Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

In any case digging up fossil fuels is also pretty dirty, and has been known to pollute indigenous people’s drinking water, steal their land, and on occasion pay for private militias and government troops to put down protests.

There isn’t much in industry exempt from that kind of thing, but countries go to war over access to oil. Anything that reduces consumption is good for mankind.

Is LMFP actually available in quantity? Wikipedia suggests not.

I realized that, I put an edit on there to not specify LMFP which has only been used in EVs in a limited fashion. I was confusing NMC which is actually the most common, oops. I changed it to a generic reference.

The problem with sodium ion batteries, apart from lower density, is that they have a shorter lifespan.

I’ve read differing reports on that. But yeah, cycle life is a big deal. In general it’s not great for the common Li-Ion types. LFP has pretty amazing cycle life, about five times greater and rivals the NiMH king. In many cases it’s well worth the additional size and weight, but for things sensitive to it like cars and handheld devices it’s a problem.

Also Sodium Ion (Na-Ion) batteries are currently in production and could be a viable alternative as the technology advances and production ramps up.

Right now Na-Ion batteries rival only the LFP type of Li-Ion battery (lithium-iron-phosphate) having a lower energy density than other Lithium chemistries. LFP is used commonly in utility power storage for its much greater safety and longevity, but it carries about 20% less power for size and weight compared to other lithium chemistries.

At present the favored battery type for EVs are Lithium types with the highest energy density. Some combine several advantages of the various Li-Ion chemistries having the highest energy density with somewhat greater safety and longevity.

Na-Ion is a new type of battery chemistry with lots of potential for improvement. They use more sustainable materials being cheaper and more abundant. If they could get the Na-Ion battery type within range of presently used Lithium technologies it would be a hugely better solution, a lot cheaper, a lot safer, and much easier on the environment.

Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It’s a different and better experience for me.

Haha, most of my opinions are unpopular. Some posted in this in thread I agree with.

I don’t see that either. People have disagreed with me politely and intelligently here which is just good conversation.

Not going to read the article so in response to the comment, electric bicycles put people in a strange place in terms of safety. You’ve got the speeds of a motorcycle without the ability to flow with traffic. In the presence of high density traffic I’d say an e-bike is more dangerous than a motorcycle.

I’ve been a motorcyclist most of my life and I can say you have to be super vigilant about situational awareness and ready to evade at all times. People driving in cars are not programmed to notice motorcycles. They’re always looking for cars and sometimes don’t register other hazards. It shouldn’t be that way, but nothing is going to change that as long as human beings are driving.

My recommendation to anyone who wants to use an e-bike for regular transportation is just go to a motorcycle, it’s going to be much safer in traffic. There’s some really nice electric motorcycles now. For e-bike users you have to be extra careful. Drivers don’t see bicyclists anyway and you’re going a lot faster most of the time. A head injury at 10 mph can be fatal.

I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.

uBlock Origin forever and always.

Haha, most important program on my computer. My browser is a uBO support system.

They transport cars with no gas in them. When I was going to school I used to work part time for a service center that prepped cars for the dealer after overseas transport. There were a lot of things that had to be done. The cars didn’t even have oil in the engine.

They transport EV’s with a 40% charge which is the industry standard storage charge for Li-Ion batteries. At storage charge a Li-Ion battery is greatly less likely to spontaneously combust due to a manufacturing defect. It can still happen, but a lot less of a chance. More likely an internal short will drain the battery to zero charge before catching fire.

In any case they don’t know the cause for sure. They’re stating an EV as a possible cause, but it could be anything at this point. They can’t know the cause for sure without an investigation and that won’t happen as long as it’s burning. If the ship sinks there may be no investigation at all.

Car alarms, biggest complaint about horns. I’d love to have a bell for my car, just like a bicycle bell but a bit louder.

What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.

Biggest tool in the history of tools.

Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he’s buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that’s absolutely what’s going on.

I believe he’s killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don’t think there’s some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy’s ego extends past Planet 9.

I like them when they are actually amusing. Problem is that’s maybe one in ten so it’s not worth browsing them. If someone posts one and it’s actually good, no problem.

Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.

In imperial units I get this for a single stack of 44B in $100 bills;

.0043 inches * 44B / (12 inches in a foot * 5280 feet in a mile) = 2986 miles

That would be approximately the distance from Los Angeles to New York. That’s a long stack of bills.

For sure, either he’s destroying it on purpose of he’s that stupid, either one is just way out there.

For the longest time I used my hand lathering with the bar first, then realized using a washcloth works much better.