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hobbesmaster posted:pretty sure almost every car sold here in mn has a block heater. just one more thing the dealer can mark up same in sweden, at the very least north of stockholm. it's a little less common than it used to be, but on diesels it's pretty much standard everywhere though. parking spots outside apartment buildings usually have a little locked box on a post for each pair of parking spots, inside which you'll find two power outlets with simple timers, so you can pre-set the heater to turn on an hour before you're going to use the car. might be the same in the northern parts of the us, idk. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Oct 2, 2018 |
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Oct 2, 2018 03:42
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Munkeymon posted:how do they fit the timers in the box? they just make a bigger box duh in case you're actually curious, they typically look like this:   the timers are controlled by the black knobs at the bottom and are pretty much just glorified mechanical egg timers.
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Oct 2, 2018 18:30
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i don't have a car, because i don't have a driver's license, because i live in a civilized country where going everywhere by public transportation and/or bicycle is cheap and convenient. lately i've been considering getting the license tho, because sometimes i do go out in the boonies where public transportation is far less convenient, but i don't think i'll ever want to actually own a car. feeling pretty good about that.
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Oct 21, 2018 12:12
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if you implemented the swedish driving license system in the us i'm pretty sure the country would implode
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Nov 20, 2018 20:10
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getting a swedish driver's license typically costs around $1500 and the procedure goes something like this: 1. take a vision test at an optician or at certain driving schools. they test both for correctable vision errors and for field of vision. 2. fill in a health questionnaire from the transportation board. few health problems are outright disqualifying, but if you have diabetes, epilepsy, attention span problems (ADD/ADHD/autism spectrum), heart diseases, alcohol problems, etc you might need to get a doctor to fill in a form regarding how your health might impact your ability to drive safely. 3. attach the questionnaire and the vision test result to your application for a learner's permit and send it to the board of transportation. processing time is typically around 1-2 weeks. 4. if you want to practice driving outside of a licensed driving school, you need a supervisor (usually a parent or guardian) that needs to have held their own license for at least five years, the last three of which must be free from major traffic violations (speeding tickets are ok as long as they're not too serious). the supervisor must then take a 3-hour introductory course. driving alone on your learner's permit without your supervisor is illegal. 5. study theory. the standard course book is about 300 pages. fortunately it's available in translated form in most major languages and a good number of minor ones at your local public library. things that fly under "theory" include general principles of how the car works and maneuvers (e.g. how speed affects braking distance), eco-driving, traffic safety, traffic rules and regulations, and psychological factors. 6. take "risks 101", a three hour long course at a licensed driving school where they tell you that driving while drunk or tired is risky. costs anywhere between $50 and $100 depending on where you take it. 7. take "risks 102" - the fun part. this is mainly a three to four hour long practical hands-on lesson in losing traction. you do it either on a slippery surface or in a specially equipped car with "training wheels" that can be lowered to take weight off the main wheels in order to simulate poor traction. you do brake tests, you do slalom driving between cones ("moose test"), you try to take curves too fast and spin out, etc. it is very intentional that you are supposed to lose control in every situation they expose you to. there's no pass or fail criteria, it's just there to make you get the feel for what losing control is like, in a safe environment. 8. take the theory exam. 70 multiple choice questions, time limit 50 minutes, passing grade is 80%. in 2016, about 52% of all tests taken resulted in a failing grade. if you pass the theory test, you now have two months to pass the practical exam. if you don't pass the practical exam within two months you need to take the theory exam again. 9. time for the practical exam! it takes about 45 minutes; the instructor tells you where to go and you go there. highway and city driving are almost always tested. parallel parking and starting on a slope are commonly tested as well. thinking out loud is encouraged so they understand how you reason about your decisions. you can fail for driving too slow or too passively. you can actually fail for almost any reason, and in fact the passing rate is about 50%. most people need at least two tries. it costs around $120 per attempt. when you book a time for your practical exam, you can choose if you want an automatic or a manual car. if you do the exam on an automatic, your drivers license is limited to automatics and you are not legally allowed to drive a manual without re-taking the exam in a manual car. if you pass, congratulations, you have your license. for most people the entire procedure takes a few months, but there are driving schools that offer intensive courses that do it in 2-3 weeks. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Nov 20, 2018 |
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Nov 20, 2018 21:20
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fishmech posted:Cool sounds exactly like what it cost and took to get a driver's license in my state when I was a kid, except the textbook was shorter. america is bad, fishmech.
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Nov 20, 2018 21:45
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:ours had higher classroom and supervised driving time requirements than sweden as well: 30 and 8 hours, respectively oh yeah I forgot to say, you can get your learner's permit at 16 and your license at 18, similar to everywhere else. only the risk courses are mandatory as far as lessons go, both practicing driving and studying theory is completely up to you if you want to do yourself or at a driving school. you can take the exams whenever you like. probably contributes a bit to the relatively high fail rates for the exams - self-studying people probably don't know when they're ready.
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Nov 20, 2018 22:09
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evil_bunnY posted:Yeah. Also mandatory re-testing because holy poo poo old people need to get forcibly removed from the driving population. Doctors are legally required to report any issues that might impact your ability to drive safely, but there's currently no mandatory re-testing based on age. It's been debated, but statistically speaking the elderly are quite safe drivers here - they tend to know their limitations and unlike in the US they don't need to choose between driving and never leaving their home, so they tend to stop driving volountarily once they start feeling insecure about it. Young men are by far the most dangerous group on the roads, here like everywhere else.
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Nov 21, 2018 16:40
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H.P. Hovercraft posted:ghost ride
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Apr 3, 2019 00:24
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https://futurism.com/pepsi-orbital-billboard-night-skyquote:A Russian company called StartRocket says it’s going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an “orbital billboard,” projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations. And its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo — which will use the system to promote a “campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers” on behalf of an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush. this is the future that spacex wants
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Apr 13, 2019 18:44
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cross-posting from the c-spam thread (via forums poster gschmidl)IFO Institute Center for Economic Studies posted:ifo Schnelldienst: Electric Vehicles are not a Panacea for Climate Change Full study (PDF, in German) e: my German is pretty terrible but as far as I can tell from skimming the PDF, this result is in large part because 52% of the the German electrical power generation is fossil in origin. 22.7% comes from lignite which is particularly terrible as far as CO2 emissions go. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Apr 22, 2019 |
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Apr 22, 2019 11:26
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fukushima has been deeply traumatic for the region though, lots of actual problems associated with it, but most of them are, uh, psychosomatic, so to speak. lots of businesses having problems because people avoid goods from fukushima, some cases of outright discrimination against people from there, and of course of plain old psychological problems like depression and anxiety and the associated elevated suicide rate. not saying this is a rational reason to avoid nuclear power, but these issues are real and they are not a problem that technology can solve, much like many other social issues.
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Apr 22, 2019 22:01
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crazy eyes mustafa posted:haha hell yeah give me a non zero chance of making the place where I live uninhabitable for generations, and please make it susceptible to human loving error right now it's kinda looking like it's either that or make the entire planet uninhabitable for generations
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Apr 22, 2019 22:07
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President Beep posted:dr. ron paul https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmYMzxA_U-c
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Apr 22, 2019 23:13
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Moist von Lipwig posted:is there even any net gain on EVs if the charging comes from poo poo sources like coal? I could see transmission loss wiping it out entirely or even making it a net negative. there was a german study i linked a few pages back (which in fact kinda kicked off this whole nuclear derail) which found that with the german mix of electricity production (~50% comes from fossil fuels) a battery electric vehicle was significantly worse when it came to CO2 emissions than a modern diesel powered vehicle
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Apr 23, 2019 21:32
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you know what has nice electric drivetrains? actual trains. https://youtu.be/tJNqpcsvlqI 1500 amps yo this is old and busted 1960's dc stuff tho TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:38 on May 14, 2019 |
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May 14, 2019 18:33
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Sagebrush posted:I mean that is literally what Tesla's marketing materials say, if I recall correctly. Something along the lines of "by purchasing full self-driving capability your car comes with all the hardware that is needed and will receive it in a future software update" i'm waiting for this guy to lose his toxx. only 7 years to go then there's also this poo poo (from early 2016) on the left posted:You are 100% wrong on this. I have talked with product planners from the Big 3 US Automakers and they all plan on having a high-end self-driving car for 2020, and expect the technology to be throughout their product lines by 2025.
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Jun 20, 2019 20:36
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evil_bunnY posted:One of my fav keepsakes is an ancient wheelio widget you roll on a map and it tells you the distance and whatever scale with a watch-like dial and hand. I have one of those in the boat, it's easier to use for estimating a distance through an archipelago than trying to plot out a route with waypoints on the GPS we use the gps for basically all navigation ofc but the paper charts are still v nice for planning and a bigger picture look. can't exactly get an A2 sized screen in the boat.
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Oct 28, 2019 23:59
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ryde posted:I think there's also an underlying assumption that there's a lot of untapped demand for very heavy lift and if you make it reasonably affordable with something like Starship you'll see the demand come. But it could also very well be that no-one is really interested in putting very large objects in space outside of various science projects and thus the demand will remain weak. i'm pretty dang sure the reason that they're going so hard on starlink is exactly because there isn't any external demand for more launches, so they need to make up a growth market to tell their investors about. merely being a profitable company with a great product and the majority of the market share is absolutely unacceptable in 2019 - number must go up exponentially or you're trash bazingas in the space thread in sal think cheap satellite launches will be an industrial revolution enabler on par with the steam engine though. i really don't see it, there's not a whole lot of interesting stuff you can do with cheap sats really. it's basically communications, photos/surveying and science. there are also many barriers to entry other than the launch price. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Oct 31, 2019 |
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Oct 31, 2019 23:35
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2018 was the first year since 1990 that had more than 100 launches, but 2019 has only had 75 so far and there are only maybe a dozen more scheduled to definitely launch this year. not a growth market, of course, but spacex must make it appear that it is
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Oct 31, 2019 23:41
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Shipon posted:ok to be fair the mandatory front plate law is bullshit and they should get rid of it but yeah tesla drivers I can't help but bite. what on earth is this about? what is the deal with front license plates? is this some kind of American freedoms thing? front license plates are standard just about everywhere I can think of.
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Nov 3, 2019 16:19
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lots of regulatory fuckery around starlink: https://www.plainsite.org/dockets/4...or-the-spacex-/ if you can't just ignore the regulatory framework, just file for permission but then keep spamming amendments to it a rate the legal wranglers can't keep up with and just obstruct your way what you want. innovation! (below: EPFD = equivalent power flux density) quote:The original license granted for the SpaceX NGSO system specified that: like, what the gently caress is this bullshit then it also turns out that the original license was granted on the basis that risk of the starlink sats colliding with other sats was effectively zero (because they could maneuver, see, and the failure rate was totally going to be 1% or less), but in the first tranche the actual failure rate is more like 10-15%, lmao
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Nov 6, 2019 18:20
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Combat Theory posted:There is a non zero chance one of the countless certificates required to tool up for producing some loving dangerous stuff in Germany is given out by somebody I know and regardless who it is gonna be of those people that thought makes me immensely happy. lol all problems will be disappeared and the process smoothed out, because musk's dick must be sucked: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-11-13/elon-musk-s-german-factory-started-with-love-letter-from-berlin quote:The government in Brandenburg, one of five federal states in the former communist east, also lobbied hard to win over Musk, offering at least 100 million euros in aid. The state’s negotiators kept up the pressure in the past months, touting Brandenburg’s proximity to Berlin, its skilled labor force and an abundance of clean-energy plants, Premier Dietmar Woidke said. nothing matters, there's a legion of people in power just tripping over themselves in their eagerness to give musk money and cover up for him. just give him 100m € and "smooth out" the ever so stifling and bureaucratic regulations that's hurting innovation, nbd will someone start a loving nuclear war already, gently caress TheFluff fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Nov 14, 2019 |
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Nov 14, 2019 00:51
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lmao if you think the unions can do anything either, if they try there's going to be anti-union legislation introduced stat. this has already started happening in Sweden dehumanize yourself and face to neoliberalism
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Nov 14, 2019 00:58
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spankmeister posted:I'm happy that I live in a major population center so that when the bombs fall I get instantly vaporized. #blessed
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Nov 14, 2019 00:59
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Oh it's dumber than that. The launch permit was given with the condition that the collision risk with other sats was zero. This is actually a normal assumption for satellites with orbital maneuvering capability, for obvious reasons. Normal sats are built to be very reliable though because it's so loving expensive to replace them, but starlink, uh, isn't. Even the first tranche of 60 sats already has something like a 15% failure rate on maneuvering after mere months. There's a whole bunch of other sat operators petitioning the FCC to block further starlink launches for precisely this reason
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Nov 20, 2019 12:42
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the powerwall 2 has some pretty amazing secfucks in it it exposes a management web gui over wifi. the wifi password is trivial to guess based on the ssid (which is broadcasted, of course) and it's not possible to change it, nor to turn off the wifi once you connect to wifi you can gently caress with the power metering in software to do all sorts of shenanigans; in fact it seems really easy to destroy/set fire to the unit 
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Nov 23, 2019 06:11
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Lutha Mahtin posted:There are some companies in the icebox regions of northern Minnesota that have purpose-built tracks and cold chambers to test cars in extreme cold. A bunch of automakers, from all over the world, go up there every winter to test new models of their cars. There's a bunch of these places in northern Scandinavia too, small towns that double in population when a few thousand German engineers fly in every winter
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Nov 25, 2019 09:14
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There are people who have done this laser in space data link poo poo already, but the only operational thing I know of is the ESA's, where they have earth observation sats in low orbit send data up to a geostationary relay via laser which is then downlinked to the ground via regular radio. This is fairly recent, like 2016 I think? Not bazinga enough to get excited about at any rate, just boring useful scientific data
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Nov 26, 2019 00:34
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evil_bunnY posted:It doesn't e: https://www.transportstyrelsen.se/sv/vagtrafik/Korkort/forlorat-korkort/aterkallat/ point 4 TheFluff fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Dec 9, 2019 |
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Dec 9, 2019 11:44
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hobbesmaster posted:how has that account not be locked/purged/whatever yet as far as I can tell it's a very consistent social media strategy on the part of treasurer torsella, appeals to millennials and all that. seems like he's skeptical of "tech" in general as well e: https://www.inquirer.com/business/pennsylvania-treasurer-joe-torsella-tweets-twitter-20190824.html TheFluff fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Jan 15, 2020 |
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Jan 15, 2020 18:49
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it's kind of amazing to see bazingas being all enthusiastic about musk crashing rockets over and over here on earth as some sort of progress, while jpl does powered descents on loving mars with hardware that was impossible to test here on earth and gets it right the first time, twice like, jpl even gets us better video quality from mars with commodity hardware than musk gets from his loving rockets here on earth, lmao like, the spaceflight thread has already moved on from perseverance and is going to be back jerking off to starship crashes again in a few days. wow we're ~living in the future~ when there's a falcon 9 floating in the sea, amazing TheFluff fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Feb 23, 2021 |
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Feb 23, 2021 20:34
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is that pipedream guy aware that pneumatic tube systems have been around since the 1850's 
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Feb 24, 2021 16:11
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meanwhile in south korea they've fired up six new reactors in the last decade and have another four under construction. the older gen II designs they built in the early 2010's took about five years from construction start to commercial operation. the new gen III ones have taken a bit longer to build, about 8 years it seems. it's absolutely feasible to build new nuclear plants, you just can't rely on ~the market~ to solve climate change. not all countries have convenient deserts to fill with solar either.FMguru posted:look up the current state of the reactors being built in finland (olkiluoto 3) and the uk (hinckley point c). both of these - as well as flamanville 3 in france, also massively delayed - are the same french reactor design, EPR, which for some reason has been an absolute trash fire. gen III reactors don't have to be trash fires though, see e.g. the korean APR-1400. the russians also have a whole bunch of various improved gen III/III+ VVER's that they're building all over the place. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Mar 9, 2021 |
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Mar 9, 2021 02:09
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Chalks posted:if you're building a new nuclear power station it should be because there's no feasible way to generate enough renewable energy and that's not really a thing. it is absolutely a thing. renewables require a lot of land use, especially if you're going to rely exclusively on them. i live in sweden. we have a lot of hydro power here, as in we've used most of the suitable rivers for it (leaving only four major ones for environmental conservation) and quite a bit of wind. solar is not a thing for anything other than domestic installations, because it's quite common that things are like they were last year and we get situations like single digits of sunlight hours for the entire month of november in most of the country. yes solar still does generate power even when it's cloudy but you'd need such comical amounts of it that it becomes completely impractical. things like batteries and pumped hydro are functionally incapable of mitigating issues like that. still, we've had almost completely fossil free power generation for like 40 years already, and nuclear has been a decent chunk of it. the mix in 2020 was 45% hydro, 30% nuclear, 17% wind and 4% recycled waste heat of various kinds (about half from various industrial processes and the rest from district heating, which usually burns either trash or wood pellets). recently though we've had to start occasionally importing power from coal plants in germany and poland because we don't have enough HVDC from the north (where the hydro is) to the south of the country (such links would be approaching 2000 km long and even if they existed we'd start to have capacity problems soon), and we've started closing nuclear reactors. we don't have tides here, and wave generators aren't really mature enough for large scale deployment yet. there's more wind generators being built everywhere but increasingly out to sea because especially in the southern parts of the country land use is starting to become an issue. even if we did add absolutely absurd amounts of wind there can still be extended periods of low wind speeds and storage can only take us so far. so, although nuclear has been essentially dead since a 1980 referendum that resulted in a decision to keep the reactors that existed at the time but not replace them, the politics have shifted to start reconsidering that option again. exploiting those last four untouched rivers is technically an option but destroying huge nature preserves until the next ice age doesn't exactly seem appealing. and this is the situation in one of the lowest population densities in europe. it's really not that weird that very densely populated countries like japan and south korea have as much nuclear as they do. land use will also become even more of an issue as sea levels rise. if you think "just add more solar" then you are suffering from california brain. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Mar 9, 2021 |
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Mar 9, 2021 14:19
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Chalks posted:sorry, i was being flippant. i do support the idea of nuclear power in principal, it's sure as hell a lot better than fossil fuels and should absolutely be used when there's a shortfall of renewables that can't be plugged in the same timeframe - but the timeframe for getting a new nuclear plant online is decades and i'm not sure there are a lot of situations where that can be said. specifically about new power plants, shutting down existing ones while there are any fossil fuel plants running is criminal. it can take decades if you start with a new and unproven reactor design and especially if you have previously let reactor development knowledge wither for decades (or just lost all institutional knowledge in a confusing soup of corporate mergers and spinoffs, see westinghouse). all the european examples of hugely delayed new construction reactors are the same french reactor design (EPR) which has had to be significantly reworked while construction has been in progress. i'm not familiar enough with it to say exactly why it's been such a f-35 scale development disaster, but as i mentioned on the previous page modern reactors don't have to be this way. the south koreans are selling their new APR-1400 design on the open market and so far it has pretty consistently taken 8 years from construction start to commercial operation for the units built. these are proven technology, plain old PWR's, no molten salts or supercritical water or gas coolant or whatever, but with incremental improvements. or if you can stomach the russians they too have modernized versions of their VVER's for sale, and the timeline there looks to be a bit shy of 10 years. i'm sure china will have offerings soon as well if they don't already. it's absolutely possible to just buy these things off the shelf, you don't have to go off and develop a whole new design for prestige points. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Mar 9, 2021 |
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Mar 9, 2021 18:42
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Russian nuclear safety is... something, to be sure, and especially on the military side - this report was posted in the Cold War thread in TFR the other day and they've, uuuuh, "lost" more than a few submarine reactors, so to speak. As in, the report is from back in the 90's and lists over 50 major Soviet/Russian submarine incidents or accidents. It's some wack rear end poo poo. But even they, with their godawful track record and while operating a bunch of the fundamentally unsafe RBMK reactors even to this day, they haven't really had any major incidents on the civilian power generation side since '86.
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Mar 9, 2021 23:39
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https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1374515499472613381 saw this and thought "this is exactly the opposite of what tesla is doing"
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Mar 25, 2021 10:35
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ask jpl how they managed to do a powered landing first try on another planet but no tho, blowing up prototypes is necessary in order how to learn things you see
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Mar 31, 2021 16:02
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spankmeister posted:I hope the pandemic brought this race to the bottom wrt airline pricing to an end. The train should be significantly cheaper than flying.  one of the most bizarrely idiotic things about air travel is that it's illegal - by international convention, so basically everywhere in the world - to tax aviation fuel that is used for international flights. this has been the case since 1944.
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Apr 7, 2021 02:32
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