To each their own. I prefer having the ability to adjust things from 1 central source. I’m prone to losing remotes.
Also, how would you do such a remote. You would also need a screen for feedback etc, which puts you back at square 1.
Also, a remote would be considerably more expensive than the extra cost of a ZigBee/Wifi enabled microcontroller.
I’m a fan of both, but fully accept that fission is now too late to be useful. We also have fusion right on the tipping point of viability. That could likely fill the use cases of fusion quite well, with far less issues.
FYI, nuclear produces 3 sorts of nuclear waste. High activity is nasty, but short lived. Put it in a pool for a few years and it decays away. Low grade is the stuff like lab waste and contaminated pipes. You don’t really want it going in normal landfill, but it’s not going to kill anyone with radiation (heavy metal toxicity is another matter). It’s only the last type, medium activity that is problematic. It lasts a long time, while still putting out enough radiation to cause potential problems. Unfortunately, older “power” plants, were actually bomb factories. They were intended to make plutonium, and so produce a lot more of the medium activity waste than they could.
The ability to play with it, without having to fiddle with tiny switches is a big feature to many. Often these are used by people with mobility issues. The ability to add an extra feed, due to exercise, or adjust the timings to account for changes in life plans are a godsend to many.
Smart home devices are a balancing act. The extra control means more can also go wrong. Minimising that is a big part. The most critical is making it behave sanely when it suddenly goes offline. E.g. smart light switches become dumb ones, when the central hub goes down.
More a replacement brain for an EV. Compared to an ICE there is far less to manage in a hyper time critical manner. It’s a lot more viable to design a drop in replacement. Particularly if the battery bank already has its own monitoring, that just reports upwards.
You would end up with a modern EV, with many of the desired features. However, the manufacturer would no longer be able to reach in and extract data, either remotely, at a mechanic, or after an accident.
I’m hoping that someone does some reverse engineering on the engine management computers of EVs. EVs internals are a lot simpler. An open source, drop in brain is definitely not unachievable.
All the advantages of an EV with none of the corporate tracking.
They need to convince the people living there to actually vote for them. MPs areas are generally small enough that a local grass roots campaign can counter someone just pouring money in.
While the UK does have political parties, there is less blind party voting than the US seems to have.
He has a certain charisma to a subset of people. It’s a similar effect as trump in the US, only to a smaller subset of idiots.
The things he claims don’t hold up to scrutiny, but that doesn’t matter to some. They just hear the surface promises, and don’t think deeper.
If you want to get extremely pedantic, “Queens English” was defined as the reference. The rich toffs of the British empire got annoyed at their servants having various accents, and either being hard to understand, or mishearing them.
In this case however, it was meant as a local accent, so none noticeable.
Ignorance, rather than stupidity. In many ways it’s worse. Stupidity can at best be outgrown with time. Ignorance is, in the modern world, a choice.
I had a friend who worked at a wine shop. He was also 1/4 french, though with no accent at all.
Some other friends went in to see him at work. They found it hilarious that he had this excessive french accent. It turned out he did it as a joke 6 months before, and got a good reaction from customers. His subconscious apparently ran with this, without his notice. The more he racked it up, the better the customers respected his opinions on wine. He was, however, completely unaware he was doing it!
As a counter example, I remember listening to a radio interview with a woman who accidentally joined a boxing gym, and decided to roll with it. Even after 3 years training, it apparently took new men about 6 weeks to blast past her in strength.
And jumping back to my earlier comment. Societies tend to amplify differences. Men are stronger, so are expected to do jobs requiring strength. This, in turn leads to stronger men, reinforcing the stereotype.
In short, there’s not much baseline difference between men and women. There are however differences. Societies and cultures often amplify them, particularly when it improves division of labour. In an agrarian society they might not be able to afford the split, so the situation you read about plays out. Men can’t afford to powerhouse, while women need to pick up significant physical labour.
It’s also an unfortunate fact that testosterone makes it a LOT easier to put on muscle mass. A good chunk of men don’t take advantage of it, but the biology still holds. It’s also worth noting that men are on average taller than women. Our volume of muscle is often bigger to start with.
My wife does quite a bit more strength based exercise than I do. The force multiplier on my exercise however means I can easily out power her, when it comes to brute strength.
It’s worth noting however that a lot of the initial strength gain of exercise isn’t muscle increase, but better control. Both men and women can increase this, fairly evenly. The difference tells most once that caps out.
The 2 often feed off each other too. E.g. men are slightly stronger than women, on average. Men are then expected to take on the strong protector role, while women are expected to act weak and subservient. This amplifies the original slight difference massively, reinforcing the social stereotype.
Women seem to have a preference for cooperation, with their ranking within the group mattering most. Men seem to err towards intergroup competition, where your teams ranking matters most. These necessitate different types of social skills, which feeds the stereotype, which feeds the original difference.
As I read it, it basically comes off as the author being grumpy that it’s harder to sponge off people who drink less, or slower.
I will do reciprocal drink buying, but hate formalising into “rounds”. My drinking rate can vary wildly. I don’t want to be forced to drink faster, to keep up with others.
Gen Z is the most financially squeezed age group in my memory. The fact they want to be more discerning in how much they drink and pay makes complete sense.
It’s also worth noting that contactless card machines also remove a major bottleneck in going to the bar.
The ground has been dried out. It doesn’t happen often.
Also humidity is relative. Hot air holds a lot more water. The same amount of water will have a lower humidity, for a higher temperature.
For those confused. The training tried to say that autistic people were more likely to be socially isolated. That then makes them more likely to be “befriended” into extremism.
It was akin to saying “black people commit more petty crimes”. While technically true (poor people commit more petty crimes, and a disproportionate number of blacks are poorer), it runs roughshod over the people it’s trying to protect/help.
It’s worth noting that this is talking about plug in solar, so would be at standard mains voltage.
1kw would be around 4A in Europe, but 8A in the USA. Also, since resistive losses scale with I^2 that’s 4x the heat dumped in the walls.
At least in the UK, they tend to run 3 phase to a road, but only a single phase goes into a given house. You need to get a special hook up to get 3 phase to a domestic premise, and they don’t like doing it.
I had a chat about this with a friend who works for the national grid (UK).
Apparently the problem is keeping the grid balanced and stable. Basically, the grid struggles to react fast, so they plan ahead. Things like large scale solar can provide predictions on output. Home solar can’t.
When clouds pass over an area it can cause slumps and surges in the local grid. The more home solar, the worse it gets. The current grid is designed to work top down, with predictable changes in demand. It needs upgrading to deal with large scale bidirectional flows.
The plug in units are (potentially) even more ropey. If used properly, they are no worse than normal home solar. Unfortunately, being cheaper, there are worries over the microinverters not shutting down. Either due to the manufacturer cheaping out, or turning on an “off grid” mode.
There are also worries about overloading household circuits. Back feeding bypasses the household circuit breakers and RCDs. They could overload wall wiring and cause fires, or stop an RCD tripping, allowing for a person to be shocked.
I don’t know how much this would apply to the American Grid, but I would imagine it would be worse. Your grid is older and larger. You also use 120VAC which makes the current overload issue a lot worse.
I fully agree. The only thing to add is that a lot of the economic issues are due to the type of reactors used. The new designs could be a lot more economical. Unfortunately they get buried under the same red tape as the old bomb factory designs.
I suspect we won’t see a lot of them used until after fusion power renders them redundant.
It’s worth noting that I think both should exist.
Agreed, I just want a ZigBee endpoint as well.
As for the smart home stuff, I already have it in place, so it’s no additional expense.
Control wise, your method would be fine for someone techie and motivated. It would annoy the hell out of some non techies, particularly if they had vision issues (think OAP). It would also close down the option of relatives helping out by monitoring it remotely.
As I said, different target audiences. Both have their places. I just wish the smart option did its job properly, rather than the half baked options we keep getting.