Also, anything sounds big when you put it in gallons. Doesn't sound so big when you mention that's 92 acre feet, the amount used by less than 20 acres / 8 hectares of alfalfa per year. Or when you mention that a typical *closed loop* 1GW nuclear reactor uses 6-20 billion gallons of cooling water per year (once-through uses 200-500 billion gallons, though most of that is returned, whereas closed loop evaporates it)
I don't think it has anything to do with that. As soon as I saw the headline, my mind went "cohort study". And sure enough, yeah, it's a cohort study. Remember that big thing about how wine improves your health, and then it turned out to just be that people who drink wine tend to be wealthier and thus have better health outcomes? And also, the "sick quitter" effect, where people who are in worse health would tend to stop drinking, so you ended up with extra sick people in the non-wine group? Same sort of thing. This study says they're controlling for a wide range of factors, but I'd put money on it just being the same sort of spurious correlations.
"I just put my models on a usb drive then plug said drive into the printer."
You must have a lot of spare time on your hands.
"It works great locally" - Um, no it doesn't?
They've made a nice easy-to-use ecosystem. For $400 you can get a P1S that supports adding an AMS, auto bed leveling, enclosed-chamber printing, high precision, high print speeds, and 300/100C nozzle/plate temps, and has an easy cloud print service and a robust ecosystem of models you can just download and print with no extra config straight from the app.
But yeah, their behavior is increasingly entering bad-actor territory. I wonder how long it'll be before they lock entry-level printers into their branded filament?
is that two years of work, or 1.999 years in a queue and then its 10 minutes work, and approved?
Dont these ding bats know anything about business processes and KPI and just pure logic.
Just get AI to approve 95% of the easy ones, and staff to check last 5% quickly.
If they have 1000s of rules, then post them all on the website, and have an AI do preapproval checks and notifications of changes.
Isnt that enough to buy all of Vancouver ?
Enough to buy 4 Million tesla cars, to give away.
In the UK there's talk of a 3p per mile tax for EVs, 1.5p for a plug in hybrid. So if I want an EV for local driving, I should probably get a plug in hybrid with a knackered engine.
Considering I currently pay 7p per kWh to charge at home, and average 3.6 miles per kWh, that's definitely noticeable, but not exactly the end of the world. With a 45mpg petrol car, I think the equivalent would be about 10p per mile just charged in fuel duty.
You're also paying £200 road tax, whereas an older small engine petrol/diesel would be paying £20 a year, so the current cheapest low mileage car might be a small petrol engined car registered before 2017.
I think I'd prefer them to defer the per mileage costs, not because I have an issue with them, but I think I'd rather there to be as few visible disadvantages in getting an EV as possible.
Running you cable across the pavement would be illegal. There's some moves to get channels installed in the pavement to allow you to run a cable that way, or little bollard things
https://www.gov.uk/government/...
But it's hard to describe getting either of those sorted as simple - I get why it's much harder for people without a driveway. You could pay for a charging subscription to get cheaper charging elsewhere, but it lacks the convenience of just plugging in on your driveway.
As the OP points out, the charging cost for even slow charging (probably around 40p or thereabouts is common) is way out of line with the 7/8p you might be paying on an EV tariff at home, and you can get those tariffs with even a dumb 3-pin plug charger, as long as your car is compatible.
Ours charges fairly slowly by modern standards - I don't think I've seen it hit 90kW, but then it only has a 58kWh usable capacity, so that's not so bad.
Often I find the charges sit in an annoying middle ground - too fast to bother waiting with it, but too fast to order food and eat it before I have to unplug it. Last time I stopped, I went into the restaurant, ordered food, walked back to the car and moved it, and was back to the table just as my starter arrived. For all the benefits of EVs, I'm not going to gripe too hard about that annoyance.
The drop to 11kW (the fastest ours can charge off AC) pings it out the other side, where it's not fast enough for a short stop. If it's a long stop, it can go down to 3kW and I'll still likely get enough on overnight to pull me back up to 80%. Hell, I was charging at 2kW last place I visited and that was more than enough.
But this is still talking about road trips, which isn't what the bulk of our driving is.
It's interesting how issues with ICE cars vanish in the presence of EVs. There's plenty of failures on ICE cars that end up costing more than it's worth to fix, by the time you're looking at an old car. If I have a ten year old ICE car, and the gearbox fails, it's not worth fixing. Hell, if the turbo dies, I probably couldn't justify an OEM part to fix it.
Why does the fact EVs can have the same severity fault get treated quite so harshly? Yes, old cars can be uneconomical to repair. But then I don't get a 100k miles / 8 year warranty on anything on my ICE, but I do get it on the battery of my EV.
On the plus side, I think there's sufficient timidity around buying used EVs that they're currently excellent value, so maybe I shouldn't complain.
I don't believe a significant number of schools are seeking a change in the law.
Right now, schools can set their own policy. Some introduce lockers, or lockable pouches. I've seen this implemented really badly where not having a phone in a pouch was a punishable offence, even if you forgot your phone, or deliberately left it at home. It's also expensive - you're looking at something upwards of £10k to setup something like this, and there's an ongoing cost in time as well as money needed to replace/maintain pouches/lockers over time.
More common is a rule of "not seen or heard", which is usually expressed as "your phone should be off in your bag during the school day". If you need to contact a parent, you go to the school office or similar. This rule seems to work well on the whole. You'll get some kids going to the toilets to use their phone, which definitely isn't ideal, but I don't think it's a widespread problem. Without lots of funding, I can't see anyone Faraday caging such rooms.
"Ask not what A Group of Employees can do for you. But ask what can All Employees do for A Group of Employees." -- Mike Dennison
