I always saw it as being part of messing with the kids, he looks at the warning lights on top of the fence first. And for my headcannon at least, Grant is savvy enough to know that’s no way to test if the fence is live or not, lol.

Very true. Unfortunately, this process just pulls gold from dilute sources and gathers it into nuggets, from small ones to very very large. No gold is being made new though, that would be great.

Well, that is the amount gold that is mined or recycled every year that is used in electronics. The thing is though, a lot of the gold used in electronics is never recovered. So a considerable amount of the gold used in electronics is removed from from circulation in a way the gold in jewelry or bullion or coins isn’t. It isn’t the primary driver of gold’s price increase, but it is a significant factor.

Gold prices have risen steadily for a long time, partly because of its use in electronics. Over $2500/ounce now. But another quirk of gold is the ease with which we can make very thin coatings of it over other materials, sometimes only a few atoms thick. So it is commonly used, but in very very small amounts per device.

But remember, electric motors also require next to no maintenance and can last for many years of runtime. Pros and cons.

Probably worse for Barbra than the picture is this phenomenon being named after her. I was familiar with the the Streisand Effect and who the name came from, but didn’t know the backstory and hadn’t seen her house.

For anyone curious.

Maybe that was literally the case, he apparently had mercury poisoning at around the same time.

It’s starting to sound like a retelling of the old lady who swallowed the fly.

Someone needs to invite /u/Poem_for_your_sprog to Lemmy.

Well, I just said carbon fiber, but to be more exact it is forged carbon SMC, so yeah, careful engineering involved. Same stuff Lamborghini is using for some structural components, so probably fairly fit to purpose.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forged_composite

Well, it has a carbon fiber frame with a crumple zone in the front. They are going to put it through 3rd party safety testing. It won’t be as safe as a big SUV, sure, but I think it will be safer than an ebike. It also protects you from weather and has 35 cubic feet of storage in the back. I think ebikes are great too, but this does have more of the advantages of a car.

The benefits increase as the efficiency of the car increases though, check out Aptera. They say they get 10 miles per kwh, and they have a lot of surface area for panels. Enough that in ideal conditions they say they get 40 miles per day from solar. It is a bit different looking though.

https://aptera.us

Growing crops to make ethanol is not particulatly green. In fact, in most existing production loops we would be better off environmentally to just burn pure gasoline than produce the ethanol to mix into it, unfortunately. Too much water, too many tractors and trucks, and way too much electricity into ethanol production to be worth what we get out of it. And the bit of carbon the crops sequester doesn’t overcome it. Electric vehicles are by far the greenest option right now.

This is misleading, billionaires have been paying effectively lower taxes for many many years. They just had to be more creative about it before now.

This is ridiculous. There are practically no goods that would support the cost of hypersonic intercontinental rocket delivery, it would viewed as an unacceptable safety and security risk for any receiving area, and would be ludicrously bad for the environment and climate.

It won’t have started getting closer again before the Milky Way collides with the Adromeda galaxy in 5 Billion years, so it and anything we send on a similar path isn’t coming back.

I am not any kind of expert either, but I have been following this company for a couple of years. If it makes it to market and is at all price competitive i can’t see it not being a big deal. Granted, that is an if, not when, but they seem to be further along than most battery tech you read about.

No rare earth metals or even nickel or copper, has a very flat degradation curve even at charge rates up to 30C (testing stopped at 3k cycles in the coin cell tests), non flammable and non toxic. The only thing you would wish for is better capacity, but it is already better than any mass produced Li ion cell, and it has a theoretical maximum a couple times that of Li ions.

You’re right, battery news IS always breathlessly excited about the next crazy advancement, but they have a lot of things in their favor on this one. They broke ground on a manufacturing plant last year, which is not the case for most battery news stories. And the battery uses no rare earth metals, is non flammable, and performes better by nearly every metric than lithium ion. If they make it to market, I think they will absolutely be revolutionary.

A increasing percentage of new construction gets heat pumps. Some replacement HVAC units make the switch, but there is still a large portion of people who won’t because of misinformation and/or stubbornness.

But, unfortunately, most existing residential systems do not use heat pumps, under 20% in the US I believe.

They are too expensive. But only because auto manufacturers are only making midsized and larger suvs or luxury cars. The average price of an EV has dropped over 50% in China since 2015. That would have been tough for us to match, mostly because of batteries, but we could have made much more progress than we have.

The electric grid isn’t nearly as unprepared as people say. Sure, we need to build out more charging stations, but the grid as a whole far exceeds current needs. In fact, nationwide electrical usage is actually trending down in the US because of efficiency gains. Better building codes, heat pumps, LED lighting, if it uses electricity newer stuff is more efficient. If we had sold 8 times as many EVs in 2023 than we did, electricity usage would have stayed about flat.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/02/the-us-added-1-2-million-evs-to-the-grid-last-year-electricity-use-went-down/

Well, as far as crash safety, I would think it would almost always safer to be facing backwards. That’s the way infant car seats are. Facing backward would mean your whole body would absorb the inertia change against the seat and your head would be supported. Better than seat belt bruises and a bobble head imitation, seems like.

That’s assuming the forward facing people in the back row are buckled of course. 60 mph headbutt would be…bad. Turn those seats around too maybe?