efaardvark

think i drive thru places like that regularly

@Wodahs Yes, it is very much a drive through (and hope you don't have to stop) sort of place. 

@Wodahs Mad respect for your line of work! What do you normally end up hauling if you don't mind me asking?

I love that movie.  

You never know. Haha.

Makes you wonder how much research companies put into their product names.

@Animedragon I wonder too.  I think companies just look at a table of names vs sorted by the %age of people who recognize that “brand” and go with the top entry.  Otherwise, yeah.  Why pick that one?

That was... something. Love the dramatic music as well. 

I don't think this one is going to 'end', it'll always be with us. As more people are vaccinated and gain a degree of immunity it will slowly join the list of other infections like the flu, we'll get our yearly jab and carry on with our lives. Like flu some will catch it and just be ill for a couple of weeks, others be hospitalised or sadly die from it.

im up for a orgie , i mean party

ikr

Pain (;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`)

Hmmm that all

my jeep takes 24 gallons to fill (of diesel the cheap fuel not even gas) and the cost here to fill currently is just over $186 if it were a gas motor that would cost around $204 to fill

Car maintenance, home maintenance & taxes.  No spring or summer break. Adulting sucks 

just wait till you get to health issue's expenses on top of all them

ill tell ya thats when life really sux and you go back to just wishing it was just all the other things that break and need maintenance

i think i need to stop working before i become to broken

@Wodahs Already there.  Not so much recently but I did spend a few years beating cancer that left me without a thyroid and on hormone replacement for the rest of my life.  That was a rough patch but is now history, or at least stable and manageable.

My big problems now are my mother who is aphasic (degenerative frontal-lobe disease similar to Alzheimer’s) and my sister in law who is disabled and diabetic.  My brother never really got the hang of the adulting thing and is .. not a big help.  He has a part-time job but he and SIL can’t even meet their own expenses.

In the old days the social pact was you worked your ass off until you were 55, then you retired to enjoy the rest of your life on whatever pension and savings you’d been able to arrange.  Instead I’m already 57 with no possibility of retirement in sight.  My income is all we’ve got and I’m basically a single parent to 3 special-needs kids.  Unless I manage to win the lottery I’m gonna have to work till I drop.  

Only 2 of the 15 series I’m currently watching are isekai, though  I dropped several from this season  And both my keepers are more comical, one being an outright parody. That number is almost certain to increase with the upcoming season as Shield Hero & Bookworm are pretty much locks for me, not taking into account any new series.

Part of the problem is that isekai has pretty much become synonymous with the fantasy/D&D genre. Many times the isekai aspect being tacked on for little discernible reason.

Nice Ghostbusters reference  

Sorry for the dup.  I switched from my phone to the desktop and somehow sent essentially the same thing twice.

@Wodahs I just know physics myself so I might be wrong as well but leaving things like politics aside and just going with the physics I think there’s already a very good economic case for things like big-rig diesel to switch to electricity, either directly on batteries or using ultra clean “synthetic” hydrocarbon fuel via fuel cell technology.  To produce such fuel with nuclear power we could run the chemistry “backward” to make carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel from water and CO2 from the air.  That way nobody needs to switch right away, yet we still take the geopolitical risk issue(s) off the table.  (Though there would still be the distribution problem and point-of-use pollution issue putting pressure on the phase-out of internal combustion, especially within high-population areas.)

I'll point out that electrification of the delivery industry is already happening at the short-range end for delivery by entities like fedex or Amazon but give the battery technology a couple years and an infrastructure / environmental demand for it and I think we’ll be seeing even the long-haul stuff switch a lot sooner than most people think.  This is where Tesla is going with their big-rig designs.

Of course vehicles the size of ships could use nuclear directly.  There are designs for SMRs (small modular reactors) that could even be used without much in the way of training on the part of operators.  They’re designed to be simple, passive heat sources that do their thing for 20 years then get swapped out for another unit.

Couple that / those to one of Stanford’s supercritical CO2 gas turbines and electric motors and you get a very simple, cheap design.  Simpler even than current diesel/bunker fuel designs.  Economically that’s a no-brainer for the merchant fleet.

We don’t need to be digging up “fossil” fuels.

(I do have concerns about nuclear waste because some of these designs are solid-fuel but if we also have larger molten-salt designs for grid power then the “waste” could be destroyed using them.  We just need to be reasonably intelligent about the overall system design.)

As for the lithium supply issue, there are battery technologies out there that are even better than lithium.  Tesla is already moving away from traditional lithium batteries even for EV applications.  We're where we are now because the production was already there due to the consumer electronics industry.  For instance, Toyota's first Prius models actually used batteries that were taken out of laptop battery assemblies and remanufactured into the automotive assemblies for use in the cars.  Needless to say that was a highly uneconomic way to do it but even so it still made a profit for Toyota.  It also showed Panasonic and others that the demand was there to build dedicated factories for the automotive applications, which of course lead more or less directly to full EVs and Tesla's Gigafactories.

Lithium will probably continue to be used in mobile applications because it makes for lightweight and energy-dense batteries.  Obviously that has advantages for things like laptops, cellphones, cars, and planes but I think everywhere else will find other battery technologies that are more optimal for those other uses.  For instance, I think that grid power storage and frequency control will probably switch to sodium-ion and/or iron-based batteries eventually simply for economic/profit reasons, especially if EVs become dominant and cheap electricity becomes common.

Also, even now lithium is not exactly in short supply.  Worldwide there is plenty of the element.  "Reserves" (discovered deposits) are limited because historically there has not been the demand to justify searching for more sources.  Laptops and cellphones only require so much of it after all.  Ultimately there will be more prospecting now because the demand is now higher, which will no doubt lead to more discovered sources, just as it has for oil.

We will never get into the same situation with lithium as oil in terms of geopolitics however.  Or at least doing so should not be necessary if our "leaders" do their job right.  There's a huge source of lithium readily available worldwide.  With nuclear power we will have enough power to separate things like lithium and sodium from seawater.  There's a lot of other stuff in seawater that we could also pull out at the same time that would help with the economics and make it happen sooner than later.  This would include fresh water, which is also in short supply worldwide.

Already the Saudis, Israelis, and others are getting a significant amount of their fresh water from desalinization.  I'm in California in the middle of a severe multi-decade drought that's threatening everything from farming and food supply to hydro power generation.  Cheaper power would have an immediate economic benefit for us, and again help with the geopolitical risk issues.  I mean, I've already got solar on the roof (no-brainer here in the southwest US with SoCalEdison's $0.42/kWh electricity) but distributed solar is really only useful for residential power and personal transport.  It does not help much with water or industrial manufacturing/transport power needs.

i do agree with the there is alternatives that can take the function of oil

my post was more in the aspect of if ye hadnt given putin money for oil up untill now (as it was the point of how he got the capital for his war) we would have been giving it to Xi Jinping of china , who people would probably claim he would be using it for his expansion of territory's in the south china see and so on

we (companies in australia and one next door to my company) seem heavy in to producing hydrocarbon fuels for big equipment and have started exporting it (tho its still made by dirty methods) and have a couple of export ships running on gas for fuel which we also export , along with oil and coal and rear earth minerals including lithium (australia is as big as the us size wise we just dont have the population) we do seem to have a fair amount of resources here too most going to china or the asia pacific

YIKES!!! 

Does your insurance cover for any damages? If not, how much do you plan on spending to fix it? :,(((

@deaaath yes I’m in California so by law I have to have insurance to drive legally on public roads.  I’ve got comp and collision so it will be covered by insurance - or at least what’s left after a $500 deductible.  The impact speed was very low and I don’t see any visible deformation of the metal.  Hopefully that means no metal/body work.  The cruise control still works too, so the radar emitter/sensor is working as well.  I’m hoping it is just the broken plastic around the radar.  Probably have to special order replacement parts from the manufacturer however so that might still get expensive.  I’ll have to see what the shop says.  The Toyota emblem that covers the radar is about $150 all by itself!

Too bad I don’t have a 3D printer or I might just print my own replacements.   

id offer to help with the use of my 3d printer , but im half a world away in the west of australia , so not the cheaper option

like you i have full on my MY18 Jeep GC Trailhawk and seems bout the same deductible unless im not at fault

but it can still be a nuance

Your “Valentines Day poem” reminded me of this

looking forward to season 2

woof woof

whats a CRT

all i do for enjoyment is to look in to my Kinetograph , tho it hat me stuffed at how they put them little moving people in there

@Wodahs  Kinetograph??  Even I'm not that old! 

I just tried googling "CRT".  I got "Cross Timbers Royalty Trust", Critical Race Theory", "Cardiac Resuscitation Therapy", and "Community Renewal Team" but no "Cathode Ray Tube" until about 3 pages in.  You know you're too old when even the internet has forgotten what you did when you were young.

CRT here is also a rural farming supplies store and yes i had heard of most of them but with your comment "time stare into a particle accelerator for their motion picture enjoyment" i had assumed you were going with the Cathode Ray Tube , a part also used in early TV's

hence going with your statement "Am I really that old" i thought id go for the father of the TV the moving picture unit Kinetograph

or in short "im explaining im old too"

actually i thought i put the old in oLDtaku