> Remember people, you have to be vaccinated and boosted to prevent the spread of the virus even though being vaccinated or boosted does not actually prevent the spread of the virus.
This is just misinformation that’s been repeated so much as a meme people think it’s true based on a misreading of the simple fact that a study which said if you do experience a breakthrough infection with a high viral load, vaccinated people transmit that viral load as readily as a non-vaccinated person. What is clearly not true is that vaccinated people have the same likelihood of having an infection with that high viral load in the first place. Which they don’t and why vaccines remain an important tool to reduce spread.
> Vaccinated people are also less likely to collapse the local medical system in surges because their disease course is less severe
But once you have primed your cell immunity with exposure (vaccine or natural), the benefit of repeated boosters is negligible. Protection from infection is affected by changes in variants because only Ig neutralizing the spike can block infection. Cell-based immunity, although it does not prevent infection, is more resilient to these changes (the homology in the SARS-CoV-2 proteins outside the spike is around 80-85%). Also, memory cells last for at least two years after exposure (A.Sette's group works).
IOW, less severe versus an immunologically naive person. But at this point, with 95%+ seroprevalence, these scenarios are becoming very rare.
This guy wrote a whole article outlining how bad and unusable the British pipe standards are and you’re surprised the two (ish) continents that don’t use them are actually pretty happy with their standard and don’t want the other?
NPT has some flaws and complexities but generally while it’s comprehensive conventions and practices mean that for specific types of plumbing you’ll need some specific standard fittings and once you get used to them that’s pretty much that. From gases to liquids. None of this “whoa someone decided to use a tapered one here” you don’t get to chose what fitting you’re feeling like that day, we have building codes and if it’s a pipe in a wall carrying water than there’s a convention (and likely building code) that tells you your pipe, fitting, and which way the threads should turn! (Generally in the broadest strokes: Explosive gases are reverse threaded. Everything else isn’t.)
Anyway we’ve been saying no to bad British ideas since 1776. Don’t blame us outside the Americas the rest of you (and ISO) fell for it.
You’ve articulated a common bay area mistake of assuming what you happen to be aware of is a comprehensive list of what exists in the bay area. There are still many common warehouse and workshop communities through the bay. There will eventually be wikipedia articles about them, claiming them to be a nexus of culture in their time. And you will read comments on those articles also bemoaning that there’s no such things anymore. :)
Don’t feel bad, just get out there and be open to what exists. There’s tons yet to discover in the Bay Area and even as we lose spaces we love, others rise.
Edit: and also even if you confine yourself to just hackerspaces (of which there are still several?) then remember that for many of them “barely clinging to life” is pretty much the state some of them have been fine with since their founding and if the pandemic didn’t kill them, they’re probably not likely to die off for real anytime soon.
Name some! I'm in many Meetup communities for various kinds of tech, in touch with people working on several stealth startups, and the only "tech enthusiast" spaces that ever come up in conversation are the struggling one on the peninsula and the chaotic one in the Mission.
Almost all EVs come with built in charging schedule settings and people use them because the alternative is throwing money at your utility company to charge during peak hours for no reason. You just plug it in and wake up charged in the morning.
> If the state government was serious about this, they would be installing chargers all over the place.
Seen the charger network in California lately? They’re… quite widespread. And the state is definitely helping with infill to keep adding more. The state is even adding them to rest stops, which is unusual in California since rest stops here are normally very nearly free of any services or amenities.
So yes, they’re serious, and yes, they’re doing exactly what you suggested they’d be doing if they were, and have been for years now.
I live in California and the charger network is barely adequate for the current number of electric cars. If everyone had them, there would be hours-long lines for chargers.
Electric cars are still a luxury for people who have dedicated parking spaces with chargers at home, and the voters all know it.
By the way, I am not against electric cars. I own one. I'm just being realistic about their practicality for the general population.
It is not cheap for them to build. It requires a lot of capacity to put a charger in every space. It often requires upgrading the entire electrical system for the property, trenching across parking lots, etc.
Also, many of the current residents in an HOA will oppose the project because it will cost them money but they themselves would not benefit because they don't have electric cars.
I think the common misconception here is that chargers are often compared to gas pumps. Do you visit the gas pump every day with your car? Most people don't. Most EV owners charge at home, often during night hours, to take advantage of cheaper TOU electricity rates.
The clear difference here is that with an EV, you can wake up every morning with a "full tank". That eliminates the need to use a public charger unless you 1) forgot to charge 2) are on a road trip or 3) drive a lot. The average commute is ~15 miles the last I checked, so I think #3 will happen, but it won't be very common.
tldr: You can't really leave for your destination in an ICE with a full tank. With an EV, you can.
A coupon is an informal term for a small sample of material, most often metal. It’s perhaps most commonly used in welding where practice welds for people first training to weld are done on pieces of metal often referred to as coupons. :)
It is usually an artifact of materials like metal which are hard to cut, and can’t efficiently just be cut as needed during a task, but are prepared and pre-cut into small pieces you can grab easily. Each of those pieces is called a coupon.
I used to store mine in a Chinese takeout container box.
In the mid 1970s, in my welding class, the school was located down the street from a small manufacturer that formed various metal alloys.
They would provide the school with bins of scrap from their manufacturing free of charge. Those were our practice coupons in class. We had to be careful to return the welded scraps back to the proper bin so the manufacturer could recycle them.
Our class was just a very small part of their recycling flow. It was a great relationship, we needed practice materials, and they hired welders.
It definitely has supplanted them in Iceland. Even the most remote places that used to use oil are generally switching to geothermal for heating. Converting the heat to power isn’t always worth it because the island has so much plentiful hydro power. Fossil fuels account for basically 0% of Icelandic power.
That's energy, OP referred to power, which normally means generated power in these discussions. All of the fossil energy is oil, none is coal, and I believe that's all used in transportation and a tiny bit of heating in the hinterlands.
I wonder how the flying in and out is accounted for in these sorts of figures, if hydrocarbons are ever replaced in aviation it will be dead last after everything else.
Okay. OP' parent referred to "global replacement for fossil fuels or it would have supplanted them already".
I found Iceland's "Fuel Use Forecast" at https://nea.is/fuel/forecast/nr/132 , which appear to be from 2007. It shows aviation as the biggest - and growing - consumer of fuel.
Iceland has so much access to power that they're likely to be the first country to export net negative carbon in some fashion: aluminum I'd guess, we always need that.
This won't involve burning less jet fuel and resembles a Papal indulgence, but maintaining an industrial civilization while decarbonizing industry is impossible without this kind of accounting.
Nah. It’s a standard feature of most battery systems to run when the grid is down. Solar without battery doesn’t, (and the solar itself cuts out) but if you have battery systems involved for storage, you’re already capable of them interoperating with the grid, or without it.
As for getting reference from a generator, no need. You can get all that from the batteries and they’re increasingly planned to be used for grid scale black start.
If you haven’t yet, try turning on (or up) the micro contrast feature in the picture/display settings. Won’t solve everything, but can make a lot of dark scenes in a bright room a lot clearer to watch.
This is just misinformation that’s been repeated so much as a meme people think it’s true based on a misreading of the simple fact that a study which said if you do experience a breakthrough infection with a high viral load, vaccinated people transmit that viral load as readily as a non-vaccinated person. What is clearly not true is that vaccinated people have the same likelihood of having an infection with that high viral load in the first place. Which they don’t and why vaccines remain an important tool to reduce spread.
In addition to averaging lower peak viral levels for infection, vaccinated people has faster clearance rates, which means they are contagious for shorter amounts of time: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...
Vaccinated people have faster symptom onset as their bodies react to the virus faster, which means they can test and isolate sooner.
Vaccinated people are still less likely to be infected than non vaccinated people: https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/handle/10044/1/90800
Vaccinated people are also less likely to collapse the local medical system in surges because their disease course is less severe: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/73/12/2257/6124429