In Scandinavia, it is 3-phases all the way baby - at least to the fuse board. Some household induction cookers take 3-phase feeds too. If it's single phase, it's ancient or some wooden shack in the forest with its own 6kV/0,4 oil-can transformer.
This Causing endless frustration in my latest job, because the lead engineers were american and they insisted on refusing local reality and doing it the American way, by distributing single phase power to each bunch of racks. The standard "here" is a "3-phase feed and using a socket strip pre-made for exactly that purpose, which distributes the load onto the phases".
So,compromise is made, we got a Power Distribution Unit, a fuse box, in each rack. Which let the Brits in with their fetish about pre-fusing all the equipment fuses! Jesus Wept!!!
]]>The building contractors favorite move.
It's so universal that there could be a common source. Maybe the dark arts are "infused" by some ancient rituals, their true purpose long forgotten, being performed by the secret builders society where they also allocate contracts and fix the prices?
I'd imagine that actual demons would very good at crafting an interminable contract that always costs more, while giving the impression that the whole thing is just a quick one-off job.
However, home renovation projects and contractors are all what earth can bear of such phenomena, so the demons stick to their sphere. Maximising the extraction of human suffering.
]]>Maybe you are joking here, but, the CODEC's used for GSM works exactly like this: By assuming that your speech can be produced by a model equipped with two tunable resonances, one fixed resonance, and an exponential function driving it.
The sending end uses an algorithm, Kalmar Filter, f.ex., to fit this very crude model to produce an output that matches your local audio signal. Then it sends only the filter- and impulse- configurations to the receiver, and your voice is resurrected by the model.
It can get down to a datarate of about 3.5 kbit/ second, and still work well enough to sound like the person you know.
I find it somewhat spooky that in reality there is no actual connection between myself and the person I am talking to, I am just talking to a numeric model that becomes the person for the occasion. If one tuned the parameters slightly, one could become an entirely different person over the phone.
So, what if one could build a somewhat bigger numerical model, still continually tuned with some algorithm?
It could cover more "scope", surely.
And, maybe that model could represent me well enough to make the other parties believe in my existence / presence? Whenever I am not there, the model could be "me" well enough.
With Elon Musks money, there could be an exact digital model tasked with being an arsehole on Twitter, thus freeing up much quality time to harass employees "in the flesh".
]]>"Nun bist alles in die hosen gelaufen!"
and
"Message from: SYSTEM, I have upped my priority, now up yours!"
]]>Paraphrasing Tuco (("The Ugly"): "If your gonna murder someone, murder someone. Don't spend years reading a book to figure your reasoning for it".
]]>Same ways as They deal with a wayward teenager: Have some wannabe "Meal Team 6" goons kidnap them and put them in a bootcamp for nine months.
]]>It probably depends on climate, personal sensibilities and such, but: What I do is hang my running clothes outside to dry out after each run. In my opinion, it only gets smelly after about 10 runs, which is almost 4 weeks of "use". Then I will wash it. In my experience, it is leaving the sweaty clothes in a pile, or stuffing it all into the laundry basket, that makes it go moldy and (permanently!), smelly.
Also, many synthetic fabrics are much "smellier" than wool or cotton. I use mostly merino clothing because it is damn chilly most of the year here. The sweat evaporates right through that fabric so I don't get cold even when using only two thin layers. Some of the wool stuff (gloves, the tube thing for the neck, beanie, outer shell), can go for months before getting smelly.
The shell-type / membrane stuff is better off not washed if at all possible, it will keep looking pristine a lot longer if one simply let it dry and brush off the worst dirt, and maybe rinse it under the shower. The grandkids parents does that for the kiddies "performance clothes" and it works. The clothes looks new until it is grown out off or worn through. It pays, it is 150 EUR of clothing per child!
]]>Another interesting thing is that the Chinese emperor did not agree with having the telegraph line running through China, so GNT send a gunship to China and worked with Chinese river pirates to protect the installation.
Then they set up secret offices where Chinese traders could use the telegraph to front-run the Markets. The rich people saw the utility of the telegraph and the emperor then kept himself out of it.
https://atlantic-cable.com/CableCos/GreatNorthern/
The full story is in an old, six-volume, technologogical encyclopedia edited, I think, by Paul Bergsøe (It is lost in a removal crate somewhere in my new house).
I remember the story for it's enthusiasm about the project and for all the skullduggery involved; a bit of piracy is always good when one is on the pirating side :).
]]>I worked with radar about 15 years back and the company had a SAR, it was basically 2 half-height 19" racks that could be fitted on a plane, and it needed some post-processing.
But, the resolution on that machine was incredible.
One could see where a car had been parked "earlier" because the heat from the engine caused the tarmac to expand just enough to reflect the microwaves differently, one could very clearly see footpaths in vegetation on land, one could see enough to have a good guess of what kind of oil was spilled on water.
The resolution goes up with the length of the antenna, which is length of the path the antenna moved while recording. It goes down with position inaccuracies. The noise kinda cancel out because it is random.
Anyways, with the CPU power we have right now*) and cheap GPS, the whole system is probably in the format of a small suitcase and the imagery one get will be more less realtime. With the caveat that to get the full resolution, one has to complete an entire sweep of "antenna length".
For a low orbit survellance sattelite SAR, that will be about 20 minutes for a sweep across Ukraine. If anything disturbed anything in the taget area, sattelite based SAR will probably see it!
*) People build these machines in their garages now, just to play with. Next they will be putting them on drones.
]]>The fast decays of the nasty stuff like Sr-90 can be overcome by having plenty of it to start with. Decay is exponential, so some will be left for very long time. If only a few milligrams are enough to poison, I think "enough" will still be there.
My guess is that thousands of tonnes of mixed radioactive crap ejected from the Chernobyl reactor explosion was simply disposed off with the usual care and consideration that the USSR employed about everything else in general: Dumped somewhere in a trench, covered with dirt, no good records kept as a matter of principle. Because records gets people shot ín the USSR.
Diggers and dumper drivers are then dispersed to important new tasks in many different places far away, nobody hears that they all died "too soon", and the manager of the operation does get a bad cluster in their HR-statistics (and get shot).
Decades later a new bunch of suckers arrive to dig trenches in a perfectly chosen spot where the soil is nice and soft. They are huffing in all that pesky dust, making some open fires with radioactive wood, and maybe a lucky few finds "heating rocks" they can stick in their sleeping bags to warm their feet with?
Soldiers who know better and maybe questions any part of the operation, they get put down in records as a gobby, to be shot later when a boost to motivation and a display of leadership is required.
]]>Which, IMO, is indeed one of the reasons why there is barely any concept of fraud in neo-classical economics. Those Harward bastards carefully designed the whole edifice for looting and fraud and created a religion around it, so everyone thinks that "Let The Market Decide" is the best possible theory and what everyone should aspire to follow - Bis Zum Endsiehg!
Anyways, all about 2008, and why we are still fucked because everything that was shit then has been lovinigly preserved, is explained better in:
"Econned How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism" by "Yves Smith" https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Econned-by-Yves-Smith/9780230114562
) There is *some hand-wringing where it is assumed that "Markets" and "Market Actors" will, "because efficientcy", police and clean themselves up. However, Fraud and Looting, delivering Nothing for Something or straight-up stealing, will always be more "Efficient" than the something for something else that a normal business would follow.
**) The other reason is that having fraud as a concept will mean there are limits to Markets and make the all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-perfect Market impure. It would be like the pope saying there are just some things that God cannot do.
]]>However, the evolutionary pressure in western society is for Covid-19 is to move away from something acute & dramatic, that will require our "leaders" to do something effective to limit transmission, and towards something less acute, but possibly more chronic, where our dear leaders can transmute the chronic elements of the disease into the very popular mold of "Personal Choice and Iresponsible Behaviour".
Which means that they don't have to do anything but "let it rip": Those neo-liberal ghouls "in charge" can obviously afford to lose 0.2% p/a of the "ressources" a lot better than they can afford fixing basic stuff that benefits all, like ventilation systems!
There are lots of troubling research about brain problems, cardiovascular stuff, endocrine system issues, et cetera, coming out. All this will be "communicated" away once it begins to hit the official statistics. We are so screwed.
]]>I've probably still got the manual that tells how to make them - what chemical solution to soak the newspaper in - around here somewhere?
Some kind of oxidiser should work, maybe Potassium Permanganate?
]]>Nobody wealthy actually cares about money.
Instead they do care a lot about one thing that money cannot buy for them: Time. That is why they never go to prison, they simply cannot afford it. It is literally cheaper for them to pay off entire countries to make the laws and legal systems so that they don't have to go to jail!
The key concern with the drugs is keeping the wrong sort from entering the billionaire set with the money they made from the drugs trade.
]]>My current TBTF-place of employment is organised exactly like that.
This "competion" is totally a great thing, if one does not give a shit about anything else than Paycheck:
Because they have no budget, our "internal suppliers" are a lot more busy with robbing the "Work Packages / Projects" blind (project managers have budgets, so they are cash pinatas), than they are with delivering the actual work.
In return, the projects can easily document & blame their over-spending and under-delivering on the "internal suppliers", while managers can send contracts to their mates for holding "working together" seminars so we don't kill each other.
I used to think Ericsson was dysfunctional, but, I found that it is possible to add an exponent to that!
]]>