rm_dash_r_star

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.

Also why the seemingly arbitrary graduations, 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. If it was say 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute, seconds would be close to the same amount of time. Same with latitude and longitude, why 360 degrees in a circle with 60 minutes in a degree and 60 seconds in a minute.

They will get rid of all human employees and drive their companies into the ground before they realize ML is supposed to supplement jobs, not take them over completely.

Exactly, replacing jobs with robots will not end well. It's been going on for a long time and is about to hit the steep of the curve. Problem is when machines are doing all the work, there's nobody making money to support the consumer economy a company relies on.

Even for companies that don't rely on the consumer market there's a trickle down. They're producing for companies that do and their customers will dry up when those companies fail.

In order for a wholly machine serviced industrial system to work we would need a whole new economic system. That's not a good thing since we're talking a situation where everyone is basically a ward of the state. We saw how well that worked for the former USSR.

Machines need to help people do their jobs, not replace them. The people running these companies have always been notoriously short sighted and it will be their end, ours too. The draw is too big to resist since labor costs are by far the biggest overhead in running a company.

These modern CEOs need to take a lesson from Henry Ford who's goal was to close the circle, pay people to make the products they will buy. He pretty much invented the middle class. That idea died in industry a long time ago and nobody is the better for it.

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.

Big difference is a modern sailboat like a ketch or sloop can maintain a straight course as much as 45 degrees into the wind. A Victorian era square rigger is greatly more limited with a range about 60 degrees off either side of downwind. A kite would be even more limited, probably within 45 degrees so it would only be useful when going mostly downwind. Still if it's cheap and easy to deploy it's free energy when it can be used. An interesting parallel is the spinnaker sail used on a typical sailboat flies much like a kite and can only be used within a similar downwind range. It's a very powerful sail when it can be deployed.

CO meter for sure, but a CO2 meter? It's actually a good idea to have CO alarms in your house if using natural gas powered appliances. However CO2 is only a concern if you're in a hermetically sealed environment like a submarine or space ship. I suppose it could be useful to check proper ventilation in the home, but normally you can just open a window.

Anyway the Earth has a carbon cycle, in other words it filters natural CO2 emissions through environmental processes. The problem is the amount added by industry is more than the natural carbon cycle can process. So levels are steadily increasing.

When we talk about zero carbon footprint we mean sources from industry like driving gasoline powered cars, generation of electricity, and production of consumer goods. A good amount already comes from natural processes like volcanos and erosion so we don't actually need a zero carbon footprint, just need it low enough to avoid overwhelming the natural cycle.

At a personal level it would be just about impossible to have a zero carbon footprint. If you had a solar and wind powered home off-grid and used it to charge an electric car you could be well below average. However any consumer goods you use put carbon in the air to produce them. Even if you went full native you'd still be putting carbon in the air burning wood and candles.

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.

Yes female action heroes are a trope now. They've over-played it, but of course anything from Marvel or DC is going to be shit. These days they're just movie mills pumping out the same old rehash.

The Alien movies made a female action hero seem natural. They did it right. There's been a few others that have done it right. More have done it wrong.

I don't know anything about the Barbie move since I haven't seen it. I would like to see it but will wait until it comes to streaming. My wife saw it with a group of her friends and said it was cute and weird, but definitely worth the watch. So evidently it's not in the same caliber as Legally Blonde.

I agree with your philosophy on federation and defederation and support it. It's one of the main reasons lemm.ee is my home instance. I support your actions as you feel appropriate.

That said, it's often the most intolerant people that get overly vocal about issues. In other words they get easily offended and try to make a bigger argument footprint than warranted. I mean if a person doesn't want to see something what's so hard about blocking a community in their personal profile or just ignoring a post and moving on to the next.

Do we really want to set a precedent where we need to block a whole instance because someone might potentially get offended? I prefer not to have an admin or mod make harsh decisions like that. On the other hand there is content that is just not acceptable under the most liberal judgement and that kind of stuff needs to get pruned, that's why we need reasonable mods.