• 2 Posts
  • 191 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I stopped reading the article there.

    Either the author is voluntarily misleading or he has no idea of what he is talking about.

    Here is the map all the fast charging stations (>100kW) along the way between Paris and the Mont St Michel.

    The Tesla model 3 in Europe uses the standard combo CCS plug so it can use all of these stations.

    https://files.catbox.moe/8v8j4l.png

    I did not count them but at a first glance the number of charger is higher than “none”

    Edit: OK I read the article after all but I really don’t see what problem battery swapping would solve.

    I could see a use case for public transport that has to go a specific road and need to run non stop every days but even then I suspect that having overhead cable on a short section to charge the battery while running would be more appropriate than battery swapping.

    The article is talking about the lack of charging station but battery swapping just make the problem way way worse. A battery charger is just a parking spot and a high voltage AC - DC transformer connected to the grid. It’s relatively cheap and easy to install, does not take much space and work for all electric cars compared to a battery swapping station that can only work for one specific brand (specific model too ?) need robotics and plenty of storage. Its much harder and expensive to install and you need one charging station per brand. This means less stations overall.

    Finally there is the speed of charging, this is true that battery swapping is probably faster than fast charging but honestly I don’t find charging an electric car that inconvenient.

    On long highway trips I need to stop around 20 minutes every 2 hours, a 20 minutes break every 2 hours is not that bad, just enough time for a toilet break, a quick coffee before going back on the road.











  • I don’t know where you found this number, the commercial crew contract was awarded by NASA in September 2014 to SpaceX and Boeing (Boeing getting twice the amount of money than SpaceX). It was expected that two crew capsule would be certified by NASA in 2017.

    SpaceX only certified the capsule Crew Dragon with a crewed launch in 2020, so 3 years delay. In the mean time NASA is still waiting for Boeing to do its first crewed Starliner launch.

    There is plenty of reason to hate Musk but people at SpaceX did accomplish great things.

    Without SpaceX NASA would still be relying on Soyuz to send astronauts to the ISS.




  • On the other hand I did took care of a pool for a while, it was in a villa that my in laws owned.

    We did a few things that helped lowering the maintenance cost and the pool was pristine.

    First thing is a salt chlorinator. It keeps a constant (low) chlorine level so the pool stays clean, there is no more chlorine smell and you only need to top up salt after too much rain.

    Then we were using hardware store muriatic acid to bring the pH up and baking soda to control alkalinity. We still went to the pool store to get productd for the calcium hardness and cyanuric acid.

    The last thing is a bit more involved but this is what made the biggest difference on the bill is to replace the pump with a DC pump directly connected to refurbished solar panels, no batteries, no inverter. This way when there is a lot of sun the pump is running a lot, a little sun and the pump is running a little.

    It’s perfect since the amount of algae development is proportional to the amount of sunlight. There is almost no electronic in the system, just a extremely reliable DC pump and solar panels that can last for decades, I found that to be a great low-tech solution.

    However we were in a tropical country, I have no idea if this would apply in another climate.