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Comment Quality control (Score 1) 27

police officers will then be able to review the document to ensure accuracy

Yeah. Like that's going to get done correctly.

My only experience with a red light camera involved the local police sending me a ticket for running a light in a late model car. In spite of the fact that the vehicle description based on the plate number was my 45 year-old FJ40. Not even close. They mistakenly entered a 'Q' instead of an 'O' and never even bothered to look at the DMV record their system retrieved.

Fixed with a phone call. But other stuff will undoubtedly slip through.

Comment Re:How much is really delayed maintenance? (Score 1) 51

The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..

Comment Vast improvement on status quo (Score 1) 27

If you actually follow up the countless video channels that document police work, you'll find a common trend of police reports being "what police officer remembered happened" are often wrong on details. Sometimes diametrically opposite of reality, as documented by officer's own body camera footage. Human perception at a time of crisis is a weird thing, and so is what it chooses to put into long term memory and what is forgotten. An issue well documented in psychology and criminology.

Automated speech recognition that generates facts-based report template for the officer to file may actually be a part of a solution to the problem of human condition in relationship to fair policing. As it will serve as a good refresher and reminder of what actually happened.

Comment Re:No big deal (Score 1) 316

Motte and bailey fallacy spotted. The starting argument was (not made by you but argued for by you):

>We need sodium batteries for grid storage.

When I challenged that specific point, you decided to make a stronger argument than even the person who opened with the claim:

>but batteries now make sense for at least part of the solution

And when challenged on that, you decided to retreat from indefensible position you yourself chose to retreat to a completely different much more defensible motte positions in points 1 and 2, and then making another attempt to push out for the indefensible bailey again in the point 3. 1. being "but there were major revolutions in the past" (true but irrelevant to the point argued), that "other chemistries that are unsuitable for large scale grid deployment for variety of reasons got cheaper" (again true but irrelevant for the point being argued) and finally "they can work, you just need magical engineering and things that don't exist, but I'll claim do anyway because EVs are also magical" (push back out to the bailey with prima facie absurd claims about magical engineering that doesn't exist, but should exist because you said so).

Comment Re:How much is really delayed maintenance? (Score -1, Troll) 51

>So it would be good to know how much of this upgrade is really stuff that should be (should have been?) done by now regardless

No. You don't massively overbuild a grid for shits and giggles. That's a massive resource sink, and copper is neither cheap nor environmentally friendly to extract and refine. Not to mention things like transformers, concrete and steel structures needed to keep the wires up and so on.

Comment Re:Nice idea (Score 2) 26

>And nobody really upgrades a laptop.

Because it's almost impossible to do with unique form factor for each laptop. But a lot of people update their desktops. Because those are standardized around things like ATX. You can just buy a new GPU and drop it in. New memory and drop it in. New CPU and just drop it in. New motherboard, CPU and memory, but keep all the hard drives and GPU. Etc.

And so people do that quite a lot. For many of the nerdier types, our desktop is probably a frankensteinian amalgam of old parts and new parts. Desktop I'm typing this on for example has a sound card from early 2000s, several disks from early 2010s, and a case from early 2000s. Fans are from all over the time frame of existence of it, PSU is from 2010s, and the newest part being GPU is only a couple of years old. And all of this is living nicely together. And it's saved me a lot of money that I didn't need to throw everything out whenever a system drive, or memory or CPU died.

The goal of framework is standardizing laptops to be similar to desktops. That you can do to their laptops what you did to your desktop for a long time. And that's an amazing goal and I truly wish they can make it. Sadly I can't support them by buying their laptop, because they don't sell directly to Finland yet. But I am actually keeping an eye on them and when my current laptop dies, I'm very likely to get theirs if it's available here.

Specifically because I want to be able to stretch the laptop just as far as I stretched my desktop.

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