Once upon a time in Iraq, another unit put in a work order to have my shop evaluate a building project in a remote area they wanted to stand up. Not a big deal up until we checked the primary distribution map and found getting power there was going to be a trick.
”Can’t you just put one of those boxes there?”
This is my review of Simpler Times Lager:
The guy was referring to is called a Secondary Distribution Center
USAF file photo…what? I pay taxes. I’m entitled to use it.
(SDC). It is basically a transformer in a box, with a bunch of points where a guy like me can hook up 3-phase cables to buildings, tents, HVAC units—everything needed to fight a war in style. The only thing you really see is the big metal box everything is hooked up to. The primary voltage (4160v) cables are buried underground. Which means no, we can’t “just” put the magic electric box that keeps the lights on where we please. There’s more to the process.
We joked about it but didn’t really hold anything against the guy, how could he know? His ignorance of how BEAR base electric distribution works wasn’t exactly harmful. Which brings me to this guy on Twitter, because in this case ignorance actually is harmful:
He continues…
This short term pain of course being the sudden rise in the cost of everything that requires fuel for transport which is of course every good and service available today. That should create the perfect incentive to purchase a $100k car? The EV cost will drop with the increased demand, right? No, that’s not exactly how supply and demand works. Furthermore, (TW: ZeroHedge) EV costs are driven by the commodity prices in the materials in the battery. Commodities with markets controlled mostly by communist despots that prefer to keep them expensive. So no, jacking up the price of gas is just a good way to make everyone more miserable than they already are.
Sadly, this guy probably votes.
What isn’t sad is this Trader Joe’s branded beer. While it might look like hipster juice with its hipster juice label, sold in a hipster grocery store located conveniently where hipsters congregate in a part of town populated by hipsters. This particular location isn’t a hipster neighborhood, but one populated by people with more money than they know what to do with, and thus are looking for a good value for their considerable quantity of dollars rather than just blowing it on hipster juice.
In short, this is just a Non-threatening Pilsner, done reasonably well, priced in a way ($4!) that leads me to believe they don’t have a budget for CGI cartoon characters dancing with scantily clad women. Simple Times Lager: 3.0/5
The less you know about something, the easier it looks.
Iron laws are a bitch.
Thanks, Señor. That looks like a beer to try.
Much better than their Czech Pilsner, which is comparatively sweet.
My corollary to that is ‘Nothing is too difficult for the person who does not actually have to do it’.
Do you even First, bruh?
Tundra just did.
The best kind of first, bro whining,
Cheers!
You know you’re just encouraging him?
I know you intended to be second. When such a glorious firster as yourself decides to first, first he will be!
You don’t need to apologize for last night. You be you.
TJs does make a reasonably good ale as well,
Arc flash rated nyco!
Thought the same thing, but that pic predated the arc flash incident that made them go full retard on the safety standards. I wound up getting stationed with the guy. He has a prosthetic nipple.
Its gross.
I measure inflation by the price of gas. As a much younger man at my first real job I was making about $1.80 an hour, gas about 30 cents a gallon, so I could work an hour, buy 6 gallons. So if gas is 3 bucks a gal I’d need to make $18 @ hour. Since I’m not in the work force I’m not sure what a first job pays but one difference is as a youngster I paid little to no income tax. $4 a gallon would translate to $24 per hour.
Sounds like a lot but maybe not. What kind of pay does an uneducated high school grad start at these days?
Grain Belt was about a buck a 6 pack, 35 cents a bottle at the bar, in I could sneak in and pretend.
One who goes straight from Walmart to FedEx driving a forklift makes >$20/hr, but only part time while she waits for a full-time position to open. It’s the part time that’s hurting her right now.
So about 5 gallons an hour, computed by teenagers?
I guess? I never taught her to think in gallons because it never occurred to me to think in gallons. I would also be tempted to calculate it with mpg involved (cost to commute). And the reason I would is because she’s thinking about transferring to a warehouse far, far away from here but she can’t afford to live on her own yet.
Fast food is advertising $15-$18/hr around here. Entry level jobs have been doing better until now (except for losing jobs and increased competition for positions), but minimum wage and inflation has been carving out the buying power a while of anyone who hasn’t been seeing 5% or more annualized wage growth.
I’d guess entry level wages are now reaching the point where it makes more sense for an owner to invest in automation as much as possible.
I watched a video not too long ago of a robot that makes cheeseburgers. Beef is ground, tomatoes sliced, pickles cut, cheese shredded, etc. fresh at the time of each order. Looked much better than any fast food restaurant, and I think the selling price was $5/burger. Not sure if it was a one-off prototype or actual production item.
I’d guess entry level wages are now reaching the point where it makes more sense for an owner to invest in automation as much as possible.
I’ll leave the dirty details to Warty, but one of his projects will put Mexicans tying the joints for rebar cages together for concrete structures out of a job.
I know you just said you don’t know the details, but literally just the tying part, or like bending the bars, assembly and everything as well?
With a high quality 3-D CAD drawing you could probably do that part too.
Tying only. To my understanding you still have to arrange the cages correctly.
Just the tying for now.
half my career: designing quality into a product/process, over half of which was erasing common labor, training, talent, and effort from the assembly process
I’m reminded of a great story from Ypsilanti where a brilliant women on the assembly line showed her supervisor how her morning had gone so much better than usual since she discovered that the transmissions went together so much more easily if you just skip a couple of shims and a washer
Efficient! XD
No worries, just ship ‘‘em and let the customer sort it out.
Ford version: paint it blue and ship ’em through
That’s really just a gauge of whether wages and prices are inflating at the same rate.
Kind of important for those of us who don’t yet have our gold vault filled.
prices drive income for someone somewhere…the only storage I can think of is X-M: how much of spending goes overseas; is there some other dynamic that can sustain different rates beyond the shortest runs?
in Fourscore’s example, the gauge is of the relative utility of the two inputs (unskilled labor vs RBOB) on the spot with a dose of short-run stickiness; even though both inputs are important, they’re not meaningful indicators of the wider economy over hardly any time period
When I was 16 I lived in a tiny world. Gasoline shot up from $0.70 to $1.00, and minimum wage ran from $2.65 up to $3.35. I got around 14MPG, not great but by no means unusual then.
$3.35perhour/$1.00pergallon*14MPG ~ 46 miles per hour, my you-want-fries-with-that index
cars get much better mileage now, but I think entry-level beaters cost more in real dollars to buy and to repair, many such repairs requiring tools and skills that normal high schoolers just don’t have any more
Burger flipper by my house is offering $21/hr plus benefits, but I’m in a pricey area of the country.
Grocery store is hiring at about $18-19 an hour.
And the electricity for EVs just comes out of the wall, right?
See, if I’d had an EV I could have plugged in to an outlet in the garage and used my dad’s tab.
The main reason the Old Man stopped having the big tax-free farm gas tank on the property filled up was because I kept filling up my car from it. On his tab, as it were.
My step dad had a problem with somebody stealing gas out of his bulk tank. He decided to fill the tank with diesel instead of gas. The next week, we found his nephew’s car just down the road. Caught red handed.
The Old Man had his nozzle padlocked. Problem was, I knew where he kept the key.
Family member’s neighbor on corner had problem with kids in 4WD vehicles cutting the corner on his front lawn.
He put in a bunch of railroad ties with spikes and painted them green.
I was impressed as the kids didn’t make it more than 10 feet or so after running over them with four completely flat tires.
Caltrops for the win!
Sensei, that is what most people literally believe.
I got my bachelor’s degree in generic electrical engineering, but my masters degree is in “Electric Power Engineering.”
I got teased a lot about going into power. “Everything has been done! It’s so basic! So boring!” Two holes in the wall, they said.
I liked power engineering because it gets back to first principles engineering: anything involving extremely high currents and voltages and relativistic speeds is far more challenging and interesting than a smaller phone power charger.
Where there is power, there is knowledge.
Did I share this with you before?
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
Jim says the fault lasted 20 milliseconds before breakers tripped. (The breakers for a wire like this are pretty amazing in their own right. They use high pressure gas to blow out the arc as the circuit begins to open. Anything that can cut off this number of megawatts in 20 ms gets my respect.) It blew carbonized oil about 3000 feet down the pipe to either side of the fault. (Compute velocity…)
Also, I drive a Tesla not to save the planet but because it is a joy to drive.
+1
As a car guy my frustration with the “whiter than white” emissions controls drove me completely away from ICE. For passenger gasoline powered autos we are so far in the tail of emissions that manufacturers are forced to do the ridiculous. Also they essentially artificially break when any of the emissions systems fails. For example, Toyota will disable the A/C under the guise that it will increase emissions if the system is inoperative.
And the electricity for EVs just comes out of the wall, right?
Magic box.
Which brings me to this guy on Twitter, because in this case ignorance actually is harmful:
He reminds me of a few Proglodytes I used to know through the Boston swing dance scene. They truly believed that increasing the gas tax would only hurt people that drove cars.
they don’t have a budget for CGI cartoon characters dancing with scantily clad women.
This is sad.
I was going to say I wish we had someone like him, then I realized we kinda do – Matt Taibbi.
You got to love this…
Yes, it is all magic, and it will work if we just wish hard enough.
I drive an EV when I’m at my dad’s house. You get funny looks driving an EV around the mountains of western SC.
I do believe that is the first time I have ever seen the words “mountains” and “South Carolina” in the same sentence.
*Looks north at Denali*
*Chuckles*
Upwards of 3000′ elevation – which compared to most of the state… Of course you’re in either Georgia or North Carolina in very short order.
those highs aren’t so high as the lows are just so low
I’d say half the people I broach the subject with assume that TN has a higher point than TX, when Guadalupe is actually almost twice as high above sea level as Clingman
https://mobile.twitter.com/SabinaCiofu/status/1497496617221607426?cxt=HHwWhMC-najPlsgpAAAA
Romanians to the rescue.
Pie should go find a hot refugee.
He’s busy finding immortal brides in Madrid.
I was going to post something similar.
He’s missing his shot at a great thing.
Because of all the shit going on in the world right now, here is something that will help soothe people. Some of the notes are a little flat but the piece is still pretty good.
“Short term pain, long term gain”
Gee, I wonder where the price of electricity will be when everybody is “nudged” to buy EVs?
In Germany, electricity is already 3x as expensive as it is here (of course, gas is also a lot more expensive, too). The equivalence between electricity kWh and gallons of gas to travel the same distance is about 8.5 (34 kWh/100 miles vs. 25 mpg = 4 gal/100 miles). With $3.50 gas, electricity would only have to cost $0.41 to reach parity.
“But with my solar panels, my electric bill is zero. In fact the power company pays me!”
LOL. Perfect for Glibs.
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2022/02/image003-5-1.jpg?w=600&ssl=1
We just had a bunch of tree work done on the property. I loved the name of the chipper they used.
INTIMIDATOR™ 18XP
It was parked in the driveway and was rattling everything in the house.
*places order with custom Gadsden flag paint job*
Is that? a… Volvo?
No no no. It’s just a Swedish Subaru.
https://m.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10224940967928849&set=a.10211702079244906
Brewery starts making molotovs.
this is just a Non-threatening Pilsner, done reasonably well
I’d try it. Being a pilsner and lager guy.
Done right they’re exquisite in their simplicity.
Never change Germany, never change.
German Power Operators Reject Calls to Keep Nuclear Plants Running Despite Ukraine War
Too bad you can’t power a country on smug.
Apparently you can rule a country with smug, though. And what’s really important, after all?
Zelensky refused to be evacuated from Ukraine. He’s staying to fight. That’s a leader.
I liked his “I need ammo, not a ride” reply.
Trudeau fled from truckers with bouncy houses. This dude straps on armor and grabs a gun.
I want to believe they have a chance to resist Putin.
https://www.barrons.com/news/germany-to-send-anti-tank-weapons-stinger-missiles-to-ukraine-01645899307?tesla=y
We should have an endless stream of Globemasters unloading guns, ammo, antitank, anti air, etc. in Ukraine.
On whose tab, and arming who?
Tab? Not their (or my) problem.
USAF: Outfitters to the Biden/Obama/Bush/Clinton regime.
Compare and contrast Ukrainian politicians facing an actual threat and US politicians facing unhappy unarmed constituents.
I want to believe they have a chance to resist Putin.
Me too. Not optimistic about it though. I think Russia has been intentionally holding back so far to avoid civilian causalities. Failure for Putin is not an option. So they will escalate as needed. They also have tactical battlefield nukes that can cut through any conventional force like it was made of butter.
As Ukraine holds out, NATO countries will continue to increase their deployment of troops in the bordering countries. It’s like watching a group of teens psyching each other up to take the first punch, and the odds of WWIII increase increase daily. I don’t watch MSM, so I didn’t realize how loudly the drum is beating for us to engage Russia. I caught a clip on YouTube of ABC where they had some NATO guy on talking about even cyberattack by Russia against any NATO nation could be used to invoke Article V. I want Ukraine to win. I’m also getting more concerned about us getting dragged into WWIII over this.
causalities are complicated
Lunatics
We seldom disagree, and I’m not a NATO fan or hot to get into something with Russia, but I’m open to a wide body of interpretations of acts of war, and I don’t see an attack on one sort of infrastructure as ethically different from another. If you turn off the grid and people starve or have accidents or die in the dark when they otherwise would have not, that’s good enough for me, with or without NATO.
As to whether an attack on the UK’s internet is our business, that’s no different from any other attack. The question of whether we should be in NATO at all is primary, not what qualifies as an attack.
Do you see it a different way?
I’m more concerned with the threat of broader war. A cyber attack can run the gamut of mild to severe like any other. And there will be the question of who actually did it, Russia, another country, or a non-state actor?
The tensions keep ratcheting up and we’re all going to be in a world of hurt.
You know, there really is no such thing as a non-state actor. Every actor lives in some state, and acts in either that state or some other sovereign location, and is subject to the laws in either. Claiming someone isn’t subject to a state is a lot of bullshit that allows criminal states to disown that activity even though it wouldn’t be tolerated if it was aimed at them (prime example being hackers inside Russia).
Claiming someone isn’t subject to a state
right; surely; who would argue with that; I just made a wide and simple observation
the question of who did it, not that I meant to make that point, is not remotely a new problem or limited to cyber
Remember the Maine!
There’s a few. But most seem to working with the state turning a blind eye or encouraging them these days. We’ve certainly got our own here, like the Anonymous guy who hacked GiveSendGo.
Regardless, the situation is tense enough.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17781441/kremlin-websites-down-russian-tv-channels-hacked/
What about this?
Yeah Don, I was riffing on Scruffy, since hackers are routinely disclaimed as non-state actors.
If they engage in an attack that amounts to an act of war, the state doesn’t get to go “oh wait, that’s not us – don’t hold us accountable”. Sure, we won’t – right when we see you stringing those little motherfuckers up. Need any rope?
Also agree that the existence of NATO, since 1990, has been unjustifiable. Hell, shouldn’t even have existed before – after all, we invented the U.N. to obsolete such things. Or does that mean the U.N. has been worthless since day one?
“does that mean the U.N. has been worthless since day one?”
DING DING DING!
https://mobile.twitter.com/hiyouther/status/1497654209113694215?cxt=HHwWjoC5qa-k3sgpAAAA
??
Take the tank to a car wash.
“Hey, any of you guys got money to stick in the coin slot?”
Starting to look like Budapest 1956.
I thought this lager was meh, but at the price point, I’m not going to turn it down. I will once again pimp out the corked and caged Trader Joe’s branded beers, as they are Unibroue beers (this can be confirmed by looking at the cage and cork). If you like the Unibroue house yeast strain, they are well worth picking up.
The train in spain is fast but damn the seats are unconfortable. No leg room. Also i got one of those with a table between 4 seets and the person across from me had luggage under the table further restricting leg room. I went to the bar to stand and strech my legs having a crappy spanish beer. Also i can keep my mask off as i am drinking. But as a tourist, i can say the speed of the train is worth the debt of the spanish taxpayer for an unprofitable rail system.
cruzcampo especial
Also this pixel 5a phone has fantastic battery life
So the train in spain is a pain?
Only on the knees and hamstrings
are you say’n you need a cane?
I think he’s got it
I fell like a moron today and now it hurts. I had my eyes on the map on the phone and triped over this concrete thing mramt to prevent cars from parking
*points and laughs*
I was running for a train once (dignity? what dignity) and I tripped and fell. A guy even stopped and asked a fella if he was hurt to which a fella replied “just my pride”, which is a good thing because pride is a sin.
I did that once, except I was looking at a girl’s ass.
The best trains evaaahh that I’ve been on where in France. Clean, spacious, and on time. I can’t speak for all of France. The trains in the Netherlands were dirty. I figure it’s all one big continental network and it depends very much what route you are on.
Amtrak was just a comedy routine with no laugh track.
working at a plant in the Rhine, taking lunch on a spring day on the lawn, some sort of supertrain blew by just feet from our spot
it made me wonder what a soldier thinks when he sees a strafing run begin on the horizon and attack him: it was a sound, a hiss more than a roar, then there before I could make it out and gone just as fast, and if it had leapt off the track I would have had no options….that speed that close is captivating
Amtrak’s Acela is pretty nice (just BOS NYC DC – i.e., the only part of Amtrak that could even theoretically make money).
The Italian Frecciarossa was pretty sweet. Fast and comfortable.
The trains ran on time.
I need someone to rid me of Alan Bester’s animated The Stars My Destination. I have bought the print copy, I now (or really ,ever) have no need of this version. MikeS is a no. Would anyone care for volume one of the comic rendering of Alan Bester’s novel, The Stars My Destination.
?
Seriously?
Shouldn’t I be?
jacking up the price
What is broken in the premise is the urge for centralized meddling. Let me assure everyone, when the market decides that EV deserve the lion’s share of production, only more government interference can prevent it. If anyone believes there is some Jedi-morality to EV and you’re saving all of humanity, fine: get off your goddam dead ass and learn some Ohm/Volta, Kirchhoff, Faraday, Laplace and go build something.
I can abide almost anything except for useless people and their opinions. STFU; show me….but, probably, keep shutting up…it’s good form.
Is that for a 6 pack?
Aye
That’s a very nice price. I wish we had a Trader Joe’s near us
Flathead Vally, Montana crime update.
Where has OMWC been?
2:54 p.m. A strange man reassured the girls he was following that he wasn’t going to kill them.
11:32 p.m. After consuming six beers, a man upset his wife.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1497664391273193476?cxt=HHwWiIC5qYb14sgpAAAA
Prepped for a warm welcome. ?
Ooof, that’s one dropped cocktail away from a really bad time.
My thoughts exactly.
“Let’s put these homemade explosives in a big pile out in the middle of the street where any idiot could set the whole thing off.”
Smoking. According to the above-mentioned 2010 World Bank study 36% (28.6% is the average in Europe) of Ukrainians smoke tobacco, including 31% of those who smoke every day.
So about a third of Ukrainians smoke.
Had reread that twice, at first I thought it was $4 a can. Sounds like a good value.
Thanks for the article, like everything else, it is harder than it seems.
There is an EV charging station located at a Walmart near me. Last time I drove past, mid-day during the week, there was not a single vehicle connected to one of the chargers. It is also possible that the peak time for using these chargers are nights and weekends.
But the electric infrastructure will not support charging the number of EVs that Calacanis envisions, at least not the 480V outlets which can do a full charge overnight for most vehicles. And as noted above, that electricity has to come from somewhere. I’ll take these people more seriously once they start calling for us to ramp up nuclear power generation, particularly MST reactors, but we know they’ll never go for that because Greeners are all about the narrative as Mexi pointed out.
a true cost comparison I linked to recently shows a conspicuous expense for time lost and miles wasted deadheading to charging stations; infrastructure will change that, but merely reading the story of hunting for kWh gave me the sort of anxiety one gets when he’s 100 miles from a gasoline station
Foreseeable consequences and all that. Whenever I’m confronted with something like that I suspect that as with many things leftist it’s the camel’s nose under the tent. They love “infrastructure improvements” (union jobs), and they get to piggyback other pipe dreams like moar solarz and buried residential power delivery onto this.
There’s 2 here in my community, just right down th street here. They’ve been there for at least 5 years and I have never seen anyone even parked in those spots. It’s like the bike trail they took 5 years to build that I’ve never seen a bike on.
They make no sense. What are you supposed to do for the hours your car is sitting at the charging station? Unless it’s your employers or your garage I just don’t see it.
It makes about as much sense as the 50 parking stations reserved for handicap and no one ever parked in any of them.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dwtruthwarrior/status/1497680074639769602
Oops.
If that guy lives through it, he’ll never live it down.
I wonder what it would take to make a “fake-charge” box that would fool the charging station into thinking a vehicle was plugged in, while just directing the charging current through a resistor, dumping all the energy as heat to the environment.
IDK if the stations are free or whether you have to pay. I’ve never gotten close enough to one.
The ones that I’ve seen in parking lots and the like around here are “free” (paid for by the store/lot owner).
Nobody offered me a free tank of gas for shopping there.
There are two kinds of EV chargers. “Courtesy” EV chargers in front of stores and hotels and DC Fast chargers.
The courtesy chargers can be any amperage, mostly they run 20A to 40A at 240V. You’d need to stay at them for hours (i.e. overnight at a hotel) to gain significant range. For example my home set up is 40A 240V and takes around 8 hours to go from mostly empty to full.
DC fast chargers – essentially Tesla’s proprietary network versus Electrify American and Chargepoint. One of the last two has an agreement with Walmart, I believe. These are the ones that add real range.
Inefficient. Load up an F-150 with batteries, charge them for free, and power your off-the-grid household for a week.
You are thinking too small. Build a rig to step down the juice to run multiple racks of Bitcoin miners and a big cooling fan.
Make a van with a big “EV Van” stenciled on the side with a std engine and hidden highly muffled tail pipe.
??
I have the racks of mining equipment…now I just need a Double-E to help me design the power circuitry.
A Tesla V3 supercharger puts out 250kW. That would be a big resistor!
Mind you they communicate – so you could ask for less juice. I think down to 1A at 400VDC – so 400W you’d need to dissipate.
But I like Timelose’s idea of actually doing something with the energy.
HIPSTER JUICE!
Ahh, I feel better now.
I just ordered a bottle of Russian vodka to support anyone against Joe Biden.
Which one, Comrade. I like this one.
Is there a term for reply fail?
“Brooksed”.
That’s intentional. I mean by accident.
Brooksed can be accidental akso.
Gilmored is when you reply to something in the wrong thread.
Sugar Free’d (SF’d) is when you fuck up a link.
If there are others, I don’t remember them. All the tulpae now know. Is this in the FAQ, @Tonio?
Gilmore is a top five Glib if I get the vote, and I guess he’s missed half the party now since TOS
I believe he got a job where he couldn’t risk being associated with us. F
Yeah, it’s by accident too.
Brooks is the only one who does it on purpose, thus fondly named after him.
That’s why I asked. Just being ?
Didn’t you get the memo?
https://nypost.com/2022/02/26/russian-vodka-pulled-from-shelves-in-us-canada-bars-liquor-stores/
Dumbfucks.
Also, I’ll take it, they can deliver it right here.
No, I did not. Fuck them. So here’s the weird thing. My closest liquor store sells this for $32, which is $16 cheaper than mega-booze TW&M. I don’t know why. Tomorrow, I’m going to clean them out if no has not already done so.
If you don’t hear from me again, my wife killed me in my sleep. Prosit.
Biden got something right…kinda
President Donald Trump imposed the 25% tariffs on select products of the European Union, including Scotch single malt whiskies, in October 2019 as part of the trade dispute.
taing Dhia !
Beluga. My comrades Ivan and Igor say great stuff, even good for 3 dog night, in Mother Russia Vodka drink you!
Hammer and Sickle. Haha, funny, comrade.
Well I just shaved my pate and cracked another beer. Are you doing your part?
Pate is Canadian for taint.
It is quite flappy.
annual hour of exploring Monty Python
Fun!
Nothing on Facebook from the Team USA guys since they got to China. But the Slovak team posted photos and it looks like a scene from ET, what with all the hazmat suits and whatnot.
I’ve always thought that the Paralympics should go first instead of being an afterthought. More exposure for the sports. Just my two cents. At these Games it doesn’t seem to matter much.