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Comment Re: a much needed move? (Score 1) 219

What you said was dumb because what we need is to reduce emissions further than our weak targets. Also automakers do NOT have any trouble meeting the targets. They could have met those targets years ago, but they would have had to make less exciting vehicles. You're putting your excitement over sustainability. This explains why you support a child molester's tampering with the future.

Comment Re:Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbait (Score 2) 65

The idea that humans in 2100 will politely sit on their hands while the planet burns is genuinely adorable.

It's happening now. There are serious effects now. And there is mostly a lot of thumb-sitting going on.

Humans invent things.

Yes, for profit.

AI is already chewing through research faster than half the committees publishing these forecasts.

AI is chewing through NATURAL RESOURCES faster.

Pretending society wonâ(TM)t respond, wonâ(TM)t adapt and wonâ(TM)t innovate is probably the most unrealistic assumption in the whole exercise.

We don't have to pretend, we can see it happening right now. Or rather, not happening.

Comment Re:some problems (Score 1) 19

For example if you need to get call records months after the fact, with prepaid, tough shit, they don't have them at all.

Nonsense.

Want HD calling? Prepaid got it years after postpaid.

Why would I care? I don't speak a language for which call quality matters.

Paying three times as much or more for someone else to keep records for you is dumb. My phone keeps records for me.

Comment Cute Little Aluminum Blocks with Turbochargers (Score 1) 219

My 2.2 tonnne Ford 4wd gets 25 mpg. My 1 tonne Ford Escort (1973) got .... 25mpg. Your mate is wrong. When I first got a company car it did 12 l/100km. 25 years later the same model of car was grtiing less than 9, despite 25% more par, and meeting tighter emissions regs. Your mate is wrong.

You're clearly not talking about American cars. What's a 1-tonne Ford Escort? I did have a 1983 Dodge Ram D150 half-ton pickup truck with a Slant-6 and an A-833 manual transmission; that thing would get 25MPG and hold 75MPH all the way westbound across Michigan... of course, it took it a while to get to 75MPH, merging was just like driving a Peterbilt with a 53' trailer full of anvils. That exact same engine and a comparable transmission were available for the Dodge Trucks line from 1960 to 1987 and was renowned for durability and reliability.

The key point is that Americans typically don't want them. To this day, in Canada, gasoline is cheaper than water. I'm not sure if that's a statement about gas prices or a slam against the sort of fool who feels the need to buy their tapwater in PET bottles, but I digress. So people buy horsepower. People buy large vehicles based on truck platforms.

As CAFE forces vehicles to become more fuel efficient - without addressing the underlying consumer demand problem! - manufacturers are being forced to use smaller and smaller engines. This means adding turbochargers to cute little aluminum blocks, narrower cam lobes and variable displacement oil pumps and smaller oil control rings all to reduce the internal drag, and thinner oils which offer zero cushion on connecting rod bearings. All of this gets stuffed into a full-size pickup truck with a trailer hitch. They're intolerant of real-world conditions and use, and because of their complexity they're expensive to repair. These vehicles will not have a long lifespan - sure, you might get a good fleet average mileage, but if 50% of the vehicles don't make it to the 100,000 mile mark, they're getting replaced faster with all the environmental damage of producing and disposing of the vehicle.

Maximizing vehicle life is an important part of reducing the vehicle's overall environmental impact.

There's a great YouTube channel where the owner of a full-service used auto parts business takes apart modern engines and shows you what failed. No prior knowledge of engines is required to understand this. Some engines are spectacularly broken. And Eric talks about what will last, and what won't, with an entertaining sarcasm.

Recycling? The lead-acid primary battery gets removed, then the car gets crushed and shredded. Only the steel and the aluminum get recycled. Anyone who thinks that any other material in a car gets recycled in any quantity has never seen a car shredder in operation. ASR (Auto Shredder Residue) is a special waste stream now consisting mostly of mixed plastics, smashed safety glass, and the crap people leave in their cars when they junk them. All that plastic gets landfilled.

Comment long time coming (Score 1, Funny) 44

As I said https://slashdot.org/comments....
AFAIC ruzzia can and needs to go to hell. I hire people, I won't hire a ruzzian, the world needs to get its act together and start using space without them.

They are a scourge, always were, always will be. The American scientists, that passed information to the USSR about nuclear weapon design and manufacturing were not just traitors, they made a gigantic mistake, they truly made the world a much worse place to live. Preferably the soviets and by extension the Chinese and then the Iraqies, Iranians, North Koreans and who knows who else should not have nukes, at least not immediately after the Americans designed and built them.

Americans are exceptionally good at delivering innovation, but they are also exceptionally naive about the rest of the world. All Americans, their scientists incorrectly believe in basic good human nature, their politicians incorrectly believe that others are just like them and want to do business. Ha! Business is the last thing on the minds of foreign despots. The first thing is to make sure their population are controllable so that nothing can dethrone them, this means the status quo must be maintained, business does not help to maintain status quo, on the contrary, it may provide extra resources to the population. Once the population has more resources than the absolute minimum and once the population does not depend on the State to provide this bare minimum, once the population can provide for itself it starts demanding change and this is unaaceptable. The change is a political demand, population must be dependent and ready to die for a few scraps off the table of the rulers, business interferes with this. Americans think putin or whatever other dictator wants to do business, what a stupid notion.

American people believe they can just keep to themselves, nothing concerns them about the rest of the world, they do not need to try and control the outcomes. They are the naive wealthy mark, walking carelessly through a foreign open market, there are enough eyes on their pockets and there is a guy with a knife in a dark alley waiting for them specifically. This is a metaphore. Americans need to build alliances with the Europeans, not break them, they need to understand that ruzzians are not friends or business partners. They also need to understand that global caliphate is a real thing, it is the goal and if Americans care about their way of life even a little, Israel and Ukraine are their lines of defence right now and must be supported as if the war was already in the USA, bevause it is.

Comment Re:study confirms expectations (Score 1) 190

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

Comment I'm sure someone cares but (Score 1, Offtopic) 55

I really don't want this "feature". What I want is for existing features to work correctly.

For example, automated subtitling. For some reason the subtitles sometimes just stop coming for a while, then you get half a minute's subtitles all at once so you have to pause to read them. I've been watching foreign content lately and I depend on this functionality to understand what's happening, and it often just doesn't work right.

If Google could just pull their head out of their ass long enough to make their service work correctly and wouldn't bundle shit I don't want with it and overcharge, I would pay for a subscription to Youtube. But I absolutely will not give them money while they are proving that they don't give a single solitary fuck about their software actually working.

Comment Re:"more semiconductors expertise on the board" (Score 1) 124

Yep, I had writeups from those flame wars. They *REALLY* did not want it discussed. Governors Brown and Kotek continued the pay-to-play system, which is what lost Oregon the Ohio CHIPs foundry campus (before they realized that Biden wasn't going to pay out CHIPs act at all).

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