Fun fact: most gasoline car fires are started by electrical issues. Mechanical fuel pumps died out with the carburetor, just about every car made has hot wires going to the gas tank. The conflagration is completely fueled by gasoline though. Diesel is pretty hard to ignite, you can toss a burning match into a pool of diesel and the match will go out. But once ignited it’ll burn like a champ.
Thermodynamics question: do you think it is more or less efficient to burn coal or natural gas, use that heat to boil water to turn a turbine, generate enough of a surplus to avoid brownouts and blackouts, transmit that power over long distance, radiating energy the entire way and losing more at every transformer power station eventually using energy to boil a pot of water…
Or to burn gas to boil a pot of water directly.
I own stock of energy producers and transporters in my 401k, so I’m extremely glad those in power get this question wrong. But I also know that wrongness has a cost.
And before you say “solar” please realize capacity does not equal production. Germany is on the forefront of renewable energy, and generates 10.4% of power from solar compared to 20.1% from lignite, the dirtiest possible coal. Hard coal, natural gas and lignite add up to 11.3 + 13.3 + 20.1 = 44.6%. United states has solar at 3.93% of our energy mix, with 37.82% generated from natural gas.
Google has turned evil. Back to Microsoft, everyone!
I used to specifically not want A/C in my cars back in the 90s living in Denver. It was never hot enough to need it. In the past years I’ve spent quite a few days sitting in stopped traffic in my open Jeep with the thermometer reading 104-107F. Once was behind an uncovered manure truck. Good times, good times.
Where I live now (further north from CO) there’s a massive junk yard with thousands of snowmobiles. Apparently my current area used to be a mecca for snowmobiling in the 70s and 80s, with 1500 miles of snowmobile trails. It snows maybe 3 times a year now, average of 10 inches total per season. Neighbors all around me have every kind of motor toy imaginable, but I have not seen a single snowmobile. My snowblower hasn’t been seen use in over 4 years, and the city routinely forgets how to plow or sand streets.
Weather definitely got hotter year round over 3-4 decades. I’ll fight fellow Gen-X and boomers over this.
No, air conditioning is rare in Europe. Pretty much only hotels have it, and by far not all hotels. About 5% of private residences have A/C, even in southern regions of France, Spain and Italy.
Source: Wikipedia, and my kid that went to Italy and Greece and Germany for the previous few summers worth of heat waves.
Edit: Formal, government supplied cooling centers are a CA thing. Informal ones like shopping centers are more widespread in the U.S., but don’t really exist in Europe.
I’m also feeling more quality over quantity, as in the earlier days of Reddit. Ditto on broadening of interests, and more scrolling.
Perhaps that’s not all a good thing, but I’m rolling with it.
I jumped the gun and simply deleted my account, but this is 1337% more genius. Having the script pull from Bullshit Ipsum to edit years of linked and quoted posts would have been perfect.
Ask 3 Linux users and you’ll get 5 dissenting opinions. Mine is that KDE Plasma is very simple out of the box and more familiar to Windows users. A previous Windows user can use it without any kind of deep learning. Gnome is a bit more alien, borrows a bit more from OSX, and does force its workflow on the user more.
KDE also offers an insane amount of easy customization for those of us with a desire to tweak or enjoy a different aesthetic or workflow. The built-in shop for widgets, wallpapers, themes, cursors, etc makes that very accessible to anyone. Gnome customization requires a lot more command line and editing of configs.
HOAs can be absolutely awful, with power tripping board members and management companies that steal collected funds. But if you want to live in a manicured, upscale, gentrified suburb that’s the best way to get ahead of crappification, salvage grade cars on blocks in the yard, appliances on the porch and meth houses.
Me, I’d rather a large buffer of land between me and my neighbors. I do realize those with commuter jobs can’t practically get tens of acres to live on, however.
Both li-ion and lithium polymer batteries still have many kilograms of lithium. A lithium-ion battery pack for a single electric car contains about 8 kilograms (kg) of lithium, according to figures from US Department of Energy science and engineering research centre Argonne National Laboratory. It may be a small percentage of the total battery pack and coolant weight, but it’s still a lot of extremely explosive metal.