Posts by Graham Dawson 2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
As long as you cut the breakers out to the main supply. I've heard more than a few stories out of the US, of linesmen getting a nasty zap because someone decided to keep their home running with that sort of lash-up, but didn't realise that they were also living up local power lines as well.
So we've got the Bourbon biscuits and the Garibaldi biscuits, but where's the Peek Freans Trotsky Assortment?
Revolutionary biscuits of Italy
Rise up out of your box
You have nothing to lose but your wafers!
Yum yum yum yum yum
... yes, the one with the complete Young Ones DVD set in the pocket, please. No, I'll see myself out. No, you don't need to call the police.
The only place that ever made ethanol viable as a fuel was Brazil, and only then because they could burn the sugar cane after they had extracted sugar from it and fermented it to ethanol, which meant they could produce more energy from the crop than was invested to produce it (not counting the energy from the sun, obviously).
Most places outside of the tropics have to use some other crop, such as sorghum or maize, which require more energy invested than you get out of them, including the energy from the sun. That makes them net CO2 emitters. Every other crop than sugar cane is a net CO2 emitter when used to make biofuel.
Aside from that, we don't have room to grow food and also grow crops for fuel, even if we massively reduce our energy consumption. Brazil didn't either, which is why they abandoned ethanol production for a long time.
Currently, most ethanol for fuel is produced in the tropics, in huge sugar cane and palm oil plantations that have been hacked out of pristine tropical forest. More forest has been cleared to feed "environmentally friendly" fuel than anything else in the last thirty years. This isn't "Norwegian propaganda", it's verifiable fact.
This is an issue where membership of the single market (which I've always said we should have remained within via the EEA/EFTA route - the problem was all the political gubbins) was hiding a systemic problem in both the UK and EU employment market for HGV drivers.
HGV drivers are paid terrible rates for long hours, even with the working time regulations limiting how much time they could drive - in fact, some relatively recent alternations to the working time directive, which changed the hourly restriction from hours driven to all work (such as loading supervision, inspection, maintenance and so on), turned barely profitable runs into a net loss. As a consequence, the employment market has been a constant churn of new drivers who find themselves working long hours for poor pay, while treated like crap, before eventually leaving to change careers.
This has been a systemic issue across the entire EU. There has always been a shortage of drivers across the single market, but because the that same market allows the arbitrage of drivers, the shortage has always appeared to be a temporary or limited issue. Now that we've left the single market, that arbitrage is no longer available to the UK and the true scale of the driver shortage has become apparent. The EU is also facing an urgent driver shortage because our previously significant contribution is no longer available.
Opinions on Musk's tenuous grasp on sanity aside, as I'm quite certain that's what is driving your thought process on this: when you're testing experimental prototypes you want them to break at some point, if for nothing else than to find out what their real-world limitations are. Destructive testing highlights failures in design that might not have seemed obvious from simulations and component testing.
Any other battery would be better for this sort of application than LiIon, which sacrifices a level of stability in exchange for increased energy density. At this scale, energy density is less of an issue, but LiIon has become the meme thanks to Mr Musk's marketing.
IMO grid-scale storage is a dead-end anyway; it's only being pushed to try and paper over the problem of renewal intermittency. Regardless of one's views on renewables, a lot of the issues that these storage sites are supposed to fix would be better resolved with HVDC interconnects than with grid-scale storage. Energy storage, if it's required, should constructed at end-points, where it can be tailored to the needs of the consumer, whoever they might be.
Not just the electrolyte. The anode and cathode will release oxygen as they're heated and decompose, which is why I suggested that simply dousing the thing in nitrogen won't work. A BC or ABC extinguisher for a small battery will probably work, but for a fire of this size there's really not much that can be done to stop it.
Regardless of the misapprehensions of the article writer, the right to free speech is not merely some lines on an American republic's constitutional document, but a philosophical concept that predates the formation of the united states by several centuries.
Facebook is a private entity, yes, but by how far it has inserted itself into the every day lives and communications of individuals around the world, it has become a quasi-state; a government in all but name of a vast and diverse demos, to which it provides services across borders, and over which it exercises incredible power in ways that traditional states could only dream of. Facebook can, at the flick of an SQL command, completely destroy the lives and livelihoods of thousands by removing their business pages, through which they - at facebook's own encouragement - conducted the majority of the economic activity, or by cutting them off from friends and family, who may have no other means of communication than through facebook's service, again because of the way facebook has encouraged and manipulated it's way into being the sole form of communication for many.
At this point, facebook is no longer merely "a private corporation". It has, by dint of its invasion of the private and public lives of so many people, a responsibility to enforce and uphold the rights of the people it claims to serve. Instead it acts as the arbiter of "acceptable" speech and behaviour, to a standard far more restrictive than any free society would otherwise tolerate, censoring almost at random, according to the whims of an unknown, unaccountable minority within the corporation.
The same standard can be applied to google, amazon, and a few other world-spanning communications and tech corporations. They have moved beyond mere "private" entities. The argument of "private property" can no longer apply, any more than it could apply to a company town enforcing private scrip and the company store on its denizens.
Of course he is. He helped get them elected, after all.
Cummings, Johnson, the whole disgusting shower should be tossed in the sea at Blackpool beach, with all the other raw sewage, and then laughed at as they flail around like the useless pratts they are. Starmer and co can join them, too.
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