It sounds like extreme incompetence on the part of the designers, or at least someone in the chain.

Lithium batteries can't be charged as fast when they are cold, which is why some EVs automatically heat their batteries when you navigate to a charger. They can still be charged slowly though, and the charging warms them up so that speed eventually improves. Given these are likely being charged overnight, it shouldn't be an issue.

Maybe the problem is not the battery, but the inverter, if they are charging from AC. Maybe some component doesn't work well below 5C, and they haven't been able to engineer a work-around.

Either way, it sounds like something went badly wrong. Other deployments have gone very well, in extremely cold and warm climates.

I did a bit of digging. The busses are Canadian, and the batteries are German. A little surprising as you would expect both of those to be used to sub 5C temperatures.

FWIW the ones in Norway use Chinese batteries, and many of the busses are made in China too. They have no issues with low temperatures, and in fact often use NMC batteries because they perform well in cold climates. I don't know what chemistry the ones in these busses are, but it sounds quite old if they can't charge below 5C.

Me: "My concern about vat-grown "meat" is that when the proteins go wrong the animal becomes nonviable and probably isn't even successfully born."

You: "My concerns look like prion diseases"

From the top of the WP article on prions: "A prion (/ËpriËÉ'n/ â") is a misfolded protein"

Meme: They're the same picture.

There is no such thing as a New Flyer SE40. They are model XE40.

The spec sheet tells us that "The battery chemistry is Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC), providing the best balance of energy, power, safety, and life."

NMC is shit, especially for EVs.

Not having a battery heater is shit, especially in climates where it regularly freezes, like Vermont... but also anywhere it can freeze.

I agree that there is fraud involved, in that what New Flyer claims about NMC batteries is false. But they decided to buy the buses, and the battery chemistry is in the sales literature and therefore not a secret, and they should be at least minimally knowledgeable about EVs if they're going to spend The People's money on them. So at least one person at VGMT is party to that fraud.

[success] Successfully installed theme: radix
$ drush --include="web/themes/contrib/radix" radix:create radix-xxx
  [success] ðYs Sub-theme 'radix-xxx' created successfully. You may now enable it in the Appearance section of the Drupal administration or by Drush as shown below:
[...]
  [notice] Enable and set radix-rdcert as the default theme:
ddev drush then radix-xxx -y
ddev drush config-set system.theme default radix-xxx -y

uh oh, bad sign, I'm not even using ddev. and the install instructions on the project page don't say anything about it either.

$ drush then radix-xxx -y

In ThemeCommands.php line 113:

    Unable to install themes radix-rdcert due to missing themes radix-xxx.

ooh, and here's the npm install step:
npm WARN deprecated stable@0.1.8: Modern JS already guarantees Array#sort() is a stable sort, so this library is deprecated. See the compatibility table on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/...
npm WARN deprecated rimraf@3.0.2: Rimraf versions prior to v4 are no longer supported
npm WARN deprecated @types/minimatch@6.0.0: This is a stub types definition. minimatch provides its own type definitions, so you do not need this installed.
npm WARN deprecated inflight@1.0.6: This module is not supported, and leaks memory. Do not use it. Check out lru-cache if you want a good and tested way to coalesce async requests by a key value, which is much more comprehensive and powerful.
npm WARN deprecated glob@7.2.3: Old versions of glob are not supported, and contain widely publicized security vulnerabilities, which have been fixed in the current version. Please update. Support for old versions may be purchased (at exorbitant rates) by contacting i@izs.me
npm WARN deprecated @babel/plugin-proposal-object-rest-spread@7.20.7: This proposal has been merged to the ECMAScript standard and thus this plugin is no longer maintained. Please use @babel/plugin-transform-object-rest-spread instead.

These guys DGAF in general, huh? Backing away slowly and killing this with fire.

. You can't bring a cow with you to Mars

Well... kind of. Most animals have small breeds. Cows remain one of the hardest, as their miniature breeds are tstillabout 1/4th to 1/3rd the adult mass of their full-scale relatives. But there are lots of species in bovidae (the cow/sheep/antelope family) and some of them are incredibly small - random example, the royal antelope. As for sheep and goats, you have things like dwarf Nigerian goats which are quite small, and a good milk breed. Horses, you have e.g. teeny falabellas. Hens of course are small to begin with, and get smaller with bantams. Fish like tilapa are probably easiest - they can be brought as teeny fingerlings, and in cold water with limited food, their growth can be retarded so that they're still small on arrival. Etc.

Whatever you bring, if you bring a small breed, you can always bring frozen embryos of larger or more productive breeds to backbreed on arrival. The real issue is of course management at your destination - not simply space and food/water, but also odor, waste, dust, etc (for example: rotting manure can give off things like ammonia and can pose disease risks). That said, there are advantages. Vegetarian animals can often eat what is otherwise "waste" plant matter to humans which we either don't want, can't digest, or is outright toxic to us - and then they convert that matter into edible things like milk, eggs, and meat. The former two generally give you much higher conversion rates than the latter, although you'll always get at least some meat from old animals (either culled or via natural deaths). Tilapia can even eat (as a fraction of their diet) literal manure (albeit this is controversial due to disease risks).

A space station would be great, but that's a lot of mass that you either have to send there or find there and then turn into a space station. It's a lot less mass to take enough food for a mission.

If you're planning to actually stay, then you don't need a station, you need to build structures on the planet.

Neither you nor your friend is a human?

Perhaps in the next version of Debian I will get a KDE which has this feature. I didn't realize how far behind they were even in Trixie until this story came out.

It's probably for the best, because in the past when I've run cutting edge KDE I've regretted it.

It can be safe for humans, but not for bees. I've seen people out spraying it on flowering plants poking up through sidewalks. Hey assholes, do you want to have a future or not? Guess not.

Drupal has done the same thing. I installed their new turnkey distribution ("Drupal CMS 2.0") and it came with an AI bullshit module. Naturally this was the first thing I tore out. (Followed by the new package manager, which also means losing automatic updates, but neither thing works well anyway so the only reasonable way to manage Drupal is from the CLI using composer and drush.)

On the plus side, it's easy to not use these misfeatures.

If I wanted AI to do something for me for Drupal, it would be to write me a theme. Fuck that's gotten annoying since olden times.

This is why people everywhere eat beans.

We evolved to enjoy meat, because it's efficient to eat it.

Those processes both are and aren't random. That is to say, they are orderly and work based on rules. This is not different from vat-grown "meat", except that the rules are different. An animal grows in an egg or a womb, the conditions differ from a vat (or another container) even if you put in all the same stuff, which they don't.

My concern about vat-grown "meat" is that when the proteins go wrong the animal becomes nonviable and probably isn't even successfully born.

What's the evidence that they had to be paid to deny it? Nobody wants to be Cassandra.

*of people who claim that they know exactly yada yada

This study is based on executives taking surveys. It's not based on executives submitting financials for review.