Most phones seem to give you the option to skip the next alarm. That may be better than disabling it?

Brick does really badly in earthquakes, at least without major reinforcing. ‘Unreinforced masonry’ can be fatal pretty easily.

Brick veneer over timber framing can be a thing.

What I mean is that the bulk of current copper wiring goes towards distribution and consumption, not generation.

Yes, but big batteries everywhere is going to effect that if there’s copper in lithium batteries, and apparently there is.

This isn’t a big thing. This is a constant thing in every system. It’s the push and pull between efficiency and resiliency. More storage capacity is less efficient when things are going well, but is more resilient and adaptable when they’re not.

Excess storage capacity, sure.

But inflating the base battery capacity to cover people having showers at 5pm because it’s easier than storage water heaters and time/remote controls is stupid. You can reduce the base need for batteries by reducing the need for electricity in the first place and reducing the use of vehicles that need to carry batteries in place of e.g. overhead catenary.

You’re wrong in terms of long distance power lines being mostly copper, but this does seem a lot like fossil fuel propaganda.

Motors, generators, and transformers can be built using aluminium; they’re just a bit bulkier and less efficient. Very common practice.

It looks like CCA might be making its way back into house wiring in the near future, with much lower risks than the 70s aluminium scare.

The big thing is that batteries really should be a last resort, behind demand response (using power when it is available, rather than storing it for later), long distance transmission, and public transport instead of private vehicles.

That’s incorrect. Aluminium is about 30% worse by volume than copper, meaning you need to go up a size. What stopped it being used for houses was that the terminations weren’t good enough, because aluminium has different thermal expansion and corrosion properties, plus they were using much worse alloys. That’s now mostly fixed and if you’re in the US, there’s a very good chance that your service main is aluminium, and there’s talk of allowing copper-clad aluminium (CCA) for subcircuit wiring.

Per mass, aluminium is a better conductor, which is why it’s almost exclusively used overhead and in pretty significant volumes underground. The power grids were built on ACSR.

In a lot of the world, a school bus is a normal city bus that gets “school” signs put on the front and back, and runs a specific route. There’s not much point in maintaining a dedicated fleet.

Here in NZ I believe they mostly can set their own routes, being ‘independent’ contractors.

I have heard Amazon in particular is super tight in the US.

And probably drives on the most efficient route for their run.

You’re about halfway along the run? They’ll always pass you about halfway through the day.

Redundancy doesn’t necessarily come with a golden handshake, though many employment contracts do mandate it.

But they do have to try to find you another job elsewhere in the organisation if that’s possible, and they have to disestablish the position not necessarily you. That means that if they want to make one person from a team redundant, they generally have to actually ask if anyone wants to leave, and if not, run a transparent process to decide who from the team to make redundant, not just pick someone.

You also have to not be planning to re-hire for the role any time soon as that would imply the redundancy wasn’t genuine.

If you’re in a country with good worker protection, there’s a big difference between ‘made redundant’ and ‘fired for cause’. There is no ‘fired for no reason’.

Google has removed the video through an automated process without talking to the owner of the channel or verifying who owns the video in the first place.

Honestly sounds like Hanlon’s Razor on Google’s part. No collusion necessary, just incompetence.

Running through a tent site is not the world’s smartest plan. You’ll trip on a guy wire.

Do you remember where you played it?

It sounds/looks a little like some of the stuff from bontegames.

That’s not bad pricing wise. There’s very very little prosumer gear that’s multi gigabit and it’s all much higher price, or it’s just a PC with several NICs.

If and when we move to hyperfibre this is going to be pretty high up on the list.

Lots of places also have variable limit signs that get updated based on traffic, accidents etc.

Here in NZ those seem to all be marked on the speed limit maps as 100km/h even if in some places the signs never go above 80.

Ngauranga Gorge is one such location and I believe has the country’s highest grossing speed camera.

Where on earth do they get the ‘AYD’ from?

Seems like spifk, sporf, or knorkoon might be more sensible.

Never ask questions you don’t want answers to. Rule 34.

603 for maglevs, 574.8 for steel rail, set in France in 2007 by a hotted up, modified TGV.

China holds the record for a stock train at 487, set in 2010.

(all per Wikipedia)

It looks like the article might be implying that they will be the fastest trains operating in revenue service when they enter service, but that surely needs to be demonstrated with a production train in revenue service.

“I want this to finish at 6PM” can be easier maths than 11h 15m from now.

1. Most of these are in a metal box, which blocks signal. Adding careful routing to get an antenna in an unshrouded position where it’s still physically protected is a pain. Also, in the middle of an apartment building can give you pretty terrible reception in the first place.

2. GPS doesn’t provide time zones or daylight savings info. The appliance would know where you are and what UTC time it is, but not which time zone you’re in. The manufacturer could pre-program shape files in (yay, more memory) but they become obsolete the next time a politician decides to move time zones or change daylight savings. If this happens to you, your device will keep repeatedly changing to be an hour fast/slow no matter how often you reset it.

   You could have the GPS satellites continually broadcast shape files for the time zone but this would be a big change, use up a lot of the limited bandwidth, and it would take your clock half an hour to set itself.

3. it’s like an extra $5-10 in parts and unlike a WiFi module, the manufacturer can’t make any big data or ad revenue from it.