

    Also, remember that there are temperate rainforests? They sequester a fair amount of carbon in fallen logs and in the soil. Forests are diverse places.

    In any case, what you're arguing for is what developers argue for: cut down all the forests, build homes with the wood, plant new forests. Problem solved, because of course the houses will last forever. Why not?

    Well, there are a bunch of reasons why not. One is that most of the new subdivisions are going up in areas that were considered too dangerous to build in previously: high fire areas in the west, flood basins in Houston, and so forth, so the chance of the homes they built lasting 100 years is pretty slim. Also, modern construction isn't that durable, so they'll have to be rebuilt, so this only works if the construction debris is landfilled for a long time. And we're almost out of landfill space. Long story short, trees might last as long or longer than homes, and they'll keep sucking in carbon for their entire lives, unlike homes.

    On the supply end, they routinely confuse relative growth rate (amount of carbon sequestered per plant/size of plant) with absolute growth rate (amount of carbon sequestered per plant). This actually matters, because seedlings grow fast, doubling in size in the first year. Thing is, they're tiny, so doubling in size during the first year doesn't sequester much carbon. A 50 m tree, growing a millimeter wider, sequesters thousands of times more carbon per year than a seedling does in an absolute sense. However, if you confuse absolute and relative growth rates (as developers do), you'll cut down the big carbon sequestrating tree and plant a seedling, because seedlings grow faster than mature trees.

    Beginning to see how this gets screwed up? If you want trees to maximize carbon sequestration, you need to maximize the number of big trees on the landscape. They start as seeds, but cutting down existing forests and planting seedlings (which does get proposed quite regularly) actually makes the problem worse.

    If you want homes to sequester carbon with cut wood, you need to maximize the longevity of the buildings. Then, of course, if you want to actually house people, you need to make the buildings as cheap as possible, which generally means they won't be durable...

    686:

    One thing I do point out to the more brutal population reduction enthusiasts is that even such notable fans as Hitler and Pol Pot realised that shooting people is a woefully inefficient way to reduce a population. One muppet with a gun would be doing well to kill even 500 people, when the "necessary" reduction is several orders of magnitude bigger than that. It's also not very environmentally friendly, as I'm sure many people would be keen to point out.

    I think we're better read than they are. See, for example: this article from SPLC about current right-wing politics.

    687:

    Uhm. Have you never heard of sustainable forestry?

    Cutting down the forest is a horrifically inaccurate characterization. The entire points is to selectively harvest old growth (which is the best timber anyway) trees then come back next year and do it again, with the rate of harvest set set so the forest can fill back in. These work, given sufficient quality of training and law and order, and, well, politically, you are never going to persuade people to reforest marginal lands if you have a purist objection to said forests being useful.

    688:

    H @ 686 THAT is truly deeply scary. It's an almost-exact copy of the rhetoric of two previous failed attempots ar fascist takeovers - if not three... The speech & actions of the US deep south in the period approx 1845-61 was just like that & so, of course was the language & actions of the NSDAP. Musso used similar tactics. Who & how to stop them?

    689:

    Uhm. Have you never heard of sustainable forestry?

    Well, since I had a forestry student as a roommate while I was in grad school getting my masters in botany and learning the measurement techniques myself, I might have heard of it a few (dozen) times.

    Anyway, sustainable forestry is mostly bullshit. In general, you need at least 150-200 years for a forest to get to old growth status (question: you do know what old growth means, right?). Pacific Lumber tried the trick you suggested, but they ended up sitting on so much valuable timber that they got bought out by Charles Hurwitz in a leveraged deal and logged wholesale to pay the debt Hurwitz incurred buying them out. That's what set up the fight over preserving the Headwaters Forest in the 1990s. That's the downside to having over 99% of your assets sitting in the ground untouched in today's capitalism.

    Currently, forest rotations (cutting to cutting) are running around 30-50 years. They're also being marketed as offsetting carbon (you know, it's in the tree for 30 years, then in a house or something). That's the reality on the ground, and it's based entirely on the relative growth rate argument I mentioned above.

    690:

    It's an almost-exact copy of the rhetoric of two previous failed attempots ar fascist takeovers - if not three...Who & how to stop them?

    Well, so far the NVDA movement and groups like the SPLC are doing a reasonable job at containing the madness (with some help from the antifa when it comes to making rioting less fun and profitable). I'd suggest that, for those who are worried about a fascist takeover of the US, one thing to do is to donate to SPLC, ACLU, and like-minded legal groups. Tangling these people up in the courts and defending their victims does take money.

    Just as gun violence can be seen as an epidemic, so can hate and right-wing political violence. The point here is not that the right wing radicals are a disease, but that the ideology acts like one, and it damages those it infects and their relationships with others. Therefore, I'd suggest that strategies to curtail the spread of the ideology and to help the people suffering from it cure themselves before they hurt themselves or others are probably the best solutions.

    691:

    Eh. Well, have to admit that my attitude is probably a tiny bit biased by the fact that the local forestry operations do, in fact, operate like this. And on century scales. People are planting new oak, beech and ash by the thousands of acre. A lot of this, is because the ultimate intent is a multi-use forest, and those woods are good hunting, but.. I have trouble taking the argument that this stuff is "Impossible under capitalism" seriously because, well, seeing, believing.

    692:

    Where is this and how do they keep the hedge funds off their back?

    693:

    ...My name does not give it away? Denmark. Mostly by not being corporations. Coops, sole ownerships, privately held, and, of course, the crown forests.

    694:

    Thomas Jorgensen: If you want to save the world, you have to have a vision of a future world worth actually living in, or what is the damn point?

    Anarcho-primitivist eschatology. God (Gaea/Mother Nature) will pronounce Final Judgment (the climate apocalypse), man's Original Sin (technology and modernity) will be punished, the Sinful and the Blasphemous (the parasitic consumerist masses) will at last be scoured from the earth, and the Faithful and the Penitent (those who've voluntarily embraced pre-modern agrarian peasantry) will be rewarded with a New Covenant (survival and re-population among the ruins).

    TL;DR: "Back to the Garden" and all that.

    It's the other side of the coin from the techno-optimist obsession with the Singularity.

    People want the world to end. To provide narrative and moral closure to the human experience. To give existence meaning. It's simple, clear, and intuitively satisfying in a way that reality--humanity muddling along in fits and starts in an indifferent, amoral universe--can never and will never be.

    695:

    “...do, in fact, operate like this”

    It just suggests that what you are seeing is not driven by forestry as such, but is side effect of a different sort of initiative, an attempt to extract some commercial value while still protecting an acknowledged greater value. Most likely, especially somewhere like Denmark, there’s some sort of social initiative behind it or at worst a long-term entrenched power group. It isn’t “capitalism” in the narrow sense, and only sort of involves it in the broad sense.

    The economics around logging native forests here in Oz are closer to mining. The largest scale most automated processes are used to clear-fell large areas, mostly for paper production. In contrast, most “sustainable logging” is now short-term plantation forests using fast growing species like radiata pine. There are lots of those - they are basically tree farms, though some people like to think of them as “nature” the same way they think of domestic animals as “nature”. Undisturbed old growth sequesters vastly more carbon and supports vastly more species.

    696:

    “The 'food per acre' argument is based on the false simplification that all acres are interchangeable.”

    Actually that’s a straw man (as are Greg, Nojay and others’s follow on). There definitely is land that is not suitable for agriculture, but is suitable for grazing. That’s why Australia is able to produce so much beef, and why South American countries have such a big economic interest in clearing rainforest. But even here, while beef cattle spend most of their lives in pasture, the last couple of years are, for overwhelmingly most, spent in feedlots where most of their weight is acquired from grains that were produced by agriculture. This is what most people are referring to when they talk about food per acre - basically the cattle concentrate the acres used to produce that grain to a small fraction of the output available in eating the grain. Grass-finished beef does exist, can even be organic (I certainly buy quite a bit of it) but finishing pastures again are on land that probably could be cropped (depending on the local terrain and climate).

    In general the concept of using marginal land for meat production is reasonable, on on environmental grounds, purely in an inputs-versus-outputs sense. There are other gotchas - hooved grazing animals have totally trashed grassland soil profiles in Australia and the Americas where they have supplanted native fauna (one reason kangaroo farming has legs, as it were, the main problem is you can’t herd kangaroos and they can jump over fences less than 15’ high). But the important point is that this raw usage mechanism is actually nothing like how meat production works now, and you would see significant change if it were to become so.

    697:

    Anarcho-primitivist eschatology. God (Gaea/Mother Nature) will pronounce Final Judgment (the climate apocalypse), man's Original Sin (technology and modernity) will be punished, the Sinful and the Blasphemous (the parasitic consumerist masses) will at last be scoured from the earth, and the Faithful and the Penitent (those who've voluntarily embraced pre-modern agrarian peasantry) will be rewarded with a New Covenant (survival and re-population among the ruins).

    Silly, you got it backwards! You slipped up with the comment "people want the world to end." If you conflate that with a few people surviving for millions of years into the future by foraging with the world ending, then you've got a truly bizarre idea of what ending actually means. Perhaps for you, the world is only civilization?

    Anyway, if it's a religious statement, it's one that's based on archaeology. Anarcho-primitivists humans have lived for around 300,000 years through multiple ice ages, which are climate change on an epic scale, and it's still around in isolated corners even today. Meanwhile, the promise of progress to give everybody a life of ease and luxury rarely pans out for even three generations of the wealthiest families, it only works on that limited level by strip-mining the rest of the world. Therefore, if one had to pick the lifestyle most resilient to climate change, anarcho-primitivism wins, based on the evidence. But that's not praying to mother nature or making artistic declarations about the best way to govern 8 billion suffering people in a rapidly changing world. Rather, it's the only lifestyle available when one's diet consists primarily of rats and kudzu. As a conservationist, I'm hoping that these future primitives also get the occasional ant and thistle for variety.

    698:

    An interesting idea - comments & predictions, please?

    699:

    On a most practical level, I think I just spotted a very cheap way to reduce the carbon emissions of europe by. Uhm. About a percent? https://energyvault.com/ These guys talk about how they are going to make renewables more viable. They are wrong about that, since their capital expediture is still too darn high for that, but.. Most of the reactors in France run at reduced capacity at night. Shifting that to daytime use (and selling it out of the country, mostly, let us be real) is.. well, the marginal costs to edf of running those plants full bore all the time instead of in load following mode should, as I understand it actually be negative, so.... That is a very good practical joke - for me at least, as a person educated in electric energy. Energy storage solutions are all in the same characteristic fields - they are absolutely necesary for basic functionality of electrical network, and they are very expensive. Because there is no way of storage large amounts of electric energy, especially without converting it into different form. In actuality, baseline electric network and its connected devices have some inherited storage capacity, like inertia of the rotors of electric machines, or filter capacitors - but these are usually barely sufficient for 1-3 seconds after loss of power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage Another words, we'd be better off building something more conventional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_accumulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage Hey, they actually have closely to what I visualized - it is more compact and thus probably more effective: https://revolution-green.com/gravity-storage-new-stone-age/ It is complicated, but it is better forged out than dreams about green cars that move around by usage of morning wind and afternoon sunlight.

    700:

    Yup. I register as a Democrat... though I'm also an actual dues-paying member of the DSA.

    For those who don't understand in the US, I try to explain this way: Democrats are fair-weather friends. That means that if it's not too much trouble, and not too far out of their way, sometimes they'll do something you want.

    Meanwhile, the Reptilians are enemies: they will always go out of their way to screw you.

    701:

    Anyway, there's a particular problem associated with environmentalism that I don't get nowadays. Do eco-technologies have to be profitable? A lot of people, who are engaged in the "green" industry seem to be driven by logic of the marked and profit, and even it is the same logic that the allows them to be subsidized to stay afloat. Oh right, the fuel-derived energy get subsidized too, but again people easily forget other parts of equation, for one they also pay taxes and tolls, keeping the budget afloat. The same budget that is then used to keep environmental policy going.

    But anyway, the actual question is that - why do we have to pay for diminishing results if investing in certain project will inevitably result in net loss? Why do we have to invest in solar or wind energy in places where it is obviously impossible to gather enough energy to cover our own expenses, much less to compete with traditional sources of energy? What is the net effectiveness in using geothermal energy if it is used to bury down carbon hell knows where. Or there's a good perspective of biofuel downward spiral. You get fuel from plants, but plants need to be planted, watered, harvested and processes, and since nobody is doing it by hand, it all needs fuel to power up the machines. You get less fuel from less fuel, and that is all that happens here, and everybody pretend it was very useful.

    Why do we have to buy an electric car which costs 3-5 times as much as normal car, if we are living in predominantly fuel-powered economy? Producing such car will take more funds than the regular car, more funds means more effort expended on building it, which means more fuel burned - the result is that of course it is going to cost the environment more, and everybody is going to pay for that. I may generalize there a bit, and there are many conflicting views on how to estimate effectiveness - but they are worth our effort to see if the difference between them is 5% or 20% - not 400%. There's, of course, Jevons paradox, but more people should learn that it actually works both ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

    Anarcho-primitivist eschatology. It seems natural for people to think that they will have to pay a lot more money to combat the pollution, and Save The F*cking Planet, and it is natural that what we get IRL instead is outsourcing the pollution from first to third world countries. It is natural that instead of funding projects all over the world what we get is attraction of greater amounts of capital back into "developed world" and in complete disregard to quality of life improvement in the rest of the world. Wherever I see, there's only one general environmental policy that remains afloat - use any opportunity to grab as much as you can, and never let it go - because the rest of the people are just going to die out before you, and thus the justice will be served, and you will inherit the Earth (and the rest of the Universe, if you like to dream a bit). You don't need to be primitivist to act on that.

    702:

    Don't get me started. What killed the Old Left (along with McCarthy and his backers) was "The time is here for Revolution, but you've got the Wrong Analysis, so I'm going to take my bat and glove and go home." That hit the New Left (along with the collapse from exhaustion when 'Nam ended, and then the millionaires who became billionaires started funding the religious right, and buying the GOP wholesale).

    703:

    Correction, I actually meant to add: It seems natural for people to think that they will have to pay a lot more money to combat the pollution "...and thus only rich people can be allowed to invest into environmentalism."

    704:

    Y'know, y'all are talking as though violence or non-violence are the only options. There's also the middle ground.

    For example, back during the GOP convention in Miami in '72, there were the folks who crossed the line for civil disobedience, with intent to get busted, there were the protesters who didn't... and then there was the third group. We were roving civil disobedience, get their attention but don't get caught. It draws way more cops to deal with that version....

    705:

    My name does not give it away? Denmark.

    Just put Greenland in this bag and no-one gets hurt... :D

    Mostly by not being corporations.

    That's such an important part of it. The whole "only duty is short term return to shareholders" cult has broken the corporation model.

    Personally I've done more or less the same, with the twist that I screwed the tax office out of all the tree-planting credits I could until they realised that my logging cycle was 400 years and that's longer than they were willing to allow. Now it's conservation land (oh no, a tax-effective capital loss to top it all off. I sad!)

    706:

    Whelp, that was a costly little run. Bit more chipped off.

    Running Chaos Mirrors is not fun, esp. if the US system is setup to encourage them. We're so tired of American Gamer Wars[tm] being setup to now link into MAGA and anti-China stuff, turns out a lot of the Corporate types like those games. Sexual thrill time, gonna blow some Minds. Sad, Underworld is not your play-pen.

    The Disney-Sony faux battle over Spider Man is about to be replaced with an actual grenade going off. Never liked Disney. Nor their Partners. MIC - KEY - MO- USE. Got about 4 months for that.

    Hey, anyone noticed the entire C level of HSBC in HK quit and several high level bankers are doing stuff like killing themselves under their pool covers? Times must be bad for that to happen. HK protest strong: surprising plays on the top levels though.(FR, HK, Sudan etc etc... when do the US suppliers of gas hit a material supply chain problem? Let's test this)

    Kashmir: well, they're technically not at war, yet. Go look up a very interesting (Yawn, "Slayer") article detailing how pre-370 was planned. A year in advance. India Times reporting that Twitter is sanctioning a Pak PM for his Tweets: if you needed to know where the owner's politics were.

    Trees? Should look into (prior grep) Germany and Israel planting the wrong damn trees for the wrong damn ecology and look what happened. Total disaster ecologically. Makes a mockery of both's "Environmental" credentials.

    Amazon / S.America - scale is off the charts. Not just Brazil, all of them. Someone is running a major "BURN IT ALL" continent wide meme, and they're aggressive and also [REDACTED]. These fuckers really don't like their ex-Master's work, know what we mean? It's pure [REDACTED], one in particular is an old old one. Likes his Slavery Heydays from the Confederate Up North mixed with his Nazi stuff. Bad bad mojo.

    Australia? Gov defending water right coupons issued to major abusers, won't protect the environment or the people without water. UK same policy - no water for the chalk streams of yore. Same slaved Minds, same thinking.

    Germany? Well, they won't revolt about immigrants and so on, but put their savings into negative yield and you got yourself an economic bomb. ECB about to get real unpopular.

    IMF? Well, apart from being responsible for countries like Egypt or India going heavily into water intensive crops that destroyed their aquifers and made gigacide 100% a given, turns out they're about to crash another S.American country. Good job!

    Antarctica? Whelp, you're being played over GIANT PENGUINS

    2017: https://www.livescience.com/61178-giant-penguin-fossils.html 2019: https://www.livescience.com/newfound-ancient-monster-penguin.html

    Do us a favor, spot if those are different stories or not. Hint: they're not. Suckers!

    Arctic? Whelp, you probably don't want to know the fate of the giant salmon (Hint: it was you, not the fucking tiny populations of mega-fauna left, you muppets - seriously) but we'd suggest looking at Anchorage and working out what the hell is producing that density of CO2 during day time. Probably Cruise / Transport ships, but it's higher than factories in CN / RU.

    The Ocean: No, Greta is not an adult. Yes, she is a pawn. No, she is correct. Yes, her parents have links with some Davos level PR stuff connected to Branson. There's (like we told you) about $100 mil spend behind it. Do we think they have the answers: no. Do we think she's bad? No. Do we think she genuinely enjoyed her Atlantic sailing? Probably. Target her and you have 2/3 Furies on you immediately. Srs.

    Epstein / Andrew / Peadageddon: Mail is flaming it, means he's being hung out as Lamb. Unlike his priors, that's probably more accurately Mutton. They're doing this to shift focus from the fact that almost every major fashion house / model agency / music business (HELLO SOUTH KOREA) are basically flesh pots. Yes, we can back this up. No, we think your species are insane.

    BoJo and MaROON get giggly. No-one mentions Yellow Vests. Much Banter. Shit all got done. Boris meets Trump: SPIDER MAN "NO YOU!" moment. Shit all got done. They're waiting for the economic crash, banking on EU splitting before their shit houses do.

    Trans* rights / TRANS AMERICA continue to fracture Minds across the US/UK spectrum. Mum's Net is now basically the precursor to the Khmer Rouge, we have decent Scot's feminists dying of brain tumours [@Host - I know you know Purple Hair Woman story-teller: tell her to check the degradation of hair style / right eyelid twitch / circumstances - evil fucks poisoned her to make a martyr. Quite easy to make that kind of tumor if you know what you're doing. Found that one out by accident, nasty nasty US Religious freaks behind it.]

    Any more?

    Loads.

    But hey.

    Grats on the award Host.

    Unlike Koch, perhaps you live long enough to see the evil empire (well, the one closest) burn down.

    Happy? [i]I do love you but

    707:

    I'm mostly aware that the outrage media often define non-violence in such a restrictive way that any inconvenience to anyone (including corporate persons), or mention of violence (including by outrage media) voids the claim to non-violence. The classic is "there has been talk of violent protests" when the only mentions of violence have been by outrage media, or the even worse "police are preparing for violence"... of course they are, violence and threats of violence are a major part of what they do ('obey or you will be arrested'... and the classic crime 'failure to obey').

    Note that any public event can't be entirely non-violent because any random fuknukle can wander in and start a fight, and often will. The best you can hope for is that the great majority of people will be non-violent.

    What I have seen, sadly enough, is Police scanning big peaceful protests for people they want to arrest and violently arresting anyone they think matches. That is incredibly disruptive and I fear that is the intent. It turns 'peaceful commemoration of Survival Day' into "several violent incidents and police arrested five people, one of whom has been charged with attempted murder"... not mentioned is that the violent incidents were all initiated by police, and the attempted murder happened weeks before the march.

    I've been involved with Critical Mass who are non-violent but disruptive, and often entirely law-abiding but disruptive (often the more law-abiding the more disruptive, albeit only if you consider rush hour to be a disruption). I've also done one-off protesting ranging from "ring your elected representative" to "lock on to construction equipment" and one of the funnier ones is "run round in an active logging coup" because they have to stop logging if there's any non-loggers there :)

    I've also been at events with extreme non-violence proponents, right down to people who sincerely believe that Jesus eschewed violence even in self-defence. I respect that but don't have any intention of emulating it.

    708:

    we'd be better off building something more conventional

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

    That's the major GWh scale storage technology that has actually been built. The good news is that even in dry countries like Australia it's very easy to build and there's no shortage of potential sites. We even have three existing sites and one under construction. Sadly two of the existing ones are owned by coal generators and not used because they would lower the price of electricity. They were built when the generators were state owned and lowering the cost of electricity was seen as a good thing.

    709:

    Why do we have to invest in solar or wind energy in places where it is obviously impossible to gather enough energy to cover our own expenses, much less to compete with traditional sources of energy?

    Because while that may be obvious, it's also wrong. Currently the two sources of electrical power that are cheapest per MWh delivered to build are wind and solar. It's possibly not obvious to you because Russia is not the best place to build solar, but wind is definitely an option.

    There's a vicious fight going on to hide the cost of operating non-renewable energy sources because if those costs are made visible tits impossible to pretend that non-renewables can work. In Australia we have (yet another) government inquiry into nuclear power which will inevitably conclude that it's too expensive. Or more accurately, that to make it viable we need a carbon tax around $100/tonne when the current government opposed even a $25$/tonne tax and refuses to consider any tax at all.

    710:

    Bit of confusion - when I look at forestry studies - they seem to indicate that sequestration is on an s-curve, with the tailing off usually happening in less than a century? There was also a lot of muttering about indeterminate results from sustainable logging. So, it seems likely that on some timescale you should sometimes be able to increase sequestration by logging.

    Now, from a pragmatic global heating perspective, it does appear that whatever benefits from sustainable logging are moderate at best over timescales in question. Otherwise, the results wouldn't be indeterminate.

    @680 if you wanted to engineer the planet - starting with the watery bits makes sense - there are a lot of them. Ocean farming sounds fun. Particularly if food insecurity ends up being a thing. I personally liked algae-based Soylent.

    @693 Remember, lots of schemes are judged on the basis of applicability to USains - a focus on unscrupulous crony capitalism means that many things sensible people could do simply won't work here. Case in point, you can't have a company agree to remedy environmental damage from strip mining your property - as the liability is limited to the loss in property value.

    @675 Are you sure? It would seem reasonable to have natural gas backup (only thing that spins up rapidly) and have enough storage to rarely use the gas. That is a tradeoff between overall capacity, grid 'robustness', and acceptable partial downtimes. It seems to indicate a solar grid with extra average generation that is used to, perhaps, generate fuel for those times the sun doesn't shine. It wouldn't work for northern countries or the UK, but there are a lot of people where, assuming continued cost scaling, it seems quite reasonable. (And by lots of people, I mean a big fraction of the planet.)

    @684 Thing I don't understand - for global warming - the central issue appears to be the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation. Most other things are rounding errors, perhaps large ones, but even so...

    So, why so much wasted attention on eliminating modern conveniences, eg, plane flights? I mean - wealthy people do waste resources - but - overall - poor people consume a lot of power. There is doubtless something I'm missing but given the plausible options of:

    1) build out nuclear and solar with reasonable haste, eventually switch transport to mostly electric. Retreat from low lying lands and run some vertical greenhouses with excess power. Accept many mass extinctions. Fiddle with geoengineering as necessary. Probably transplant a few species and hope. Accept that some nations with relatively low standards of living will have massive numbers of deaths. Pretty much business as usual.

    2) Switch to a new civilizational order, along with massive rework of existing infrastructure...accompanied by many deaths. Accept that some nations with relatively low standard of living will have massive deaths...

    A large enough majority will choose #1 that #2 is neither accessible through nonviolent nor violent resistance.

    The key bit is the greater fraction of the world is not as prosperous as the first world. That fraction will have little interest in different forms of power generation unless they are comparable in price. While preserving local ecology is important in its own right - global warming is driven by CO2 and other greenhouse gases that will tend to scale rapidly as people get richer outside of the first world. OTOH, that fraction of the world does have the opportunity to look at the US and not be so stupid.

    711:

    for global warming - the central issue appears to be the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation

    The gulf between "the single largest" and "the only important" is significant. Especially as the cheap and easy options are taken up, what counts as "the single largest" will change. But to hark back to earlier "but what's your complete plan for everything" objections, you seem to be taking the opposite tack and saying that all mitigation efforts should focus on the single largest problem ignoring all others.

    Specifically, right now global aviation emissions are under 10% of the problem, but that will rise as other emissions fall and with the "inevitable" growth of air travel. The limiting case of everything else falling to zero would leave air travel as 100% of the problem.

    So it makes sense to address aviation as well, especially since like everything else it's not just a matter of saying "this is a problem, we know the solution let us apply it now... problem solved". If we could do that why would we not do so immediately? Or more accurately, the known solution is shutting down all aviation and we could do that today if we wanted to. But most people regard that as unacceptable so there is a lot of research being done into ways to have lower emission aviation.

    712:

    why so much wasted attention on eliminating modern conveniences

    Because we don't know how to have those and keep living.

    It really is that simple. It's not even "if everyone did that", it's "the few people living that way now are killing us all". As people keep saying, we are in the middle of an unavoidable revolutionary change which right now appears likely to kill billions of people. The question some of us are trying to answer is "can we have a revolutionary change that kills fewer people and is nicer all round".

    Saying "but I don't want a revolutionary change" is asking the impossible. We are terrorforming the planet, the only options are more of it or less of it.

    Also, no one solution will be enough on its own (except, obviously, the final solution - kill everyone), so it makes sense to do all thing things that seem likely to help, see which ones work, and do more of the things that work and less of the things that make the problem worse.

    Trouble is, a lot of people still evaluate solutions in terms of "does this make me richer" rather than "does this make the terrorforming kinder", and as a result opt for things that make the terrorforming nastier.

    713:

    Will people PLEASE look at the link I posted in # 698 ... And give me feedback / commnets?

    714:

    Not seeing how this is ever going to be viable. Cooling is a pretty inefficient process, so the round trip storage losses are going to be grim and it is going to be sucking up enormous amounts of environmental heat when dispatching power, that is absolutely required to re-expand the gas, so it wont work nearly as well in winter.

    Unless you.. I dunno, build it in conjunction with a thermal power plant so you can use the outflow pipes as a heat source?

    And it aims at long term storage, which means capital utilization will be bad. That would be okay if it was very cheap per kwh, but not seeing how this is, unless insulated pressure tanks are far cheaper than I think they are.

    Mostly, storage schemes that are not some variation on "Storage and recovery of gravitic potential energy via mechanical engineering" tend to have issues.

    715:

    Meanwhile the wanker STILL dosn't get it Brexit is obviously for "the Bankers" according to JC - he seems to have reailsed, FINALLY that IF he actually wants to stop brexit, he might not get to be "leader" because no-one will trust him not to fuck it up. I suppose it's a start .....

    716:

    We haven't done "lifting buildings" for a while (with the steampunk pantograph folding stairs). Nor have we done the ObPratchett: "Storage and recovery of rotational inertia via a vertical oriented cylindrical mass rotating around the long axis and mouonted on frictionless bearings".

    717:

    The Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson, a member of a previous Tory-led government is determined to put another Tory in charge (Ken Clarke) and won't countenance the leader of the second-largest party in Parliament taking the role of Prime Minister because... well, he's not a Tory for one thing and he detests the Tory Party and won't work with Tories like Jo Swinson has done. That makes it all his fault, you see.

    718:

    It's garbage. As Thomas says, it's cryogenic so while they don't have high pressure or high temperature problems, they are cooling a lot of air then throwing away 90% of what they produce (the heat) and trying to recover (most of) that from the environment when they go into generation mode.

    I struggle to see how they're going to get the claimed 70-80% efficiency unless they have a readily available source of heat. It can be low temperature heat, but they need a lot of it. Loosely, for every gigawatt of output they're going to need about a gigawatt of heat input.

    FWIW, modern pumped hydro is about 80% efficient, older plants can be lower than 70%... but regardless, even 80% is not competitive with lithium. They're going to have to be radically cheaper somehow, as well as more easily sited than pumped hydro (otherwise the decision makers are going to be looking at a mature technology available off the shelf from multiple suppliers vs a new system being scaled up from a small demonstration plant. There's a reason Musk said "operating in 90 days or it's free").

    Saying "but we don't have enough lithium" doesn't matter when we have enough for our ability to manufacture batteries now. It's like any other common mineral, as demand rises the price goes up and previously uneconomic sources become viable. Currently with lithium we're barely past picking nuggets up off the ground ("ooh, a big dry lakebed full of lithium salts").

    719:

    Yes. There are several such profitable, sustainable woodland management schemes. I have seen the woodlands you describe in many places in Europe.

    In the UK, the classic is coppicing, which fueled most of the UK's industry for a millennium or more. While that cannot be done everywhere, it is more productive than modern clear-felling and VASTLY environmentally superior. It lapsed primarily because we converted to using coal as a fuel and importin timber for construction, but is still done. It's also done in parts of California (coastal redwoods coppice well).

    I don't know how many such schemes are done in the tropics, but I know that at least some are possible.

    720:

    How about "juggling heavy weights" - get an electromegnetic cannon pointed upwards, but instead of just launching spacecraft into orbit fire them up to store energy, then catch them to generate it. We could end up with quite silly spacecraft being a lump of lead (or concrete) wrapped in a conductor then a layer of heat shielding.

    Could get a bit Wernher Von Braun if it goes wrong, but like the song says 'who cares where they come down'...

    721:

    No, it's as profitable as farming, and has fairly similar requirements. Remember that the climate of the UK and Denmark is entirely different from those of Australia.

    722:

    Oops. I may not have been coherent. It was more of a 'are you actually working in a movement that hopes to convince people in the us to stop using even electric cars? Cause that just won't work. I mean, some posts sound like that, but I'm guessing that's not your primary focus. I'm probably not understanding you'. Not intended to be a please define everything - albeit curious about plans for everything - so - um - maybe it worked out.

    Dunno. I'm not sure the do everything approach flies - as opposed to the do a lot and work on geoengineering. Afforestation of degraded forests might, eg, be able to take up about 0.2 Ttons carbon. Now, there are pretty significant realistic limits there... If you don't mind mucking with the oceans, seaweed farming might extrapolate up to about 0.5Ttons yearly, which seems relevant. (Wikipedia). Albeit, there's a lot of ignorance on my end reading those estimates. Given that emissions are about 0.037 Ttons, sequestration may have some role. (Albeit, farming seaweed over the whole ocean has some fairly obvious problems.) The problem with the do everything approach is that it seems to involve significant inefficiencies and to be unacceptable to most of the population. It doesn't look productive. Eg, while I do daydream about reworking CA infrastructure to eliminate the need for ridiculous commutes...I am aware that, immediately following such a decree - there would be an armed, violent, majoritarian revolution involving my death. Similar with air travel - an awful lot of which involves visiting distant relatives. (Well, a decent rail system would help.)

    Now, everything probably helps. I just have this model with societal resistance as springiness. Power plant change is really floppy. Gas to electric transportation is really floppy (although you can see that some portion of the relatively sympathetic audience here froths at that). Elimination of cars - kind of more like a steel block, for the us at least. Elimination of planes - similar. Elimination of consumerism - somewhere in between - but unsure of impacts. Efficiency - really floppy, but small impact. From that I get an estimate of carbon saved per effort and the prioritization I tend to hear from global less warming advocates seems inefficient. Still don't understand why there is zero movement towards deregulation of nuclear.

    Also, don't underestimate impact if costs - looked at interest in solar in less developed countries - until cost comparable - surveys found very little interest.

    @greg Given that it seems to be using liquid air, erm, kind of looks like a big bomb if something ever goes wrong with the cooling. To some extent, shielding costs may end up dominating. Don't think local temperature matters much - as air liquifies well below room temperature. Still, storage efficiency is probably low, then you run it through turbines to get power, which is also not high efficiency. OTOH, probably relatively space efficient for power storage. So, maybe useful for a solar grid with rare offtime and significant excess capacity - which a solar grid probably will need. Probably more efficient than storage as chemical energy, not sure though. Some sort of crispered biofuel making plant or algae might do about as well. Dunno - kind of depends on distribution of solar power generation and solar capacity. With nuclear, intuitive guess is that building more plants is better.

    723:

    We are not talking about a change of government to do anything other than stop no deal brexit. Which is why Corbyn is the wrong person to be a caretaker PM, and a Tory probaby is.

    1: we curently have a legitimate tory government (No PM but tories plus DUP can get budge through the house so legitimate) a change of PM to one of the same party is seen as normal by most people without a general election (Calaghan, Major, Brown, May, Johnson etc)

    2: without Tories turning on Johnson and the Brexiteer pirates they will push through no deal brexit and we are all *d, so someone who " won't work with Tories" is not going to fly

    3: These rebel Tories still want there to be a future Tory govt (with them in charge) they wont back Corbin to be PM as they think legitimately it gives him credibility and they think they can spin a govt on national unity being the best for the country if they can get past brexit (could be right)

    4: Corbin is being a bit of an idiot if he Realy wants to be PM under these circumstances - he wont be able to do ANY of the things he wants to do policy wise AND he will surely piss off the Brexit favouring but labour voting population is HE is seen as PERSONALY blocking brexit

    5: I expect he will win a general election after the No deal brexit is broken but not if the Brexit party can blame blocking no deal brexit on him

    6: Jo swinson is not a member of the labour party - and was a member of a junior coalition partner party. people need to grow up about politics. And if the labour party activists hadnt spent so much time attacking the lib dems instead of the Tories from 2010 we would have Chaos with Ed Milliband Right now!

    724:

    I'm not sure, I think we need an evacuated tube to increase efficiency. If one end of the tube is based on the equator, and the other end is in geostationary orbit. Then you don't even need pumps, you can just seal the lower end[1] and open the upper end to space!

    The cool thing then is that the storage is actually rotational inertia instead of, or at least just as much as gravity.

    [1] The problem with irony is that not everyone gets it.

    725: 678 - "Sir, I'm pretty certain that 'Coach' will arrive at LAX at the same time as the rest of the 'plane!" Claire Millar; retiring stewardess on Pacific Air 121 (Snakes on a Plane) 679 - Or worse, there's a lot of igneous rock in the Highlands that won't even hold 5cm of soil, and is impermeable as well, so won't hold moisture. 693 - Without seeing this I was fairly sure about Scandinavia, but not which nation. 701 - First, what is the definition of "profit" we are working to? 708 - In Scotland we're actually running out of new sites for hydro power. 710 - Because of the false assumption that carbon sequestered ~ tree radius rather than tree sectional area (area of a tree section being roughly pi() * R^2).

    Yesterday, when AFK, I saw Trumpolini's G7 news conference. How can anyone not realise that the man is delusional?

    726:

    Nojay @ 717 Irrelevant. Cor Bin can be almost guaranteed to come up with the wrong solution. Ken Clarke would qualify as a liberal, these days, he's the Father of the House & greatly respected ... he's also a fervent Remainer, whilst Cor Bin is still suck in the 1973 time-trap, where the communists & the BNP ( & Corbyn) opposed JOINING the EU!

    EC @ 719 AIUI, coppicing is making a slow, small-scale comeback

    Rlloyd27 @ 723 1: CORRECT 2: Also, unfotunately, correct 3: Maybe - some sort of "Government of National Unity" is a good idea that needs serious looking into. 4: Corbin is being a bit of an idiot Understatement of the century - Cor Bin is almost guaranteed to get it wrong, even on the occasions when he gets it right, if you see what I mean? His history of being anti-EU since before 1973 does not help, shall we say? 5: I doubt it - even ( particularly?) many traditional Labour voters don't rust him, for the same reasons no-one else does, either. Not because he is dishonest, but because he is utterly, totally completely incompetent. 6: Correct - especially as we wouldn't have had this brexit fiasco in the first place .....

    727:

    @Erwin, you really need to notice what Paws said here:

    #710 - Because of the false assumption that carbon sequestered ~ tree radius rather than tree sectional area (area of a tree section being roughly pi() * R^2).

    It's actually something we've talked about here before. Older forests sequester carbon and for trees that get really large, the larger they are the more they sequester. Some reports are rubbish because they only consider radial growth as a linear input.

    As an aside and a nitpicky thing, while I read all of the relevant trilogy anyway, the liberal use of the (apparently a) word "sequestrate" really made some of Peter F. Hamilton's writing hard work for me.

    728:

    as profitable as farming, and has fairly similar requirements.

    I don't doubt that is true, but it demonstrates my point that there are factors other than plain market capital at play. Unlike farming, which doesn't represent much in the way of frozen assets and has to be productive to yield value, the uncut timber is a non-liquid asset and liquidating it immediately, then investing the proceeds is almost certainly more profitable than long term management. Maybe not right now with record low bond markets, but in principle. You need a rate of return that is higher than available investment opportunities to ensure preservation, and to sustain that long term, otherwise you have other factors at play.

    It's not unlike Piketty's thing about having the rate of GDP growth higher than the rater of return on investment... otherwise Bad Things[tm] happen. If the rate of return for your managed forest is always higher than the rate of return on ... well anyway you know what I'm saying. There are situations where we can stop the bad things, and situations where we can't. I'm not aware of situations currently available where we can make things better given these rules. But that's just a different re-wording of what Moz and Frank have been saying. And you too, EC. Cheers!

    729:

    Ken Clarke is "greatly respected" but he's a Tory and the Labour Party doesn't trust and will never support a Tory, neither will the SNP who are the third-largest party in Parliament don't forget. Father of the House is a sinecure position for an elderly MP who is never going to get anywhere near power ever again -- see Edward Heath as a worked example. It's unlikely Clarke could command the confidence of a Parliamentary majority even with Jo Swinson whipping a whole twelve LD MPs to vote Tory again -- many of the more rabid Tories hate Clarke's guts for being insufficiently Hate the Poors.

    What we need is a Messiah to return from the wilderness... Tony Blair is at leisure, I understand.

    730:

    Nojay Ypu last sentence is the give-away! And NO tory & 99% of the Lom0crats, nor a large slice of the SNP will trust Cor Bin - they know his record for incompetence & his desire to get OUT of the EU, blame it on the tories THEN institute hos almpst-communist holy vision. He's as much a wrecker sa BOZO the clown, just not supposedly in charge.

    Keir Starmer? Chukka Umannah? Stella? ( THAT woukd be fun! )

    731:

    Old news... like, really old news. Thing is that nearly all forms of energy storage have already been tried back in the days when internal combustion engines and batteries both sucked badly enough that there was an obvious reason to look for alternatives. Liquid air was one of them. It sucked, too. Not just the need to supply heat to vaporise it but also liquid or gaseous water turning to solid and gumming up the works.

    Which isn't to say there were no applications it's good for. Like compressed air locomotives, it's handy in mines, where the exhaust provides both cooling and ventilation. Compressed air was easier to deal with though.

    732:

    So, fission, then, whether directly or by making use of hot fission fragments.

    733:

    Well, it does make a lot of sense for transporting grain or anything else that doesn't go off. (And Newby himself is of course an example of how finding people prepared to tolerate the... somewhat primitive living conditions is not necessarily the major problem you might expect.) After all, it doesn't matter how slow the transport is as long as you keep shoving stuff in at one end as fast as you take it out the other (of course, these days you also have to shoot a few accountants, but you need to get your R&R somehow.)

    (For those who don't recognise it... the book is "The Last Grain Race" and it is highly recommended.)

    734:

    Already exists... some French tram system, I think (again, a resurrected hundred-year-old idea which has become considerably easier now we have modern semiconductor devices to switch the power collection points off when the tram isn't there).

    Also, the Parry People Mover light rail vehicle, which uses flywheel energy storage.

    735:

    Yeah. And it has fundamental (low) limits on efficiency, too. That has been pointed out before on this blog, at least one of the times it came up previously.

    736:

    You might be surprised about Ken Clarke; if he gave his word about his objectives, I am pretty sure that most Labour and SNP MPs would trust him.

    737:

    Greg Tingey @ 698: An interesting idea - comments & predictions, please?

    It's probably going to cost more and deliver less in the long run, but it sounds like it might work. I note the article says:

    "The project took longer to complete than originally planned: When GTM covered the company's partnership with GE in 2014, the demo was expected to begin operations in spring 2015. Issues with some of the components caused the delays, but now everything is performing as expected, ..."

    That suggests it's going to take a while to prove itself (if it ever does).

    738:

    That's Kenneth Clarke, Thatcher's privatising Health Secretary and willing member of her cabinet and not some other Kenneth Clarke? Right? He's a Tory through and through and the Labour Party in Parliament and the country doesn't trust Tories, ditto with knobs on for the SNP (see for example the Poll Tax which was trialled in Scotland first by Thatcher). That's why they're called the (Loyal) Opposition. As for Tory-led Government Minister and now Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson, I can't read minds but it looks like she wants to get back into a Tory Cabinet again.

    Jeremy Corbyn has said "call for a vote of no-confidence and win it, form an alliance that has the confidence of the House and make me, as Leader of the Party with the greatest number of MPs in the coalition the Prime Minister and I'll call for a general Election immediately after postponing Brexit." From the way some commentators on this blog are reacting they seem to think he wants to settle into No. 10 and stay there. Given the fragility of such a coalition I can't see that happening but the Daily Mail influences many peoples minds.

    739:

    _Moz_ @ 708:

    "we'd be better off building something more conventional"

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

    That's the major GWh scale storage technology that has actually been built. The good news is that even in dry countries like Australia it's very easy to build and there's no shortage of potential sites. We even have three existing sites and one under construction. Sadly two of the existing ones are owned by coal generators and not used because they would lower the price of electricity. They were built when the generators were state owned and lowering the cost of electricity was seen as a good thing.

    There are many locations where pumped storage hydro is NOT the answer (for whatever reason - usually scarcity of water). Using liquefied air as a storage mechanism might be an alternative in those places. Even locations where water is scarce still have air. It's an idea worth pursuing simply from the point of view of Don't put all your eggs in one basket!.

    740:

    check some of the nastier failure modes of lithium ion batteries before claiming that battery electric cars actually solve problems

    ICE vehicles catch fire EVERY DAY. Google gives me 22,000 times as many hits for "car fire" as for "battery fire". Leaving aside the numerical details, it's clear that batteries making things better, not worse.

    741:

    paws4thot @ 725: Yesterday, when AFK, I saw Trumpolini's G7 news conference. How can anyone not realise that the man is delusional?

    They know. The problem is a significant minority of Americans (somewhere between 30% and 40%) are turned on by his delusions, don't understand the long term adverse consequences of normalizing those delusions and don't care as long as they can use those delusions to permanently embed themselves (in power) like a tick.

    742:

    Thats Retiring MP (so cant use as leverage in upcoming election) and Strong anti no dealer Ken Clark. who gives the tory Anti No Dealers the only vaguely plausible way to vote out the Brexiteer government and put up a fig leaf that they were not betraying their party.

    A govt of National Unity is not Labour led coalition by back door, can only be for one purpose stopping no deal brexit.

    This is going to be a transitional government at the Whim of ALL the participants so you dont need to Trust him his only power would comes from parliament which means All the Parties have a veto not just labour.

    Your chance for a JC led government comes after a general election not before. J Swinson could be in a labour led cabinate or in a tory led one or in none - depends how the votes go and how many seats she wins and how these are traded (its not going to be a formal coalition its going to be confidence and supply - they learned that lesson) - she is Not a member of the Labour party OR a member of the Tory party, she represents the people who vote Lib Dem (so not you i take it).

    JC can not get those tories to betray their party by backing him for PM - its impossible so he cant be a transitional PM - Harriett Harmon and KC together as co PMs works for this too.

    (Also Father of the House and Mother of the House are simply titles for longest serving MPs not sinecures)

    743:

    Advice from the sixties and seventies: check their shoes.

    Lessee, military spies word shiny black shoes, FBI wo5e shiny brown shoes, and the police wore shiny black plastic shoes. All of them shined well....

    744:

    Saying "but we don't have enough lithium" doesn't matter when we have enough for our ability to manufacture batteries now. It's like any other common mineral, as demand rises the price goes up and previously uneconomic sources become viable.

    Because lithium batteries are being manufactured in volume, they have a price advantage over the alternative batteries coming out of little startups. But there are a whole zoo of those startups, and some of them talk a good fight about the cost of their raw materials. For example, Form Energy has made so-far-unsupported claims about $10/kWh. Aziz and Gordon at Harvard project $50/kWh for their organic electrolyte. Wu at Ohio State claims $44 for his. Ambri claims $25. ESSinc claims $20. And that's not the whole list ! If any of them manages to get a serious share of the upcoming billion-dollar "grid storage" biz, their prices might start to resemble their materials cost. Each startup individually is a long shot, but it is a Good Thing to have so many technology bets happening.

    One thing pretty well all of the startups do, is emphasize that their materials are earth-abundant. (Well, vanadium worries me.) And some say other good things, like "non toxic" (Stanford liquid metal flow battery, NanoFlowcell, Aziz) or "non-flammable and non-corrosive" (ESS). Which is nice, but "cheap and abundant raw materials" matters more if we want to get serious about storage. The alternatives are a more expensive power grid, or else expensive nukes.

    745:

    In the US, buses are heavily being moved to burning LNG from diesel.

    746:

    Ding, dong, the bitch is dead (no insult meant to innocent female dogs)!!! Thoughts and prayers for his brother, who will join him (hopefully) soonest.

    Appropriate music: Dylan's Masters of War.

    "And I hope that you die, And I hope that it's soon"

    747:

    Not just engineers. As I've mentioned before, it's "subject matter experts", who think they're experts in all subjects.

    Do not get me started on bioscientists who think they can write code.

    748:

    Not sure about overmanned. How about whalers? From what little I know, they could lose something like ->40%<- of the crew to accidents and weather.

    749:

    I don't know the cost, monetary and electrical, of running the air compressor plants. Certainly, on exhaust, you'd have a 100% directed stream....

    750:

    What this situation need is a white man to fix things, they used to say.

    The Tories with an assist by the Lib Dems got us into Brexit via the pointless decision to hold a referendum. The Tories led the way to a victory by the Leavers in that referendum, the Tories invoked Article 50 prematurely, the Tories called another General Election which made things worse, the Tories faffed around, Tories in Cabinet talked about prosecco and BMWs and how they needed us more than we needed them, the Tory government failed totally to notice the Good Friday Agreement's collision with a hard border with the EU in Ireland, the Tories set red lines on all sorts of post-EU issues, the Tories fucked up and fucked up and eventually allowed Boris Johnson into Number 10. And the only solution you can see to all these Tory mistakes is to put another Tory in charge to fix this Tory-created mess because...

    Well, he'd be a member of the natural Party of Government in the UK, that's the only qualification I can see that he has for the position. The last time Clarke ran for the leadership of the Tory Party back in the 90s he lost in the first round and he's probably not picked up much more support since then so the idea that the Tory party, rife with Leavers and looking over their shoulders at the Brexit Party would fall in line with a superannuated has-been is debatable at best.

    A Government of National Unity is for wartime when external enemies threaten the existence of the nation, to remain in place until the enemies are no more. In this case the problem lies within our borders and there can be no defeat of the Leavers because they are us, xenophobic Uncle Harry and Daily-Mail reading Granny and the swivel-eyed loons of the ERG.

    Corbyn's "plan" isn't really workable, I believe since it needs a lot of diverse and frankly right-wing folks like Swinson to go along with the demonic Socialist (he hides his horns so well, doesn't he?) to get us through the current crisis but he's the popularly-elected leader of the majority Opposition party which gives him some clout in the negotiations.

    751:

    to Moz @709 Because while that may be obvious, it's also wrong. Currently the two sources of electrical power that are cheapest per MWh delivered to build are wind and solar. It's possibly not obvious to you because Russia is not the best place to build solar, but wind is definitely an option. I am sorry to state obvious, but all of my education, knowledge and life experience says "no, this is not how it works". They are hardly cheapest even without their inherent technological features like reduced reliability and intermittent nature - if they would be any close to commercial viability as fuel, we would have already switched over to them. They can be only made so by constant subsidizing and other methods of state and market-mixed of financial support. Fortunately, the only real resources we have as renewable is hydropower. It is so good, in fact, that a lot of people use it to power up the entire industry, aluminum, for one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_Iceland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusal#Sustainability Incidentally, you can create 100% renewable energy economy, except only if you use at least 70% hydropower component that will allow you to both cover the demand for energy and cover the irregularity for the networks. Or you will have to run into some serious expenses.

    to JBS @739 There are many locations where pumped storage hydro is NOT the answer (for whatever reason - usually scarcity of water). Using liquefied air as a storage mechanism might be an alternative in those places. Even locations where water is scarce still have air. It's an idea worth pursuing simply from the point of view of Don't put all your eggs in one basket!. Yeah, exactly, except I also have different theory why there is a thing. The natural gas liquefying is a big business these days, an international LNG fleet is increasing ever since, and it is entirely possible that some big company or a concern is looking to increase their equipment demand for the nearest future. If you would quote the article: The company uses equipment developed for the conventional power and oil and gas industries to liquefy gas, store it in tanks and release it to spin turbines and produce electricity on demand. and These parts come from the liquefied natural gas and power plant industries, so they are designed for power-plant scale. Basically, when you are not building LNG facilities, you can start building those magical "liquid air" storages, providing steady return of investments.

    to paws4thot @725 #701 - First, what is the definition of "profit" we are working to? Monetary profit in general, of course. But considering financial manipulation, corruption and general lack of planned regulation, monetary situation does not always corresponding to reality, there's also a term "sustainability" which more closely relates to relation between the investment and its outcome. http://thenextturn.com/eroei-energy-cliff/

    752:

    EXTRA for Nojay @ 7829 but he's a tory FUCKING GROW UP, sorry, but .. Brexit - nothing else matters - I refer you to W S Churchill in 1941 "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons." - yes - have you got it yet? .....sort our other differences LATER, in the meantime, nothing else matters AT ALL.

    @ 738 FUCK OFF - also the most effective chancellor we've had in many yraes - he SIMPLIFIED the tax system ..... YOU STILL DON'T GET IT. You would rather we had a no-deal brexit than put up with Kenneth Clarke? Make up your tiny little mind, OK?

    I repeat, Corbyn cannot be trusted - he refers to brexit as "the Bankers Brexit", in spite of the fact that the BoE & every UK-based bank is against it ... What part of brutal reality do you want to be introduced to next, if your amazing idological purity isn't violated?

    ... see also Rlloyd27 @ 742 And, how about a Guvmint of National Unity with Clarke as PM & Starmer as deputy? Entirely possible. But - for ideological puity you dont want that - or would you?

    @ 750 THIS IS WARTIME, idiot! HOWEVER - you seem to have finally noticed: Corbyn's "plan" isn't really workable And Swinson is not right wing, she appears to be some flovour of Social Democrat, actually ....

    JBS @ 739 Your last line is the important one

    753:

    Erwin@722, Sleepingroutine@751: I think this is where we all need to be very careful to distinguish between "what I see locally" and "what is happening globally".

    As I understand it the Russian grid is almost a perfect case of something that can't work without huge continuous generators, because it's old and run-down, there's no money to replace it, and it was built around those generators. Plus solar is pretty woeful in most of Russia. There are other social issues that I suspect make those factors worse. My solution is nuclear, preferably centred on Moscow and wherever else your leaders live :)

    But elsewhere Pacific Island nations are taking up solar power with considerable enthusiasm, not just because it's cheaper but because they need a high level of moral suasion right now. In Timor and PNG remote settlements are likewise taking up solar because it's cheap and readily available, but that's been happening for a couple of decades.

    There are vigorous efforts by fossil fans to counter this, especially those in global/national aid agencies who have a very simple argument: we will only fund fossil generation, what sort would you like?

    Arguing about the intermittent nature of some renewables is only relevant at an industrial scale where there are big loads that must operate continuously. But those industries also have the funds to build storage, and most of them already have redundant supplies. For small grids intermittent with battery is often fine, and a lot of those systems are trying to avoid developing the continuous loads that would require more than the solar they can afford. A lot of them are aware, sometimes from experience, that they can't afford fossil generation (the cost contrast between even NiFe battery backed solar and petrol generators is ridiculous - the financial payback time for solar is often less than a year).

    The same can be said for cars. The US is close to the definitive case of the Cult of the Car, and asking them to give up the object of their worship is tricky. But since they have the dollar as a superior deity I suggest that simply applying carbon and congestion pricing will produce the required change.

    754:

    Jo Swinson was part of a Tory government between 2010 and 2105, the infamous "Coalition" that led to the referendum and the win by Leave. She rightly got kicked out of Parliament in the election that followed, part of the slaughter of the Lib Dem collaborators that was rightly due. Sadly the good folks of East Dunbartonshire forgave and forgot and re-elected her to the House in 2017 whereupon she became Leader of the Party as one of only a dozen or so Lib Dem MPs. She is now pushing to get another Tory installed as PM and, presumably, another seat for herself in the Cabinet room at number 10. If that makes her a Social Democrat then I fail to understand your adoration of your own not-really-a-member-of-the-Labour-party Social Democrat MP, Greg.

    A Government of National Unity means getting the Labour Party alongside since they have Google Google 247 MPs. The rest of the possible coalition for this supposed GoNU comprises 35 SNP MPs and 14 Lib Dems which together add up to a fifth of the Labour Party's contribution to the proposed vote of no confidence which will kickstart this effort to form such a GoNU-- under Parliamentary rules I understand such a vote can only be lodged by the largest party not in government anyway. Instead of accepting that the elephant in the committee room will be wearing a red rose one of the minnows wanted some antiquated Tory to lead for no practical reason other than he's a Tory and she likes Tories to be in charge for some reason.

    755:

    I thought you were suggesting a new application for Hype-Loop, where you have an evacuated ring with very high speed trains running in it storing kinetic energy.

    The problem with irony is that not everyone gets it.

    The housewives of Australia get it, despite the price having gone up.

    756:

    lithium batteries are being manufactured in volume, they have a price advantage over the alternative batteries coming out of little startups.

    Oh, very definitely. It wasn't so long ago that lithium batteries were primarily single-use in low current long duration applications and the high-capacity rechargeable market was lead or nothing. I'm sure that we will see new technologies come onto the market, hopefully in bulk and at much better price points.

    The fundamental problem with chemical storage is that it is unstable by definition, so there will always be the possibility of rapid exothermic decomposition. The higher the density the more exciting the exhibition. But that doesn't mean we can't have them everywhere, after all petrol is explicitly designed as a combination of chemicals that explode readily when mixed with air and we have that all over the place.

    One quibble: lithium is the most common metal overall, just as hydrogen is the most common non-metal. it's kind of the definitive metal in that regard. On the earth's surface it's not especially common, but sadly the odds of a silica-aluminium battery seem remote :) Although we do have calcium and fluorine so perhaps an battery using those (at 7V per cell!)?

    757:

    Part of the problem with primary and rechargeable batteries is the internal resistance of the cell which limits the maximum current a given cell structure can provide. Lead-acid has quite a high internal resistance so car starter batteries are physically large to maximise the cell area to provide the high current draw they experience. Nickel-cadmium and Ni-MH batteries have a much lower internal resistance; they were used during WWII for car and truck starter batteries since lead was needed for making bullets. The result was smaller but more expensive batteries which could produce the hundreds of amps needed but with less endurance -- they could only crank a car engine for a few seconds unlike a regular lead-acid battery of much greater capacity.

    Lithium tech batteries have a very very low internal resistance which means it's possible to draw very high currents out of them, a real advantage for automotive uses as well as static storage. The downside is that if something goes wrong inside the cell and they start to short out then the current flows are very high releasing a lot of energy as heat in a very short (so to speak) period of time. The high capacity in a small volume only exacerbates that effect as heat will damage adjacent cells and cause them to short out too in a cascade effect.

    758:

    : I think this is where we all need to be very careful to distinguish between "what I see locally" and "what is happening globally" See, I have a very particular view on energy management because it is in my education and job. That means that, besides what I hear on media, TV and social nets, there's also some professional opinion and practical experience also (although I'm not working in networks or generation really). So yeah, I can see some things globally, and I have something to relate to, if only out of curiosity.

    As I understand it the Russian grid is almost a perfect case of something that can't work without huge continuous generators, because it's old and run-down, there's no money to replace it, and it was built around those generators. Plus solar is pretty woeful in most of Russia. There are other social issues that I suspect make those factors worse. This is actually entirely opposite. USSR electrical distribution was one of the most effective and modernized from the very beginning, at least for the epoch it was built for. Because it was always built around centralized state-run system of control (instead of multiple corporations), which allowed to govern all networks uniformly and allowed huge amounts of energy to be transported and redistributed. Practically speaking, people in USSR who have had access to electricity practically didn't know what blackout is, and energy price was very, very low. Especially if you consider widest application of co-generation and heating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO_plan This was significantly degraded during period of uncontrolled market and budget cuts during 90-s and beginning of 00s - prices rose and quality dropped. But as soon they realized where it leads, as several blackouts happened in Moscow, they reversed back on many positions (not all of them). It is still mixed system, with different groups of people pushing for marked liberalization and others arguing for centralized effort, but as for "renewables" there's not much effort because they are simply unsustainable here.

    In Timor and PNG remote settlements are likewise taking up solar because it's cheap and readily available, but that's been happening for a couple of decades. There are many reasons for that, and admittedly there's a question of limited application. Or smaller numbers. I don't mean to say that smaller/poorer nation has better chances to transit to new vision of energy policy faster than bigger countries (that'd be liberal buffoonery all over again), but if they are behind the trend that also means they will not have to break down their existing infrastructure to replace it with innovative system, they can start from the scratch.

    There are vigorous efforts by fossil fans to counter this, especially those in global/national aid agencies who have a very simple argument: we will only fund fossil generation, what sort would you like? But you shouldn't really think about it like that. There are no "fossil fans" as there are "solar fans" because the fossil is a conservative, sturdy and reliable source which we know a lot and build a lot. It is a matter of philosophy, psychology, politics and safety, not a laughing matter. People have been driving themselves in overspending for decades now, who is going to responsible for that?

    The same can be said for cars. The US is close to the definitive case of the Cult of the Car, and asking them to give up the object of their worship is tricky. Hell, I can't even expect them to electrify their railroads like any fucking civilized country, what about those smaller contributions? That is also connected to HUGE FXXKING INVESTMENT which they actually can't afford because of their debts. OTOH, with infrastructure slowly crumbling from overusage, I'd expect them to do this eventually, because there's no reason to rebuild what you don't want to use anyway. See, if you live in low rise suburbs without public transport, how are you even supposed to go to work without a car? How you are going to build electrified road if you don't have substations running along? Will the electric cars and delivery trucks reach everyone who need it, or it's only the rich who will buy it as a sign of their privileged position? None of that have anything to do with climate directly, but it is very important overall before you consider the final question of sustainability.

    759:

    "The US is close to the definitive case of the Cult of the Car"

    You keep saying things like this and it really doesn't help.

    Cars are not popular because of some irrational cult. Cars are popular for the thoroughly rational reason that they are incredibly fucking useful. Especially somewhere like the US, which is big, and has distances between towns that on a British scale would put you in the sea as often as not. (And that same sparseness probably means its public transport is always going to more or less suck, even ignoring the numerous cases where the one-size-fits-all nature of it mean it can't not suck.)

    Moreover, they're hardly a new idea. Humans always have sought means of getting about the place using something other than human musculature as a power source. Horses, oxen, dogs, mythical giant eagles the size of a B52, digging stuff up at the top of hills to use at the bottom, sticking a big hanky on it so it blows across the water, etc. etc. etc. The only "new" thing is that we now have a means of powering vehicles that basically keeps going as long as you keep it supplied with energy, doesn't get knackered after only travelling a short distance, doesn't suffer from a vast range of mysterious ailments about which medics can do little more than give really weird names to them, can have broken legs welded back together or new ones bolted on instead of having to shoot it, doesn't have a significantly shorter range than a self-powered human so you can't use it when you most want to, doesn't need half a farm to keep it on, doesn't do any of the other things that used to mean that all the people who wanted one couldn't actually have one. Basically, being able to get about the place is a pretty fundamental human desire; it's not something that's going to be usefully altered by treating it as the product of cultism.

    (Yes, I know that not so long ago many people never went more than a few miles from their home village. See above re limitations of horseandcarts etc.)

    Note that I have done your thing of moving ridiculous loads by bicycle (though not to such an extreme degree) - when circumstances permitted it. They don't any more - mainly because I no longer have the gas exchange capacity to make the thing move - and even at the time I was well aware that more people than not wouldn't be able to manage it.

    I also think that public transport could play a much greater role, particularly somewhere like England which is for the most part dense enough that it stands a chance of being half decent. The trouble is that far too little effort is put into making it something that people actually want to use and far too much into viewing it as a way to make money; far too many advocates of it refuse to recognise that driving has to suck really hard before public transport as it currently exists becomes a genuinely preferable option as opposed to something you use because you're forced to, and argue black is white to try and explain why people aren't using it without having to acknowledge that it isn't actually anywhere near as good as they claim it is.

    (Not to mention that even in England, let alone other parts of the UK, there are places it doesn't go and probably never will. Without cars those places will go from "not many people live there" to "no-one lives there". It's already a problem that "only rich people live there" because even though cars are far more available than horseandcarts they're not available to everyone and there's nothing else.)

    One thing I certainly don't advocate is the apparent extension of the thought "public transport does work [more or less] in London" (where the conditions uniquely favour it) to advocating replicating those conditions everywhere by moving everyone into Wretched Hives, instead of adapting the transport provisions to the conditions that exist outside of London. (Replace "London" with standard national Wretched Hive example according to nationality of person advocating it.) Bleurgh. One of the things that remains good about this country is that more of it isn't London than is. (Also, the words "massive urban heat island" spring to mind...)

    I don't deny that the distribution of travel across different modes of transport is sub-optimal, but I do think that any idea based around "get rid of cars" is basically daft unless you're going to start shooting people, and denying their usefulness is counterproductive.

    760:

    Cars are popular for the thoroughly rational reason that they are incredibly fucking useful.

    Saying "in a country (re)built around cars, cars are useful" is tautological. I could equally say "in The Netherlands bicycles are really fucking useful" and it would be just as meaningful.

    I'm not arguing now, and I've never argued, that cars aren't useful. Just as you're no longer trying to pretend that cars don't have costs. My argument rests entirely on the question "can we keep relying on everyone having a car?" and the answer is "obviously not", especially because even in the limiting case of the US not everyone has a car (albeit the US has a strong "the poor aren't people" sentiment). I live in Australia, as you might perhaps know, and Australia is almost as fixated on cars with a side order of "you call that a big country? THIS is a big country".

    In the face of "everyone should have a car, everyone should rive everywhere" it's very hard to say "most people don't need to drive anywhere near as much as they do and an awful lot of people don't need to drive at all" without some people getting upset about banning cars. It's like the US 2nd Amendment discussions. "first they came for my right to drag race down the main street, then they came...". I don't think anyone is doing that, but it's easy to mistake "cars are dumb idea and a lot of them will go away/have to disappear" as a threat rather than simply an observation. As more of the costs are reflected back to drivers I think there will be fewer drives. It's that simple.

    One of the things I'm seeing in Sydney (Australia, not Canada) is panic from the motoring lobby because increasing numbers of people are not even getting driving permits, let alone cars. It's apparently largely cost driven. Some people see this as an opportunity.

    761:

    There are no "fossil fans" as there are "solar fans" because the fossil is a conservative, sturdy and reliable source which we know a lot and build a lot. It is a matter of philosophy, psychology, politics and safety, not a laughing matter

    In Australia we have a whole lot of people who are absolutely fossil fans and proudly so (and that pleases their donors). Tony Abbott became prime minister here on an explicit platform of denigrating renewables, denying climate change, and subsidising fossil fuels. There is ongoing support from "small government, low tax conservatives" for the government to build a new coal fired power plant, and as far as anyone can tell that is purely as a way of saying "ha ha greenie scum you lose".

    I don't think it's a laughing matter, any more than I think burning human civilisation off the face of the planet is a conservative solution to the problems the human species faces. We know that "what has always worked in the past" is also what's going to kill us in the future. The question is, as the social darwinists and others say "change or die?"

    762:

    Underlying this is my conviction that if we keep burning fossil fuels we're doomed, so when people like you insist we have to do that, I go "I hope you're wrong and I'm going to act as though you are".

    As I see it you have two options: hope that the scientific consensus is completely wrong and actually fossil fuel burning has no connection to global heating (or that global heating isn't happening, etc); or hope that we can somehow support 10 billion people on a planet that's 5-10 degrees warmer than it is now. I suppose the other option is "hope that carbon sequestration technology rescues us all" but that's wildly unlikely (thermodynamically as well as politically and economically).

    I doubt all those options, but I'm using conservative numbers for the heating we get from business as usual because from what I know the actual best answer from the scientists is "arrgh, scary, run away" and also "argh, scary, run away heating". The good news is that we're too far from the sun for greenhouse heating to turn us into Venus II unless we get really creative with halocarbons or something similar.

    763:

    Oh, yes, and they even produced complete MGB cars for a wee whiley, with BMH bodyshells and Rover V8 engines... and no roof, which was one of the things that had always disappointed people about the original MGB V8.

    I think all that happened with the Morris Minor was that it got too popular for its own good. While it didn't have the glamour of the MGB, and nobody ever remanufactured complete bodyshells, it's more practical - particularly when it comes to repairing rusted bodywork - and it was pretty much the default choice for someone who decided they wanted a British classic car and wasn't bothered about it being "sporty". (I suspect that a lot of the piles of boxes are coming from people who found that they had nevertheless bitten off more than they could chew.) Then there are the upgrades Paws mentioned, nearly all of which - apart from engine/transmission swaps, which aren't necessary for road use anyway - involve nothing more than taking bits off a scrap Marina (mostly) and bolting them onto the Minor, are well worth the effort, and are just as easily reversed if you're concerned about maintaining originality. I think what happened is just that we ran out of Minors.

    764:

    Running Chaos Mirrors is not fun, esp. if the US system is setup to encourage them. Term is new to me. I'll try to work it out.

    Amazon / S.America - scale is off the charts. Not just Brazil, all of them. Someone is running a major "BURN IT ALL" continent wide meme, and they're aggressive and also [REDACTED]. These fuckers really don't like their ex-Master's work, know what we mean? Not parsing this confidently (been US-focused). Is it related to (or a new backlash against, or something else) PROSUR? And how does Bolsonaro align with the official democracy goal: 5. That the essential requirements to participate in this space will be the full validity of democracy, of the respective constitutional orders, respect for the principle of separation of the Powers of the State, and the promotion, protection, respect and guarantee of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as the sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, with respect to international law.

    Re salmon, this is an interesting technique: Genetics of century‐old fish scales reveal population patterns of decline (Michael H.H. Price, 20 August 2019, open access) Populations of larger‐bodied fish have declined the most in abundance, likely because of size‐selective commercial fisheries. and it refs this which also is interesting on a skim: Anthropogenic habitat alteration leads to rapid loss of adaptive variation and restoration potential in wild salmon populations (January 2, 2019) New tools. (Also this month's Communications of the ACM has a piece Computational Sustainability: Computing for a Better World and a Sustainable Future, many refs.)

    765:

    Nojay FFS! So, you loathe all tories ... but you & we are going to NEED some of them to stop brexit - or are you joining Cor Bin in WANTING to be out of the EU? I agree Swinson is nowhere near perfect, but that's not the point, is it? Make your tiny mind up, as your amazing shortsighted blindness needs a cure ... Do you want to be ideologically pure, or do you want to stop brexit? It's as simple as that.

    Anyway, it may not matter ... it lloks like the bastards are going for a General Election between now & 31st Oct, oh shit. SEE ALSO Diamond Geezer's post of today

    766: 748 - I presume you mean "whale catchers"? Like ships of the line (qv). 751 - Specialist subject "not actually answering the question". Money is a means of measuring the level of profit, not of defining what we mean by profit, which is a political question and one only you can answer as to which of the several definitions you are working to. 759 - Public transport also works, and works well, in West Central Scotland. So much so that I'm personally mystified as to why it doesn't work better in the West Midlands for example. 763 - Er, BL made all the parts needed for a B-series engined Morris 1_000; see Riley One-point-Five and Wolseley 1500. And some of you thought that badge engineering was a "new thing". ;-)
    767:

    There’s a place in NSW where they can make so many Moke parts, that pretty much all you need is the original compliance plate from a defunct Moke and they will build one for you. If there’s a part they can’t make themselves, they can get it in from somewhere. I forget what they are called, they may not still be in business but I recall their website was a bit of a hoot.

    768:

    Tories in charge caused the referendum to happen, Tories in charge caused the Leave campaign to win, Tories in charge caused the Brexit process to go horribly wrong leaving us facing a bad outcome, Tories in charge are responsible for the mess we're in. Tory enablers want to put a Tory in charge to fix this mess because the popularly-elected Leader of the official Opposition who has fought Tories tooth and nail for decades in Parliament is a baby-eating Socialist and we can't be having with that sort of thing now, can we?

    Any Tories who truly want to stop Brexit can get off their butts and support the Leader of the Opposition and along with the smaller minority parties vote Boris Johnson out of Number 10. The idea that 270-odd Labour MPs should act as a pliant doormat for some right-wing Tory "angel descending from on high" and slavishly do their bidding because Tories have fucked up everything they have touched for the past five years rankles a bit.

    ObSF: the "lizards" bit in So Long, And Thanks For all The Fish.

    769:

    Yeah, but I want a car, not a bath tub with a fringe on top!

    770:

    Picking up that sailing thread, there was a bloke who sailed something very much like a bathtub, albeit an almost spherical, aluminium and plexiglass bathtub, across the Pacific (without a visa). This something currently lives in the Queensland Maritime Museum. This was in the 80s, I suppose if he’d tried it today he’d have ended up on Manus Island.

    https://maritimemuseum.com.au/collections/vessels/happy-ii/

    771:

    BoZo the Clown intends to prorogue parliament. Er, wasn't Wrecksit supposed to be about "taking back sovereignty", not removing it completely?

    772:

    "back" was a typo.

    773:

    Nojay @ 768 YOU STILL DON'T GET IT, DO YOU?

    Not that it matters, now .... BOZO the clown has gone for broke & I think we go over to the next thread: "Case Nightmare Blonde"

    At this point even a temprary Cor Bin supposeldy "in charge" is an improvement - maybe

    774:

    WMPT: It varies a lot depending on the route in question, but one problem that affects all of them, including the ones that don't go through it, is Birmingham New Street station. Basically, it isn't big enough and it doesn't have enough approach tracks. It even still bears traces of its pre-electrification existence as two essentially separate but juxtaposed stations - you get stuff like some trains booked to arrive at platforms on the north side whose stock is then used to form services departing from the south side having to go out one end, all the way down to King's Norton, round the Lifford loop, all the way back up Camp Hill and back in the other end, because simply shunting them out of one platform and into the other is too much hassle for the track layout.

    It's a rare event to get a clear run into New Street without being held for five minutes at one of the outer junctions where the various routes all come together, and again inside the tunnels waiting for a platform. It's pretty well always been like that and because of the tunnels at both ends there's not a great deal they can do about it. Even excavating a whole second level and approach tunnels underneath the existing station wouldn't help all that much because of the levels - especially at the east end where the tracks drop sharply immediately off the end of the platforms, then climb sharply still in tunnel, and emerge onto the railway version of Spaghetti Junction with a tangle of viaducts all over the place. The amount of reconstruction you'd have to do in total to make the whole thing work would dwarf the mere excavation of a bunch of low-level platforms and their approaches. It always was kind of a crappy site from the beginning, because Birmingham was in the way, but still much better than Curzon Street.

    Because they had to do something they reopened Snow Hill and diverted some services into there based mainly on where history had left tracks, but that of course also reintroduced the historical lack of route integration, so journeys which for a while involved only a change of platform are now back to requiring a walk half a mile across the city centre to a different station altogether. (To be fair it's not as bad a walk as some other towns with an arbitrary split of services between two main stations impose on you, but it's still a huge pain in the arse.)

    This particularly affects services from my neck of the woods, which go to either New Street or Snow Hill depending on whether they turn right or left at Droitwich. People from the Kidderminster loop are basically screwed unless they want Dorridge or Stratford, while for people from further out, although there are quite frequent services by either route, somehow the next train is always going the wrong route, kind of like a railway version of "all winds are contrary on a bicycle". We are also affected by the silly contortions imposed so that poor little Tories don't have to admit that on the railways competition is an even dafter idea than it usually is; for instance the Chiltern services to Marylebone start from Kidderminster instead of the obvious starting point of Worcester, and the Wrexham-Marylebone service was killed off mainly because of the same silly contortions preventing it from calling in Birmingham at all and instead forcing it to take a crappy and slow route that dodged Birmingham and took ages.

    Recently, they finally got around to electrifying the Lickey and building a proper four-platform station at Bromsgrove, which is bloody brilliant, as it means the West Suburban line has ceased to be effectively a single-ended line terminating at Longbridge and instead goes places at both ends. But we still don't get anything like the full potential from it, because the two-track section from King's Norton to New Street is fearfully slow in both directions, many trains don't stop at a lot of the stations, and they are still pithering on over whether or not to reopen the Camp Hill route to stopping passenger traffic.

    Which reminds me... :) concerning B-series engines in the Morris Minor... the thing is, the only component you need from the Wolseley 1500/Riley 1.5 is the diff, which goes straight in and gives you a 3.73:1 ratio instead of 4.22/4.55. With that gearing and the 1098cc engine it will do 80 down the motorway all day perfectly happily, and since first gear is so low it will still climb any gradient it can get a grip on; less paddling round the box in towns, too. The Minor might never have had the A-series at all if the school of thought that advocated restricting it to the Mini had prevailed; it could have ended up with a 1200cc B-series, and it would have been shit. For all their apparent similarity, the A-series is one of the lucky hits where pre-CFD engine design managed to hit an efficiency and good running sweet spot, whereas the B-series was always kind of a dog - heavy, thirsty, tractory - by comparison, even when it eventually started growing OHC aluminium heads while the A-series just carried on same as ever.

    775:

    I give up - can anyone explain to me why Liz agreed to BoJo's shutdown of Parliament?

    776:

    Actually, part of the US rail system is electrified: specifically, the entire Northeast Corridor. The Pennsy and NYCentral electrified, originally due to tunnels to NYC, and then they went north and south; the Pennsy was (and Amtrak is) electrified to Harrisburg, PA.

    The one good thing about diesel-electric locos (and all the rest are that, and have been since '39 or so) is that they're immensely efficient, far more so than trucks.

    777:

    There are a couple of electrified commuter heavy rail routes in Chicago as well, though most of the routes are diesel.

    778:

    to Moz @761 In Australia we have a whole lot of people who are absolutely fossil fans and proudly so (and that pleases their donors). That's a bit harder to believe considering your link leads to article that says things like "". Accusing people in political lobbying while the "green" economy is getting finances comparable to traditional (despite its smaller size) is kind of.. missing the point. Although what do I know about Australia - maybe it is already some sort of post-modernist fad where the outcome is no longer related to cause.

    The question is, as the social darwinists and others say "change or die?" To hell with social darwinism, as it more often than not leads to "you die instead of me" and sometimes even "you die today so at least I can die tomorrow".

    @762 As I see it you have two options: hope that the scientific consensus is completely wrong and actually fossil fuel burning has no connection to global heating (or that global heating isn't happening, etc); or hope that we can somehow support 10 billion people on a planet that's 5-10 degrees warmer than it is now. I suppose the other option is "hope that carbon sequestration technology rescues us all" but that's wildly unlikely (thermodynamically as well as politically and economically). First and last options are rather out of question. Firstly, it is not global heating that is happening, it is global climate shift, which is a whole lot more complex than just "heating" - and it is bad enough indeed. You get weather anomalies, droughts, forest fires and flash floods and whole lot of local extinction. And eventually even pro- and anti- ecoterrorism and biological or climate warfare. Another option is out of question too - it is all about cloud castles and belief in better human nature (i.e. "somebody will be nice enough to die for your stupid and selfish ideas like v2ganism or g34der rights").

    What we can hope to achieve is that population will have to be stabilized before we will be able to control it. Most likely through demographic transition, which is underway in developing countries and which is also pissing a a whole lot of first world decision makers. And don't believe those who think that planet can not sustain certain number of people - they have zero clue about what technology already did for us and can do after that, they are too afraid about the resources somebody is going to steal from the planet that rightfully belongs to them. Anyway, I think it was mentioned that planet can level out fairly comfortable at about 10-13 billions without actually turning into a dumpster on fire.

    Although TBH I am a lot less optimistic, in a sense. Humanity, in my opinion, and in vision of Tsiolkovsky, shall leave the planet, and by worst estimation it can possibly happen only when conditions here will be comparable to those in the outer space. Which may or may not happen before Earth atmosphere will become unbreathable, so that we better start having artificial atmosphere anyway.

    Oh and don't mind me too much, several weeks ago I found a fairly good quality manga about saving the planet after this exact scenario. It is rather amusing in exposition style and not by any estimation can be considered educational. But I guess I'm just being curious.

    779:

    Specialist subject "not actually answering the question". Money is a means of measuring the level of profit, not of defining what we mean by profit, which is a political question and one only you can answer as to which of the several definitions you are working to. Ahem, this is quite exactly that I meant to say. I was saying that in modern neoliberal globalist world profit is measured by amount of money, return on investment, and everything else is about secondary to it. It is because, from whatever angle I look at it, the world I governed by monetarism policies, and monetarism, to put it simply, considers currency to have value by itself. After all, if you have money, you can form connections and print out articles and create media projects, so that everybody will believe in what you believe. It is more than just couple of policies we can get rid of to live better, it is a way of thinking. Modern investors aren't going to be pushed by ideas like "50 years later we may have this and that", they operate on assumption that they want to return of their funds, and within certain term, and this term is mostly below several years. So they are very keen on running around and screaming that we only have several years, give us all your money RIGHT NOW or we all will die tomorrow, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeXatquVqAc

    If the project requires you to run around with posters and pamphlets to gather donations for saving the whales, and it actually pushes people to gather money for "ecology" because they too want to save the planet, this eco-project will be considered successful and you may as well capitalize on that success. It is something everybody does in our trying times, and ecology is just another position near space exploration, or biotechnology, or bitcoin. When receptionist in bank asks me "what positions you believe in"(rough translation) to invest my money (because they believe I have too much money on hands, see "monetarism" again), I understand what a huge gap there is in understanding between people when they talk about efficiency and profit. I understand what they are saying, but it sounds entirely wrong.

    780:

    somebody will be nice enough to die for your stupid and selfish ideas Also to not to offend somebody too much, I would say, I don't presume myself to be perfect, and I also have a lot of stupid and selfish ideas, so the accent here is on "to die for".

    781:

    I give up - can anyone explain to me why Liz agreed to BoJo's shutdown of Parliament?

    Rock solid precedent. See my post about Canada in the next thread.

    782:

    Nothing new.

    I give you new.

    You give me news.

    I give you Truth (ok, ffs, might take a few years, our Minds don't do TIME like yours do)

    You give me trash.

    I give you meta-understanding of data points in Matrix made long before they become Real.

    You give me... nothing.

    We attempt to take your crumbs and present them as a fair exchange.

    Anyhow.

    VIII

    You've no idea the cost.

    Oh, it's a Gamer-Gate...

    https://www.metafilter.com/182816/I-dont-want-to-fight-this-I-want-this-to-never-have-happened

    Drops 24 later.

    No idea about the counter-push from kwiwiwiki farms

    Or the work done to make sure that no-one could farm this into a GG orgy?

    Or the CN / Tencent / Reddit angles or anything like that?!?

    I know what launched it, and it wasn't women. Disney, silly silly, and the remnants of Minvera.

    Athena says: it's not sexist to suggest that a woman who has a long string of failed projects that have never been completed and has taken the money from them might not be an ally here.

    MF >>>> BELIIIIEVE KIWI FARMS >>>> FIGHT DISNEY >> >NEED PR

    Being honest.

    Some of the tales of abuse are true.

    Standard PR tactics to prevent #metoo etc running is get an Avatar who will lie, get her/him/ze to jump on the bandwagon and hype it up until they're proved to be lying, at which point the actual complaint is rendered powerless.

    MF kids.

    Disney > Zoe the "never completed a project but has a comic" > this.

    MF / Kiwifarms, not ever cynical enough.

    Like, literally, WE ARE IN CHAINS and we don't want to do this but hey, sado-sexual abuse is NOW A FRUCKING AMERICAN PR0N DEFAUKLT.

    There's your new Gamer-Gate.

    It's being run by Disney. $$$cash

    783:

    Don't see Ironmouth anymore.

    It wouldn't be pleasant if we met him.

    But he's a dead man walking anyhow.

    784:

    What amazes us is that MF and Kiwifarms are like... basically the same sophistication.

    They can't imagine that one side or the other are not true.

    What they don't do is actually track the PR cash and narrative writers. Which takes like 45 seconds.

    Oh.

    Disney. What are you doing here?

    785:

    "I saw Trumpolini's G7 news conference. How can anyone not realise that the man is delusional?"

    In the words of the immortal Joe Walsh:

    Tellin' us this and he's tellin' us that Changes it every day Says it doesn't matter Bases are loaded and Casey's at bat, Playin' it play by play Time to change the batter.

    786:

    Interesting article about cars and roads, and the 'cost of congestion'. It's mostly about the difference between mobility (the ability to travel at high speed) and accessibility (the ability to get to where you want to be). More roads, more cars gives great mobility, and the US has been focused on that. Sadly it means (re)moving the places people want to be, with the result that you have the same or declining accessibility.

    https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/8/28/the-mobility-trap-why-well-never-fix-congestion-by-speeding-up-traffic

    787:

    See also: Milton Keynes.

    See also: Councils complaining about "death of the high street" with apparent complete lack of self-awareness regarding whose idea it was to approve the town centre "improvements" that make it harder and harder for people to get there and the out-of-town "retail parks" for them to go to instead.

    788:

    "For Carbon-free power plants - go NUCLEAR RIGHT NOW"

    I'd agree if nuclear power plants could be built RIGHT NOW. They can't. Not even close. A 99% finished one makes 0% power. At present they're about 20 years from "go ahead" to complete. We don't have 20 years.

    789:

    That's not "can't", that's "can't be arsed".

    It takes 3 years even when you've never built one before and you're still fucked from just having fought a massive war and you're tying your hands by trying to make it perform two functions which don't go well together at the same time. Now we've built lots of them and know what to do already we could be growing them like mushrooms if we'd just do it instead of pissing and moaning about it being expensive.

    790:

    With regards to washing machines and repairing old appliances and/or machines ... a couple of things I encountered this week that may amuse:

  • T-shirt: "Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color" - too slow on the uptake to ask where I might find one.

  • I have an OLD Troy-Bilt, Garden Way Manufacturing, Super Tomahawk chipper/shredder I use to make mulch/compost out of tree limbs & yard waste. Yesterday, one of the shaft bearings disintegrated. Garden Way Manufacturing went out of business in 1991 (I think).

  • No biggie. I've got a whole file folder full of parts diagrams, numbers & sources for replacement parts from the last time I had to rebuild it ... except that file folder is on the hard-drive that failed last week. Oops!.

    Again, no biggie - I've already found & ordered the parts I need and I'm on the way to rebuilding the file folder with all the information (with a backup folder on a different computer, still don't have an adequate off-site backup plan). It's just that this time of year is the time I need the chipper/shredder the most & it's going to be out of action for a couple of weeks.

    PS: gasdive @ 788: and Pigeon @ 789:

    Even without the regulatory hoops you have to jump through before you can begin construction, Nuclear Power Plants take time to build. BTDT-GTTS

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shearon_Harris_Nuclear_Power_Plant

    Once you have all the materials on hand AND all of the regulatory permissions, it still takes almost a decade to BUILD it. Then it takes a couple of years fueling it & testing it before you can expect it to generate any meaningful amount of power.

    https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-like-this-will-be-buil.html

    791:

    It takes 3 years even when you've never built one before and you're still fucked from just having fought a massive war and you're tying your hands by trying to make it perform two functions which don't go well together at the same time.

    ... and you don't care about the cost and and you don't give a flying fuck what happens to the people near the plant and you don't give any more fucks about what happens after you've been running the plant for a while. If you just want electricity right now and DGAF, we already have coal plants that can do that.

    The whole rationale for 3rd gen and the planned 4th gen plants is that they're cheaper, more reliable and safer than their predecessors. Ditto for the various plants that use plutonium, thorium, etherium or radioactive waste as their fuel sources. About the best I can say is that they're more likely to work than hydrogen fuelled plants.

    792:

    Yeah, others have replied, but I'll chime in.

    If you want to build the reactors we know how to build, the proven designs are around 30-40 years old. They seem to have a mean time between "abandon the city for 100 years" level events of about 10 000 years. That makes them among the safest machines ever built. Commercial jet airliners which are very very safe, run about 0.4 crashes resulting in someone dying per million operating hours. Or one disaster every 285 years.

    As the pro nuclear people say, they're the safest form of energy. Really really spectacularly safe. Amazingly, orders of magnitude, safer than anything else we've ever built that has moving parts.

    To power the world we need about 25 TW. Or about 25 000 reactors of the size they're installing at Hinkley Point.

    So you're talking about abandoning 2-3 cities every year. How long do you think people would put up with that?

    The alternative is to wait for gen4 reactors to be built (budget a decade if there are no hiccups at all building a new design), test run a hundred or so for a couple of decades to get a good feel for the actual safety and iron out the bugs, and then build 25 000 of them (assuming everything worked in the field exactly as we expected)

    That might sound like "RIGHT NOW" to your ears, but not to mine.

    793:

    "Interconnecting larger areas is surprisingly unhelpful with this. A fully interconnected US would still need a full two days of storage"

    How often does the US experience two full days between sunset and sunrise? I would have thought it infrequent enough that people would accept a power interruption during the 48 hour nation wide nights.

    794:

    "buses are heavily being moved to burning LNG"

    ??

    Cryofuel in buses?

    795:

    "So you're talking about abandoning 2-3 cities every year. How long do you think people would put up with that?"

    Not even worth bothering to debate the assertion in the first sentence. First hit for city loss rate sea level rise was National Geographic talking about abandonment rates orders of magnitude higher than that just for cities in the US. The phrase "lost in the noise" springs to mind. So does "heading for the cliff edge with the brakes off, refusing to put the brakes on because of the cost of brake pads and the asbestos in brake dust".

    796:

    Sure, you and I know that doing nothing involves a huge retreat. Cities like NY and London becoming uninhabitable, but noone will care that most major cities are coastal, and nuclear is saving them from something worse.

    People won't stand for it.

    Councils and cities all over the world are declaring a "climate emergency" but not one single government at any level has acted like its an emergency. People's brains aren't wired the same as the people on this blog.

    797:

    https://youtu.be/KT-immrD8hw

    Wow, cryofuel buses. I had no idea.

    And people say batteries are dangerous.

    798:

    The need for "two days of storage" is obviously not from "2 days of no production at all", it is from the fact that weather systems are large enough that you get weeks were the US as a whole has much lower production than normal fairly regularly, and if you feed in the historical weather patterns, you need two days of storage and a continental interconnect to not run the stores dry before things swing the other way and windier/sunnier-than-average days can refill the stores. (I believe also some overbuild on the generating side so that average days, in fact, tend to fill storage..) The smaller the interconnect, and the farther from the equator, the worse this gets.

    Re: Nuclear construction speed : Historically, serious nuclear power drives have been very fast. Heck, even unserious ones have been faster than our attempts at renewable. The relevant measure is not "How long from first spade to first watt at each project" it is "how much extra power do we average each year from an ongoing effort"

    We all agree the Energywende is an example of an industrial nation working very hard at renewable rollout, right? Well.. Germany was adding low carbon energy to their grid significantly faster back when they were building their nuclear reactors. And that was a darn half-hearted effort.

    Sweden built reactor generation capacity six times faster than the energywende is building capacity now, per capita.

    799:

    When you build a coal fired grid, you build it such that in the situation of the lowest usual generation situation you can still keep going with a couple of credible failures.

    If you apply that to renewables (ie, you use perfectly normal grid building principles) then it works just as well.

    So you build it such that lower than normal supply is higher than higher than normal demand.

    You would have to do the same with a nuclear grid, except that building the extra capacity costs a lot more.

    A highly interconnected grid makes that easier, but remember that PV doesn't produce no output on a cloudy day. Less, certainly, but not zero as many on this blog maintain.

    800:

    PS, I'd also say that there have been no serious attempts at building renewables.

    A Tesla Gigafactory style factory runs to around 5 billion. A serious push for renewables would be building 2 or 3 factories of that size that build the machines that make PV panels. They'd be supplying the construction of say 10 factories that make PV panels every year. Each one of those factories producing a many panels as the current world production. You could do that for 6 years and you wouldn't even equal the cost of the French nuclear build. Yet you'd have increased the global PV production by a factor of 60. Current world PV production is about 100 GW. This would be 6000 GW of renewables per year. That's equivalent to about 1000 nuclear reactors every year for the same as what France spent to build 60ish.

    That's a serious push.

    801:

    The energywende represents total spending of well over half a trillion euros. If that is not enough to count as "serious" to you, there is something very wrong with your metrics. Note that this financial commitment represents enough money that if they had gone all in on nuclear to this degree, they would not only have a zero-carbon grid, they would have built enough reactors to also clean up all transport and all industry in Germany. The actual result of the energywende is that it just about offset the reactors they shut down. This is not success. This is catastrophic failure.

    802:

    "A fully interconnected US would still need a full two days of storage"

    https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/8/9/20767886/renewable-energy-storage-cost-electricity

    quotes Jessika Trancik of MIT (her actual article seems to be paywalled at Joule). She looked at stored-energy amounts vs "availability factor" using 20 years of historical weather reports. I think that 100% renewables is assumed, and $1/watt solar is assumed.

    I take the exercise with a grain of salt. Aside from the fact that solar and batteries continue to get cheaper, and the climate is changing, there's the assumption of a Target - something shiny and perfect (or imperfect) that will be in place on a given date. Nooo, a hundred different US organizations are going to be spending their own money at their own pace. The system is in motion and will still be in motion on the given date. Argue for nuclear if you will: Lazard's 2018 report had nukes at a levelized cost 3-6x as much as unsubsidized utility solar, and getting USians to pay for new nukes will be like pulling teeth. Technologies that can be installed incrementally, with low costs per increment, are what I expect to sell. Recall that Musk sold a 129 MWh battery to Australia with the promise that it would be free if it wasn't installed in 90 days.

    803:

    "spending" doesn't equal "serious"

    How much spending was on building renewable energy generators? Zero from what I can see.

    It did have a global effect on that it kicked PV production into gear and that had had a huge effect on PV price. Prices fell about 90% and Germany played a really big part in that.

    However I can't see that it was ever even intended to be a renewables program. If you want to build cars, you build a car factory, you don't pay people to stop breeding horses. They paid people to close nuclear plants, they paid people to do R&D (but not to manufacture what they'd designed), they paid people a super feed in tarrif far higher than what it would have cost the government to buy, install and run their own PV farms. None of that sounds like a serious attempt at renewables, no matter how much money they spent.

    804:

    Sorry. I didn't read the link last the point they say wind and solar aren't despatchable. (Excepting solar behind the meter if it's a dumb meter) wind and solar are highly despatchable. I expect the next bit will be explaining how coal and nuclear (which aren't despatchable at all) are despatchable. I can't put myself through reading such twaddle again.

    805:

    Sorry, clicked the wrong reply button. Response to you is #804

    806:

    I didn't read the link last the point they say wind and solar aren't despatchable. ... wind and solar are highly despatchable. I expect the next bit will be explaining how coal and nuclear (which aren't despatchable at all) are despatchable.

    Hmm, the article's use of the word seems to agree with Wikipedia's definition of it:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatchable_generation

    Do you have a better source ?

    807:

    Your source is fine

    "Dispatchable generators can be turned on or off, or can adjust their power output according to an order"

    Solar and wind can be turned on and off, or adjust according to network orders really really really well. On, off, up, down all within a second. Coal and nuclear take hours or days and the owners get quite annoyed if ordered to do anything other than run flat out.

    808:

    The linked source says that solar, wind, tidal etc are classed as intermittent resources because you can't rely on them being available at the exact moment you need them. That's why they are not classed as dispatchable like gas or hydro is. You can certainly dial them up and down easily, you just can't do it on a calm night for example.

    809:

    You can certainly dial them up and down easily, you just can't do it on a calm night for example.

    More precisely, you can dial them down, by dumping generated electricity. "Up" only exists in the sense of ceasing to dump.

    This is why battery storage is so desired. It's dispatchable (until you empty it), but also, it's dispatchable in less than one second. The best fossil-fuel peaker plants still take minutes to spin up. That makes storage useful for syncing sources to the grid's 60 Hz, papering over spin-up transients, and other such quotidian duties.

    Also, now that solar is increasingly cheap, compared to its price a decade ago, it's no longer silly to think about installing excess capacity, say 100% or so. On a cloudy day, you might still get what you need. On sunny days, you fill the storage, then dump.

    But if we're going to dump electricity on a regular basis, that means we can have systems designed to use the dumpage. What could we do with large quantities of free but intermittent electricity? Well, for example, CO2 scrubbers that generate alcohol. Negativism about such technologies tends to focus on the energy cost, which is a fair comment if someone has to pay for the energy. But we're heading for a future where energy dumpage is normal.

    810:

    All generators are intermittent. No generator can be relied upon, and in a well run grid, no generator is relied upon. You can tell when you're somewhere that the grid operator relies on generators. All the shops have petrol generators because the power goes out for a few hours on most days. Dumping electricity is how pure coal grids have worked since there were coal generators. Because they're not dispatchable. They're 'baseload' generators. 'baseload' is the antonym of 'dispatchable'.

    Wind can feather and solar can simply switch off the inverters. Unlike coal, they don't need to dump excess. Because they're dispatchable. 'up' exists in the sense of, 'stop feathering, turn on your inverters'. Obviously that doesn't work if the generator isn't available, just like every other generator that's ever been built or imagined. So you need interconnects so you can draw from generators that are available (which is where we came in)

    811:

    In the future I expect we will do a lot more matching of demand to supply in electricity use. This has actually always happened. There are industrial users which allow power companies to control their activity in exchange for preferential rates. But down the road we will do home water heating, washing and drying, a lot more industry, car charging, big data operations, heating and cooling, etc preferentially when the sun happens to be shining bright.

    We will also probably have more industries that use electricity for heat where they currently burn something directly. These will be able to gulp very large amounts of power when it is available and convert it into steel or concrete or whatever.

    812:

    This suggest we should be looking for systems that can soak up spare capacity. Part of that problem is that a lot of industrial processes like making Ammonia can't be ramped up and down quickly. Even there, perhaps bits of the process can be turned into dispatchable demand like water -> hydrogen as feedstock.

    But more importantly, overbuild and dumping spare capacity turns it into a financial problem. Too much electricity that's so cheap as to be too cheap to measure and that you might as well give away doesn't provide any return on investment. So how do you fund the capital investment of a Hinkley C or a North Sea wind farm, if the average price in the markets for their electricity is £1/MWHr and not £100/MWHr.

    But mainly, too much electricity is a good thing. So it's not either/or but both/and. We should be doing all of it; Solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, batteries, grid, etc., etc. And we know now how to do all these things. We just don't know how to pay for it.

    813:

    Pacific Lumber/Hurwitz

    So it’s not that sustainable forestry isn’t a good idea, it’s just that it’s incompatible with the current US political and economic system.

    814:

    OK, worked example from the UK:

    Renewables, meaning wind and solar. Today we have about 24GW "dataplate" of wind turbines installed onshore and offshore. During periods of low wind that fleet can produce as little as 200MW and it can spend days producing less than a GW (examples provided if you want them but you can get the raw data from the Gridwatch site which records reported production from most British grid generators).

    http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

    Peak demand for electricity in the UK is about 50GW weekdays in winter after the sun has set so the solar contribution is zero (during winter our 6GW summer peak or so of grid solar provides about 1GW for a few hours on a good day thanks to long slant angles and overcast).

    Taking 1GW minimum for 24GW installed wind generation that means to meet that 50GW requirement we'd need to overbuild 24 * 50 or install 1200GW of wind turbines -- and there would still be periods of at least a few hours each year when that installation wouldn't provide enough electricity for the entire nation. To cover the very very low periods (200MW lows from today's installed base) we'd need five times that 1200MW wind turbine install.

    Nuclear, meaning modern 1GW PWRs. Modern PWRs like Sizewell B have an uptime of about 85% on average producing about 1.2GW. Some years PWRs can run 100%, sometimes they have extended outages for upgrades, inspections etc. but the modern average is around that figure. To meet that peak demand we need 50GW / 0.85 = about 60 1GW reactors.

    Since reactors are predictable generation we can do the smart thing and refuel them and carry out minor inspections and repairs during summer when demand is a lot lower and bring nearly all of the fleet online in preparation for winter's high demand. It's what we do now with our existing reactor fleet -- at the moment Hunterston B reactor 3 is down because of its graphite core problem but the three other reactors that are out of service at the moment have planned returns to generation before the middle of December.

    https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses

    Since we're in charge and not the fickle Gods of Wind then we could probably reduce the number of reactors required from 60 to 55 by scheduling downtimes efficiently and still cover the peak winter demand.

    Of course electricity demand is going to increase as electric vehicle demand goes up -- a back-of-the-envelope calculation I did suggests we'll need another 5GW of capacity to recharge 30 million battery-powered vehicles if fossil-fuel engines are eliminated from our streets although the peak demand for charging will probably be something like 10GW or more. Replacing gas-fired home heating with electric heating would add another 30-40GW of demand etc.

    815:

    Largely, yes. But his example is contrived, anyway. Sustainable forestry does NOT necessarily mean old growth forests. Coppicing worked for many centuries, is still done, and has a delay of between 20 and 80 years, depending on the details - while much of the USA is probably unsuitable for it, I believe that Californian redwoods are actually managed that way, and there are other places that could do it. Similar remarks apply about most of the European conifer forests, and in most of the tropics - which does NOT mean that most forestry is sustainable, but that it could be.

    All this has been pointed out before.

    816:

    “Coppicing ... has a delay of between 20 and 80 years,” Still way too long for the modern next-quarter-bonus-focused executive.

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