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Comment Re:Criminal = Immigrant. DEPORT: save yourselves! (Score 2, Informative) 60

Oh look, you cite FBI data showing that blacks (15% of the population) commit 47.3% of homicides. And that whites (57% of the population) commit 47.8% of homicides.

Why are you posting data that is clearly racist towards minorities in the U.S.? Is it because your racism prevented you from crunching the numbers?

Comment Re:I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but .. (Score 1) 135

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Comment cobalt chemistry, not so nice. (Score 1) 115

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

Comment I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but ... (Score 1) 135

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

Comment Re:Spoofing from address? (Score 1) 17

Nothing is being spoofed.

Typically, the spammers find a support ticket submission page, or a bug tracker or some other quasi-public system. Then they open a ticket or report a bug using YOUR email address and a name like "YOURNAME, we are going to charge your credit card $587.16 for Norton Antivirus if you don't call XXX or email YYY in the next 24 hours"

YOU then get an email from the ticketing system or bug tracker or whatever it is. This email contains the spammer's message, plus whatever is in the stock "your report is now in our system" email template the system is using.

This was all over Zendesk a few months ago. I was getting them from seemingly every company on the planet that had outsourced ticket tracking to their system.

Comment Re: Seems Reasonable (Score 1) 55

Tariffs always apply to the import. Yes, I agree if there are cases where digital content is bounced back and forth across borders while incurring some value add step then that becomes hard to track both internally and externally. But no more difficult than likewise having manufacturing that has a supply chain across borders. Real businesses have accounting for such things.

Comment Re:Congress is the one with the purse (Score 1) 338

Bureau of Land Management Instruction Memorandum 2023-010 talks about refunds for leases. It is dated November 21, 2022, right in the middle of the Biden Administration. It has been superseded by newer versions that contain very similar language.

The purpose of the memo is to ensure that BLM practices are compatible with various laws, including the then-recently passed Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Additionally, refunds are standard practice everywhere.

Comment Re:Late to the party (Score 1) 179

No one has ever made that argument in the entire history of humanity.

The argument is that because EVs can't do everything, we shouldn't legislate the demise of gasoline cars and diesel trucks. That if an EV doesn't cover every possible vehicle use case, then we shouldn't take away the vehicles that do cover those use cases.

Comment Re:Curious looking with these wide mirror stalks (Score 1) 179

Are you deliberately trying to avoid understanding what he is saying?

With a mirror, if the sun is at a bad angle, you can move your head and change the apparent position of the sun. With a camera, you are fucked because the camera is in a single fixed location and can't be moved.

Sometimes "where you need them" isn't actually where you need them.

Comment Look up "human shields" (Score 1) 255

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

Comment Comparing your accent to claimed residence history (Score 1) 255

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

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