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Comment Re:When Trump pulls shit like this (Score 2) 204

I guess, it's the first one. It's the strong man he is posing at. "We'll take your precious Lake Ontario as punishment!" And many of his voters like the strong man punching holes in the walls the establishment has erected - even if it is only an established name. And his voters like symbol politics, so he gives them symbolism.

Comment Re:Still on the doors? (Score 4, Interesting) 155

Consumers have known for a long time that too much technology in a car is a bad thing.

Apparently not. Otherwise, consumers would not buy all those additional features. Some people calling themselves car guys have claimed for a long time that too much technology in a car is a bad thing. But that's not what consumer demand tells the car companies. And if you look at statistics, car break downs per mile driven are in a constant decline. A 1970ies car at 100,000 miles was ridden down. A 2020ies car at 100,000 miles is just well driven in. Yes, people could fix the 1970ies car themselves. Just buy the manual and the spare part, and off you go. But that was a necessity, not a feature. Today, people want their Apple Carplay and their Android Auto. And that means you need a computer as your head unit. People want cruise control and good mileage, and that means electronic injection. Lambda catalysts have reduced car emissions, and unleaded fuel has severally brought down violent crime numbers 20 years later. This also required electronic injection. People don't want to crank down their windows, and that means electric window controls. People like their stability control, so the car does not go off the road uncontrolled if you make a steering mistake. People like anti lock brakes. Airbags and pretensioners have brought down road fatalities from their heights in the 1970ies.

Yes, you now need to be a learned car specialist to service a car. But you need service far less often, and your car is a better car in all other aspects.

Comment Re:How far back do the records exist? (Score 1) 153

Yes and now. It was also the Age of Discoveries. That means that basically each ship crossing the oceans at the time also had a part time or full time scientist on board, who was measuring everything he could put his instruments on. The Royal Navy and its requirements for logs also demanded a lot of data to be taken daily, including air and water temperature.

Comment Re:How far back do the records exist? (Score 5, Interesting) 153

Depending on the region you live in, it goes back until 1736 (e.g. Schoenbrunn, Vienna and Mannheim, Germany). In this year, several observatories in Central Europe agreed to take regularly measurements of weather data and keep a log of them.

And yes, that's the time when Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 - 1736), Anders Celsius (1701 - 1744) and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1686 - 1757) lived, each constructing his own type of thermometer, and defining his own temperature scale.

Comment Re:About Fsck'n time... (Score 5, Interesting) 96

It was Attachmate, which swallowed Novell and spun of for instance SuSE Linux before being itself acquired by Micro Focus. SuSE S.A. is now a separate company in Luxembourg, and maybe, they are holding the original UNIX licenses, as it would fit into their portfolio.

Comment Re:pay for the environment (Score 2) 209

As I have paid 300 Euros for a pair of solar panels and a rectifier back in March, and despite the panels not being optimally mounted (straight upright, facing Southwest, and partly in the shadow from nearby trees), I harvested already 200 kWh as of today, I am pretty sure, "green energy" is not about twice as expensive as it should be. Even a badly mounted setup will return the investment in less than five years.

Comment Re: Air Conditioners save lives (Score 2) 194

This is plain bullshit. Itâs that until recently, air condition was not necessary at all. Europe is very far to the north. Great Britain for instance lies between the latitudes of Vancouver Island and Juneau, Alaska. On the other side, Montreal, Canada is on the same latitude than Milan, Italy, and Toronto is as far to the north as Florence. Most of the continuous U.S. is somewhere between the Mediterran and the Sahara Desert. No one in southern Italy doubted the necessity of air condition in the Summer. For Germans or Scandinavians on the other hand, air condition was just a waste of space and energy, because it never was hot enough for A/C to make a difference, except in large office complexes with their large windows and basically no shadow. And they all have air condition. This year, nearly all European places have posted new local temperature highs. Europe today is hotter than it ever was in recorded history.

Comment U.S. license plate design is quite bad. (Score 4, Informative) 115

That's why back in the late 1970ies already, Germany developed FE-Schrift especially for license plates. It gives each letter a shape so unique, it does not even match in part another letter, making automatic recognition easier, and forging a license plate by covering up parts or adding color a lot more complicated.

Comment Re:Well yeah (Score 4, Insightful) 143

No one is actually pulling out. The U.S. has made it harder for foreign companies to import them. But there are still domestic manufacturers of EVs, like Tesla, Ford and Stellantis. This is something very else: For the last decade, one big argument against EVs was "bad resale value", because EVs were seen as a novelty, and fear for dead batteries, fueled by the problems with first gen Nissan Leafs, made buyers wary of used EVs. Additionally, there were not many used EVs on the market to begin with, fleet operators did not have many young EVs to sell, and prices did not really average out yet.

Now, demand for EVs is rising due to high fuel prices, and a good public charging network making EVs a viable alternative for many people. And also people looking for bargains are hitting the market, and with used batteries not being the problem they were thought to be, used EVs have its own value proposition. We have here the normal effect of demand rising more than the available supply.

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