I don't know you guys, I use my cotton bags all the time....They probably all have the 350 uses already.
@DrunkCorsair I understand electric right now is only marginally better environmentally speaking, but it's a very new technology relative to the fossil fuel monolith, with only companies like Tesla and Rivian taking it seriously enough to go whole hog. Hell, BMW and Mercedes see every electric car they put out as a loss and only make them because they have to. As people make the move toward electric new techniques will be developed that make the process less wasteful. In fact, my girlfriend is currently a large shareholder in a South Korean company that specializes in the recycling of lithium-ion batteries. Their stock has almost quintupled since she bought in. Right now solar tech isn't quite at the point of being able to power cars. Karma Reveros have solar roofs and can only get about 2 miles of charge per 8 hours of sitting in the sun on clear days. I did hear about a potential solar car cover being developed for Tesla that might be able to get about 5 miles, but it would be cheap and removable, nothing compared to the cost of installing panels on the sunroof.
@Brother Smoke In the end i dont care which parts of a car i make at work. My problem, at least here in Germany is, that people want to force you into buying electric cars only telling half the truth about the technology and dont admit that there need to be other stuff done to make electric cars useable for everyone or at least for the majority. I am living in a rural area, here isnt even the infrastructure to use a car like that. If my village would build 3 or 4 charging stations the power grid would collapse. Deamonizing the actual technology wont help either.
Compulsory change helps nobody. I have heard about the ways Europe is going about with the shift and it honestly sucks. EVs simply don't work for some people and that is perfectly fine, getting government involved just makes the whole thing fall apart. Sorry you have to deal with that
At some point you have to do a compulsory shift. However I agree with @DrunkCorsair there are other technologies which are looking way more viable than just the battery solution. Problem is: The car manufacturers (e.g. BMW, Mercedes, VW) do not want to change in general. Managers are doing fine as is, so fuck the future.... At the same time we are dealing with massive weather phenomena (on a global but also regional scale). The german forests are suffering from a drought, because it did not rain anywhere near enough for the last 3-5 years. We have had some downpour on several occasions, but that water is gone so fast, because the ground cannot suck it up... I am really getting that "Fridays for future"-movement at the moment ....
The big issue for the (older) Prius models was that they'd shut down if their wheelspin exceeded a certain amount due to the road being 'unsafe'. That amount of wheelspin was normal for going up a hill on snow-covered pavement. I think someone finally beat Toyota upside the head until it was fixed. Yeah, nuclear reactors don't go boom like that. (Missile submarine crewman here.) Chernobyl had a graphite-moderated reactor that got hotter as you pulled more power out of it (the exact opposite of how you should design a reactor!). It also suffered from random heat/reaction spikes when run at very low power. What the powerplant was doing was to make sure that the 'coast-down' cooling pump would work if a reactor had to shut down all of a sudden, so they were running the reactor at very low power (like 1% or less), to simulate being in an emergency shutdown. Heat/reaction spikes happened. It got so hot that the water flashed into steam and then into hydrogen+oxygen gas, which then exploded. And lit the graphite on fire. Hydrogen happily explodes at any atmospheric concentration from 4% to 75%. Fukushima was a pressurized water reactor, but it wasn't the reactor proper that had an issue (PWRs are impressively safe when emergency-shutdown, as long as you can maintain cooling flow). It was the cooling system design, which didn't circulate under natural convection currents (typical, I should add, since that usually limits how much power you can pull out of the reactor), and so required pumps to maintain cooling flow. The big tsunami flooded out the backup generators for the cooling circulation pumps, hot fuel first boiled the water and then cracked it into hydrogen+oxygen, which then exploded. And this is at a good 600psi pressure, so the hydrogen explosion was ... impressive. Fukushima was compounded by a cultural aversion to telling a superior or politician to STFU when he doesn't know what he's talking about. The only appropriate thing for anyone who does not know that specific powerplant design to say when a nuclear reactor problem is happening is "Make. It. Stop. You have permission to do anything and everything to make it stop and make it safe, including permanently damaging the reactor core if nothing else will stop it. If you do not have resources on-hand to deal with the problem, tell me what you need and I will make it available to you as fast as I can. Steal things if you need it before I can get it to you, I will pardon you. Just keep a list of everything you grabbed so that we can pay the owners back."
Well Mercedes was researching for hydrogen fuel cells. But that was cur cause we need to reduce costs. Personly i dont think you need a compulsory shift if other options were viable for most not for a few. Electric cars arent cheap, neither is there an infrastructure to use them so as long as that is given they wont be a viable option for the masses with low or middle income. I fear we will end up with some idiot laws here again. My best example is for house isolation. The german government ruled if you want to do the facade of your house in it is more than 10 square metres you have to isolate your house to save energy. If you dont do that you can get a fine up to 50000€. My problem is, i have an old house build in 1954 with bricks and other stuff, if i want to save money by isolating i have to life to celebrate my 130 birthdays before the costs are covered by the energy cost saved. Friend of mine owns a house made of quarry stone. he doesnt even find a civil engineer that can do the maths for what he could save on energy. Thats how laws end up in germany when the green party is involved.
I have inherited (the bigger part) of a country house (5 or so hours from my residence. Unreachable without a car. Do not ask to use more than the bare minimum of electricity. Do not ask for running water, but there is a natural spring erected nearly a century ago at a 300 meters walk with a 60º inclination). Besides the openings for doors and windows (and there are 6 impressive huge balconies, not projecting outside but the holes...), the outer walls are about 60cm thick. The inner walls, about 20-30cm wide. Of rock. Oh, I forgot to mention... about 100 squared meters per floor, with 3 floors and a fourth where the roof is that could be adapted for living too, if so desired. And it has a separated stable (3 floors), and a garage... If that house were in Germany, I'd bet it would cost more than twice as much to isolate the house from heat exchange (and change all windows, balconies' doors and the three big doors) than the market cost of the house, with all the surrounding land included. Frigging laws... (I think the house was built before 1800...)
Here in the US, the "McMansions" (large houses on relatively small plots of land) are notorious for being very cheaply built and poorly insulated even for their construction costs. You'd usually be better off suffering a 'horrible accidental fire' and rebuilding.
With spiraling building costs and overstretched buyers most McMansions are not insured for nearly enough to rebuild.
Well you need to work on a bigger family, soo you can cuddle warm each other. I am more angered by how that law was done, with wrong numbers so it fits to the green partys agenda. And i am forced to do stuff which doesnt benefit me.
It does sometimes bother me whenever Chernobyl gets brought up as an argument against any nuclear power plants ever. I mean, I wouldn't buy a god-damn car off those guys, never mind trust them to build a reactor. At the time, would anyone really boast, "Soviet made! :) " ? And on Fukushima, I wish I kept the pictures but a short time after the incident, the newspaper articles were displaying subtle shifts in the narrative. I read some that seemed to imply the power plant caused the tsunami. In other WtFs, a friend of mine got married a few weeks ago and the newlyweds went to Africa for their honeymoon, intent on seeing the game reserves. Last night they came round to SK Towers for a visit and to tell us all about their trip. Towards the end of the holiday, the new wife got very sick with an unknown illness and was bed ridden for days. She made a full recovery but they did joke that the husband was out enjoying himself at the hotel bar while she was "dying". As they gave the details of the symptoms it did sound fairly serious (even mentioned she literally had to crawl to the bathroom one night; she was so crippled). Later on in the conversation they mentioned they were staying in huts where the roofs were actually open to the outside, so they had bats living in the rafters. The wife said that one day, early in their stay, she got a spray of bat piss to the eye and it was after this when the illness appeared. Now, I did have a brief stint as an amateur rat-catcher a few years back and so I did learn a bit about big rodents, so when their story began to unfold I did get slightly suspicious... >rodent piss >flu-like symptoms >muscle pain and dehydration So I had a look on my phone just to confirm it and, yup, by the looks of it she had contracted a dose of Weil's Disease! So while they joke about it now, she may actually have been dying. Thankfully it was just a mild dose (so she didn't turn yellow) but holy shit, that was a close one - after getting the bat piss in the eye she was assured by everyone, hotel staff included, that she'd be fine and nothing would happen.
If there is one thing Chernobyl is a great example of it's of the failure of the communist ideology Coincidentally, there is a new Chernobyl series on HBO, only 1 episode in but I am already hooked. Not 100% historically accurate, but pretty darn entertaining.
